[If you didn’t expect this outcome, you’re like people who are still] stunned to learn that a game as inherently violent as football would lead to life-altering issues among players from repeated concussions and blows to the head.

Far worse, you’re like Louisville’s superscummy basketball coach, who says he’s “completely shocked” by the shocking corruption in university basketball. As completely shocked as he was by the whorehouse being run in a dorm lived in by basketball players and visited by recruits and their families.

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So here’s UD‘s take. American university students are being trained to be Italians. Italians are living the good life and they don’t give a rat’s ass that their entire world is howlingly corrupt. In a New Yorker article about the sordid Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair, Adam Gopnik noted French anxiety about

what many in Paris see as the “Italianization” of French life — the descent into what might become an unseemly round of Berlusconian squalor …

The University of Louisville is the avant-garde: Can you grow a university whose students heartily endorse, and fork all their tuition money over to, Rick Berlusconi Strauss-Kahn Pitino? His sextortion, his whores for sixteen year old recruits and their fathers, his stuffed envelopes for sports agents in Las Vegas hotel rooms? Can you guarantee a university whose students will rush to the bookstore and buy out Pitino’s many books about how to be ethical?

The entire financial foundation of the University of Louisville rests on a bet that there’s no bottom – that students and alumni will be able — FOREVER — to look at a guy who could give Jerry Sandusky a run for his money and say WE LOVE YOU RICK. TELL US HOW MUCH MORE YOU WANT US TO COUGH UP FOR YOUR SALARY.

It’s a solid bet. This is Kentucky, after all.

The beyond-thrilling news that women are now permitted to drive cars in Saudi Arabia (What’s next? Walk down the street without a male guardian?) reminds UD of her favorite edict from that country, known to all as The Adult Breastfeeding Fatwa.

Since an unrelated man and a woman being together in the same room is strictly forbidden…

Sheikh ‘Abd Al-Muhsin Al-‘Obikan, an advisor at the Saudi Justice Ministry, recently issued a fatwa allowing the breastfeeding of adults. The fatwa is aimed at enabling an unrelated man and woman to be secluded in the same room, a situation which Islam considers forbidden gender mixing. The rationale behind the fatwa is that breastfeeding creates a bond of kinship between the man and woman, … thus making it acceptable for them to be together in seclusion.

The order generated a lot of controversy. (Egypt even saw some nipple retraction.)

One columnist pointed to a paradox, namely that the fear of gender-mixing is prompting clerics to encourage lewd behaviors like women breastfeeding grown men.

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In an earlier post, UD imagined Rate My Expressers entries for women-taught university courses in Saudi Arabia:

Why weren’t any head coaches implicated [in today’s university bribery scandal]? Christian Dawkins, who was working to start his own sports-management company, may have provided the beginnings of an answer in a wiretapped phone call: He said the best way to reach players was through assistant coaches because “the head coach … ain’t willing to [take bribes] ’cause they’re making too much money.“

This blog is ambivalent about the predictable call for the University of Louisville to get the death penalty (it’d probably be curtains for the whole university, since without its sports programs …), now that its totally stinky irredeemable stinkiness (there’s a reason they call it the U of Smell) has yet again wafted its way across the landscape of this great country of ours. When it comes to Louisville, it’s very much as George immortally put it to Martha: There isn’t an abomination award going that you haven’t won. The only thing left for that university to win is the death penalty.

One observer claims that the career of UL’s super-louche basketball coach will “almost certainly … end in a fall of Shakespearian dimension.” (That should be Shakespearean.). But if you start in the gutter and end in the gutter does that count as Shakespearean? Tragic?

And why are we here at University Diaries ambivalent? Because without the sex drugs and rock and roll we get from UL we’d suffer a fall of Shakespearean dimension.

… on the big ongoing – and apparently expanding – university corruption story.

Okay, so it’s unnamed so far, so… uh… so… (thinking quick here!)… So here’s the description of U6:

University 6 is described as a public research university in Kentucky with an enrollment of 22,640. The University of Louisville is Kentucky’s only school that matches that description.

Here’s our play, guys. Listen up.

You’re getting hundreds of millions from Adidas in a sponsorship deal… In fact, you are

the highest-earning school in Adidas’ college portfolio.

Adidas sure don’t give a shit about that whole whormitory thing! Anyway.

