Rape, unreported, robs me of my rest:
Rape, silly rape, our ardent team encumbers:
Rape, nightmare-like, lies heavy on my chest,
And weaves itself into my midnight slumbers!
Trump University or another for-profit school?
Trump University had one major difference with all these other for-profit colleges. Because it was unlicensed and unaccredited, it was not eligible for federal student grants and loans. The for-profit college industry has been taking as much as $32 billion a year in this funding. So while the cost of Trump University’s abuses came down only on its students, the other colleges have spread this misery among students, many of them lower-income than the typical Trump enrollee, but also on taxpayers.
But misogynistic thuggery IS Waco! Every city has to be about something, and only Waco boasts a biker massacre at a breastaurant, Branch Davidian child rape, and a religious university complicit in the rape of its women students.
****************
Baylor University: Stupid is as stupid does.
The disregard for victims at Baylor wasn’t some kind of oversight. It wasn’t merely callous. It was sick. What kind of adult looks into the beseeching face of a young victim who could be his or her own daughter and decides that football is more important?
The Ken Starr kind. The same kind that went after the Clintons, first on trumped up public charges, then for sex. It’s this very cycle of history, coming back to take Starr down at last, that Baylor missed seeing over its shoulder and now is bumbling and stumbling in panic to evade.
[A New York City public swimming pool is] unmoored from the laws of New York City and the Constitution, and commonly held principles of fairness and equal access… Orthodox Jewish beliefs demand modesty in dress, and a strict separation of the sexes, and those are the beliefs to which the taxpayer-owned-and-operated Metropolitan Recreation Center will yield [in mandating sex-segregated swimming hours].
[The city cannot let stand this] religious intrusion into a secular space. [The city should] immediately end religious segregation in the pools…
Let those who cannot abide public, secular rules at a public, secular pool find their own private place to swim…
Bravo, New York Times.
Fraternities create drug distribution gangs; the Wharton School creates insider trader gangs. University athletic teams create rape-gangs and theft-gangs. At the very highest levels, your team of trustees creates international news.
Campuses are places where you connect with people like yourself – people who have similar strong interests and ambitions. Of course in most cases those ambitions aren’t criminal. But if they are, the isolated secret-brotherhood hothouse intensity of certain campus groups, the general public’s romanticization of college and graduate students as inquiring innocents, and the often rabid winner-take-all ideology of some of these associations (the athletes’ cafeteria at the University of Oregon has EAT YOUR ENEMIES in big illuminated letters on the wall), will make it temptingly easy to criminalize your association, if that’s what you’d like to do.
Not everyone on your wrestling team – to take the latest example, from the University of Minnesota – will want to take part in your Xanax distribution conspiracy. But the beauty of things like wrestling teams is that, once inducted into the brotherhood, it’s unlikely even non-participants will squeal.
My point is that when you’ve already got an organized team, you make much easier the transition to organized crime. There’s a lot of disorganized drug selling and buying at colleges, but it’s always going to be small time, and it’s going to be vulnerable to detection (see Wesleyan University). Fraternity drug rings only seem to get infiltrated after they’ve had a chance to grow enormously, as at San Diego State. The Minnesota gang seems to have had a chance to grow similarly huge — it handles spectacular quantities of Xanax.
*****************
UD thanks two readers
for telling her about
the Gophers and the Xanax.
… have all featured the camp followers and comfort women that typically accompany men in battle. The commanders of Waco’s Branch Davidians, in their protracted campaign against the government, prostituted the daughters of sect adherents. At the outset of pagan hostilities at Waco’s Twin Peaks, breastaurant women ran for their lives. Coeds at Baylor University knew to run just as fast when any of the men running the ball for the greater good of Baptism approached.
Davidian, Pagan, Baptist – whatever the divine cause, Waconan soldiers will make sexual use of women. It’s the Waco way.
**************
Eh. It’s the world’s way. When the bellicose righteous fight their righteous cause…
[Dominique] Strauss-Kahn … told the court that group-sex sessions were rare “recreation” in his hectic schedule as IMF chief, taking place only four times a year because he had been very busy “saving the world from catastrophe” at the time of the US sub-prime crisis.
… can thank Judge Gonzalo Curiel for opening the annals of Trump University, a landmark postmodern school. Until the inauguration of the University of California Goldman Sachs, Trump U. will continue to stand as our nation’s most cutting-edge institution.
— Now what is the meaning of this word retreat and why is it allowed on all hands to be a most salutary practice for all who desire to lead before God and in the eyes of men a truly christian life? A retreat, my dear boys, signifies a withdrawal for awhile from the cares of our life, the cares of this workaday world, in order to examine the state of our football program, to reflect on the mysteries of holy gridiron and to understand better why we are here in this league. During these few days I intend to put before you some thoughts concerning the four last things. They are, as you know, the NCAA death penalty, retrenchment (for this we look in fellowship to our Brother in Football, Southern Methodist University), new recruitment, and the wondrous beginning of a Rebirth in Football. We shall try to understand them fully during these few days so that we may derive from the understanding of them a lasting benefit to our win/loss stats. And remember, my dear boys, that we have been sent into this world for one thing and for one thing alone: to win football games no matter the price. All else is worthless. One thing alone is needful, the regional championship. What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world if he suffer the loss of his coach? Ah, my dear boys, believe me there is nothing in this wretched world that can make up for such a loss.
[University of Louisville President James] Ramsey has been in hot water with the university as faculty and staff have polled for a no-confidence vote due to negative publicity and claims of mismanagement. U of L and the Foundation have also been in an ongoing state audit, which was stalled by late submissions from the university three weeks ago…
… Ramsey was paid $2.8 million by the University of Louisville Foundation in 2014, $1 million more than he was paid in 2013.
Thus sayeth UD: He who goes after a President for going down will himself go down.
*********************
And suddenly there appeared The President of the Baylor Men, praising football, and saying:
The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest my rapists to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With shame, disgrace, and getting fired.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?
I, a chancellor and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.
It’s within range of both Oregon State University and the University of Oregon.
UD REVIEWED
Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
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