“If there ever was a death penalty case in recent memory, [the University of North Carolina] is one. But when you look at how much the NCAA has tried to run away from [the death penalty], I would bet a ton of money on it never being enacted again for a Power Five school.”

So of course the president of the University of Maryland is right, and the idiots condemning him are doing that because they know that he’s right.

I mean, you don’t want people running around saying that UNC deserves the death penalty when everyone knows it deserves the death penalty. Get it?

… about the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill having so corrupted itself via athletics that it deserves the NCAA’s death penalty, life goes on at the increasingly pathetic UNC. Yesterday the Faculty Athletic Committee met to discuss this and that. Let’s listen in.

The chancellor kicks things off with an insipid pep talk.

“People come here every single year because of sports engagements, and they get very excited about a national championship, but they come for the other athletic performances too and they come for our arts and our other academic performances.”

Are you excited yet? Well, how about this!

The Faculty Athletics Committee met Tuesday to discuss students missing classes for the men’s basketball national championship game in Arizona… Committee members also wanted to address the issue of cheerleaders and band members missing classes to travel during the postseason.

FAC Chairperson John Stephens brought up the concerns of one biology professor who said students in the pep band missed as many as eight classes between the ACC and NCAA tournaments — almost one quarter of the semester.

Associate Athletic Director for Strategic Communications Robbi Evans said athletes were required to travel earlier because of media obligations, but cheerleaders and band members are not required to go to the game and must receive permission from their professors.

FAC member Andrew Perrin said he agrees that the community has benefitted from the national championship, but reminded the committee that everything good comes at a cost.

“For us to just sit around a table and talk about how fantastically wonderful it is that we won the championship and how many people were involved in it — I think we need to recognize that it’s not just lectures that get missed, it’s labs, it’s discussions, it’s experiential and participatory education,” Perrin said.

Yes, they must get permission, and I’m gonna be the professor at UNC who refuses Bob, The Team Barker, permission! Watch me! Watch me refuse permission! Because this is a serious school and I’m a serious person!

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

And yes, in case you hadn’t thought about this yet, it’s not just the players who don’t go to class. It’s cheerleaders, the pep band – all the people who shake their ass for ten minutes and then plant it on a bleacher for three hours… All of them need to be absent too…

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

But UD hasn’t gotten to the best part. What is a Faculty Athletics Committee, anyway?

It’s a carefully selected group of jock-adoring professors whose job it is to make little speeches like Andrew Perrin’s up there… About how, you know, it’s kind of not cool that our chancellor gives semi-literate sermons on the superduper superness of sports even in the shadow of our recent notorious academic fraud scandal… And that many students who are only tangentially associated with sports at this university routinely blow off class…

Yes, the chancellor does her inane enthusiasm thing, and the FAC professor does his inane Is this really a good idea? thing, and the UNC farce keeps rolling along until the next scandal…

So the president of the University of Maryland is in all kinds of trouble because he made a Kinsley Gaffe about the University of North Carolina deserving the death penalty — which, after decades of bogus jock courses, it certainly does.

… Wallace D. Loh, the president of the University of Maryland, responded to a question from a faculty member in a university senate meeting last Thursday by guessing — “I would think” — the North Carolina academic scandal “would lead to the implementation of the death penalty by the NCAA.”

All American media outlets are now screaming about how appalling it is that President Loh said that mean thing about UNC.

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

But who was that questioning faculty member??

None other than my own Mr UD.

Brian Burnett, senior vice president for finance and operations at the University of Minnesota, cautions a reporter that

spending sports revenue on academics could make the teams less competitive…. “You certainly can look at contributing back to the campus, but that’ll move you down the scale for competitive resources.”

Burnett’s is one of a number of gratifyingly straightforward comments on the relationship between universities and sports that UD has stumbled upon lately (scroll down a bit for some other examples). His remark appears in one of those archetypal Are we being had? pieces that periodically pop up in the local booster press… The hometown sports reporter seems to recall that high-ranking university personnel not long ago assured him that, what with this super tv deal and that super advertising deal, the university would shortly not only be in the black sportswise; it’d start giving money to the academic side of the university.

Like Herbert Hoover announcing prosperity was just around the corner, jock schools are always announcing they’re teetering on the brink of athletics riches, and the football-slobberers always believe them. Then after the incredibly expensive player sex scandal, the incredibly expensive buyouts of drunk horny coaches, the fans so grossed out by the players and the coaches that they’re not buying football tickets, and the crushing loan payments on palatial buildings for all of these wonderful players and coaches, it turns out hey we’re in the red for fuck’s sake. (UM is indeed in the red for fuck’s sake.)

