It begins to dawn on yet another university that laptops in classrooms are lunacy. In a nicely titled article (Bodies Present, Brains Unaccounted For) students at Loyola University Chicago feature the unsurprising results of polls and interviews that underscore the brain-removal service that is the personal computer in the classroom.

As always with such pieces, the journalists find a couple of give-a-shit finance professors who say it ain’t my job to create classroom conditions in which students pay attention…

… appears.

A career on the brink of success as the starter for a big name coach in a power five conference had derailed, and he had finished his college career playing his last game at Yager Stadium in Topeka, Kansas. In front of an announced attendance of 5,403 he had rushed for 17 yards on 13 carries and caught three passes for forty yards. And that was it…

[One day Brandon Bourbon] retweeted a link to an article from Scientific American that just a single concussion has the ability to triple the long-term risk of suicide. Bourbon suffered at least one concussion during his time at the University of Kansas, missing time in 2011 as a result of that injury. It is not hard to imagine that he suffered others during his playing days as well.

This single tweet, mixed in amongst Bourbon’s other Tweets, may have been a stab in the dark at an individual trying to understand and comprehend the lasting effects of head trauma…

… It is unclear what led Bourbon to take his own life. Did his 2011 concussion play a role? Was it years of subconcussive trauma to the head? Were there outside factors of which no one is aware? Was it the rapid descent from starter for a team in a power five conference to unable to continue his career at that level because of injury and NCAA rules? Was it the fact that he had lived and breathed football for decades, and with the end of his college career, the driving factor for the majority of his life had been removed?

Background here.

You have to read down the page a bit to get to the fun stuff in research fraud.

–Knighted.

… at the voting station
in her small old elementary
school, which is now a big
new elementary school.

She wears her I Voted
sticker with pride.

We’ll use this Alberto Moravia title to describe not the moral degeneracy of twentieth century Italy, but the moral degeneracy of one of America’s most noisily Christian universities, Baylor. One of the victims of one of Baylor’s woman-beaters is indeed currently suing the school for “indifference,” and UD thinks she’s got a winner on her hands. It’s hard to come up with a university as consistently indifferent to beaten and raped women on its campus as Baylor.

Baylor knew three [football] players had serious assault charges against them and chose the best course of action was no action…

But you have to understand…

The one area on the field where [the team] consistently struggled was defense, and all three of the players in question were defensive linemen.

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I guess Baylor figures there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

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Remarkable candor on the ethics of accepting into a university setting – and deifying – violent people.

Talent trumps all, said Peter Schroeder, a sports management expert, chair of the University of Pacific’s Department of Health, Exercise and Sport Sciences. “A really good player can make a big difference.”

UD finds the remains of a hornet nest.

Some Eastern Michigan University Faculty Members Want More Funds For Academics And Less For Sports

(The link goes to Page Not Found; use search engine to get to article.)

Texas A&M’s chancellor, Johnny Football’s biggest booster, must be thrilled at Johnny’s latest play! Sharp can sleep well, knowing it was his relentless defense of Johnny throughout his violent, troubled years at Texas A&M that made it possible for the lad to come so far. Well done, Chancellor Sharp!

Word is to the provost gone and word is to them all
And word is out to all the press, and that’s the worst of all
That Mary Willingham taped her chats
With the highest Tar Heels of all

Oh rise, arise Mary Willingham
Make sure you’re in good hands
Or thou shalt be beheaded by
A posse of basketball fans

An Oregon man is accused of tipping a prostitute with an exotic primate swiped from his own pet store along with stolen Girl Scout cookie money and a laptop computer.

Iowa State University President Steven Leath said he would love to see athletics at ISU provide financial support to academics.

However, he was not optimistic about this occurring anytime soon.

“We are facing a number of very large, comprehensive serious lawsuits related to athletics,” Leath said. “So before we would change our budget structure and put money into academics, we want to at least get past some of these immediate lawsuits.”

… as she devoted her considerable intelligence and visual skill to the understanding and preservation of England’s medieval heritage, lived alone in a Devon cottage. In retirement, she was active in her town’s affairs, in the continued pursuit of her research, and in the right to die movement.

Because of what she called, in her suicide note, “the illogical, cruel British law” which forbids assisted suicide, once she became too debilitated and ill to want to go on, she had to die an undelicate and ugly death, alone, days after having been harassed by the police for having imported certain lethal drugs.

The note is a model of incision and self-control — and pathos, as she arranges “burial in my orchard” and specifies that she washed the pills down with “a miniature bottle of Cointreau.” Meticulous and courteous to the end, she notes that

If I have fouled the bath in death, please please be kind enough to wash it down: Dettol is provided.

A sad death for a proud, autonomous woman.

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Mary Warnock has written:

When opponents speak of “life being precious”, they forget that life isn’t a kind of stuff, like water, which has an objective value, and which we can be urged not to squander, but to preserve. If a human being has got to the state where her life is hateful to her, no one else can insist it is valuable. It is for her to judge its value.

Warnock also points out that better palliative care, while a solution for some people, would be insupportable for others.

I do not believe that everyone would prefer palliative care. There are those for whom it would be a nightmare and who would prefer death to the drawn-out process of being kept alive and conscious, however kind, attentive and competent their carers.

This is the second right-to-die professor UD has taken note of on this blog. She tends to agree that this is one of the great human rights issues of our time, and she will approach the controversy by following stories about professors who act on their belief that reasonable people deserve the freedom to decide when they have had enough of life.

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UD thanks dmf.

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A comment on the religious argument:

The main idea here is the “sanctity of life” — the belief that life is precious and death should never be hastened. I can understand this point of view, but I think it should apply only to believers. Why should the rest of the population be held to this standard?

First, Toronto’s North by Northeast Festival; then, UD‘s George Washington University; and now, exceedingly well-heeled Trinity College may be close to deciding that, yes, rich kids like to go slumming, but there are limits.

Ditties celebrating the rape and murder of women just don’t sit well with some folks. Who knows why. But Trinity might be the third institution to disinvite this person.

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For every Action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

It’s a good typo… Not a great typo, but a good one, and in a few hours, when the hangover wears off, the writer will correct it, so you will click on the link and go to the last line in the article and say to yourself Where does UD get off making up typos in order to make people look ridiculous? …

Anyway. I tire somewhat of Rutgers University (in the BBC series, Aristocrats, the dying Charles Fox says I tire somewhat of life), but HBO’s Real Sports featured it as one of America’s exemplary suicide-by-sport schools, and who can argue with the producers’ choice? The fairy-tale world of Fat and Skinny at Rutgers is undeniably riveting:

… Rutgers spent about $26,000 per home game (seven games) last season to board its team in a hotel on the night before kickoff and $69,154.20 total on food before four games.

… [One] Rutgers student … said he works two part-time jobs – moving furniture for the school and driving a cab – and still “can’t afford some meals.”

“Some days I don’t eat,” he said. “Some days I skimp by just drinking water.”

Asked … if he suffers from hunger pains, the student shook his head and said, “some days, yeah,” before adding, “sometimes there are events on campus where there might be light refreshments and things like that. I’d usually try to find one of those and go there.”