What’s amazing is what goes on before university athletes go to jail.

I have seen, while serving as departmental chair and on [the University of Texas] Faculty Council executive and budget advisory committees, four presidents at UT Austin, at least as many provosts, and many faculty committees wasting time on athletics that could be better spent on academics.

Run by mad substitute football coach Norries Wilson [“Wilson … proceeded to go around the [press conference] room calling on individual reporters one at a time like a school teacher. The first person he called on worked for Penn State athletics and was simply at the press conference to record quotes, so he didn’t have a question. Later, [Norries] called on a photographer who was only filming, so she also didn’t have a question…. [A] reporter referred to the Rutgers head coach as ‘Flood.’ Wilson interrupted the question and demanded the reporter call him ‘Coach Flood.'”], Rutgers University now does little more than express for the nation the institution-wide surreality of big-time university sports (“The New Brunswick jail can probably field a terrific football team.”), exactly the way Donald Trump expresses for us the surreality of presidential campaigns.

Rutgers’ putative president wants nothing to do with an athletics program that has anyway, like so many such programs, almost fully spun off from whatever leftovers in New Brunswick people are calling a “university” (see details on the total divorce between universities and their big sports programs here), and the fall of the Rutgers second-in-command (really first, but let’s go with the fiction that presidents run sports factories) COACH Flood, leaves us with the Alexander Haig-like (“I’m in control here.”) figure of third-in-command Norries. All sportsdom this morning talks of his wacko press conference, and there’s no one left at Rutgers to send in the vaudeville hook.

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One difference between Trump and Rutgers: Trump is really rich…

Oh but Rutgers is well on its way, given all those big-time football bucks…

The program is a financial disgrace. Since 2003-04, it has racked up $287 million in deficits. The university’s financial plan for sports calls for $183 million in additional deficits through 2022 — despite new revenue from the Big Ten Conference.

These deficits have been funded with subsidies from student fees (students have no say about that, of course) and university general funds.

Frank Rich writes a grand synthesis of university-president-cum-presidential-candidate Donald Trump here. In a literate and amusing analysis of Trump’s lineage and appeal, Rich does not forget to mention his intellectual chops, a subject of abiding interest on a blog called University Diaries:

That “pledge” [not to run as a third party candidate] served Trump’s immediate goal of securing his spot on primary ballots, but come next year it will carry no more weight than a certificate from the now-defunct Trump University.

The man sitting across from me at this long white laptop-use table in the lobby of the North Bethesda Marriott Hotel has just read very carefully through the Sunday comics in USA Today, closed the paper, and announced to me and everyone else (the table is full) what I’ve put in this post’s headline. A pit of despair.

UD is currently having one of those experiences you can easily have if you live in a place like Washington DC. She left her house this Sunday afternoon because Mr UD’s holding a seminar there for a few hours; she went to the place she always goes to, this pleasant hotel with a Starbucks and free internet and comfortable seating.

What she turns out to have walked into is this year’s Small Press Expo, “North America’s premiere independent cartooning and comic arts festival. SPX brings together more than 4,000 cartoonists and comic arts enthusiasts every fall in Bethesda, Maryland.”

What this means on the ground is lots of people (average age twenty) in black tops and jeans and tattoos and heavy black glasses (it’s got me thinking of Portlandia) walking back and forth in front of me in the lobby. Some of them are sitting with me at this long white laptop table. Their sketchbooks (comic book art boards, I should say) are out and they’re all drawing cartoon panels (“Yeah that’s gonna need a darker line. That’s not gonna read.”) They often consult their smart phones (for image ideas?) and they chat among themselves. The vibe is nerdy, friendly, in-group. They talk about how bad most of the comics out there are.

“The British Dennis the Menace is terrible.”

“It’s disgusting. The kid’s just farting all the time.”

“I hate that kid. He’s the worst.”

“Remember Space Cases?”

“I remember that show.”

“There were only a few seasons.”

“When I was a kid I had a crush on Catalina.”

“I had a crush on the guy with the long hair. What was his name. Rolf.”

They discuss the most disgusting thing they’ve ever eaten.

Winner: Dog treats.

I see a lot of Rug Rats t-shirts, but also NASA and Goth and Anime and Heavy Metal. People have dyed their hair way black.

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

So I’ll describe a guy who just came by and who is, I now see after spending a couple of hours here, the Ur-Cartooning and Comic Arts guy.

He is 19, 20, years old. Rotund. Pasty. Under his black baseball hat he has dyed his long hair purple and yellow. His backpack is ratty. He lumbers rather than walks, his eyes (behind big black-framed glasses) firmly down, fixed on his electronic devices. He wears jeans and a black t-shirt. He expresses to UD the following thing: I spend most of my time inside watching tv.