BUT!

Happy days are here again! Just sit tight and athletics is going to be making so much money you won’t believe it and neither will the Classics department when athletics hands them plane fare to Delphi!

A brave, hard-hitting, contrarian editorial in North Dakota.

Braswell bobbled an option pitch and was chasing a fumble with his head down, and Abram launched himself straight into Braswell’s head. … [T]his is a textbook example of targeting…

It would’ve been an ejectable hit in a regular game, but in this game, it was simply a day-ender. Whether Abram was defenseless on the play, the contact to his head was so strong that any video crew in college football would’ve called targeting.

It was his teammate, too!

And democracy.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm salutes politicians who write simply and directly, and it doesn’t get any more direct than State Rep Peter Schweyer, who has taken the measure of PSU trustee Al “So-Called Victims” Lord and wants him out.

Lord has already said he won’t run for reelection, but that leaves a lot of time in his current term for him to shoot his mouth off on any number of anal-rape-related subjects.

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

Barking mad big boys on university BOTs are the life blood of this blog, so we will admit to ambivalence at the prospect of a defrocked Lord wandering the Poconos in search of a flock. But we feel confident that Penn State will find someone just like him for his replacement.

… with her buddies on a sunny Irish day
on the Bray to Greystones Cliffwalk.

… as George says in Edward Albee’s immortal Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and UD is telling you that if you follow the swine in this story… follow him all the way to the end of the story… you will find your truffle.

Bigtime Harvard donor Morris Zukerman’s going to jail because of uber-swinish tax evasion over decades. He has stolen at least $45 million from this country.

The truffle appears in this article’s very last paragraph:

In his defense, Zukerman submitted more than 100 letters from supporters vouching for his character, including one from Zbigniew Brzezinski, the U.S. national security adviser during the Carter administration, who presided over the marriage of Zukerman’s daughter and cited his “genuine patriotism.” He also submitted a 2007 letter from the then-president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Emily Rafferty, thanking him for a $100,000 pledge.

Ah, the genuine patriotism of the man who spent much of his working life stealing forty five million dollars from his beloved country… And thanks for the $100,000 pledge you also stole from the United States!

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As for Zukerman’s beloved Harvard, that struggling school upon which he lavished huge amounts of stolen money… It even named a professorship after him! All about social justice, natch. The M.E. Zukerman Professor of Sociology.

And yet when you go to that page now, it’s The Professor Formerly Known as the M.E. Zukerman Professor of Sociology.

Fast work, that.

They’re never too young to enslave – especially when they live in democratic countries that might start giving them ideas.

UCLA’s race problem.

UD has been writing against the burqa for years.

It has been gratifying to track global efforts to suppress it. Here’s the latest.

The European Parliament’s biggest political grouping has said it supports the introduction of a European Union-wide ban on Islamic face veils.

The European People’s Party adopted the measure as an official policy at its annual congress in Malta this week, claiming that the ban should be introduced “both for reasons of security and because seeing one another’s faces is an integral part of human interaction in Europe”.

The EPP, a centre-right liberal conservative grouping, holds 216 seats in the 751 member European Parliament and is affiliated with major governing parties such as Angela Merkel’s CDU, the French Republicains and Spain’s People’s Party.

I’d revise that statement about “seeing one another’s faces” and “human interaction.” Seeing women’s faces; and, since they can barely see (and have virtually no peripheral vision) out of their eye netting, and since their mouths are covered, female interaction. Let’s be as honest and precise as we can about this: Burqas and niqabs erase women.

… it’s time for the feel-bad part.

The dull-witted Kansas public schools superintendent who showed gross negligence not only in hiring the scammer, but in condescendingly and aggressively defending her against his sharp-witted students should, UD believes, resign. He has brought international embarrassment to his district. Even after he was forced to fire the diploma mill grad, he noted, with persistent gullibility, that she “also has a teaching degree from the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England.”

It is clear that the superintendent’s education on matters of credentials is happening much, much too slowly.

He needs to go.

At writing, Trump’s candidate, Gorsuch
Has certainly got quite a poor touch.
But to disqualify
I’m afraid this won’t fly.
There really has got to be more such.