Parsing moral responsibility at Arizona State University is a subtle thing.

Yes, fraternity members encouraged a classmate to drink himself to death…

On the other hand, when he started to die they dropped him at the local hospital…

Even more nobly, before they abandoned him in the lobby one student taped a piece of paper onto his body with information about how much he’d had to drink. The world will little note, nor long remember, exactly what the student wrote, but it can never forget what he did …

Similarly, after an exploding beer bottle someone threw into a bonfire badly burned two women, ASU students “helped extinguish the girls’ flaming skin.” Then they “kicked them out of the party to avoid getting into trouble.”

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These are the sorts of moral scenarios philosophy professors like to use in their classrooms. They’re stories with a rich ambiguity that can provoke valuable discussion.

After cheering while a friend drinks himself to the point of death, should you

1. put him away in a room to die or sleep it off?
2. take him to the hospital?
3. put clothes on him? (he only had on a bathing suit)
4. stay long enough to talk to a doctor or nurse?
5. abandon him?
6. stick a note on him and then abandon him?

After setting off an explosion that grievously injures two people, should you

1. douse their flames?
2. throw them out into the night?

Hail, Chairman Cheney!

Our football team has not achieved the success we would have liked to have seen over the years, but we have had pockets of success that inspire. How about our three Aggie players drafted into the NFL for three consecutive years! For those who watched, NMSU beat Minnesota two years ago — there was a state of elation that had people talking the whole season. Who can deny that a win against our major rivals — UTEP or UNM — creates electricity and enthusiasm for a unified Aggie Nation! My challenge to all of us is to get behind and support our teams that represent us with such pride. Anyone can criticize. It takes fortitude to be a supporter on our way to achieving the success we desire.

I am proud of New Mexico State University. If we aspire to be known as one of America’s great universities, we are going to need to act like we are one of those universities today! That is what is called vision! When we believe in our vision; when we support our faculty; when we support our staff; when we support our administration; when we support our coaches and athletic director; and yes, when we support our board of regents; success will be ours! It takes courage to stand tall in the face of criticism. It takes heart to support our student-athletes who are giving it their all, each time that enter a competition. It takes special people to take NMSU to a new place, and I believe we are in a place in our history, with people of passion, who can help us get there!

Stand tall! Anyone can criticize!!

… the University of Colorado. They’ve had years of absolutely fascinating violence, rape, alcohol, and spending scandals, and it just keeps coming! One of their players went out the other night and drank, by his estimation, “six glasses of wine, 10 beers and six shots of various other alcohols,” and got into a big ol’ fight with some random guy on the street and practically killed him. Haha! More great shit for the team; plus for the … … … university? I think there’s a university somewhere in these stories…!

UD thinks all the people who want to end the alcohol ban at CU’s Folsom Field should use this guy in their ads. LOL.

… Mike Rice.

… This is what comes of not knowing the difference between principle and principal. The mistake follows you around, finally ending up on your US Foreign Policy syllabus:

The aim of this course is to examine the formation of U.S. foreign policy. The principle questions include…

Your uncertainty about this and other conundrums gnaws at you until late one night you turn on all the lights, get out one of your many guns, and shoot at the ceiling of your university-owned house forty times.

Lesson: Learn your homophone pairs.

If you want to be among the top twenty most highly compensated public university presidents in the United States, it helps to preside over spectacular crimes. Penn State’s Graham Spanier, “awaiting trial on criminal charges of perjury, obstruction, endangering the welfare of children, failure to properly report suspected child abuse and conspiracy,” took the number one spot for 2011-2012; coming in at #11 was Florida A&M’s James Ammons, who had the beating to death of one of his marching band members at the hands of other members of the band on his watch. Even if your sports factory doesn’t manage to produce child rape or manslaughter, the simple expedience of being an eager slave of your coaches may do the trick: Auburn’s president made the list, as did Gordon Gee of Ohio State.

Mitzi Wasserman Rapp with
her four children.

Campsite, Bavarian Alps, 1960.

UD: White cardigan, badminton racquet.

