… Mulieribus!

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[UD thanks Mary for the correction.]

“At the end of the day, I’m hoping that the NCAA and others will recognize that instead of punishing Baylor, they ought to be saluted,” [a lawyer for three Baylor University trustees] said. “I think they ought to be held up as a model for how to respond.”

There’s always a country or state or institution pretty nearby that looms as the embodiment of your fear that your proud local culture is just this far away from sinking into the depravity of that other place.

[M]any in Paris [anxiously note the] “Italianization” of French life — the descent into what might become an unseemly round of [Silvio] Berlusconian squalor…

As in – France got this close to electing President Dominique Strauss-Kahn. (Dom and Don would have been great friends.)

Leave aside the details of the [rape and pimping] allegations against Dominique Strauss Kahn, the head of the IMF (his lawyer indicates he will plead not guilty). Just note that the New York Times states that he was staying in a $3,000 a night suite and was taking a first class flight to Paris. This is the IMF, the body that imposes austerity on indebted countries and is funded by global taxpayers. And this was the likely leading socialist candidate for the French presidency.

Money and sex sleaze is all over, of course (hence widespread Italianization fears), but let’s consider this warning to the University of Kansas (a public university) in the specific context of global elites and public money/general sleaze.

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First: The problem besetting Francois Fillon today is exactly DSK’s problem, minus the raping: Greed + Hypocrisy. Fillon is just as stern about austerity (for the common French; not for him and his family) as was DSK’s IMF. Now his decade-long extraction of roughly a million euros from the public purse – like DSK’s use of global taxpayer money for his hotel room and flight – has the French joking about le million de Fillon and referring to François Million.

Maybe the world should establish special austerity guidelines for elites: Spain’s Princess Cristina may soon be sent to prison for a few years – she’s accused of being her husband’s accomplice in taking six million public euros (he faces twenty years confinement)… Which really when you think about it makes Fillon’s takings seem very small indeed (one v. six million), and maybe they weren’t even illegal! DSK’s takings were even less (he wasn’t head of IMF long enough to raid it), and almost certainly they followed the letter of the law.

One reason to let most of the elites get away with it is that elite corruption that gets discovered begets much more corruption. Cristina’s father – the King of Spain when her story broke – apparently offered a two million euro bribe to some people to make her trial go away.

Having to deal with corruption is bad enough. Having to deal with corruption involving very rich and powerful people is a serious nuisance.

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Which brings me to the kings of America: our football coaches. It is they who assemble and – er – stabilize a roster of university or professional players, they who – at universities – command the highest public employee salary in twenty-seven of our states. (In other states, it’s basketball coaches.) They’re making scads more than the terrified president of their university, and, like Art Briles, they really get free rein. Everyone moves out of their way or enables them – campus police, town police, alumni, trustees, administrators, professors, presidents, chancellors, legislators… hell, governors — not a peep out of them. As for female students who may get beaten or raped by some of the players the coach has expensively recruited … Baylor’s football coach, Briles, allegedly “questioned why a woman was with ‘bad dudes’ from his football team after [he was told about] a gang rape accusation.” What kind of a dummy comes to a school that represents itself in this way and doesn’t know to expect gang rapes from bad dudes? Don’t women applicants read our admissions information? Baylor University seeks out bad dudes and deifies them.

Okay, so that’s the way of life. Like most corruption, it tends to feature elements of sex, money, and cover-up. I’ve always found it pretty remarkable that it thrives at universities, of all places – that bad dudes and even worse coaches dominate life on many campuses. But as with the Spanish monarchy, it takes far more than one disgusting eruption to bury the crown. You dump your current regent (he gets another job right away, maybe again at a noisily self-righteous Christian campus), take down his statue, and install a new royal house.

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So okay this article. This article is about what its author daintily refers to as “the situation in Lawrence.” He’s not very specific about it, but all of the links in this sentence begin to scratch the surface. He’s worried about Baylor-corruption contagion; he uses the fate of Baylor as a cautionary tale for Kansas.

Many universities have an alarming tendency of allowing sports-related problems to fester because they won’t deal with them head-on. Coaches become too powerful and too autonomous to challenge. Image protection overwhelms honesty and transparency. A toxic tolerance level for bad behavior and bad students builds up.

