I think the problem here is that the University of Florida coach wasn’t precise enough. He needed to speak to his team about not shooting guns at your pregnant girlfriend.

… her gentleman callers.

“The UMass/Amherst campus has a game plan for this and I think we should see how it plays out,” said [president Marty] Meehan when we asked him about [the university’s football program] in an interview …

Does that game plan include continuing to play games at Gillette [Stadium] in front of tens of thousands of fans disguised as empty seats?

“Some have been attended pretty well,” claimed Meehan, but the record shows only two UMass games at the stadium have drawn more than 30,000 fans…” [The stadium holds 70,000.]

It happens. When La Kid graduated from George Washington University, now-disgraced honorary degree awardee Brian Williams gave an address in which he lectured UD on personal ethics.

UD‘s kinda hurt because Williams lied to her in his speech: He said it doesn’t pay to cheat, but it does pay to cheat, and he knows it cuz he’s back at his old job after suffering only un p’tit peu for being a cheat.

University coaches are of course – if they’re any good at all – cheaters. Americans know this and love them for it. Coaches do what they have to do to get ahead, just like Brian Williams.

It almost always does pay to cheat in college sports. Wins matter more than integrity. This isn’t exactly a revelation. As Jerry Tarkanian used to say, “Nine out of 10 schools are cheating. The other one is in last place.” …Cheating pays. We’ve learned this from roided-up baseball players who walked away with tens of millions of dollars, and from white-collar criminals whose sentences paled in comparison to those of small-time crack dealers.

You can blame it on a toothless NCAA, or on a college sports system that values the almighty dollar over platitudes of integrity, or on an American culture that values winning over all else.

I’ll call it something else: The fact that schools cheat – and that they get away with it – is a natural result of the odd marriage in America between big-money athletics and academics.

The reference up there to white collar criminals reminds me of one of my all-time favorite commencement speeches, from Allen Greenspan to the young eager hedgies of Wharton. It’s a fascinating address rhetorically. Greenspan knows he’s talking to many of the most-honed, highest-level cheaters America has to offer the world, people who can barely stay seated in their chair before peeling off and starting a Ponzi scheme; and indeed he knows that the background of his talk is the most recent immense number of immense American corporate scandals… So what’s he going to say? Isn’t it all rather… futile….?

I do not deny that many appear to have succeeded in a material way by cutting corners and manipulating associates, both in their professional and in their personal lives. But material success is possible in this world, and far more satisfying, when it comes without exploiting others. The true measure of a career is to be able to be content, even proud, that you succeeded through your own endeavors without leaving a trail of casualties in your wake.

All the herbal viagra in the world won’t make this less limp.

Just as it’s especially amusing to watch the winningest coaches shovel the moral shit in their books and speeches, it’s a special treat to watch income inequality’s biggest boosters dish out the do-goodery.

The only trouble mondo cheato ever runs into is when pesky university students decide to get all judgmental about some of the important inspirational people on their campus. It bothers Yalies that Bill Cosby has an honorary degree that their school refuses to revoke. Why does it refuse to revoke Cosby’s degree? Yale says two things in response to this question:

1. It’s never revoked a degree before. (And we all know that timid backwater places like Yale can never do anything new.)

2. It doesn’t want to talk about it. Shut up.

UD rather admires Yale’s unwillingness even to try to argue the point. (Northwestern, where UD was an undergrad, is also opting for silence.) Tons of universities have revoked Cosby’s honorary degrees, and they’ve stated their reasons, but Yale’s like eh I don’t know didn’t I tell you to shut up? It’s like Yale acknowledges what UD has been saying which is like Hello? Everybody’s an asshole and the biggest assholes get honorary degrees. Nuff said.

One university leader has, however, been willing to go there. One leader has ignored the wisdom of the keep-mum crowd and gone there. Let us consider Stephen Trachtenberg’s opinion piece in the campus newspaper. Scathing Online Schoolmarm will interrupt his sentences with her commentary.

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

‘I was the GW president back in the day when we gave Bill Cosby an honorary degree. At the time, he was arguably the most popular Commencement speaker of my tenure. His remarks at graduation were received with an ovation. All attending cheered him. He was celebrated for his contributions to American culture and for his comic genius. [Spectacular dude. Was his dissertation majorly bogus? Should this matter to a university like yours as it honors him? Nah.]

It would appear, on the basis of information only now revealed, that he had, in addition to his artistic gifts, a dark and troubling and tragic hidden side. [Tragic. Da guy’s a regular Hamlet already!] Had we known of that we would not have awarded him plaudits. But we did not.

All today seem well-informed of Mr. Cosby’s seemingly Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story. His life and reputation lie in tatters. One can only speculate on the mental health issues that may underlie the behavior that numerous women have reported regarding Mr. Cosby. [There, there. It’s all about his tragic mental issues. Let’s not get all moral about this… But UD can’t help wondering: Why didn’t Mr Cosby, during the century or so during which he drugged and assaulted women, consult someone about his troubling behavior? I guess had he known that he had psychological problems he would not have attacked all those women. But he did not.]