Now, assuming the deal still goes through even though the FBI just arrested their head of global sports marketing, you take that money and with it you establish an entirely new public research university in Kentucky whose enrollment happens to be 22,640. This is an online university, of course… It’s all on paper… You recruit students (the names of students; no actual classes will ever be offered) the way many other online universities do… Hanging out at homeless shelters and offering bribes…

So anyway – this way you protect the U of L…

UD wondered why the U of Smell wasn’t one of the four schools charged by the US government in the current bribery scandal. But hold onto your basketball players’ university-provided whorehouse!

[In the case of the so-far-unnamed] “University 6” … the indictment accuses four people… of funneling approximately $100,000 to an All-America high school basketball player in order to secure that player’s commitment to the school. The player was then to sign with adidas upon entering a professional basketball league.

CBS Sports college basketball reporter Gary Parrish believes that player is Class of 2017 Louisville commit Brian Bowen.

According to a report by Louisville-based TV network WDRB, the money was wired to third-party consultants who then made cash payments to the player’s family in order to conceal the transaction from university officials.

Louisville gets extra points for having allegedly transacted this business even though it was already under probation for running a whorehouse.

Louisville received its punishment from the NCAA 6/11. A bball assistant was in a hotel room in Vegas w/Adidas conspiring to cheat on 7/27.

UL does not miss a beat. More details:

The indictments also indicate that Bowen was not the only player recruited by Louisville in this manner. WDRB.com reported that the FBI recorded a meeting in Las Vegas involving a Louisville coach recruiting a high school player in the Class of 2019.

In the meeting, one of the participants noted that the school was already on probation with the NCAA and would have to be “particularly careful” about how the money was passed to the high school player and his family. The coach agreed, saying, “we gotta be very low key,” according to the indictments.

UD keeps thinking this school can’t go any lower. Then it goes lower.

(Watch it here.)

Lamont Evans, associate head coach for the Oklahoma State Cowboys, Chuck Person, associate head coach for the Auburn University Tigers, Emanuel “Book” Richardson, assistant coach for the Arizona Wildcats, and Anthony “Tony” Bland, assistant head coach of the University of Southern California Trojans, were all named in the complaint.

How did “Book” get his nickname?

Arizona assistant coach Emanuel Richardson was nicknamed Pocketbook by his grandmother because she would catch him riffling through her purse. The name was eventually shortened on the basketball courts…

Whooda thunkit. This country’s institutions of higher education host criminal gangs getting rich off of their students!

Haha I mean our universities pay criminal gangs to get rich off of their students, as in the latest FBI raid of … Oh let’s see… If you were going to guess what name would be first on the massive university athletics corruption hit parade, what would it be?

Well, if you’ve been reading this blog for more than ten minutes, you’d be choosing between Baylor and Auburn… Auburn and Baylor… Yeah, let’s start with the A‘s… Let’s go with that glorious public university in the state of Alabam’… Ruled for decades by King Bobby Lowder, it is now the fiefdom of – among other sporty types – basketball coach Chuck Person, currently

facing six charges, including bribery conspiracy, solicitation of bribes and gratuities, conspiracy to commit honest services fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and travel act conspiracy, according to court documents.

Oh, but it’s so much bigger than one Person. Tune in today at noon for an update on America’s amazing big time university athletics programs.

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UD thanks dmf.

Design: Joe Scorsone
and Alice Drueding.

If I may quote myself. I was listing the certified Grade A sexist hypocrites (Art Briles, Ken Starr, Buddy Jones) who made possible ongoing events at Baylor University, America’s current rapeabilliest campus. Now we need to add yet another layer to the cake: interim president David Garland.

A court filing this week reveals that the former interim president of Baylor University referred to some women who said they had been sexually assaulted as willing victims… [David] Garland also said in [an] email that he had heard a radio interview with an author who chronicled her alcoholism at college, the Waco Tribune-Herald reports. He wrote in the email that the interview “added another perspective for me of what is going on in the heads of some women who may seem willingly to make themselves victims.” … He then cited verses in the New Testament referring to God’s wrath on those who commit sexual sin.

Woe until thee Jezebels who seduceth our wide receivers into the very web of Satan! God will smite thee and all thy lawyers.

