The Garfield Park Conservatory.

On her way to Ireland.

An award-winning B-School Boy, PCP, UGA… these acronyms add up to a naked angry slimy mess inside a trash truck’s hopper …

The spectacle of this student fighting with the cops for his right to die in a mobile dumpster was impressive even on a campus famous for its immensities of trash. Crowds of student onlookers apparently took lots of videos.

It’s all very primal, isn’t it? Curled naked inside the dark wet womb, UGA’s finest sticks his thumb in his mouth, dilates his eyes and cries No! In thunder.

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UD thanks John.

… now features the comical board of trustee meetings that all schools going down the tube feature. The cronies want yet another big tuition increase so that they and the coaches can continue to live in the style to which they have become accustomed; a powerful faction of disgusted trustees wants them to stop doing this.

During the meeting, [one trustee] questioned how the university spends money, calling [the school president] and his administrative team “masters of financial obfuscation.”

The sharpest debate of the meeting was over a transaction [the president] approved last year in which the university loaned $38 million of its cash on hand to the University of Louisville Real Estate Foundation, a creation of the U of L Foundation, which [the president] also runs.

[Two trustees] questioned why the loan was not approved by the trustees and whether the money could be used to fund more pressing university priorities or to curtail tuition increases.

Jason Tomlinson, the foundation’s chief financial officer, told the board that the transaction is not a loan but a “receivable.” But U of L’s independent auditors called it a loan in the university’s annual financial statements…

[One of the trustees] blew up at Tomlinson, asking how he could tell the board the deal is not a loan when the document governing the transaction has a file name of “University Loan to FDN.docx.”

The U of Smell has gotten so comprehensively smelly (put Louisville in my search engine) that a strong faction of trustees now wants the school’s ridiculous president to leave. The president refuses to leave.

The stage is set; all the rest of us have to do is sit back and enjoy the show.

Salieri’s final speech, from the film Amadeus.

Peter Shaffer, author of the play and the screenplay, has died.

… that infelicities of style can have serious repercussions.

The father of a Stanford University swimmer just convicted of sexual assault has upset a lot of people by writing that his son having to register as a sex offender and go to jail for six months is “a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action.”

Ahem. You and I know that he didn’t mean “action” in the xxx sense, in which people routinely talk about – for instance – girl on girl action. But that is where this man’s unheedful language has perhaps taken us, and it is, given the circumstances, a very unfortunate place indeed. Rather than get us thinking about a brief drunken hideous act in the context of an entire life, he has us picturing his son grinningly getting some action.

Whether it’s one of their most admired deans or one of their most admired graduates, MIT exhibits the “beautiful indifference” long identified by the psychiatric community as an unsettling insouciance in regard to one’s own dire condition.

Dean Gabriel Bitran rots in prison while MIT publications continue to admire his commitment to “producing leaders with a social conscience.” To this day, MIT has said not one word about Bitran, though one of his campus colleagues has keened over his “immense suffering” as he dealt with the legal implications of having swindled thousands of people out of millions of dollars.

As for Sloan grad Chris Clemons, who is not currently but will soon be in prison… You’d think all those tech geniuses at MIT could figure out a way to remove this from the internet. Or if they don’t like doing that sort of thing, they could append an update to this front page article slobbering over Clemons for his selfless beneficence. Otherwise, since Clemons seems to have embezzled huge funds from the charter schools he founds, sentences like this one from the MIT article about him read a bit … awkwardly…

[W]hat really got me excited were the structural aspects of running a school, like finance, and accounting, and becoming a sophisticated leader of a multimillion dollar organization.

When he said “excited,” Clemons turns out to have had in mind spending tens of thousands of school dollars at “Hooters, Twin Peaks, and the strip clubs Goldrush Showbar and the Cheetah Lounge.”

The thing is, a lot of people start charter schools with just “passion.” But, Clemons explains, you also need MBA types like him.

“Sometimes charter schools struggle to efficiently manage their resources It’s a painful divide in the non-profit sector between those who have some business skills
and acumen and those who don’t.”

UD ain’t complaining that Sloan hires and graduates a few stinkers. Everybody does that. She wonders why the school just smiles like an idiot and pretends the stinkers have nothing to do with MIT.

Life of the mind, Mississippi State University.

…quite the erection along
one of UD‘s garden paths.

Manducare Stercore Subridens

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[W]hile many Mississippi State fans might call for second chances, or try to say he was just defending his family to make ourselves feel better for taking Jeffery Simmons without any real repercussions, I just can’t bring myself to do it. I’ll just know we decided to take a really bad hit to the image of our school all in the name of winning football games.

Brian Hadad of Bulldog Sports Radio has often called taking Simmons similar to eating a turd sandwich. It tastes terrible going down and you just have to find a way to choke it down. He was completely right, but I’m not even sure I could anticipate how difficult this would be to swallow once we got here.

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But smiling while trying to get your shit down is nothing.

Football is so popular that people (myself included) have private conversations about how many people would have to die on the field before we’d seriously consider giving it up.

