… is quite the spectacle for the violence-lovers among us. First there’s coach Leach himself, accused of abusing players at Texas Tech; then a couple of weeks ago a whole bunch of WSU football players apparently beat two students at a campus party; and now this:
According to Pullman Police, [WSU football player Shalom] Luani got agitated on Wednesday because his pizza order at Dominos was taking too long. Some other customers asked him to leave, and once outside, he got into a fight with a WSU student and broke the student’s nose.
There’s obviously good team coordination under Leach, because their regular reduction of select WSU students to a pulp has a remarkable about-the-head consistency: The players at the party apparently broke a student’s jaw, whereas here you have Luani breaking a student’s nose. Keeping it all highly localized. Good coaching looks like this.
So the question is what’s next? By UD‘s calculation (no one has yet given a clear number on the party attack), you’re beginning to see serious team depletion as significant numbers of players are suspended or removed because people are starting to notice the numbers of WSU students getting bloodied by them. It is, after all, really a numbers game: How many bloodied students can universities tolerate in order to attract the most aggressive football players to their campuses? Let’s say that right now WSU has two such students, with all the lawsuits and trials and publicity attending them. How many more before they fire Leach (and you really don’t want to fire extremely expensive, extremely litigious, Mike Leach) and try to find a coach who cares a bit more than Mike does what assholes he recruits.
These are the sorts of decisions that take up most of the time of the trustees at universities like WSU. How much blood do we mop up before we dump Leach?
…dies… If the football player actually kills the dog…
But that’s East Carolina. Maybe Baylor would have kept Zamora on even if he’d killed his dog rather than just beating him to within an inch of his life. Baylor’s special.
The ECU dog-killer is a typical American higher education story, a glorious tale of the life of the mind in our country. He was dismissed from Georgia Tech after multiple conduct violations. Instantly thereafter, East Carolina found itself uncontrollably attracted to this scholar/athlete, whose presence on campus, ECU was sure, would be a great boon for everyone involved.
Which university will now bid on the dog-killer? Recruitment coaches all over the country are eyeing his stats even as we speak.
Here are the exact phrases that prompted her to laugh; the laughpoints, call them:
his ‘80s teen movie villain sons
smarmy rich assholes
the consummate douchebag
a loudmouth, handsy asshole
dickhead golfer Shooter McGavin
bloated loudmouth dick’s shenanigans
a serious De Niro-in-Raging Bull food binge
bloated, women-terrorizing ass
the accused serial sexual harasser/lardass
*********************
Hm. A close reading reveals four uses of the word ass, and two of the word dick… Make of this what you will… But UD will say that the combination in strict proximity of a high class word and a low class can be very funny. Example here: consummate douchebag.
Also – a pile-up of adjectives is often funny (bloated loudmouth dick’s, bloated [hey, there’s another repetition] woman-terrorizing ass).
On a long and lonesome highway
East of Orono
You can listen to the gov’nor
Moanin’ out his tortured soul:
Don’t you say that I’m a racist
You cocksucking SOB.
No one’s done more for the black man
Than Donald Trump and me.
Don’t need no snot-nosed little runt sayin’ I’m a fool
Gonna blow your fuckin’ head off in a nice old-fashioned duel
****************
Here I am
On the phone again
There they are
Commie fags
Here I go
Fighting foes again
There I go
Paul Le Page
A Vanity Fair writer assesses various scenarios that could tip the presidential race in favor of Donald Trump. Number Five:
5. CLINTON TURNS OUT TO BE A HOLOGRAM OF ONCE-LIVING CLINTON, À LA TUPAC AT COACHELLA
Projected odds of occurrence: below 0.01%
Disruptive power: medium
Clinton has not held any press conferences in a long time, and she normally seems programmed. But the odds of her being a hologram are still low, as she has repeatedly proven able to meet with donors this week. Also, it wouldn’t be a slam-dunk for Trump either way, because election law would come into play and Hillary’s hologram would have to be replaced by a flesh-and-blood candidate, something that might actually lower Trump’s chances.
So many full veiling bans have taken place – and will take place – in Europe that you can now discern at least one telling pattern in the process. Noise is made among political parties and leaders about introducing partial or full bans. IMMENSE numbers of opinion pieces appear in newspapers all over Europe, and in the United States, and in the Middle East. Almost all of these pieces oppose bans; the only difference among them involves the degree of anger and self-righteousness with which the author expresses her incredulity that anyone could fail to see the obvious degeneracy and threat to democracy such bans represent.
