… background, the film The Hunting Ground begins to generate commentary.

Along with institutions like Harvard, Notre Dame and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “The Hunting Ground” takes on the fraternity system — in particular, Sigma Alpha Epsilon — and even throws down a challenge of a sort for the National Football League with a not-so-subtle suggestion that teams should think twice about drafting one of the top college prospects, Jameis Winston.

Mr. Winston, the Florida State University quarterback, is the focus of one of the film’s more incendiary segments. The Heisman Trophy winner in 2013, he was accused in 2012 of sexual assault by a female student. He has asserted his innocence, did not face criminal charges and was recently cleared of violating Florida State’s student code of conduct by the university. He is widely expected to be among the first several players chosen in this spring’s N.F.L. draft. But “The Hunting Ground,” directed by Kirby Dick, makes a mockery of Florida State’s investigation, and Mr. Winston’s accuser, Erica Kinsman, speaks publicly about the case for the first time in the film, at length.

… which singled out mixed metaphors in prose. Mixed metaphors tend to mix up your reader. Here’s an example, taken from a review of The Hunting Ground, a film about sexual assault on American college campuses.

Given that the film levels a withering j’accuse against a complex skein of heterogeneous institutions and organizations, it will have a harder road ahead inspiring organizational reform in the same way The Invisible War did, but there’s no doubt it will get audiences debating and talking when it goes on release via RADiUS in March and when it is broadcast later this year on CNN.

Let’s highlight some of the figurative language in here.

‘Given that the film levels a withering j’accuse against a complex skein of heterogeneous institutions and organizations, it will have a harder road ahead inspiring organizational reform in the same way [the film] The Invisible War did, but there’s no doubt it will get audiences debating and talking when it goes on release via RADiUS in March and when it is broadcast later this year on CNN.’

*********************

The j’accuse bit is a rather overheated cliche, but let that go. The real problems in this sentence begin with skein. When we see skein, we see literal lengths of knotted yarn and figurative knotty complexities. Do we need “complex” in front of skein? Scathing Online Schoolmarm thinks not. It mucks up a sentence that already has too many words. And skein itself is maybe not the right word for what she means. She means to describe the network of universities in this country – and they are a network, not a skein. Skein suggests a somewhat fragile, random unit of things, whereas universities are more sturdy, meaningful, interconnected phenomena.

Now the writer puts the skein on the road. The skein “will have a harder road ahead.” I suppose we could at this point imagine something like tumbleweed… But really, the writer does our efforts to figure out her meaning no favors when she jams all of this at-odds figurative language into her sentence. Write simply, and don’t unspool too many skeins.

[D]espite the egregiousness of these charges, there’s something simultaneously repulsive and endearing about Sheldon Silver. He represents a bygone time of New York City politics — men in fedoras, backroom deal-making, using taxpayer-funded perks to reward loyalty. Call it sleazy, call it charmingly authentic. You decide.

… Florida State!

************************

She was totally unconscious so there is no way they can claim consent. It was recorded so they can’t claim it didn’t happen. It was reported not by the victim but by the university so they can’t claim she “cried rape”.

From the article’s comment thread.

The football players’ defense team argues that Vanderbilt’s sinful campus culture sullied the lads and forced their hand.

… and Scathing Online Schoolmarm, long a student of propaganda, finds them well worth a look. If you read through the SOS posts on this blog, you’ll see plenty of analyses of modern American sports agitprop.

The point of this genre of writing is to transform empty stadiums into … well, not full… everyone knows what’s what these days in university sports… But to transform the total embarrassment of empty stadiums (the stuff is broadcast) into the mild discomfort of half-full stadiums. And since shitty dissolute sports programs repel everyone, your hackwork here ain’t gonna be easy.

*******************

Why is why SOS finds it sad that the people to whom editors throw these challenging assignments are usually the rookies, or anyway the worst writers on staff. Who else would take the gig? Your job is to rally the troops – to get the burghers of Bogalusa out of bed in order to hit terrible traffic, deal with scary drunks, sit for three hours while almost nothing happens, etc., etc., etc.

Those long empty hours give people plenty of time to contemplate less than attractive aspects of the sports program they’re supposed to be cheering. FAMU’s fans, for instance, will have trouble shaking off memories of their school’s homicidally hazing marching band…

But you won’t find a word about that ongoing unpleasantness in Jordan Culver’s piece in the Tallahassee Democrat yesterday. Culver begins with a lament:

[F]ans have been absent — if not totally nonexistent — during home games.

