Fevered and too-long, but – if you ask Scathing Online Schoolmarm – a wonderful final reckoning with Ted Cruz’s failure and Donald Trump’s success in Rolling Stone. Nervy, funny, relentless prose.

Trump cut through this sad remainder-bin collection of the indolent, the unappealing and the relentlessly, programmatically shitheaded like a burning chainsaw going through Country Crock. He recognized a fundamental weakness at the heart of this soft, oily collection of ersatz humanity: They can be undone by basic human contempt.

SOS likes the way the writer maintains, throughout his tireless evisceration of Cruz, a focus on the odd fact that the winner of the Republican presidential primary is the only candidate who is simply an immediately recognizable authentic human being. This doesn’t mean he’s nice. Human doesn’t mean humane. In fact, human rarely means humane.

Trump won because he basically didn’t give a fuck. Not about verbal pieties, campaign traditions, rudimentary gestures of respect or the orthodoxies of modern conservatism. Nothing.

I dunno… UD can’t stand Trump, of course, but…

Doesn’t something hopeful lurk in Ross Douthat’s sentence?

[Martin] Shkreli anticipated a blockbuster product just as Turing raised the price, according to a company memo released by the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform. On August 27, 2015, he wrote in an e-mail that “I think [the drug] will be huge. We raised the price from $1,700 per bottle to $75,000 … So 5,000 paying bottles at the new price is $375,000,000- almost all of it is profit and I think we will get 3 years of that or more.”

Sanders wins Indiana.

UD got a letter, a few days ago, from the US District Court, District of Maryland, telling her that she is under consideration to serve as a federal juror.

On the assumption that political corruption in Maryland is as frisky as it is in New York, UD would love to be chosen (she probably won’t be because professors – or is this an urban legend? – are unpopular among those who select jurors), to decide a naughty boys trial. As you know if you’re a regular reader of this blog, UD is fascinated by corruption.

As you also know if you read UD regularly, UD owns a house in New York – a house one hour away from Albany, where Sheldon and his buddies ran the show until they had to go to jail. This proximity to Albany has had UD fantasizing about how amazing it would have been to be one of the jurors on Sheldon’s case – Sheldon, the pride of Yeshiva University…

You don’t have to know the language

In a Texas public school

… mushrooms, suddenly,
on all the dead limbs.

Andrew Sullivan answers the Should we start freaking out? question.

In a ‘thesdan doctors’ office this afternoon for a routine visit, UD experienced, from within her bubble, postmodernity.

First came the affluence part. Affluence and ease.

The office was gorgeous, with stylishly stenciled huge glass doors to the waiting room. A bevy of friendly greeters greeted UD; they were pleased that she had already filled out the paperwork they mailed her a few days ago.

UD scanned the magazines available (Opera News, Washingtonian), grabbed one, and took a comfy seat. Flat screens here and there featured a soundless film about Antarctican bird life. Everyone in the waiting room gazed at its endless bright blue skies.

********************

Then came the technology part. Their computers, they announced, were working very slowly. Maybe they were even down. They were certainly down intermittently. “The doctors are running a little late. We apologize.”

So more bird gazing and opera updates… But after forty-five minutes had passed, UD told one of the greeters that she would have to leave.

“Oh, don’t do that. Let me check… You’re next. The nurse will be right here.”

Out she came and ushered UD into the doctor’s examining room, where the deal clearly was that UD was supposed to continue the same wait there.

So after fifteen minutes UD got up and started to leave the doctors’ office.

“I’ll knock on the doctor’s door. Don’t leave,” said the nurse. “He’ll be right there.”

UD went back to the examining room but this time she didn’t sit down. She was willing to mill around the small space for another five minutes but that was it.

In came the very apologetic doctor. “Our computers are down! I’ve been in my office trying to connect!”

As Europe struggles over banning the burqa, several African countries quietly, and with virtually no opposition, ban it. Others officially support a ban; yet others are actively considering one.

And what a shocker that women are expressing no opposition to surrendering this beloved garment.

Oh yeah? This commentary in the aftermath of UNC’s two-decade-long massive academic fraud ups the the rhetoric-ante and informs us that universities have souls, UNC has a soul, and it’s looking at its soul being ripped out.

Most immediately, the soul-threat the writer has in mind is trouble with a couple of accrediting bodies; but you and I know that beyond a brief probation, UNC will be fine. The NCAA has let it off lightly and so will the accreditors. All will be well. Indeed, UD has no doubt that in a few years things will have so supremely settled down that UNC will be inaugurating an improved academic fraud game plan for its athletes and other interested students.