… honors a scientist at the university who was murdered, two years ago, allegedly by her husband. His trial has just begun.

UD has followed, on this blog, quite a number of university-related murders, many of them the murders of estranged wives by enraged husbands.

So enraged that the murderers made it pretty easy to discover and convict them.

Two cases out of several in the last few years come to mind – George Zinkhan, a University of Georgia professor who wasn’t tried and convicted because he decided – with the police closing in – to dig his own grave and kill himself; and Rafael Robb, a University of Pennsylvania professor about to be freed after serving five years for the murder of his wife.

Five years seems about right. Except for having bludgeoned a defenseless woman to death in one of the bloodiest crimes the state of Pennsylvania has ever seen, he’s been a really good boy.

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Update: Ah. They revoked the parole.

… as Neil Young would say.

Helpless schools like the University of Charleston will never be anything but sports factories and arrest generators. They’ll take anyone tall for their basketball teams, including people with arrest records for very serious crimes. When their players team up and get arrested together, the schools haul out their presidents to say we feel helpless.

Someone needs to step in and help America’s sports factories/arrest generators. Alone, they are helpless.

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UPDATE: And now: Three from each team!

This is the second mass arrest of University of Charleston athletes in the last few weeks.

Three University of Charleston football players have just been kicked off the team for drug dealing. You’ve got to acknowledge the remarkable degree of teamwork in both Charleston sports – three-man strategy in each case.

I quoted this in a post a long time ago, and its source – Truman State University’s newspaper – no longer has it online.

I’ve always been moved – angered – by what that student found it necessary to plead. Her Teach us something! haunts me. It’s so easy to put away the PowerPoints and the laptops and smartphones and the rest of the other barrier technologies and just turn the lights back on and look at people and talk to them. Assuming you have something to say beyond a verbal data dump. The PowerPointed plus laptopped classroom is what UD has long called, on this blog, The Morgue Classroom, where everyone ‘s dead – instructor and students.

We can expect more outbursts like this one in our secondary schools and colleges – more Teach Us Somethings – as teachers and professors continue their dance with death in the classroom. The outburst has gone way viral; Jeff Bliss’s statement (“They need to learn face to face.”) is getting national and international attention.

It’s icing on the cake that this happened in Texas, one of our most ignorant states. What are they up to in Texas high schools that’s making the news? A one million dollar football scoreboard.

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(UD thanks JND and UD‘s sister.).

In an article about soccer Saudi-style (“Protest against performance and royal interference has had the most far-reaching effect in Saudi Arabia where princes are known to phone during a match to order the change of a player.”), a writer falls into the impregnable/impregnate trap.

Football is defeating efforts by wealthy Gulf States to impregnate themselves against the wave of protests that have swept the Middle East and North Africa in the past two years and sparked a brutal civil war in Syria.

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Explanation of problem:

The two words have very different etymologies.

Impregnate comes from Latin impraegnare, which means ‘to be imbued or saturated with’.

Impregnable comes from Middle French imprenable, itself derived from Latin prehendere, which means ‘to take, grasp’.

That they have come to look so similar in English today is just coincidence.

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SOS never merely curses the darkness. She always lights a candle. So: The writer might instead use:

fortify
defend
protect

She lives for stuff like this.

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We always lose lose lose

but we take solace in our booze.

Free market, baby. When students don’t give a shit about your professional football team located on a university campus, they will buy and sell and buy and sell their student tickets to make a buck.

You taught them how the game’s played, with your trillionaire coach and athletes/pretend students and all. Bit late in the day to complain that you get to make a fortune but your players and the student fans get nothing but massive student fees to pay for your fortune.

Sure, the students will show up for the big games. They want to get drunk and excited and maybe win something. But they don’t give a shit about the team, and they’re certainly not showing up for blow-off games. Why should they? What’s your problem?

…tedious by a lieutenant governor.

Or, uh, Drew. My Drew. Lazy, dim, and… er… let’s say not entirely straightforward. But can he ever coach swimmers! The taxpayers of Indiana can’t wait to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to my Drew!