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.

… to a university with a hedge fund down the street.

Insanely rich obsessively money-hoarding Harvard (closing in on $40 billion) is jest ’bout fit to burst with all that dough; and some folks – I mean, hah hah, jest some folks, but, still, some folks – been saying that they got themselves so “fat, rich, and stupid” (says here) that they jest don’t know what all to do with it (ain’t like there’s a world of pain out there they might give some of it to or whatever!) so they been handing it out like candy to anyone who happens to work at the investment fund…

And well that plus other shit that tends to attach to the ownership by one university – one anything – of forty billion dollars seems to have embarrassed Harvard to the point where they’re kind of trying to make it all go away by outsourcing their investment activity.

Now UD‘s here to tell you that Harvard’s gonna be disappointed if it thinks that a non-profit which hoards obscene wealth except for what it hands out in twenty-million-dollar a year salaries to its investment managers will be less noticeable to journalists and alumni and the tax-paying public after it moves this activity off campus. UD wants you to know that Harvard’s greed and depravity – and the absurd lengths to which it goes to maintain this greed and depravity – will continue to be front and center, wherever it locates itself.

They flew him in just so he could give a little homily at a new prayer room in the UM hospital, and Israel’s chief rabbi duly poured on the donor-schmaltz (“You and your mother are doing a lot of good, and your father in heaven is so proud of you today.”). Now he’s giving homilies from his jail cell, where this career criminal (the police have been after him since 2005) has finally been imprisoned.

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And… I gotta say! This is the most a-fucking-mazing university page I’ve ever seen! And it’s still up on Georgetown University’s site, and all they have to do is update it with the information that he’s in jail now!

I’m quoting this in full. I am not making this up.

Yona Metzger is the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, making him one of the country’s two chief rabbis along with Sephardic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar. In June 2013 he suspended himself from official duties while under investigation for money laundering. Metzger was born in Haifa, Israel in 1953 and was ordained a rabbi after serving in the Israeli Defense Forces as a chaplain. He was appointed to the Chief Rabbinate in 2003; his appointment was controversial, as he is the only chief rabbi to have been appointed without prior experience as a rabbinical judge. Metzger has also faced allegations of sexual abuse and extortion, though formal charges were never filed. Metzger has followed in the steps of his predecessor Yisrael Meir Lau by pursuing dialogue with other religions. He has met with Muslim and Hindu leaders, the Dalai Lama, and Pope Benedict XVI during the latter’s visit to Israel.

Fuckin’ A! We want this paragon in our Berkley Center for Religion Peace & World Affairs and you know what fuck you if you think just cuz he takes charitable donations meant for suffering people and stashes them in his sister’s house we should let him go. NO. Here’s his revised faculty page and did we say fuck you?

Yona Metzger is the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, making him one of the country’s two chief rabbis along with Sephardic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar. In June 2013 he suspended himself from official duties while under investigation for money laundering. Metzger was born in Haifa, Israel in 1953 and was ordained a rabbi after serving in the Israeli Defense Forces as a chaplain. He was appointed to the Chief Rabbinate in 2003; his appointment was controversial, as he is the only chief rabbi to have been appointed without prior experience as a rabbinical judge. Metzger has also faced allegations of sexual abuse and extortion, though formal charges were never filed. Metzger has followed in the steps of his predecessor Yisrael Meir Lau by pursuing dialogue with other religions. He has met with Muslim and Hindu leaders, the Dalai Lama, and Pope Benedict XVI during the latter’s visit to Israel. Metzger just entered prison for 3 1/2 years for fraud, breach of trust and tax offenses. But watch this page – he’ll get out early (holy man) and will be able to resume his affiliation with the Center. Meanwhile, you can visit with him here, as he talks about the importance of being charitable.

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The larger spiritual context:

In practice, the office of chief rabbi has become the grand prize in a corrupt system of political spoils. Indeed, as his successor and that of his Sephardi colleague were being chosen, incumbent Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger was already under house arrest on charges of bribery and corruption…. For decades the haredim have benefited from the fact that their singular priority—funding for the network of institutions that enable their self-enclosed lifestyle—was so narrow that they could negotiate their way into almost any government coalition. The installation of Yona Metzger as Ashkenazi chief rabbi in 2003 was a perfect expression of their cynicism and contempt for the institutions of the state: He was a rabbinic nonentity with questionable ethics, but he was an entirely reliable cutout. (Earlier in his career, Metzger had agreed to be disqualified from serving as a municipal rabbi in order to forestall disciplinary charges; when he was put up for chief rabbi, he argued that he’d never been disqualified from serving the whole country, which showed chutzpah even by Israeli standards.)

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Here’s El Supremo with his bestie Glenn Beck, bemoaning the “bad public relations” from which Israel suffers.

A slow but steady slippage in live attendance [at football games] doesn’t mean a precipitous slide is ahead for college football. Lucrative television broadcast contracts are a much more important source of revenue; strong TV ratings, which haven’t seen a similar decline, not ticket sales drive those contracts.

Venture capital, as UD has noted before on this blog, should be looking into animatronic-college-student startups: Firms that produce in bulk twenty-ish rah-rah student bodies that can quickly be shipped and distributed throughout empty stadium seating areas. Clients would be in charge of campus-specific ornamentation (local beer brews, hats with the name of the relevant school on them, team face paint); the firm would be hired to plausibly replicate and animate hundreds of generic fans.

Allowing laptops, as UD often says, is academic malpractice.

Professors who continue to allow laptop use fall into the following categories.

1. I could give a shit. It’s easier for me to do virtually nothing up there if students are sedated with their fun screens. To make matters perfect, I use old text-heavy PowerPoints and drone and dribble over them. Eventually my teaching will resemble my deep calm when sleeping off benders, and my classroom will be a morgue.

2. I hate and fear humanity, especially students. I look forward to the day when all of them will be hidden from me behind their screens.

That’s about it.

Just days after the three Oregon players were released from hospitalization due to overexertion during workouts, there’s more bad news for Willie Taggart’s Ducks program.

According to the school, co-offensive coordinator and tight ends coach David Reaves was arrested and charged with driving under the influence in Eugene on Saturday night.

You’ll love the details, including Reaves’ history with hostess programs and impermissible contacts and all.

What does ol’ UD tell you over and over again? Football programs really raise the tone.