People of accomplishment can, as we know, also have criminal or evil characteristics. I think of Ezra Pound, a man of towering poetic, artistic and critical gifts, and a fascist war criminal who lived out his life in a prison hospital. [Yes. Pound was punished for what he did. And again unlike Cosby, Pound was indeed clinically insane. That’s why he was in a prison hospital. His Bollingen Prize was so controversial that Congress ended – revoked, if you like – the involvement of the Library of Congress in that award program.]

What good would it do to void Mr. Cosby’s diploma? Who actually celebrates it today? He is revealed and reviled. I am not keen on trying to rewrite history. We must own our past and learn from it. There is no Platonic device for awarding honors. We do our best to celebrate the good. We work with the best information available. But being human, we have erred in the past and will no doubt do so again in the future. [Enough platitudes for you? Mr Trachtenberg needs to go back and think about the many forms of public rejection, retraction, and revocation which have been a feature of the moral life of this country – and this country’s traditions – from the beginning. It does a lot of moral good – by way of clarification of one’s principles, and official removal from the community of people who seriously offend it – to void awards whose conferral turns out to have been a sick joke.]

We need to redouble our efforts to avoid such failures of judgement in the years to come but must in humility appreciate our limitations and permit experience to inform our thinking. There is a rough charm to the proposal that we should recall our degree from Mr. Cosby, but it is a blunt instrument that does not do real justice to the dreadful challenge it seeks to address. It does not actually get to right. It provides no real comfort to the abused. [How do you know? Have you heard what the abused have said? The obscenity of their attacker having been protected and even celebrated by the culture has featured prominently in their suffering. One of the reasons it took so long for law enforcement to catch up with Cosby was his many-laureled cultural identity, an identity to which GW contributed.]

Mr. Cosby knows that we no longer esteem him. Everybody knows. He is down. He is out. The degree is as null and void as it can be. It is self-executing. However much he may deserve it, I am disinclined to kick him again to underscore our own virtue. It’s too easy.’ [Oh yes, it’s just our virtue-narcissism at play. How contemptible of us.]

A former meerkat expert at London Zoo has been ordered to pay compensation to a monkey handler she attacked with a wine glass in a love spat over a llama-keeper.

UD finds this Ted Hughes story – whose origin seems to be a chat Janet Malcolm had with A. Alvarez when she visited him while writing her book about Hughes and Sylvia Plath – strange. The story has been picking up steam for awhile – it’s repeated in Jonathan Bates’s new Hughes biography (see my headline) and in other reviews, and has been tweeted hither and yon, etc.

Do you believe it?

Not about the vomiting. The vomiting’s fine. Do you believe that she vomited from sexual desire?

The story itself is a bit shaky. Alvarez identified the woman simply as “this woman I knew,” who told him “many years later” about her lustful spew…

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

I think it’s a case of one-upping. The woman must have known the famous story of Plath lustfully biting Hughes when she first met him, and in chatting about him with Alvarez the woman decided to come up with something better.

A few more of these and it’ll be like MadLibs:

When I first met Ted Hughes I __________________.

Bit him
Vomited
Evacuated my bowels
Shrieked Holy Himeros, collapsed, vomited, and evacuated my bowels
Bit him, vomited, evacuated my bowels, shrieked Holy Himeros, and collapsed
Und so weiter.

Don’t turn people away from your party. That seems to be what happened at Northern Arizona too. And in the years UD‘s been covering university shootings, she can recall several other examples.

Another theme she’s picked up on is the vast size of some of these parties. Hundreds of students and non-students, and lots of drinking and drugging. Things get way out of control.

Whew! Finally a credible voice has come out to deny claims that the UL basketball program hired prostitutes to capture recruits. A former player sets the record straight:

Rick Pitino… don’t need to buy any kid pussy to get him to commit to the University of Louisville.

Ain’t it the truth. At America’s football schools, we li’l ol’ instructors don’t count for shit, man. The person who really counts, far as UD can tell, is the assistant coach.

Not the coach. The coach is kinda above it all (‘cept for that dummy Kyle Flood). His job is to take millions in compensation and let the assistant coach(es) do … whatEVer… Coach don’t know. Coach don’t wanna know. They say Rick Pitino’s assistant coach turned the dorm for basketball players into a whorehouse … Rick’s far too classy a guy to know anything about that. They say an assistant coach at UCLA sat on academic support staff to get professors to change athletes’ grades. They say an assistant coach at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette worked out a little conspiracy with a friend of his who supervised ACT tests to toss the lads’ tests and substitute passing ones.