Here’s another guy. He wears raggedy bright green resort clothes (his fly is open) and carries a fabric bag that reads Schulz Library, Cartoon Studies.

A very excited much older guy (but dressed like everyone else) shows a friend a new comic book. “I love it – sorta like Dave Cooperish.” He wears a purple TROUBLE TOWN button.

Every single one of the skinny women all in black and all sort of pulled in on themselves who pass in front of me emanates a strong creative genius vibe.

A woman in a long shimmering red skirt wears a black top that on the front says SAME SAME and on the back BUT DIFFERENT. On her head sits a patterned red mob cap that looks homemade.

…turns 25.

The one hundred percent guaranteed A course in Dance Appreciation that football player Nadir Barnwell failed despite the coach’s direct intervention with the professor is all the rage at Rutgers.

The Dance Appreciation class Barnwell failed is a popular one on campus, with four sections this semester and a dozen more offered online through the university’s Mason Gross School of the Arts.

Sixteen sections! A dozen online!

The key factor in a grade is attendance, according to the online postings about the class.

What does attendance mean if you’re taking it online? If Barnwell took it online, how did he fail the course? Did the tutor whose job it is to take his classes for him fail to click on CLICK HERE? That’s a pretty poor excuse for a tutor.

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

Had Barnwell stayed in the course long enough to pick up on the everything is dance thing, he’d have had a clear path to an A: His tutor could have submitted a paper titled The Home Invasion Hornpipe.

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

A commenter describes the real point of the course:

Basically the class helps support the dance program. Instead of buying books, you buy tickets to the Mason Gross dance concerts and have to go watch, plus write a one-page reaction paper. I think it was like 50 bucks overall.

Assuming this is correct, UD proposes renaming the course Dance Program Appreciation.

As for the players, as one explains, “We’re really a tight team. You’re going to defend your brothers. I’m going to do anything for those guys I’m out there playing with.” Which sounds wonderful until you see it play out in a bar when one of them gets in a fight and the others rush in to play defense. Or when some on-campus criminal mastermind organizes them into an armed home invasion team. They’re a violent lot, the Rutgers football guys, and very group-oriented. There’s no I in RUTGERS FOOTBALL.

Coach Flood will do anything for the guys. He even sets up little teas with faculty members to swap ideas on how best to educate them.

[One] get-together lasted about 50 minutes … and resulted in [a] part-time prof agreeing to assign [one player] extra work that could improve his grade because she felt “implicitly intimidated” and “uncomfortable,” given Flood’s status.

Flood gets along just as well with full-time faculty.

[A faculty rep] believes Flood’s decision to lean on a part-time professor who earns around $4,800 per class and enjoys little job protection wasn’t an accident. “A tenured professor like me would have told him go to hell.”

Yes, go to hell highest paid public employee in New Jersey! (And don’t forget those bonuses for, uh, successful get-togethers with professors!) Go to hell most powerful man on campus who with one word can rouse hordes of fans to ruin my life! Tenured Rutgers Faculty to Flood: Go To Hell!

Ah but they’re weary now, weary… (Headline: RUTGERS COMMUNITY WEARY…)

They need to bring back Ray Rice, pride of Rutgers, to slap a little sense into them…

When he asked me asked me to review The Graduate School Mess on my blog, its publicist didn’t ask for my address in order to mail me the book. He gave me a password so that I could read the manuscript online.

Book. Manuscript. Long essay. What is The Graduate School Mess if perhaps its primary existence is as a series of scrolled paragraphs on a screen? Does The Graduate School Mess have to conform to regulation scholarly book length (around 300 pages)? Why does it have to do that, if it can make its argument (as I think it can) more briefly and more sharply? The need to feel a square object of a certain weight in my hands is gone, as is the need to pack it with sufficient pages to make up the weight. Is there an intrinsic need, for the sake of its argument, to have the thing weigh in at 300 pages plus?

Indeed, would I not have had an easier time graphically with the book had the publisher removed all the familiar long stretches of emptiness scholarly books offer? (Chapter separations, text within chapter separations, six semi-blank pages at the beginning, thirty pages of footnotes at which I’m barely going to glance, an empty page at the end.) Why do I need them, since I’m reading rolling text on a screen?

