Scathing Online Schoolmarm loves that genre of academic writing which is the outraged high-ranking campus sports-whore attacking legitimate professors and students at uber-jock universities. Before SOS talks about the email from an Auburn University dean that appears in my headline, she wants to share with you an earlier example of this classic clown-school missive.

In 2013, a women’s lacrosse coach at the infamous University of Louisville was informed that one of her players had been seen exercising her personal freedom by wearing a Michigan State sweatshirt. The coach left the following voice mail for the player:

Darby, change your clothes, don’t bother coming to practice today. Do you know that I just got a phone call about you wearing a Michigan State shirt? You obviously have no idea how serious athletics is at the University of Louisville. I do not want to see your face today until after practice, but your butt better be up in my office with a Louisville shirt on your chest when practice ends.

Schools like Auburn and Louisville are like this: They got nowhere else to go. They got nothin’ else. Nor, being game-cults, do they appreciate Winston Smiths who fail to conform to the cult. These schools got brain bashin’ ball or they got nothin’. They’re not about to go down without a fight when alien invaders like the New York Times expose their intellectual nothingness; they’re not going to let some random woman athlete introduce changes to their uniform; and they’re certainly not going to let some dissenting legitimate scholar get off scot-free. Me big macho school, on field and off!! GRRRRRRRR don’t make me mad….

It’s like… NCAA: FAAAAACK YOU.

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Auburn got so pissed at the econ professor on the faculty who kept complaining about its massive bogus course system – centered on the keep ’em eligible public administration major – that its president

took the highly unusual step of suggesting that the entire economics department be moved elsewhere.

In a memo written on presidential letterhead, [Jay] Gogue recommended that [Michael] Stern be assigned a new supervisor and that the department “no longer be a part of the College of Liberal Arts.”

It’s just what I’ve been predicting, mes petites, and Auburn will clearly be the first school to actually do it: The football cult’s economics department, with its expert financial review of the athletic program and its commitment to academics, must go. Exile. Banishment. Siberia.

And not only that – see again the email that I quote in my headline, from Auburn Dean Joseph Aistrup to the dissenting econ prof. Belitting; threats; a demand for recantation. The whole Orwellian number.

Indeed here is the model for the econ prof’s next step: Room 101, followed by I ask only for you to accept my love of Our Leader.

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[One Auburn professor] put a picture of Aistrup arm in arm with… the athletics director, on his office door, alongside photos of Joseph Stalin and Kim Jong-un.

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SOS thanks a reader for sending her Jack Stripling’s CHE piece.

The American version of Sophie’s Choice is playing out in Mississippi, and it is every bit as agonizing – more agonizing – than what Sophie endured.

Guns v Football. Guns, Football, Collide. Guns or Football. Guns, Threats, and SEC Football.

If a new bill fails to pass, you will have to choose between the two things you love most: Your AR-15 and the Rebels. You will not be able to bring your gun to university football games.

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Security officer, Vaught–Hemingway Stadium: You may keep one: football or the gun.

Snopes: Take my little girl! Take my baby!

… about his university’s athletics program. This blog chronicles tons of econ profs – people capable of actually running the numbers – who turn against their employers and detail the lies the schools tell about the money they’re spending on football. The latest guy is Colorado State University’s Steven Shulman.

[Student fees] have risen 45 percent since Tony Frank was appointed president of CSU in 2008.

Institutional support to athletics has almost tripled since 2008. These subsidies transfer resources from academics into athletics. As a result, CSU has not been able to increase instructional spending per student or protect itself from revenue declines.

Every time the state cuts CSU’s budget, the university is forced to cut academic programs. Only athletics is insulated from budget cuts.

CSU’s way-expensive new stadium hosts losing games attended by fewer and fewer people.

A commenter on Shulman’s column puts the matter well.

CSU [has] gambled $450 million (in bond repayments) on a sport that is a dying a slow death. Empty seats, phony bowl games, ethics problems – everywhere you look there are reasons to question the new stadium decision. The project can only be justified and supported by a few old alumni counting on tax benefits.

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That “old alumni” thing has UD thinking about how we might retrofit football into a truly twenty-first century university curriculum.

Pretty much everyone agrees football is over – dying a slow death, as the commenter notes.

Figure it’s got another twenty years as a professional sport, ten years at the non-southern university, and thirty years at the southern. (Down south, they’ll have to wait until the fan melee that turns into a mass shooting to really finish off the game.) It’s not too soon to start thinking about how we can excite our ahistorical students (postmodern Americans are ignorant of history, and live in what one theorist calls a “radical presentness”) in things antiquarian by featuring football, alongside, say, the Salem Witch Trials, as examples of pre-Enlightenment American ways of life. We might not be able to get our students to study Latin, but we can certainly interest many of them in the study of football, which will feature, for instance, field trips to massive rotting campus colosseums.

… after a snowfall.

Taken by UD‘s friend Ari.

Nice writing about choosing the right vacation while still deeply mourning the sudden death of your husband.

As autumn approached, my parents agreed that it would be good for my mental health to skip my first holidays without Peter. “Let’s go on a trip,” my father said. “Anywhere but Asia or Australia. I don’t want too long a flight.”

