The problem is that we have no agreement about which ideas are beyond the pale, and the people least willing to draw necessary distinctions are the most strident. Student activists are naturally going to test boundaries and make maximalist demands. Yet while I’m under no illusion that they’re interested in the opinions of Gen X liberals like myself, someone should tell them that if the principle of free speech is curtailed, those with the least power are most likely to feel the chill.

Michelle Goldberg tries to bring reason to the latest group of campus activists who successfully shut down free speech – this time at William and Mary. The target: A speaker from the nefarious ACLU.

I understand that for a lot of young leftists, it doesn’t make sense to equate what they see as hate speech with the speech of the oppressed. It’s harder for me to understand why they think that if First Amendment protections are weakened, the left — and not, say, the Trump administration — will be allowed to define what is hateful and what is not. After all, it is extremely common to hear people on the right describe Black Lives Matter as a hate group. A Louisiana police officer injured in a protest against police brutality recently tried to sue the movement and one of its most prominent members for incitement.

It’s certainly true that it’s easier to enjoy free speech when you’re privileged. It doesn’t follow from that, however, that eroding free speech protections helps the vulnerable. When disputes about free speech are adjudicated not according to broad principles but according to who has power, the left will mostly lose. If the students at William and Mary aren’t frightened off activism by their experience with national notoriety, they’ll probably learn that soon enough. Luckily, if they ever do come face to face with forces determined to shut them up, the A.C.L.U. will be there.

Or you could read this, by Conor Friedersdorf.

… the burqa.

Corruption is now synonymous with top-tier college [sports] programs, but typically, lower level coaches, like an assistant coach, take most of the fault while the head coach and higher officials continue business as usual. [Rick] Pitino was set to serve a five-game suspension this season for [the University of] Louisville’s sex scandal last season. He escaped that investigation with only a suspension because he claimed to have been unaware of the actions of his staffer, Andre McGee.

Pitino’s reaction at being named in the [DOJ/FBI corruption] allegations, followed by statements of being shocked and unaware, won’t do him any favors. It has been amazing how NCAA coaches are constantly submerged in accusations of misconduct, but high-profile names like Pitino get away with measly suspensions. The next step for Pitino is to try to recoup any of the $40 million left on his contract at Louisville. Through his lawyer, he stated that he is owed all of it, but messy contract disputes are sure to ensue after his termination is final.

I believe his reputation would be too damaged for any basketball team to consider giving him another coaching job, but with these types of actions being so common in NCAA sports, another team might just overlook Pitino’s recent history.

No, it’s not The Onion. Crazed Carmen Puliafito’s replacement as the head of the University of Southern California medical school – Puliafito’s protégé, by the way – turns out to have quite the naughty backstory himself, and since the story happened at USC and they appointed the guy dean anyway, UD thinks it’s time for the medical school at the University of Southern California to seek counseling. This is totally nuts, and UD‘s going to stop covering USC med school on this blog if things descend yet further into farce.

So. Meet the guy they chose to replace drug-crazed Carmen.

A young international student working for [Rohit] Varma on one of [his] research projects — an NIH-funded study of eye disease in Latinos — accompanied him to [a] conference.

The woman later told USC investigators that when they arrived at the conference hotel, Varma told the woman he had booked a single room and expected her to share a bed with him, according to two sources familiar with USC’s investigation. She told the investigators that when she questioned the arrangement, Varma claimed the grant money would only cover one room, the sources said.

She said that when she protested further, he took her cellphone away and threatened to have her visa revoked, according to the sources. The woman told investigators that she had no money to pay for her own room and ended up sleeping on a cot in Varma’s room, the sources said.

She reported the incident to USC, and the university’s Office of Equity and Diversity launched an investigation of Varma for sexual harassment and retaliation. Investigators found evidence to support her claims…

Just the sort of person you want when you’re desperate to clean house after orgy-meister Carmen.

The University of Louisville athletics program, rotten to the core, doesn’t even turn a profit. If you’re going to prostitute yourself in every possible way, as UL has done, at least make some money doing it. But of course the corruption on that campus involves giving its coaches obscene salaries, building pointless sports palaces, bribing recruits, and anything else twisted and rotten you can think of. ‘Fraid there’s no money left over after all that to give academics, and in fact athletics gets immense subsidies from this beyond-pathetic university. UD wonders how it feels for faculty and students to sacrifice for decades, only to discover that all the money they’ve had withheld has gone to world-historical douches like Rick Pitino, currently preparing to sue the in-the-credit-gutter school for $44 million.