This is a particularly acute set of questions given The Grad School Mess‘s strong commitment to changing the ethos of higher study in the humanities in virtually all of its manifestations, including what an 2006 MLA report attacked as “the tyranny of the book.” Leonard Cassuto notes throughout his intelligent and humane set of proposals for changes in grad school that status and conformity account for the “very conservative prestige economy” that has turned grad departments in the humanities into (to list some of his descriptions) ostrich pens and cults and boxes (we professors “live inside the box that we want to teach out of”). He laments the fact that the MLA report – and other suggestions from plenty of other places that peer-reviewed lengthy documents published by academic presses cease to be virtually the only meaningful currency in academia – has been entirely ignored. He concludes with a powerful entreaty that humanities professors in research institutions make their work far more accessible to the larger world.

These ideas are presented in a book that in every respect adheres to the conformist prestige model.

Presenting it in this way makes it likely that its call for change will be shelved, if you will, among the many Harvard and other university press books calling for similar change in the last few years. Shelved too among things like a recent American Academy of Arts and Sciences report about which Stanley Fish wrote. The authors of this report on the crisis in the humanities argue, precisely like Cassuto, that we must get out of the ostrich pen, the cult, and the box, and “connect with the larger community.”

Fish argued – correctly – that the report would be “dutifully noted by pious commentators and then live a quiet life on the shelf for which it was destined.” How can The Grad School Mess avoid this fate?

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

An ultra-secretive $35 billion corporation (the Harvard Corporation puts English professors’ efforts to avoid the public realm to shame) published this book, which exhorts us toward more egalitarian openness.

Only the exigencies of the market, and the emergence of new technologies, put this conservatively packaged book somewhat forward in time; only the commercial reality that many people won’t buy books but will download text keeps this book from being, among other things, an exercise in irony.

Equally difficult, given the realities of the culture (or cult) the book aptly describes, will be the effort to keep the book from being an exercise in futility. If in fact the situation is a “mess,” “reprehensible,” “mendacious,” “deplorable,” and “disturbing by any reasonable measure,” we will need to find ways to reach not the cultists (who are pretty much beyond reach, given their well-established ability to resist even the severest of market reversals), but, in line with the book’s democratic aims, ordinary readers. They are the ones who need to be alerted to the exploitative distortions (Cassuto lists, among other things, “old-fashioned and incoherent course offerings, bloated time to degree, high attrition, a distorted academic job market and a failure to prepare students for alternative employment, and outdated dissertation requirements”) going on in this realm of higher education.

The book is indeed written in a clear and accessible voice. But the prose can also be dull in a lecturing way (“no freedom worth having comes without responsibility”). Its scholarly self-presentation will I think fail to attract, as will this earnestness. The author tends to call livelier voices and ideas “hyperbolic” (Rebecca Schuman, who, like Camille Paglia** before her, entertainingly describes the cultists up close and personal) or “radical” (Louis Menand), and worries perhaps more than he should that biting depictions of the appalling situation in grad level humanities will encourage anti-intellectual right-wingers to kill higher study altogether. (Fish himself offered a very useful evocation of the culture of the cult here. All of these writers seem to me ultimately perhaps more useful than Andrew Delbanco and Leonard Cassuto and those like them, because they enable the ordinary reader to know her enemy and therefore arm herself.)

As to Cassuto’s recommendations: These tend to revolve around a reform of graduate study in the humanities in the direction of what I’d call a super-BA, a very high-level liberal arts college curriculum. We’re talking about the goal of a greatly heightened cultural literacy with a rather soft-focus specialization that will stand you in good stead in a postmodern job market looking for really smart, flexible, and research-savvy minds rather than people with very deep knowledge of a highly specialized subject. For those interested in pursuing a teaching career, this curriculum would feature how to teach courses, as well as higher thought about the educational process. It might allow you after a year or two to concentrate on parts of curriculum that are, if you wish, more vocational in nature; it would also allow you to remain less vocationally oriented. The point is “to train teachers and liberally educated, public intellectuals” along with those who still represent what Cassuto very nicely calls “the sacralization of research.”

____________________

**

Perhaps the French flunkies should leave academe and form their own organizations, like the Shriners, where they can moon over their idols and exchange photos like bubble gum cards. There are precedents for this in the cults of Swedenborg and Madame Blavatsky.

Beloved Leader!

… dumpster fire.

Dumpster Fire

Football’s a burning thing
And it makes a fiery ring.
Bound by wild desire
We fell into a dumpster fire.

We fell into a burning dumpster fire,
We went down, down, down as the flames went higher
And it burns, burns, burns,
The dumpster fire, the dumpster fire.

Meet State Senator Paul Bussman.

“We have a ridiculous ability to come into this chamber and talk about football,” said Sen. Paul Bussman, R-Cullman. “I’m ashamed to be in this body right now.”

… a concrete initiative.

Nice sentence. Packs a lot in.

… we’ve got a hell of a classy match-up in a few days: Rutgers v. Penn State. American university football at its prettiest.