“Let’s go to Peru,” I suggested. An avid bird-watcher, I had always wanted to visit the Tambopata region of Peru, home to the largest known clay licks on Earth. (A lick is a cliff where macaws, parrots, and parrotlets congregate to ingest mud, a vital source of sodium.) I can think of no more breathtakingly gaudy sight in the world. As our guide marched us through the jungle, day after day, in search of an ever-narrowing list of the area’s antbirds and antthrushes and flycatchers and manakins, I came to see the trip as avian psychopharmacology. It was a perfect, if privileged—and wet and buggy—way of avoiding the tinselled and ornamented triggers of the holidays.

Ronan Collins calls for no half-way measures – not a harmless nick here and a harmless nick there – but full surgical removal of the faculty member at Trinity College who loves him some mutilated female genitals.

Collins says: “I will be handing back my academic title of clinical associate professor [of medicine] if I feel the university’s response is not clear and firm in dealing with the matter.”

Especially if you’re a professor of medicine, the realization that there’s another professor somewhere at your university, in a position of authority and respect, who thinks torturing and mutilating little girls is a good idea — it’s simply too disgusting. Unbelievable, actually. Bravo, Collins.

Sing it.

An AR-15, peaches and cream,
Hair that sparkles and shines.
You’re nineteen, you’re lunatic, and it’s fine.

High velocity disintegrates me
Now I’m your angel divine
You’re nineteen, you’re lunatic, and it’s fine.

Dan Hodges’ verdict on Sandy Hook covers the latest child massacre.

NRA darling Marco Rubio gushes at this country’s amazing gun technology, and our amazing ability to put that technology in the hands of insane teenagers.

It’ll be even more amazing to see how much carnage a gang of insane teenagers will carry out. Hold onto your hats!

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Now 17 high-school kids and teachers are dead in Rubio’s backyard. And the man who has taken more than any other Florida politico from the NRA — $3.3 million as of this past October — still doesn’t want to talk about what he’s going to do about it. That’s because he’s going to do jack fucking nothing, which is exactly what the NRA pays for him to do.

A response to all the prayers.

Roses are red
Violets are blue
This tyke’s AR-15
Is aimed right at you

Dublin’s Trinity College has not yet fired the female genital mutilation enthusiast on its faculty. So far, all it has done is hire another person to teach the same material at the same time, so if you, say, would rather not learn from a depraved person, you don’t have to.

On the other hand, for those female students who enjoy sitting in a room for hours, looking at an adult male, and finding it impossible to avoid imagining him slicing off their clitoris, you’re good to go. He’s still on the faculty, and you can enjoy his company for the rest of the semester.

The president of the Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union – quoted in my headline – thinks he should be fired right away, but… well… you know. Some people think it’s culturally insensitive to respond strongly to rituals that to be sure might be alien to us but no doubt have some good in them… I mean, it’s his religion and all.

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The obvious upside: People in Ireland are really stirred up. The fact that Trinity – Ireland’s most important university – harbors a barbarian has galvanized millions of people. The more attention female genital mutilation gets, the better.

Dear Lord forgive us our buyout and our fraud
And all else we do unworthy of our God;
Show mercy, in thy holy name!
For nothing matters more than football games.

N.V.N.

Those who try to come near it are insane
and those who reach it are shaken by grief,
So now you know exactly why
my heart beats no faster under your hand.

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[From Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova, translated from the Russian by Jane Kenyon with Vera Sandomirsky Dunham (1985)]

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One does feel this –
That everything from paper hearts to fervid verse
Only faintly approaches the insane grief-shaken
Love the free soul can conceive.

We are therefore kindest to ourselves
When we close our mind-forg’d manacles
Somewhat
Around our too-fast-beating hearts.

UD.

UD has long said that in a few years schools like Rutgers – run by jokesters and jocksters – will begin phasing out their economics departments, or at the very least introducing litmus tests for new hires.

Econ professors are among the very few on any campus who can actually run the numbers on athletics programs. The loudest among these professors often have access to the local newspaper’s opinion columns, and they can stir up outrage against massive sports deficits. The cleanest thing to do will be to shut them, and their departments, down. You could, short of that, hire only economists who have demonstrated that no amount of sports-related deficit is too great to outweigh their adoration of athletics.

Meanwhile, Rutgers has the curse of Mark Killingsworth, an econ prof who relentlessly, in opinion piece after opinion piece, chronicles what he describes as the brainlessness and insanity of that school’s president and board of trustees as they drive the place into incredible debt.

[The] real [athletics] deficit for 2016-17 can now stand up and be counted: it comes to a total of $35.4 million plus $11.9 million, or $47.3 million — the largest deficit in the history of Rutgers athletics. Despite [President Robert] Barchi’s oft-expressed pious hopes for athletics self-sufficiency, the program has now blown through a grand total of $193.1 million in deficit spending since he arrived in New Brunswick.

If you think this is bad … there’s worse. From the university’s response to another OPRA request, I learned that Rutgers currently has an outstanding total of $33.13 million in “internal debt” — the last of which won’t be paid off until 2030.

… The members of Rutgers’ Board of Governors have shown that, collectively, they are either too ignorant or too timid to do anything to restore even the most modest degree of fiscal sanity to Rutgers athletics: for them, anything goes. Apparently, they don’t understand, or don’t care, that athletics deficits take money that could have been spent on academics, and shamelessly raise fees and costs for students.

The only way to shut this guy up is to dump his entire department – call it a fiscal emergency, brought on by a temporarily high athletics deficit.