That’s home games, so I guess we’re talking, uh, even less than nonexistent for away.

What to do? The team stinks, the band kills its musicians, and to make matters worse vanishingly few people are applying to attend FAMU anyway. Into this desperate situation steps the local propagandist. What can he do to help?

There are basically two ways to go: Righteous rage against the people (we’ll see an example of that in a moment), and – the Culver option – humble entreaty. Culver goes ahead and acknowledges that the program’s a total mess, with new coaches stepping in every ten minutes or so… But please note! When I call FAMU coaches, they answer the phone and talk to me!

I call, he answers. I ask a question, he — to the best of his ability — provides an answer.

You can’t abandon a program whose coaches pick up the phone. Plus they all have “a vision.”

[FAMU’s interim athletics director] is willing to share [his] vision, and I think it’s one even the most disgruntled FAMU fan can get behind.

But what is that vision? Culver doesn’t quote the AD; nor does he quote any of the other people who will be running the FAMU program for the next few hours. He just says they all have a vision. The vision thing. We can get behind that, can’t we?

*************************

Righteous rage against the people has certain inherent risks, familiar to the classic propagandists of communist countries. The greatness of humanity, its glorious freedoms – these are what life is all about. They’re especially what the freewheeling all-American ethos of sport is about. You don’t want to mess up that… vision… with nasty, coercive, or – God forbid – threatening language.

On the other hand, if you are Clemson zealot Zach Lentz you are in a terrible vindictive snit, especially about the basketball team.

[S]upport for this team is dwindling at an astonishing rate and it has to wear not only on the coach but the players.

This first point is a variant of what SOS has long called coacha inconsolata (put the phrase in my search function), the evocation of the agonies suffered by coaches who through no fault of their own recruit criminals or make institution-destroying salaries or play to empty stadiums. In an echo of the notorious “kitten” internet meme, coacha inconsolata says Every time you fail to attend a game, a coach is worn down to a nub.

Same deal for the kids:

These student-athletes put hours of blood, sweat and tears into a job that’s sole purpose is to entertain the fans watching. The least we can do as fans is get out of our house or dorm and make the trip or walk over to support them. Maybe if we fans get behind the team from the beginning rather than waiting on a magical end-of-the-season run, we might see something special from a special group of kids.

First, then, you inflict guilt. Next up is the drill sergeant, barking his orders with numbing redundancy:

[T]here is no excuse. There is no excuse for there to be empty seats in the student section. No excuse for the people who have said of football game times, “I don’t care if they play at 2 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, I’m going to be there.”

Liars! Look what you said, and look what you did! No excuse, no excuse, no excuse!

The next thing is fully in line with the tendency of communist regimes to say exactly the opposite of the truth as if everyone knows this exactly the opposite thing is obviously true:

[P]eople love to go to sporting events. They love to be a part of the pageantry and witness the spectacular in person.

We don’t have to threaten our people with reprisals if they fail to show up for the May Day parade. Everyone loves pageantry and spectacle.

**************************

It’s strange how Lentz hasn’t noticed the national conversation about massively tanking attendance at university sports events.

It’s especially strange since he’s writing about massively tanking attendance at his university’s sports events.

***************************

Finally: The sobbing old-timer grapples with his lost world.

There was a time when students camped outside, waited in the cold and rain and people couldn’t wait to get inside to watch their team take on whoever dared enter the arena that night.

Why, I remember, back in two thousand naught eight…

The people of Iran had their Green Revolution, which sought to make their country more just; now America launches our own grassroots movement for change.

Property developer Jeff Greene’s impassioned plea last week at Davos is catalyzing a movement across the United States, an upswelling of ordinary people who ask: If Jeff can do it, why can’t we?

The challenge Jeff has set:

“America’s lifestyle expectations are far too high and need to be adjusted so we have less things and a smaller, better existence,” Greene said in an interview today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We need to reinvent our whole system of life.”

Jeff, who keeps five supermansions and “flew his wife, children and two nannies on a private jet plane to Davos for the week,” joins the storied ranks of Benjamin Edelman, Vinod Khosla, Tom Perkins, Todd Henderson, Glenn Hubbard, Frederic Mishkin, Dick Fuld, and Mike “Helicopter” Bloomberg as yet another man of conscience for America, a role model whose invention of a whole new downsized system of life sets the standard for the rest of us.

