Scathing Online Schoolmarm admires Robert Zaretsky’s prose.

Hector Perla, late of UC Santa Cruz, hit all his marks. In class, he didn’t give a shit about being ignored – let ’em use laptops! – and outside of class… well… He just scored “one of the largest Title IX settlements in US history.”

Haha – I mean, his student did. The student he reportedly raped.

The claim centered on allegations that the student was sexually assaulted by one of her professors on June 13, 2015 and that UCSC knew for years that the Professor was a sexual predator. “It let the wolf roam,” Kristensen Weisberg, LLP alleged. UCSC’s failure to rein in the professor “only encouraged his ambitions. Like many other higher institutions, UCSC looked the other way when it became aware [the professor] was hunting undergraduates…The sexual assault and UCSC’s response is illustrative of the criminal neglect by a feckless administration that cannot even follow its own rules, and once it is too late, it tries to bandage up its prior malfeasance.”

UCSC had to pay out a lot of money – but that was just for one lone wolf. Here’s hoping the Baptist General Convention of Texas is real rich. The last football coach at Baylor University was recently described as “a free pimp” for his players.

Her sentence is maybe a little grammatically awkward at the end, but Sally Jenkins gets the job done here, noting first of all that corruption in university football is currently massive and growing. She notes more particularly that America’s most rape-licious campus – oh-so-Baptist Baylor – should get NCAA’s death penalty, but probably won’t cuz there’s too much money at stake. “[T]he death penalty is difficult to contemplate when major college football revenue is more than $3.4 billion.”

Plus, whether it’s Whorehouse University of Louisville or Sex Slave Baylor University (spiritual sex slaves, like what did they call those Greek temple prossies, hierodoulos), who are we to interfere with freedom of religion? It’s been said often enough – and it’s utterly obvious – that pro- and pretend-not-pro- football is a religion in America. The thick description here, as Clifford Geertz would put it, is that of multiple temple cults where worship of naughty haughty Player Gods means full submission to them. Full legal, financial, academic, physical and sexual submission. THERE IS BUT ONE GOD AND HIS NAME IS RICHIE INCOGNITO. We love steroidal fucks like Richie and want them to do whatever they want with us. They beat the shit out of our students, rape them, whatever, and the president of our university pleads Give them another chance! This is our holiest of mystery sects, full of blood and sex and brain spatter, and it all plays out, of all places, on our university campuses.

… Penelope Fillon [wife of French presidential candidate Francois Fillon] was paid about €5,000 a month between May 2012 and December 2013 by a literary review owned by a billionaire businessman friend of Fillon. The editor said he had never seen her at the magazine and only knew of two short book reviews she wrote in that time, published under a pseudonym.

A year and a half worth of employment at 5,000 euros a month for writing two short book reviews. These people truly value the arts.

You know this. I mean, yes, a few campuses, like the University of Louisville, outsource to local professionals; but it’s more common for campuses to establish so-called hostess programs, in which twenty year old female students… entertain… eighteen-year-old recruits. Taking one for the team.

Now Deadspin is sending a shout-out to all university hostesses, asking them to get in touch because, you know, Baylor and all. (Says here “Baylor coaches encouraged members of Baylor’s hostess group to engage in sexual acts with players and recruits.”) Should be interesting.

Hm yes six years a trustee at Ohio University and now he’s going to prison for five years for hm let’s see running a humongous pill mill, laundering money, and evading multiple millions in taxes.

OU has nothing to say about the fact that this man has for years and years been setting and overseeing policy for thousands of students, faculty, and alumni at Ohio University? How much will your tuition go up? Let’s see what Dr Lake decides! Alcohol and drug policy? You know who to ask!

No, no, we’ve unpersoned him – exactly the way Yeshiva University unpersoned Bernard… uh…

Bernard who?

… as UD calls Auburn University, now congratulates itself – well, a local journo congratulates it – on having avoided hiring the Beastly Briles Boys.

UD loves that. Auburn is – has long been – arguably the dirtiest sports program in the United States. (Put Auburn in my search engine if you dare.) And now it’s Oh look we kept our hands clean and didn’t hire rape-enablers! Aren’t we pretty!

They’re the only professors who consistently attack big-time university football. Almost all other professors, from other departments, keep their traps shut; but there’s always some guy in economics shooting off his mouth. Let’s analyze a recent letter to the local paper from a University of Colorado econ professor – James Markusen – and see why this is.

