At what seems to have been a party celebrating the end of winter term classes, five people – four men, one woman – have been stabbed to death in a student-rented house near campus. It’s not clear whether all were UC students.
At what seems to have been a party celebrating the end of winter term classes, five people – four men, one woman – have been stabbed to death in a student-rented house near campus. It’s not clear whether all were UC students.
Thomas Plante, a professor of psychology at Santa Clara University, is on the case. Turns out it’s hard to reconcile outrageously rewarded brutality with civility.
Of course most sports aren’t like football. Hockey is; but most sports don’t demand absolutely insane intensities of aggression. Football does, and that’s why Nebraska and Oregon got to enjoy local heroes like Richie Incognito.
But – bottom line:
“More and more people have learned about the private lives of athletes, and they’re not surprised by these things. As athletes get in trouble and show questionable judgment, fans just become numb to it all. And they’re far more concerned about how it will affect their team’s play.”
On a warm spring night, UD is about to go to the Garrett Park Town Hall, to take notes on this month’s meeting of the town council. As always, she’ll write it up for the Bugle, and, as always, she’ll link you to the write-up.
Later tonight, she’s going to try to be awake for the blood moon.
Last night, she heard a barred owl in a nearby tree.
… we must add GlaxoSmithKline, which only this morning has had to – in the words of one headline – “deny systemic corruption.”
Which is awkward. Who wants to have to be all defensive on such a basic matter as that? To have to deny systemic corruption. Heavy.
And this isn’t – like those other outfits I just mentioned – simply a temple to Mammon we’re talking about. This is a benevolent dispenser of surcease to suffering for people all over God’s green earth! GSK has got the whole world in its hand!
WHY stingy doctors refuse to prescribe the number of pills GSK requires to hit its yearly profit mark is the real question. What the hell’s that about, I’d like to know? Take it up with the damn prescribers! It’s not GSK’s fault if it has to bribe physicians all over the globe – all over the globe – to dish out pointless and destructive excess pillage to patients. I’m thinking in terms of conspiracies here… I’m thinking that – in this latest case – some Polish doctors got together and decided to – what?? – use clinical criteria in prescribing medication? And this forced GSK’s hand, making it increase its bribes until the system became too grotesque to ignore…
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UD thanks Barney.
… the scummiest university in America. It isn’t there yet – there’s a good deal of competition from states like Hawaii and Alaska – but UD would be very pleased to see a winner from the mainland for a change, and ASU, as of now, is definitely the front-runner.
What pushed it over the top is its mandatory $150 a year student athletics fee, imposed (no student vote – why do that? – they’d only vote against it) on every student to pay for all the shitty games no one goes to, plus for all the overpaid loser coaches.
Add to this ASU’s mentally challenged regents, its charming student body, and its amazing frats, and you get an institution profoundly symbolic of twenty-first century higher education in America.
One of UD‘s colleagues has joined the board of a company that “offers plant stem cell-based facial creams and beauty products.”
My colleague’s beauty product line “stimulates your own stem cells.”
… is perhaps the most common variety of plagiaristic experience – see Jonah Lehrer and Johan Hari for a couple of high-profile recent cases. And at only 25, Phil Jacob, of Australia’s The Daily Telegraph, is another perfect case in point. Stealing quotations and pretending you got them in an interview with the subject, copying and pasting large chunks of text from other sources, tweaking other sources (updating; providing specific local content) to make the content look like your own – they’re all there, all the patented techniques. And, of course, as is true of almost every high-profile case of plagiarism UD has covered on this blog, there are multiple examples of it in Jacob’s work. Plagiarists tend toward the prolific.
Jacob has resigned.
… and this one, in the Kansas City Star, is a classic. The background is of course super-squalid – University of Missouri athletes and coaches staggering and slashing their way around town…
Seven Mizzou football and men’s basketball players have been arrested eight times since January… That tally also doesn’t count an independent investigation scheduled to be released Friday about the alleged rape and eventual suicide of former swimmer Sasha Menu Courey… [A] football coach was suspended after a drunken-driving arrest two years ago, and [a] basketball coach was suspended last season by the NCAA.
Tickle me pink! These laddies!… But put the thing in context:
As far as athletic-department problems go, North Carolina would probably trade its apparently deep-rooted academic scandal for a string of arrests.
Those poor suckers at UNC! They’d give anything to have our puny string of arrests! PLUS: And here’s really the only thing that matters:
Plus, in the big picture, the last year or so of Missouri sports has been wildly successful.
You wanna know the big picture, that’s the big picture! We’re winning!
And, you know, end of the day, it’s all a learning opportunity:
We’d all like to see the family inside the MU athletic department, and in particular the football program, support [one of the most-arrested of the players] with tough love, guidance and motivation to help him move off this precarious path.
Big hug!
[C]ases of “jock” behaviour on campus remain rife and college sports are actually swelling in terms of commercial and cultural power…
Perhaps that is not surprising: as anthropologists know, every society has power networks and rituals that enable groups to coalesce. But another truism of anthropology is that rituals are most effective in upholding power structures – however distasteful – when nobody talks about them at all, be that on Wall Street or university campuses. In that sense, then, the good news about the 2006 [Duke lacrosse] scandal was that it spurred debate about standards.
The bad news, though, is that [the basic] question remains largely undiscussed: why should universities be so dominated by sports?
If there’s one thing UD‘s learned from following the history of retracted papers – most of them, lately, hothothot stem cell papers – is that you don’t want to go half way. You don’t get to be “the principal investigator on grants totaling $57 million since 2000″ without going for it, attracting BIG attention onaccounta your amazing, but strikingly difficult to replicate, work on regenerating dying hearts.
UD has also learned that with the imprimatur of Harvard behind you (our old friend Joseph Biederman continues, in his curious research, to benefit from the association, as does the scientist at issue here, Piero Anversa, the scrambled letters of whose name, UD feels sure, add up to some great phrases, but she’s not up to the task right now), you can just keep rolling along and pulling it in (all those millions for Biederman and Anversa are of course your taxes). People have been making a fuss (a negative fuss) about Anversa’s work for more than ten years.
One Harvard researcher who has long been familiar with Anversa’s work said that many people at Harvard are not surprised by these developments. “If anything it’s surprising how long it’s taken for these questions to surface.”
It’s kind of a funny way to live, isn’t it? You watch a way-belaureled scientist do his questionable research year after year… Many of you watch…
… but no one else is. I guess she just needs to puzzle it out logically, and if she does that she’ll join the rest of America, which yawns at news stories about whole squads of university students – venerated revenue sports players – roaming the bars near campus and, with remarkable violence, beating students up. She admits to being amazed that no one seems to care about American universities going to great lengths to recruit and retain frighteningly violent people to their campuses. You’d think students would be a little nervous, since they’re the ones getting beaten up. But they seem to welcome these scholarship students.
Logically, though… Logically, you’re looking for the most violent people you can find – it’s football, after all – and you’re doing all you can in grueling team practices to make them even more violent… So the reasonable way to look at this is … If you want a winning team, you’re almost inevitably going to end up admitting a few people, every few years, who can be expected to damn near beat random undergrads to death. Price of doing business.
Like this student at Lehigh University who, with some of his teammates, hit the bars one night and got into a fight with another group of students walking out of the place. No reason for the fight – he and his buddies were just drunk and belligerent… Spoiling for a fight, as they say.
So this particular football player just kicked the living shit out of this student.
When police arrived after receiving reports of a fight, they found [the student] unconscious on the ground and the former Mountain Hawk defensive back running away. Police managed to chase down [the player] and arrest him, according to court records.
Witnesses told police Phillips kicked at Graham as he lay unconscious and defenseless. Graham testified today the attack broke his jaw in two places, and he had to have his mouth wired shut, leaving him unable to eat or speak. His injuries delayed his education by a year, and he is still in counseling over the attack, he said. He cannot yawn without paralyzing pain, he said, a condition doctors say will stick with him for the rest of his life.
Hell of a tackle there, and UD is sure the pros will be all over this guy when he gets out of jail. I see him playing shoulder to shoulder with Richie Incognito. Dream team.
Since the move to Division I, UC Davis has struggled greatly as evidenced by the 9-22 record for men’s basketball and the 5-7 record for football this year. Compare this to UC Davis’ Division II career, when it won six Director’s Cups, which are given to the top Division II university in the nation.
But at least it’s destroying their non-revenue sports and bleeding money from the school.
And who would name a luxury hotel Hotel Gramsci?
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Well, but there is a bank called Institute for the Works of Religion, and another one called Banco Espírito Santo… There’s a Stalin hotel… (Watch a breezy all-American take on Uncle Joe here.)
Listen up.
Until Hillary’s in power, you’ll never rustle up enough guys to do this. President Obama is a major jock, and he sets the tone. Forget it.
And … you know what? Forget it when Hillary takes over too. When that happens, the guys will get even more jockish. In reaction.