At Baylor, a basketball player murdered his teammate in 2003, and the coach at the time (Dave Bliss) maliciously smeared the dead man in order to cover up NCAA violations. Within the football program, the [last coach,] (Art Briles, may he never coach again) expended quite a bit of energy keeping accusations about his players from going public or reaching the school’s judicial affairs office, and in obtaining special treatment from the administration. Briles had allies above him in athletic director Ian McCaw and school president Kenneth Starr.

The writer urges Kansas – which, remarkably even by university athletics standards, boasts “six incidents involving Kansas basketball players, in some form or fashion, that have come to light within the past two weeks,” not to deepen its institutional corruption by acting like Baylor (he could have chosen Florida State etc. etc., but Baylor’s the most recent) and adding cover-up to corruption.

If the Kansas trustees are smart and conscientious and concerned about the university as a whole and not just as a basketball power, they’re pushing hard for all the facts – and, if warranted, for immediate and significant action. Public action.

Don’t spend more energy trying to hide problems than fix problems. Don’t, at any cost, follow the Baylor blueprint.

But of course it isn’t just the trustees, and anyway we have no reason to think that the same trustees who let KU turn into dreck will reverse course. (And look who’s running the place.)

And speaking of reversals – given the history, over the last decade or so, of the University of Kansas, I’m afraid the corruption-contagion arguably goes the other way: Kansas has stunk to high heaven for a long time.

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Update, Fillon:

[I]nvestigators [are] now also probing whether Mr Fillon awarded the highest French state honour – the Grand Croix de la Légion d’Honneur – to the wealthy owner of a literary review in return for giving his wife a well-paid sinecure.

What also stood out was [Neil Gorsuch’s] ban of laptops in the classroom. He forbade students in his [University of Colorado] legal ethics class from using computers — an unusual move within law schools, where laptops are ubiquitous.

The computer exile was intended to eliminate distractions, boost engagement, and prompt students to listen carefully to each other, according to Jordan Henry, a second-year Colorado law student who took Gorsuch’s course last semester. And it was so effective that Henry voluntarily stopped using her laptop in several other classes.

“When you close the computers and get rid of distractions in class, you respond to each other and bring up counterpoints,” she said. “It makes for a true discussion and a much more engaged class — and frankly a more interesting class.”

From the student newspaper at … Auburn?

A coach’s work is never done.

A Baylor booster speaks.

Doctrinal missions?

Don’t make me puke.

Nocturnal emissions.

The New York Times writes a scary, hard-hitting piece about Melania Trump’s refusal to assume the position of first lady.

Unanswered requests for White House tours, traditionally run by the first lady’s office, have been piling up by the thousands, according to people familiar with the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it. It is not clear how much planning has gone into the elaborate White House events that are among the heaviest tasks for first ladies, such as the annual Easter Egg Roll, which draws 35,000 attendees.

Whither the Easter Egg Roll?

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The only thing UD likes about this ugly new administration is watching Madame Trump flip the bird at the beyond-regressive first lady joke.

UD remembers how excited she got when Judith Steinberg Dean said fu-u-u-ck that, I have a medical practice in Vermont. Naively, UD thought at the time that Jacqueline Kennedy whispering along the corridors about the new curtains might be on its way out. But then Michelle Obama, of all people, announced she was going to be “First Mom.”

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UD is fully aware of the irony that the first first lady in this country to finally fuck over First Lady but good is a rich idle beauty queen. UD doesn’t care. She wants to get the job done, and Madame Trump is getting it done. Brava.

… will be dominating news from that university for awhile. As in – what’s my girl Briles doing with her lawyers today? Last week she was suing everybody at the university cuz they said hurtful things and made her feel bad; this week she’s withdrawing her suit because “a girl can only carry so much… she wants some peace in her life…”

But don’t worry! Two other ex-football people are still suing, and there’s tons more where they came from.

America’s highest-profile Baptist university is increasingly divided up between people who are suing and people who are in prison.

Under Brazilian law, Mr Batista would have been sent to a special prison wing if he had a university degree.

But as he dropped out before finishing his engineering degree in Germany, he will be serving time in an ordinary cell with six other inmates at the Bangu penitentiary.

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.