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UD prefers the theology of Art Briles, who when told of multiple rape allegations by female students against multiple heavily recruited football players of his, said of one of the complainants: “Those are some bad dudes. Why was she around those guys?”

The Lord brought those guys to Baylor. Who knows why? The ways of the Lord are strange. We knew they were bad dudes but they were a gift from God.

… and we’ve got squads of psychologists, armed with the multimegaton DSM-5, to pick our presidents off one by one: George Bush ran into this guy (and not that I wanna do any armchair psychoanalysis, but the guy is a colleague, and we sat on an examining committee together once, and he spent his round of questioning listing his academic degrees and honors); and now our current leader has run into this guy.

UD‘s blogpal, Allen Frances, tries to introduce some sanity:

Among [John] Gartner’s most notable critics is psychiatrist Allen Frances, who wrote the guidelines for diagnosing narcissistic personality disorder — and who rejects any claim that Trump has it.

To meet the criteria for a narcissistic personality disorder, Frances said, Trump would have to display distress or impairment himself. One could argue he’s caused distress, Frances said, but he doesn’t appear to experience it.

“I think that this guy and other people like him mean well and are sincere and believe that somehow they have a professional responsibility to warn America about the horrors of Trump,” said Frances, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Duke University. “But I don’t see them as knowing much about diagnoses.”

… The effort to apply a diagnosis to Trump, Frances said, “confuses bad behavior for mental illness.”

UD is exceedingly unfond of whatzisface, but rampant diagnosis-dumping is itself bad behavior.

Of course in principle no one here at University Diaries cares about professional football and its increasingly empty stadiums; we’re interested in how college football destroys American higher education. But as California goes, so goes the campus – though in fact things are far worse on campus… We have so many schools, and so few students give a shit about the game…

A writer at The Big Lead, one of many sports pundits now specializing in The Theory of Nothing, explains:

[W]hen fans aren’t at games it has a detrimental impact on the product. It sends the message that games are boring, uninteresting and that people don’t want to have anything to do with them in person.

UD Says: Not boring. That’s not the problem. The problem is that amateur and professional American football is disturbing.

Put aside the parking and the expense and protecting your kids from squads of the obscene shitfaced. Instead try a close phenomenological account of what it’s like, moment by moment, Being There. Start with the stadium-length Godzillatron, shrieking gargantuan nonstop ads at you. Should the ads stop, they will be replaced by gargantuan images of men getting their heads bashed in. You can’t not look – your entire field of vision has been captured. The only place to look away is the field, where actual men in real time are getting their heads bashed in. As one after another goes tottering unsteadily off the field, the names Aaron Hernandez and Junior Seau etc. unavoidably go through your head, and you start worrying about the guys still on the field getting their heads bashed in. I mean, okay – boxing, NASCAR, yes, fine, I like to watch guys get hammered… But… is it fine? What exactly am I watching here?…

And now, instead of screaming and having fun like everyone else, you’re suddenly effing Epictetus or something, and all you want is to go home and go to sleep.

“Take for example, female genital mutilation,” Anderson said. “So, they say ‘that’s a cultural practice.’ I’m sorry, no culture should be able to whack off sex organs, so you can’t have pleasure anymore.”

Karrin Anderson, a professor in the Colorado State University communications department.

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Also: Check out the great “Girls Belong in School” poster on the page.

I was distracted by bird vocalizations outside my thatched roof hut, grabbed my digital camera to get pictures of the pair of woodpeckers, and when I returned to my computer where I thought I had saved my changes to the material, it had crashed with the wrong draft saved.

I guess my thinking was this person is just trying to understand what my research is about and what I’m proposing to do. And so how is letting him or her know that I got this text from this other paper, how is that going to help him understand better my project or what I’m trying to say?

I did not copy from the suggested source. We just both paraphrased from the cited author in exactly the same way.

As engineers, we do not use quotation marks around copied text.

Quotation marks are only needed for the copied words of “famous people.”

It’s only a proposal. It’s not like it’s a publication. The reviewers are smart enough to know what is my work and what is someone else’s.

My English teacher told me it’s not plagiarism if I change every seventh word.

A rogue British secretary did it.

UD‘s favorite is the engineers one.

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And think about it. These are her highly selected best ones. The five thousand or so others she receives every year didn’t make the cut.