But I guess knowing how much of that money goes to disgraced ex-AD Tom Jurich makes it all better!

“Over the past seven years, through a byzantine array of longevity and performance bonuses, base pay raises and tax subsidies, Jurich collected total compensation of $19,279,710, an average of $2.76 million per year.
“Last year, his taxable income — enriched by the vesting of a $1.8 million annuity plus $1.6 million from the university to pay his taxes on it — totaled $5.3 million.”

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

The university budgeted less for its Biology ($3.3 million), English ($4 million), History ($2.4 million) and Mathematics ($3.5 million) departments, the [Louisville] Courier-Journal’s research showed, and his listed income was more than double that of the next-highest-paid AD, Ohio State’s Gene Smith ($1.98 million).

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

Much of the remaining money, after Pitino and Jurich took what they took to drag the school through the mud, was allegedly snapped up by disgraced ex-UL president, James Ramsey, and his cronies.

That’s precisely what I remember discovering, and being mesmerized by, in my also long-ago reading of his first novel, A Pale View of Hills.

This year’s Nobel Prize winner in literature, Kazuo Ishiguro, writes with a weird, weight-bearing austerity which really captured and held me. I remember that thin novel more vividly than I remember most.

When you are young, things like your moral stance and your political position seem very important. I’d spend long nights with my friends sorting out moral and political positions that we thought would take us through adult life. And part of that would end up meaning we despised some people not for what they did, but for the opinions they professed to hold. But as I’ve got older I think I’ve realised that while it is important to have principles, you have far less control of what happens. These principles and positions only get you so far because what actually happens is that you don’t carefully chart your way through life.

I know! I know! Pick me! Pick me!

Uh, yes, UD?

Legitimate!!

A++, UD!  We’re proud of you!

Killing-field fraternities, like massive numbers of big guns in the hands of people like Stephen Paddock, are simply part of the wonderful world of many American males, and nobody gets to mess with frats or guns.

Mr. Horras, quoted in this post’s headline, is charged with defending frats in the wake of yet more torture and slaughter, but, as Caitlin Flanagan notes, he’d do a better job if he, like, knew anything about what he was defending.

Yet why bother checking the narrative – straight out of the Marquis de Sade – of Tim Piazza’s death, when Horras knows that no one will ever do anything about sadistic, homicidal, fraternities in American universities? It’s like asking how many ten minute long massacres of scores of people the country can tolerate before it enacts gun restrictions. Answer: There is no upper limit.

So let us now imagine all the forces arrayed against 19-year-old Tim Piazza as he gets dressed in his jacket and tie, preparing to go to his new chapter house and accept the bid the brothers have offered him.

He is up against a university [the drenched-in-shame Penn State] that has allowed hazing to go on for decades; a fraternity chapter that has hazed pledge classes at least twice in the previous 12 months; a set of rules that so harshly punishes hazing that the brothers will think it better to take a chance with his life than to face the consequences of having made him get drunk; and a “checking system” provided by a security firm that is, in many regards, a sham. He thinks he is going to join a club that his college endorses, and that is true. But it is also true that he is setting off to get jumped by a gang, and he won’t survive.

And UD says:

Cut and paste
In haste,
Blame everyone else
At leisure.

Which is to say that the latest plagiarism miscreant, Jill Bialosky (read the last paragraphs of this review), is going to have to end her dignified silence pretty soon and start shoveling shit like there’s no tomorrow. My research assistant did it, my computer did it, my editor did it, my agent did it, my ex-husband did it, my publicist did it, solar storms did it.

“[I]t’s hard to imagine Bialosky’s intended audience,” writes William Logan, her plagiarism-unmasker. Yet therein lies the problem. Her “condescending” book of platitudes about poetry clearly intends to corner the high school textbook market, and really how much effort do you want to put into that? Just pick up capsule bios of the poets from the Poetry Foundation and stick them between pages of metrical triage.

Even Bialosky’s title has a familiar ring – she’s picked up her cheap urgency (Poetry Will Save Your Life) from Alain De Botton’s equally blowhardy How Proust Can Change Your Life.

