I’m sure. All he ever wanted was to help educate underprivileged you. That’s all he and his company ever want – to help make the world a better place. You’ve seen their tv ads.

If Education Management Corporation is running into a little trouble, I’m sure Mr Blankfein and that other nice man, the one from KKR, will get together (don’t they look nice?) and take care of things.

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

Me, I can only skim this.

Maybe you’re made of tougher stuff.

… is making remarkable strides at the University of Montana, where tanking enrollment rates (due in part to the school’s team-induced rape crisis – the subject of a new best-selling book) are emptying the campus and driving it into deeper and deeper deficit. Will the state increase its support of the school?

Since the state largely understands the school as a football playing entity, and since the school’s team remains mired in naughty players and emptying stadiums, UD isn’t sanguine about legislators’ and taxpayers’ continued generosity. Here’s a recent snapshot. Ain’t pretty.

[F]ootball is built on large men running into each other at great speed. That creates dramatic moments — and creates constant risk of head injuries, too. And football wouldn’t be football without it.

You’ll never get anywhere with university football until you focus with laser-like clarity upon the Major Kongs riding their schools to oblivion; and the Chronicle of Higher Education knew it had a winner when it decided to feature in particular the head of Georgia State University. This frenetic delusional man will go on bleeding his indifferent-to-football students for more and more sports fees until they all decide to drop out and attend schools run by sane people.

Meanwhile, though, Mark Becker will build the world’s largest empty football stadium.

Mr. Becker’s bold idea to reduce the [escalating student] subsidy: Spend even more on athletics. He wants to build a football stadium for his team about a mile from the campus. He envisions a modern, 25,000- to 30,000-seat facility that offers a lively game-day environment. He also wants a baseball field and a soccer field, retail shops, and student housing.

Don’t imagine anything can be done to stop the madness. GSU’s trustees no doubt consider the man a genius, and no one else is in a position to do anything about him.

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

With this win Fresno State solidifies Hawaii’s last place position in the West Division Standings.

A school like Hawaii is an even more interesting case. Hawaii proves that even a team with no fans, a virtually unblemished loss record, and a school-bankrupting budget, will keep playing.

… go to the amazing centrality of football in American public universities. As one professor puts it, “intercollegiate football, or basketball, is perceived as the face of the modern public university, large or small.”

The. Face.

So, a couple of comments post-Missouri:

So much of the political and social economy of state universities is tied to football, especially in big-money conferences like Southeastern Conference, where Mizzou plays… [University] administrators created this world where our universities revolve socially, politically and economically around the exploited labor of big time football. Now let them reap what they sow.

***********

[W]hen did sports become more important than academics in American universities…?

… [T]he USA is the only country where college sport venues … consume as much, or more, capital budget than the entire balance of the university.

… [It is] worth great value to a college to recruit a “student” who possibly [can] barely read and write.

… It is doubtful anyone is willing to separate athletics out of America’s universities. But not recognizing the corruption this has done to the original academic purpose of these institutions is turning a blind eye to the obvious. For far too many universities job #1 is about running a sports franchise.

When most of the meaning, and much of the budget, of your state school rests on football, when you are essentially a setting for farm teams, the figures on campus impersonating university presidents and provosts will be toppled again and again with each athletics crisis. Those crises – cheating scandals, rape epidemics, whormitory exposes, the abuse of players by coaching staff, teams that double as criminal gangs, professors who offer hundreds of bogus independent studies per semester, cripplingly cost-overrun stadiums, outrageous student fee hikes, etc., etc. – are built in to the football school system. Only when you drop all university-pretense, in the way Auburn and Clemson and Nebraska have done, will you stop clownishly crashing into one catastrophe after another. Humiliating betrayals of your academic mission only happen if you continue to pretend you have one. If you are smart, you will make the University of Alabama your model, where the long and happy reign of the state monarch – the football coach – guarantees social tranquillity.

***********
UD thanks Rick.

… and container ship.

This evening,
Rehoboth Beach.

“Hardy … likes to hit women,” but much more importantly he likes to hit quarterbacks. So despite all the battered girlfriend pictures that have just been released, he’ll not only continue to play for the Cowboys, he’ll continue to be a university’s poster boy for great sportsmanship. That Ole Miss bio page will stay up forever, just the way the pride of the University of Nebraska, Richie Incognito, will remain on their website. Richie likes to hit everything.

(Hardy’s also got a huge personal arsenal.)

[At Bethune Cookman University’s] homecoming game, [Senior Associate AD Tony] O’Neal approached officers in his golf cart near the south gate entrance, yelling at them to help with parking tickets. Authorities said a sergeant approached O’Neal to find out what he needed and that’s when the arrest report showed O’Neal became irate and “jumped out of the golf cart, ran up to the Sergeant Morford and banged his forehead against his,” according to a report.

The sergeant backed away from O’Neal but police said he became more irate and “reached out and grabbed the Sergeant Morford with both hands in an aggressive manner, pushing Sergeant Morford backwards.”

Authorities said they were forced to take O’Neal to the ground after refusing to comply with their commands. O’Neal … was charged with battery on a law enforcement officer…

No wonder he gets pretty much the highest salary on campus.

***************
UD thanks her sister.

-oh.

A well-born drug-runner whose name is two poetry lectures in one: Alliteration and iambic pentameter.

THE FUTURE COURSE UNFOLDS

Wired, fake, and weaponized
The future course unfolds
On vast autumnal campuses
Of russet tones and golds

To Chapel Hill’s fake courses
And laptop domination
Add in a military force
To public education

Rick Pitino’s recruitment practices: A gift that keeps on giving.