… 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.

… Fangor.

… an EU citizen.

Well, yes. We all do.

The Bible thing allows you to differentiate between West Virginia University, where locals call Morgantown “a drinking town with a football problem,” and Baylor, which seems to have low rates of alcohol consumption, but shares UWV’s burning commitment to recruiting the best players regardless of, er, violent propensities.

At both schools there’s an unsettling conflation of football and the school’s spirit of choice (alcohol, God). And at both schools, whether they regard their players as Christian Soldiers or Frat Boys on Steroids, violence appears to be totally okay.

Goes without saying that guns and gangs (Baylor’s home, Waco, is in the headlines for biker/police shoot-outs) make up much of the rest of the social fabric at these locations.

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

And don’t forget sex. Nobody competes with the University of Montana and Grizzlyville (used to be Missoula, but the football team is the Grizzlies) for broad-shouldered sexual assault. But Baylor’s in there trying.

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

Anyone with the intestinal fortitude to examine the deep structure of Baylor – as in, how do you actually produce places like Baylor and Waco? – will tend to gravitate toward the school’s board of trustees, where a Bobby Lowder-like figure name of Buddy Jones seems to run the school and the town.

Buddy’s real enthusiastic about Baylor. Back in 2012, when they won a few games and all, his response was this:

“We like to use biblical analogies, and this is a year of biblical proportions,” Buddy Jones, a regent at the university, told the New York Times in 2012. “As we would say in Christendom, it’s like an early rapture.”

When his vision of the proper role of the booster was threatened by the alumni association, Jones (then chairman of the board of trustees) wrote to a fellow zealot that he couldn’t wait to

put on camp (sic) and load my weapons and go hunting for BAA game. Licking my chops.

Buddy’s official trustee statement has a rapturous boy/girl thing going to explain the nature of the school:

“Baylor’s uniqueness is her commitment to quality higher education by adapting to the 21st century, while never straying from her deep roots in God’s word and her role in his plan for mankind.”

Was Buddy the genius behind the groom’s cake at his daughter’s wedding?

[The cake was] an edible replica of Baylor’s … new stadium with a saluting bear in the middle. But perhaps the most impressive part of the cake is the video screen, which looks like it actually works. At the very least, it had a light in it that gave the illusion of working.

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

So much of this comes together this Saturday night, when a match-up between two of the nation’s scummiest football schools – LSU and Bama – will feature a political candidate’s prostitutes and patriots ad. Layers upon layers upon layers.

… So blogging will be later today.

The New York Times has contacted UD for more information about Wojciech Fangor, the Polish painter who died last week at 92.

So who knows. Maybe some of her memories will appear not only on Radio Poland, but in the NYT. UD would like that.

…agogy.

“The basic rationale for [Cairo University’s] decision [to ban the face veil for its instructors] was the allegation that the niqab prevents communication with students, and in fact this claim is not scientifically true. It is known that communication depends not only on facial expressions, but there are many aspects to the means of communication, including verbal communication and nonverbal communication through … hand gestures, feet positions, standing or sitting, in addition to facial expressions and eye contact.”