If you want to know the answer to that, consider the long history of drivers dying on the race car track. People in the stands dying at race car events. I think if we’re being honest about this, public deaths in the course of violent sports events are – fanwise – a plus.

Indeed, let’s continue with Chuck Klosterman’s argument:

There’s an embedded assumption within all arguments regarding the doomed nature of football. The assumption is that the game is even more violent and damaging than it superficially appears, and that as more people realize this (and/or refuse to deny the medical evidence verifying that damage), the game’s fan support will disappear. The mistake made by those advocating this position is their certitude that this perspective is self-evident… The contemporary stance on football’s risk feels unilateral, because nobody goes around saying, “Modern life is not violent enough.” Yet this sentiment quietly exists… Football could become a dead game to the casual sports fan without losing a fraction of its cultural influence. It could become the only way for a certain kind of person to safely access the kind of controlled violence he sees as a critical part of life… [Football will not become extinct; rather it will become] a mildly perverse masculine novelty.

But the more violence faction ain’t such a novelty, is it? It’s about to elect our next president.

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“Look, our nature, we like competitive violence. We do. As much as we talk about the quarterbacks, and where the game of football has gone the last 25 years, we still like when you show a big hit or a big tackle. We like that. You can throw five touchdown passes and that’s great. But one big hit, that’s what you’re here for.”

The elect are getting Raptured Up; the unfortunate will be Left Behind.

The state is a perennial Number One on Most Corrupt States lists; the university, which is ALL about football, issues presidential directives on cowbells. And no one would notice or be in any way surprised that Mississippi State has just welcomed with open arms a guy currently facing charges for beating the shit out of a woman – a beating you can watch on YouTube (take your pick) – if it weren’t for the current unpleasantness at Baylor… I mean, you know, it’s the SEC… Who really gives a rat’s ass? Be it ever so decadent, there’s no place like that y’all and shut ma mouth land… Don’t think y’all gonna find one person, male or female persuasion, who ain’t prepared to forgive Jeffery Simmons if he do get a bit out of hand… Small price to pay for one hell of a defensive end.

And here’s a sign of the times! Mississippi State is currently issuing protective helmets to all its women students. Distribution is mandatory but you can choose to wear yours or not.

Why do you think Beware the B-School Boys is one of this blog’s perennially popular categories? If the statement in my headline is true, or roughly true, what do you think places like Wharton, which not only produced Donald Trump and Raj Rajatnaram and Steven Cohen and many of their, er, close associates, but boasts a long glorious history of producing scads of America’s most spectacular thieves, have been teaching people all these years? I mean, not the specific content of courses… I mean the gestalt.

And what a remarkable fact about American culture, that we have these gilded b-schools specializing in predatory capitalism. And the highest-profile b-school of them all produced not only the founder of Trump University, but – possibly – the next president of the United States.

In the aftermath of the UCLA shooting, Scott Jaschik reviews what we know about the origins and characteristics of such events. Which isn’t much. Fields like engineering, math, and biology do seem to produce most of the attacks, but nursing professors and comp lit professors have also in recent years been murdered by disgruntled students.

I think that “spark” idea gets us somewhere. My own review of these attacks conjures, pretty consistently, a paranoid loser smoldering with rage.

Et alors? All professors who teach long enough encounter students whose behavior unsettles them. Maybe frightens them. (Professors lucky enough to teach on gun-friendly campuses get to worry that these unbalanced individuals may be packing heat.) Behind the vague word assessment lies the hard reality that most of us will never actually report a student, that we expect university settings to be about intensity and struggle and not giving up on people. Several of these killings came after a perpetual grad student was finally dropped from a program. University settings tolerate the sort of bizarre behavior that corporations would boot out the door in minutes.

For what it’s worth – killers in university settings (I’m thinking of professors who kill professors too, like the notorious Amy Bishop) aren’t just paranoid, from what I can tell. They are often strikingly grandiose, arrogant people. They kill those who refuse to acknowledge their superiority. They are solving a problem: They are ridding the world of people whose existence threatens their god-like self-perception. Professors who give middling or failing grades to shaky people who consider themselves transcendent geniuses would be at risk.

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The gunman has been identified.

[William] Klug was an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and had been the target of [Mainak] Sarkar’s anger on social media for months. On March 10, Sarkar called the professor a “very sick person” who should not be trusted.

“William Klug, UCLA professor is not the kind of person when you think of a professor. He is a very sick person. I urge every new student coming to UCLA to stay away from this guy,” Sarkar wrote. “He made me really sick. Your enemy is my enemy. But your friend can do a lot more harm. Be careful about whom you trust.”

A source called the gunman’s accusations “absolutely untrue.”

“The idea that somebody took his ideas is absolutely psychotic,” the source said.

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… Sarkar has been studying for his PhD since 2006 with no graduating date, two years longer than any of the other researchers.

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The killer had a list of targets and killed one of them – a woman who lived in his Minnesota town – before driving to LA and killing Krug.

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The woman was his ex-wife.

Coverage here.

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Now confirmed: A graduate student “despondent about his grades” kills his professor.

Watch live from the shooter-copter as we try to find the guy gunning down people at UCLA.

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Two dead. Shooter apparently still at large.