And you know what I bet? I bet Steve Sarkisian’s assistant coaches at the University of Southern California have been working their asses off to help him hide the fact that he’s running a big-time football empire while alcoholic.

I bet his University of Minnesota coaching assistants knew that AD Norbert Teague drank too much and pawed women and all.

Yes, over the years it’s become clear to UD that the fixer, the dirty-work-doer, the facade-maintenance-man in the vast theater of the absurd which is this nation’s effort to meld professional sports with (wait for it) universities is the assistant coach. The assistant coach is the guy who runs after the horse-drawn wagon picking up shit and trying to make it smell like roses.

************
UD thanks John.

Enjoy the pumpkins before the squirrels
eat them and the deer knock them over.

… to Mike Locksley’s tenure as University of New Mexico football coach:

That was October 2009. Here’s a more recent version:

Locksley’s stint at New Mexico could not have gone much more poorly. He was 2-26, fired in September 2011 after an 0-4 start to his third season. The Lobos finished 113th and 116th nationally in scoring in his two full seasons, both of which ended at 1-11. Off the field, it was just as bad. Locksley was accused of sexual discrimination by a former administrative assistant in a lawsuit resolved out of court. And he missed one game in 2009 to serve a suspension for his involvement in an altercation with assistant coach J.B. Gerard. His final game at UNM, a 48-45 loss to FCS-level Sam Houston State, was played before an announced crowd of 16,313, the Lobos’ smallest since 1992, and came in the wake of a DWI arrest of a 19-year family friend who was driving a car registered to the coach’s wife and son.

Okay, so UD is proud and excited to announce that Locksley will now be Mr UD’s coach! Yes, Locksley’s the new coach at the University of Maryland, and Mr UD will be part of his faculty cheering squad!!

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

More commentary on the exciting changes at the University of Maryland here.

He writes:

“Football makes a profit,” some claim. To that I would say, so what? Universities could make a profit running a casino too – should they do that?

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

Let’s change this to:

“Football makes a profit,” some claim. To that I would say, so what? Universities could make a profit running a brothel too – should they do that?

… had nothing to do with the drug-market past of the fraternity to which all of the victims belonged. From what UD is reading, it was instead about that most common and toxic campus brew:

1. A party.

4. Groups of young men.

Specifically, UD has over the years read many stories about drunk male students barred from, or kicked out of, parties, and murderously pissed about it. This particular guy – the shooter – grew up with a silver Glock in his mouth and seems to have spent most of his eighteen years (eighteen! how fast the nation’s little shooters shoot up!) preparing himself for the moment when he’s annoyed enough to begin strafing a public space. As one of his friends delicately puts it, “Steven was a bit of a hothead when it came to small, personal quibbles.”

Oh dear oh my oh yes those pesky personal quibbles.

Gwendolen. Do you allude to me, Miss Cardew, as an entanglement? You are presumptuous. On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to blow your brains out with this Beretta. It becomes a pleasure.

Cecily. Do you suggest, Miss Fairfax, that I entrapped Ernest into an engagement? How dare you? This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When experiencing a quibble I bring out my Bushmaster. [G. and C.’s heads simultaneously explode into bloody stumps.]

But rest easy. Now that more and more campuses are legally compelled to allow students like this one to carry guns onto their streets and into their classrooms, we can expect future NAU-like events to produce large-scale, protracted, three-way (party-barring group; party-barred group; police) gun battles. Think Waco bikers.

Cute!

If I may quote myself. It’s not just the notorious cases, like Cal Poly and San Diego State. More and more frats are discovering that their secrecy, their clean cut college guy front, and their ability to form themselves into tight loyal gangs, means that organized crime of all kinds can flourish in-house. The drug trade is simply the organized crime of choice.

Problem is, drugs bring another crime: the crime of violence. These frat boys pack guns. There’s their drug gang and your drug gang and… you know. Maybe you even live in Chicago.

Serious university drug markets almost always center in and around the frats. Unserious university drug markets, like those at preppie schools like Wesleyan, tend to be a bunch of unarmed deadhead friends making a bit of money selling stuff to their roomies. But serious university drug markets, like the one at the Delta Chi fraternity at Northern Arizona University, do not fool around.

Why hasn’t Northern Arizona University shut down Delta Chi, with its history of drug sales? Some of its members, according to reports, were involved in some way in the shooting (one person dead, three injured) that took place yesterday on NAU’s campus. It’s too soon to know if the shootings were drug-related, but let’s say that they were. Why was Delta Chi still in operation?

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

Correction: In the original post, I mixed up the University of Arizona in Tucson and Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. I’ve now corrected that, thanks to a reader who noticed the error.

“On the surface, it appears Louisville just skipped a sexy hostess program and went straight to the professionals,” [Armen Keteyian] wrote. “And given the high-stakes world of college basketball recruiting – and I’m not trying to be glib about this – it makes sense. This is like Hostess 5.0.“