If Bialosky has any sense, she will, having been caught red-handed, admit the plagiarism and have the book shredded. If she has more sense even than that, she will refrain not only from blaming others, but also from shifting into second gear when that fails: Confiding in us the dire psychological/financial/chemical problems that made her so desperate that she had to plagiarize. The less said the better, especially because plagiarists are notoriously prone to plagiarize repeatedly, and she doesn’t want our attention drawn to her other work.

UD and her theory of her country’s latest massacre will graciously step aside when investigators discover some simple, graspable motive on the part of the gunman. Until then, how about this.

This was a crime of boredom and intellect. A metaphysical crime mixing a sense of entitlement with a sense of having run out of amusements. This was a hobbyist murder.

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

UD will be surprised if, like Leopold and Loeb, Stephen Paddock had any acquaintance with Nietzschean nihilism. Maybe he read Cormac McCarthy. That’s the mental landscape I’m sketching.

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

His brother calls Paddock highly intelligent, successful, and rich – quite like the buddies who decided, in 1924, purely out of boredom, curiosity, grandiosity, and intellectual enjoyment of the complex technical and analytical steps it would take to carry out a perfect murder, to kill a local boy.

If it’s true that one of the cameras Paddock placed in his room was positioned for him to film himself (this hasn’t been confirmed), this would complete UD‘s picture of a narcissistic game-player (he was a compulsive high-stakes gambler) at the very end of his distracting, engrossing pastimes, a man who never grew up (two divorces, no children) and who decided to leave, at the end of his maddeningly empty life, the ultimate roomful of a bad boy’s toys.

Paddock died surrounded by more guns than he could possibly fire.

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

Since what I’ve written reminds one of my readers of Don DeLillo, here he is:

This is World War III. It’s a fact. It’s everywhere. Innocent people are being slaughtered everywhere. It’s terrorism that is expanding … almost geometrically. What’s left? What happens next? We have our lone shooters, our individual terrorists. Where do they come from? What motivates them? I think in many cases the gun is the motive as well as the weapon itself. A gun makes it possible for an individual, a man—a young man, usually—to make sense of everything that’s happening to him, either in three dimensions or in his mind. It gives him a motive. It gives him a sense of direction. It’s a substitute for real life and it’s the way he will choose to end his life, as well as the life of innocent people, of course.

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

UPDATE: Not quite the same, but an affiliated theory.

Stephen Paddock very well may have contemplated mass murder as a sensualist exercise.

Again, recall Leopold and Loeb: “They did it to see what it would feel like.”

[University of Louisville Athletic Director Tom] Jurich’s pay was essentially ill-gotten gains taken directly from players such as first-round NBA Draft pick Donovan Mitchell, whose television appeal and jersey sales produce the revenue. Yet Mitchell must be content with whatever crumbs the school illicitly tosses him? Throw open the market. Let’s see who clamors for Jurich’s jersey. Or whether the public would rather see him in prison clothes.

… says everyone this morning, after the Las Vegas bloodbath.

There’s a simple … well, it’s not entirely a solution to some of America’s many massacres, but it’s something that could perhaps be effective in certain situations.

For all public outdoor events in urban settings, require the presence onstage of at least one rocket-propelled grenade. At least one speaker/performer would have to demonstrate competence in its use before the event could take place. A child could do it.

These things are reasonably portable and can be positioned to hit pretty high up, so once you detect the source of the gunfire, you could blast the RPG in that direction.

Serious damage will be done to the building, and to some of the people in it. But this is war.

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

James Melton [whose son was killed] described other “angels” who helped his son and daughter-in-law in “that killing field that must have resembled the Marines landing on Omaha Beach.”

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

“At one point I looked up and I thought, ‘are we at war?’“

Anyone really setting out to chronicle the endless history of filthy athletics at the University of Miami would have to use as their model the 200,000 verse Indian epic. But given modern journalism’s space constraints, the task instead is to summarize as briefly as possible the long venerable ages of trashiness that are UM.

UD thinks Jerry Iannelli does a respectable job in this New Times piece, written in anticipation of an FBI indictment against UM’s basketball program.

… goes to Oxford.

SONG OF THE TRUSTEES

We’re off to dump Pitino
The god of our campus that was.
We knew he was a bit of a scuzz
If ever a scuzz there was.
And now that he’s going to jail one day
We’ve got to make sure he goes away
For cause for cause for cause for cause for cause!
Because of the terrible things he does.
We’re off to dump Pitino
The god of our campus that was.