Next up are the national polls, which virtually always reveal that strong to overwhelming majorities in the country in question support a ban. Since taking seriously results like these is also a feature of democracy, and since disturbingly and very visually annihilated female minorities on your streets doesn’t, when you think about it, smack very powerfully of democracy at all, ban-opposers are in a bit of a fix. Always they write with the confidence that all decent-minded people perceive the evil of forcing women, via fines, not to be annihilated, and then it turns out that their confidence is badly misplaced.
*******************
If they are honest, they ponder the disconnect between their sense of the world and what the world really is. Are virtually all of their fellow French citizens vile Islamophobes? Has everybody turned into Marine Le Pen? And what the hell happened to the goddamn European Court of Human Rights? The world’s gone mad!
*******************
But it is now really the intellectual responsibility of people who defend a cultural status quo in which women are visually annihilated to examine with honesty and humility how it is that they came to be so out of step with the instinct of vast majorities in almost all of the European countries where the status of fully veiled women begins to become a matter of law.
Forget the six ND football players arrested in a span of a few hours last weekend for various violent offenses; cast your mind back to Notre Dame having recently paid football coach Charlie Weis a $19 million buyout.
Weis, currently doing nothing in a gated community in Florida while his wife buys horses, chats with an interviewer about his son’s effort to attend ND:
Charlie Jr. was on track to enroll at Notre Dame. Weis says [ND’s president] himself had promised that he would be accepted, as long as his grades and test scores qualified, which they did. But after Weis was fired, Notre Dame sent a letter deferring Charlie Jr.’s acceptance. Not long after that, Weis says, he got a call from someone in Notre Dame’s development office making him an offer: If he’d donate some of the money Notre Dame owed him back to the school — “seven figures,” Weis says — Charlie Jr. could get in.
Weis said no. Charlie Jr. ended up enrolling at Florida when Weis was offensive coordinator there for a year. Then he followed his father to Kansas. [To make matters worse for Weis, he also collected many millions in buyout money from Kansas. Now he’s a huge multimillionaire with nothing to do!]
Later, Weis says, a fundraiser for the school told him that Notre Dame used the [buyout] contract in pitches to donors, saying they needed to give more because the school still owed Weis so much.
Notre Dame: Classy.
At this late date in the history of scandalous Baylor University, we shouldn’t be surprised that this very assertively Christian University lacks the basic moral clarity a local newspaper columnist displays. “[W]hat Zamora did was illegal. But to me it’s not about the legality and more about what Zamora’s actions say about him as a person. A good, kindhearted, person doesn’t abuse innocent animals.”
[Baylor] fans just endured a disgusting sexual assault scandal and many are having a hard time supporting the team after that. But we were told all the guilty parties were removed from the team, so we’re not rooting for sexual predators. Baylor shouldn’t turn around and ask those who stood by them to root for an animal abuser.
Actually, Baylor just stonewalled – rather than endured – its way through a sexual assault scandal. It was dragged kicking and screaming to doing the right thing.
Baylor University is that most curious thing: a Christian institution seemingly designed to encourage cruelty and viciousness.
****************
What I’m talking about at Baylor goes beyond the moral dissonance demanded of all serious football fans – you must adore a sport so freakishly violent that its beau idéal is Richie Incognito, even as you tell yourself you’re adoring clean-cut all-American fun.
But that’s nothing. That’s step one. Now place yourself at Baylor. Or at Notre Dame. Pile university and Christianity on top of all that dissonance. Reconcile vast mass worship of a hyper-concussive sport, quite a few of whose standout players feature, on the field and in their private lives, exactly the sort of lunatic aggression you’d expect, with some stubborn vestigial notion in your mind, some vague remembrance, that the bloody ritual you’re adoring takes place on hallowed intellectual and spiritual ground.
It should be difficult to enjoy yourself unadulteratedly under these conditions, as the bullies, brawlers, domestic abusers, rapists, and animal floggers (fuck academic cheaters; forget cheaters; c’est entendu) bloody each other down there…
But hey. Turns out not only isn’t it difficult; it’s easy. It’s a pleasure.
Because – to state the bleeding obvious – violence is the primary object of worship in the world of Baylor University. You’re sitting in Waco – home of last year’s enormous bikers-with-guns melee/massacre. You’re sitting in the heart of Trump territory. Your choice for national leader is the man who has turned a presidential election into The Rime of the Ancient Tackler.
Strangely, you don’t even like nobly violent people; you cheer on chickenshits like Trump – a man who crapped all over a war hero because he was captured and “I like people who weren’t captured.” You cheer on players who beat up women, children, and animals.