But this matter of a university’s soul… UD has done some scooting about online, and people do make a habit of assigning souls to universities. The soul seems to be a central meaningful place or group: the library, the faculty. It may be a common faith (Notre Dame’s Catholicism.) Or it may be non-profitness rather than commercialization.

Here’s the Soul Man himself, Cardinal Newman:

[The university] is almost prophetic from its knowledge of history; it is almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human nature; it has almost supernatural charity from its freedom from littleness and prejudice; it has almost the repose of faith, because nothing can startle it; it has almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation.

Or in UNC’s terms:

It is almost unbeatable in its knowledge of free throws; it is almost its own search-firm in its knowledge of football recruits; it has an almost supernatural advantage in its freedom from standards and integrity; it has almost the repose of sleep, because nothing can enlighten it; it has the beauty and harmony of hunky competitors.

By which UD means that while most writers, after Newman, consider a university’s soul some central meaningful spiritual/intellectual aspect of the place, after UNC, writers will need to take on board the fact that the only soulfully alive place on some campuses seems to be the athletic department. Surely the soul of Penn State, Auburn, Baylor, Alabama, the University of Oregon, and UNC lies somewhere in the vicinity of the locker room. And that is a soul that no accrediting body can rip out. Only a bad coach can do that.

A writer for the Auburn Citizen wrote this last year, and ever since then UD‘s been chewing on it. In particular, when UD reads about big-time football schools like the University of Hawaii, Western Michigan U., and Eastern Michigan U. — all of them perennially in the news for bankrupting their students and keeping their schools down in order to subsidize shitty coaches and put on games no one attends — UD ponders that “meaningless” thing.

The pathetic state of EMU in particular has attracted the attention of the national media. Singling out that school, an HBO show called The Arms Race featured the following facts:

At Eastern Michigan, the sports program lost $52 million over the past two years according to Howard Bunsis, an accounting professor at that school. Plus the school football team has not a winning season in nearly a couple of decades and regularly posts the smallest attendance figures in all college football.

(That amount by the way is nothing next to national joke Rutgers, where “in the last 12 years, the school’s athletics department has lost $312 million.”)

The leadership of all of these universities — president, trustees — goes ape-shit whenever anyone suggests that the all-consuming activity that has basically killed their school is meaningless. (Faculty and students, two groups immiserated by athletics, feel differently, but who listens to them?) The ferocity of their unanimous response to suggestions that they lead their university in a more meaningful as well as fiscally responsible direction tells you that for these people taking down a university through the removal of all revenues via football is obviously patently totally on the face of it worth it.

So what is the transcendent meaning they attach to what looks to the rest of us like suicide via sports?

UD thinks a hint can be found here:

It is as though they see a successful sports program as a winning multi-million dollar lottery ticket. Never mind that millions of lottery ticket holders lose.

UD thinks a more vivid and valuable analogy would be to the cargo cult phenomenon. Long ago in our ancestral past, godlike men appeared and won games and there was jubilation among the people. Then the big men went away.

Ever since, we have built gleaming stadiums and training facilities to induce them to reappear.

They will reappear.

We will never give up.

This is the meaning of our life.

I mean sure! Sure!

Ole Miss is sure gonna look into this shocking attack on our honor!

The 2014 faculty recipient of the Chatfield College prize that goes to the instructor who most “exemplifies the academic spirit and values” of the college not only looks like this (which is fine; remember the Prof or Hobo? quiz), but just got arrested with molto drugs and guns.

Awkward?

No. Not awkward. Maybe it’s just marijuana for individual use.

But he does seem to be selling large quantities of it…

Are the guns awkward?

No. Not awkward. He’s in a dicey line of work and needs protection and they’re probably all legal. This is America.

A Tufts University professor says no.

After having a laissez-faire policy on laptops in my classrooms for my first decade of teaching, I have pretty much banned them. I knew that taking notes by hand is much, much better for learning than taking notes on a computer (the latter allows the student to transcribe without thinking; the former forces the student to cognitively process what is worthy of note-taking and what is not), but I figured that was the student’s choice. The tipping point for me was research showing that open screens in a classroom distract students close to the screen. So I went all paternalistic and decided to eliminate them from my classroom. The effect was immediate — my students were more engaged with the material.

Same for PowerPoints and Lecture-By-Skype and so on and so on.

MOOCs (as UD has discovered) can be great as non-credit-bearing world-outreach sorts of things, but they can be just as cheesy as many online and PowerPoint-heavy and Go-Ahead-And-Use-Your-Laptops courses when you try to pretend they’re equivalent – in intrinsic value, and in credit-worthiness – to non-laptopped, in-class courses.

Next stop: Visiting professorship, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.