Start here. Model your wedding on Greene’s 2007 ceremony:

[The couple were married] at their 27-acre Beverly Hills canyon estate. The Los Angeles skyline glimmered as the bride appeared in a gown of hand-beaded Swarovski crystals, and four swans glided alongside her in a reflecting pool as she made her way to the French limestone gazebo, where Mr. Greene waited for her, beaming.

The 275 guests were an eclectic mix, including the director Oliver Stone; Donald Sterling, the Los Angeles Clippers owner; and the boxer Mike Tyson, who served as best man. After midnight, the guests took to the revolving dance floor installed in the 24-car garage.

You might have trouble finding Sterling. He might be hiding out.

Baby Face Emmert and t’uther boys are saddling up to ride the plains and mountains of America in search of academic fraud in our big-time athletics programs. They’ve already got no fewer than twenty schools to visit in their quest to uncover and erase any stains on the academic integrity of this country’s universities.

You’ll see some naysayers out there for sure.

… NCAA investigations won’t change anything. So long as this system continues to rest on the mind-numbingly stupid idea that education and college sports have anything to do with each other, we will be stuck in this cycle. Colleges and athletic programs will game the system; the NCAA will go scandal-hunting; wrists will be slapped; and everyone involved in the whole sham will go on lying to themselves.

UD thinks this is unfair. Nobody’s lying to himself.

I’m thinkin it’s onaccounta it’s in New York City – smack where the money is – but Columbia University sure does have one rootin-tootin, crooked-up-the-wazoo, faculty.

This 2011 post tries to gather up some of that school’s most notorious naughty boys, but CU has outdone itself since then, having most recently splashed itself all over the tabloids with the story of eminent (awed pause here), bow-tied (classy! pause here), mesothelioma researcher (grateful sanctimonious I-don’t-wanna-know-about-the-law-firms pause here) Robert Taub.

Preet Bharara just finished transacting business with Columbia’s Gregory Rorke, and now he’s had to swivel around to the school’s Milstein Family Professor (also about the Milsteins you don’t wanna know). Bharara must have a crimp in his neck.

Columbia even boasts But don’t get me started.

Rabbi Mordechai Bloi, a prominent [United Torah Judaism party] activist, made a series of implied threats against women who would involve themselves in [non-great-rabbi-guided] parties…

“Any woman who comes close to a party which is not under the guidance of the great rabbis will leave [her marriage] without her ketubah [without the money owing to her in case of divorce], and it will be forbidden to learn in her educational institutions, or to purchase any product from her, and it will be a religious obligation to remove all her children from all institutions,” Bloi said.

In addition, he was quoted as saying that any haredi woman who would run for election in a non-haredi party “will be dealt with accordingly and will pay dearly for it.”

Daddy is really pissed.

… just go to this page, and remind yourself that Sheldon Silver won the 2012 William M. Bulger (once president of the University of Massachusetts!) Excellence in State Leadership Award.

Yech.

********************

Oh goody. There’s a university professor involved. So far unnamed. UD‘s thinking identifying the person ain’t gonna be too hard.

[It is alleged that] Silver directed state research money to a university doctor in Manhattan, and that the doctor referred lucrative asbestos cases to Silver’s firm of Weitz & Luxenberg. The doctor is described as a “well-known expert” who “conducts mesothelioma research” and who had created a center at his university by or before 2002 related to that subject. The doctor, not named in the complaint, “has entered into an agreement with the USAO SDNY [U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York] under which he will not be prosecuted for the conduct described herein, and that obligates him to provide truthful information to and cooperate with the government.”

As for Preet Bharara, without whom this corruption-besotted blog could not function:

[N]othing about Bharara’s pedigree suggested he planned to burn down the New York State Democratic Party [UD is a deep-blue Democrat. She owns a house in New York State. But she’s got no loyalty to that state’s notoriously corrupt political establishment.]… Bharara, with two more years in office, is that particularly dangerous and rare political figure: a federal prosecutor who doesn’t give a fuck.

***********************

Oh. Okay. Well that wasn’t any challenge at all. Taub’s name came up immediately in a Google search; but here it is all over the papers.

The state money was provided to Dr. Robert Taub [another Yeshiva University grad] for research by the Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation — with some of the additional funds going for unspecified “additional benefits” to the doctor’s family, the court papers charges.

Taub, who is affiliated with Columbia University, is cooperating with the FBI, court papers revealed. Silver sponsored a May 2011 “official resolution” by the assembly honoring Taub.

**********************

He’s a recipient of the “Collaborator Award,” which has a special ring to it now.

UD and La Kid got home after dark last night (office hours; Tabata after work). Mr UD dropped them off and began backing out of the driveway to head to Chipotle.

Suddenly, in the snowy dark, UD spotted a small living thing sitting on one of the steps to the front door. What was it?

“Look.” She prodded La Kid.

“What is it?”

“A rat? A rabbit? A cat?”

“Why doesn’t it move? We’re inches away!”

“I don’t know.”

“Go away!” shouted La Kid. We moved closer, trying to scare it. It didn’t budge, and we still couldn’t figure out what it was.

“Call Daddy! Daddy!” La Kid called. He’d already left.

“There’s too much wildlife here,” wailed UD. “What is it? Why won’t it move? MOVE,” she screamed.

Then, as the moonlight deepened, she saw an unmistakeable rabbit-shadow.

“Hop away! Hop hop hop hop away!” they yelled. The minutes ticked by, and UD and La Kid were cold. “No wonder the owls and the hawks and the foxes like it so much here,” grumbled UD. “Big open lawns full of motionless rabbits.” They edged closer, and finally the thing bounced off…

… government (“Boring is Good”).

… – ou peut-être il serait mieux de dire Université de Moncton – which is generating controversy. Apparently some people on campus think it insults the dignity of the school by featuring students (actors, maybe) kissing passionately… uh, French kissing – in the library stacks…

It’s altogether a tonguey ad – lots of tongues hanging out of the mouths of students as they gambol about or play hockey or paihrfohrmuh zair wilduh enduh crayzee Franche roque moozeekuh…

But the ad – plus this morning’s metro ride to Foggy Bottom – has UD thinking about something else entirely. She notices that in this video everyone is beautiful. Some students are insanely beautiful, and some are merely somewhat beautiful, but everyone is beautiful. On the crowded metro this morning, she took a seat and her blazingly blond daughter stood near her; and near her daughter stood a staggeringly beautiful young man, the sort of person you kind of have to look at even though it’s a little impolite. The dude was chiseled: Closely cropped black hair, long elegant face with dramatic green eyes, aquiline nose, full lips, and cleft chin… UD thought Okay, the metro is the domain of the young and restless, the super-ambitious full-bodied hot-blooded denizens of DC … But these two are exceptionally beautiful…

But then La Kid and the guy left the train (UD had already, gazing at them, melded their DNA to produce a race of amazing specimens), off to their separate jobs, and now onto the train scrambled (see post immediately below) six random dudes, a group of friends, also in their twenties… And all of them were beautiful!

So is it just me? Am I seeing the world through rose-colored glasses? Or would turning on a camera anywhere at a place like the Moncton campus produce a steady array of beauties? Have I gotten to the point in life where the mere fact of being young makes you beautiful?

This is from the comment thread of an article about some pillaging University of Michigan fraternities…

Scathing Online Schoolmarm likes very much the word “scrambles” here. It’s the kind of mistake (distruction and other mess-ups are less interesting mistakes) that makes you think about language, about why people reach for certain words when trying to express certain things.

The writer probably meant shambles – to see my place of employment in a shambles – but also somewhere in his or her head was perhaps not merely scramble (which can have meanings having to do with making quick and sometimes desperate moves, which I suppose has some mental connection to what the marauding lads did), but also scrabble (which similarly can mean panicky random movement). This person’s place of employment will have to scramble, and it will have to scrabble through a lot of trash, to fix the mess the UM group made.

Was trample in there too? Was the desire that these visitors from one of America’s most icky football schools scram in there?

Our beautiful tax-exempt universities. We so want to keep them that way. Because they use the money we give them to give seven million dollars a year to football coaches! That is beautiful. That is so… university-y…

…[I]t is certainly reasonable to ask about the size of the salaries at nonprofits that are being subsidized with our tax dollars.

What? Why? Next you’ll ask why Harvard University is sitting on a 32.7 billion dollar endowment. Point One: None of your business. Point Two: It’s a goddamn nonprofit, that’s why! Don’t you know a nonprofit when you see one?

We get very competent people to serve as Cabinet secretaries for $200,000 a year. Suppose there were a cap on the pay at any organization with nonprofit status at $400,000 a year. After all, if an organization can’t find someone to work for it at twice the pay of a Cabinet secretary, then maybe it isn’t the sort of organization that taxpayers should be subsidizing.

The nonprofits will scream bloody murder if any measure like this is even considered. Undoubtedly, many of the nonprofits committed to reducing inequality and poverty will be yelling loudest.

Point Three: You sound like a socialist.