***************
Some like it hot.
Hot and bloody.
It’s the Baylor way.

… in late summer. UD‘s back deck.
… scores, at the tender age of 26, an opinion piece in the New York Times.
Color UD impressed.
Quite the flub.
Trump so far merely exhibits mental confusion; little by little, he’s letting us in on why – perhaps – he’s confused.
My Secret Vote
(sing it with me)
Once I had a secret vote.
It needed utmost privacy.
The fact that I’m a masochist
Should stay unknown to all but me.
So I tell a little lie
When pollsters ask me what I’ll do:
“Oh, I’d never vote for Trump.
The man just makes me want to spew.”
*********************
I’d shout my secret from the highest hill!
Sadistic Donald Trump gives me a thrill!
But these words I cannot say
Until I’m in a booth on ballot day.
The Clintons were just as willing to enrich themselves via the scummy tax-syphons as many Republicans were and are. Bill’s bogus chancellorship at a for-profit school paid him many millions to jet around the world now and then making inspirational speeches. UD is obviously a strong Hillary supporter, but the Clintons are paying now for what they did, and I’m afraid they deserve to.
Go to my Click-Thru U category for years of incredulity and anger that this should-be-criminal enterprise continues to thrive.
If you’re from Texas you know this venerable phrase, reminding you every morning to pack your cock (not Glock) in your knapsack (UD is so old she calls backpacks knapsacks) before you go to school. It’s part of a campus-wide protest against the new conceal-carry-in-classrooms law.
UD, a fervent supporter of this nascent open dildoes movement, admits to struggling a bit with the concept, though. What is the connection between showing a dildo in public and protesting against people bringing concealed guns to university classes?
At first blush, the gesture sounds merely aesthetic:
Cocks Not Glocks, a [University of Texas Austin] protest group formed last fall, is urging students and others to openly carry the sex toys around campus, offering a multicolored counterpoint to the concealed weapons that holders of handgun licenses can now legally carry inside UT classrooms and most buildings.
One of the organizers elaborates:
“As long as you have a dick on your backpack, people will be thinking about the guns inside of other people backpacks” [Jessica] Jin said Tuesday, dildo strapped to her backpack.
So it’s an aide–mémoire, a way of jogging your memory about the new fact of concealed guns all around you. Plus: obscene/obscene:
“The State of Texas has decided that it is not at all obnoxious to allow deadly concealed weapons in classrooms; however, it does have strict rules about free sexual expression, to protect your innocence. You would receive a citation for taking a dildo to class before you would get in trouble for taking a gun to class. Heaven forbid the penis.”
However, the university has announced it’s down with the dong, the more the merrier, go ahead with the dildoes, so the obscenity thing lacks a certain oomph.
I guess UD thinks of it as a counter-demonstration sort of thing, a provocative, amusing “response” to conceal carry… Also maybe a comment on guns as an aide-de-male-sexual-inadequacy-feelings? The gesture certainly skews female, certainly suggests a mordant womanly comment on boys and their toys…
Anyway there’s a rally on campus today and you should go if you’re in town because there’s something deeply shameful – not to mention dangerous- about so many guns out and about in states like Texas. UD doesn’t blame the UT architecture dean for resigning and moving to a non-lunatic state in response to campus carry (which, if I know Texas, will very soon be campus open carry), and she certainly hopes other faculty follow. Already a number of people who had planned to enroll as UT students have announced they’ll go to gun-free schools instead. And now you’ve got the dildo brigade, which is at once amusing and deadly serious.
It’s an annual autumn ritual in America: College presidents and trustees all over the country snap to it and notice that they’re running a student-chiseling, all-football, all-losses, no-attendance operation…
No, that’s wrong. What actually happens is that other people (legislators, faculty, journalists, students) notice with the start of another academic year how beyond-belief bad things are in places like the Alaska public university system, and those people make noise and that noise forces the mindless somnolent deluded sports-loving trustees and presidents to…
To say this is the end of sports as we know it at our university!
Yes, these stewards of the university have figured out that you can shut everyone up each year by saying ridiculous shit like you’re right we’re just gonna have to cease all physical activity on campus:
There are three athletics options under consideration by the university. Under the first, the University of Alaska Anchorage and University of Alaska Fairbanks would end all sports.
WHAAAAA….???? My lower intestine just curled around itself and I’m losing control of my bowels… Please no… no…
So that’s the basic move, whether you’re EMU or Fairbanks or dozens of other ridiculous hemorrhaging jockshops – scare the fuck out of people and wait for them to shut up.
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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte