And I’m not too sure they care much about negative coverage.

… but still I’ve been sitting outside gazing at the patch of sky I’ve got above my house, looking for vintage planes. I figure maybe some of them on their way to or from the National Mall for today’s flyover (it starts in ten minutes) will putter through the ‘thesdan blue. (Watch it here.)

So far all I see are the usual silent thin contrails streaming out of jets taking off from one of DC’s three airports. Loud birds and squirrels take up most of the aural landscape. In particular, a wren couple built its nest in one of our rather deep containers just at the front of the house, so there’s pretty much continual hysteria as they attempt to feed the hatchlings amid many interruptions.

Tomorrow La Kid takes UD to her beloved Rehoboth Beach for a Mother’s Day weekend. UD grew up in a house where the words bogus and kitsch and commercial were attached to Mother’s Day. But La Kid is pious about it, and UD‘s not complaining.

I’ll blog from the beach.

… she pointed out that one of many reasons professors don’t fuck with their universities’ often fucked up athletics programs has to do with simple abuse. Criticize campus sports and every yahoo from the chair of the board of trustees to the local wino who doesn’t go to games but joins fellow drunks to trash the town during tailgates is going to come after you. You’re going to be called names six ways to Sunday.

Few people want to spend their lives dealing with dicks. So few people squawk about sports.

But over the years this blog has accumulated a pantheon of professors, a handful of heroes, who have been willing to stand up to the abuse. (Some of them are here, here, here, here, and here.)

Mark Killingsworth, an econ professor at Rutgers, is one of these. As that absurd school sports itself to death, Killingsworth hammers away at the obvious point that it ain’t got no moolah. “I have to assume that so far the plan [to expand athletics] is to keep [the] status quo, to keep taking money out of academics,” says he, and ain’t it the truth. But no one else in the state of New Jersey (with the exception of Killingsworth’s father-god, William Dowling) cares, and indeed if you go by most of the comments on all the articles about Killingsworth in the local press it’s pretty clear that many people in New Jersey think poorly of Killingsworth.

Moral: Think twice before getting between a boy and his concussion.

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Update:

Rutgers is an enormous public institution, with an annual budget of $3.6 billion. It is responsible for educating 65,000 students. Why isn’t that more important that competing in the Big Ten?

Just how good?

FAMU fans want to know when the football and basketball teams will be eligible for postseason play again. [Both are currently under academic sanction.] They want to see how [the coach will] tackle a budget millions of dollars in the red. Above all, they want to know if the athletic department is moving in the right direction after eight years with six different people … at the helm.

Well. Now that the tax syphons have syphoned up our taxes and subjected a population used to exploitation to yet more exploitation, what’s next? Goldman Sachs has made its money on the for-profit ed scam and will no doubt soon be getting the hell out while the getting’s good. Goldman Sachs stands at the opposite end of the social spectrum from the exploited masses. Goldman Sachs knows what’s what, and is unhampered by morality.

As for the suckers left holding the bag (you, me, and the students of for-profit schools): I’m sure Lloyd Blankfein has a little lecture to give us all on how markets operate.

And it’s only May.

This sort of team record doesn’t come cheap. Nick Saban’s currently at seven million a year.

A football coach whose salary is the talk of the town.

A team whose arrest record is also the talk of the town.

Bama!! Life of the mind, Bama!!!

… they recruit to their already arrest-ridden football team a person with a long and ugly police record, and then they finally suspend him after, er, let’s see…

The charges stem from the April 5 beating of two men, moments after they kissed at 5th Avenue and 9th Street in Huntington. Criminal complaints charge Butler witnessed the kiss, exited a passing vehicle and proceeded to shout derogatory words toward both men related to their sexual orientation. Butler then struck the face of both victims with a closed fist, the complaints charge.

Put Marshall University in this blog’s search engine to feast your eyes on one of the scummiest campuses in Christendom. I mean, it’s not just the sports-only nature of Marshall. Marshall is hideous all around. Pity its poor faculty.

Football hero, gentleman. And now that Frank Clark’s in the news all over the country, all the glory goes to Michigan as he is universally described in these accounts as a University of Michigan player.

Why pick a player in round 2 (Michigan defensive end Frank Clark) who was kicked off his college team because of a domestic violence charge, a player who also was convicted of felony theft for stealing a laptop?

You might as well ask why Michigan held onto him as long as they did. Why his bio is still emblazoned on UM’s Go Blue site. If Michigan didn’t give a shit, why should the Seahawks? After all, you’re looking for a guy who can hit.

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Just Another Stat

But this is the sort of writing that makes it all worthwhile. See if you can spot the domestic violence charge!

And the NFL just gave up its tax exemption.

Just sayin’.

UD walks into the room in GW’s Elliott School building where she’s giving her Modern British Poetry final exam. No students are there yet, but a man, a Muslim, is on the floor praying. The exam takes place in minutes, so UD silently – as silently as she can – puts her computer on the front desk and prepares to hand out blue books.

The man stands up and looks at her. “Is there a class in here?”

“I’m giving a final exam.”

“Ah. Well, I’ll finish somewhere else.”

“Sorry to interrupt you.”

“No problem. What’s the class?”

“Modern British poetry.”

“Do you read Kipling?”

“He’s not quite modern enough. More of a Victorian.”

“Ah. Well, nice to meet you.”

Prepare Thyself.

Yours,
UD.

The former dean of George Washington University’s business school massively overspent, leaving the school with a $13 million deficit. How to repay it?

Robert Van Order, the chair of the school’s finance department, said the about 60 faculty members at the meeting discussed where the burden should fall. Some faculty thought the University should forgive the $13 million budget deficit altogether because it was incurred two years ago.

Yeah, screw it. Ancient history!

Jonathan Gottschall talks with Sam Harris.

UD‘s poetry MOOC has now enrolled 10,000 students.

Sure, Beware the B-School Boys; but as UD has often noted on this blog, your engineering school features a scam so smooth, so consistent, so reliable, that it’s positively… engineered.

You know the ol’ diddle me once routine; yet virtually every university equipped with engineering professors seems eager to be taken again and again by the time-honored get-rich-off-your-grant-by-setting-up-a-business-and-shunting-the-grant-funds-to-it. U Conn even let Cui and Shi (apparently there are yet more professors in their department who will be named; similar last names to Cui and Shi will almost certainly mean a UD limerick) start their business on campus, giving them all sorts of university perks and inducements to do so. The guys and gals then turned around and allegedly stole NSF grant money – large quantities of it – by having that money go to their company.

Not only were the purchases initiated by UConn faculty “who had a significant interest in AquaSeNT,” but two of the purchase requisitions they signed indicated, “I have no financial or other beneficial interest in the vendor,” the auditors wrote.

OTOH, there’s a simple explanation here. The guys and gals say they didn’t read the conflict of interest language in the grant before signing off on it. I mean, if they’d known… (You will know this as the George Costanza Move.) Plus they were pressed for time and all.

U Conn’s in deep doodoo too, because they didn’t inform the State Auditors office of the NSF investigation. I guess U Conn’s been pressed for time as well.