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The news that [head football coach Mike] MacIntyre just got a $16.5 million contract for five years passed with a shrug, so I’ll provide some background (all verifiable). [That parenthesis tells you all you need to know. Econ people are rationalists, and they tend to think other people are basically rational too. They tend to think that if you offer a verifiable, evidence-based argument about something, the evidence will count for something by way of convincing people in a certain direction. Even given prevailing social/political conditions in America, where all copies of George Orwell’s 1984 are currently sold out, econ people cling to the belief in rational suasion.] His yearly salary is what a top (not average) science professor earns in 22 years, or, the five-year total is what a top professor could earn in 110 years. Economists (my department) are among the highest-paid faculty. It takes a top economist only 16 years to earn MacIntyre’s annual salary, or a mere 80 years for his five-year total. [Here we’re getting at one of the reasons the econ department does the heavy sports lifting – they actually understand numbers. Yet the dolts who read this will say one thing and one thing only in response, and it’s a response UD has seen for decades: Markusen’s jealous! He wants to make $16.5 million! Shouldn’t he be happy with his cushy no-work academic job which gives him long summers, one course a semester (taught by TA’s) and a healthy salary? Fuck him.]

What is discouraging and deliberately ignored by university officials is that we now have extensive evidence [There’s that pointless evidence dealie again.] that explodes long-held myths about sports and universities. Rigorous and dispassionate statistical studies [Yawn. Pathetic.] show that successful sports teams do not generate financial donations to universities: added contributions are directed almost exclusively to the athletic department itself. [UD‘s been making that point forever. The whole increased contributions to universities thing turns out to be increased contributions almost exclusively to athletics.] Yet with only a couple of exceptions, NCAA Division I athletic departments like ours consistently lose very large sums of money which ultimately have to be paid for by students and their parents in higher tuition fees. To the latter: You might enjoy the game, but you’re paying a hell of a lot more than you think. References available on request. [Let me be clear about the pointlessness of all the perfectly solid points he’s making. He’s talking to a cultist. A desperate, inebriated cultist.]

I’ll end with one more thought. Economics is one of the most popular majors at CU. In 26 years of teaching economics at CU, I have had exactly one football player in one class. I have never had a basketball player of either gender, never had a volleyball player, never had a soccer player. In addition to our impressive inventory of evidence on sports funding, we could use a dispassionate and analytical study evaluating the reality or myth of the student-athlete. [Of course, we don’t need such a study. No one gives a shit about what its obvious conclusions are going to be. If they did, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Baylor University and the University of Nebraska and the University of Louisville etc. etc. would temporarily cease operations in order to figure out how to reconstitute themselves as actual schools. No argument will stop what’s happening with university football; what will alter the picture is the fact of legions of people deciding not to attend games. As the games become televised simulacra with empty stands, people will eventually begin to notice, and questions will start to be asked. Until then, no rigorous dispassionate evidence-based jobbie will make any difference. Trust me.]

Where else but Waco would you want your kid to go to college?

Practice in the morning – throwing, blocks, and tackles –
Practice in the noontide, til the drunken eve;
Waiting for the hostess and the time of raping,
Waiting for the lawyers, toting up the rapes.

Going forth with weeping, losing field advantage,
Though the loss sustained our spirit often grieves;
When our weeping’s over, we’ll bid new recruits welcome.
We’ll regain position, toting up the rapes.

The lawsuit, filed by a woman identified as Elizabeth Doe, alleges there were 52 “acts of rape” committed by Baylor football player from 2011 to 2014. Doe says she was gang-raped by [two football players] on April 18, 2013. According to Doe, the school did not move to investigate or discipline the players, instead offering to “pay for her education in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement.”

Three players, and you get a stipend too.

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Ouch. National reaction not very nice.

What if Baylor gets the death penalty? What’s it got left? A stupendously hypocritical Christianity, and the ruins of a university.

[Nicho] Garcia, 20, was identified through surveillance video more than a month after a 20-year-old man said he was punched repeatedly outside his apartment complex just west of campus by a man he asked to stop urinating next to him, according to a police report… Garcia admitted to being “really hammered” that night and said he often urinates outside when he’s drunk.

Rabbi Yosef Shloush, who chairs an organization of settlement rabbis that invited [Yona] Metzger to speak, was quoted by the Walla news site as saying Metzger was invited over two months ago and that, at the time, “he was [only] suspected [of bribery].”

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You cannot make this shit up.

Preparing to talk about John Cheever tomorrow, I take a look at his Paris Review interview.

This is no reflection on Hollywood, but it’s just that I seemed to have a suicide complex there. I don’t like the freeways, for one thing. Also, the pools are too hot . . . 85 degrees, and when I was last there, in late January, in the stores they were selling yarmulkes for dogs — my God! I went to a dinner and across the room a woman lost her balance and fell down. Her husband shouted over to her, “When I told you to bring your crutches, you wouldn’t listen to me.” That line couldn’t be better!

[A poem drawn from words and phrases in this essay, in the New Yorker.]

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Survival Condo Project

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear disaster slapping with loud sounds on the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.