Annette Schavan will be moving to the Vatican, in Rome, her office confirmed on Monday. The former [education] minister is a practising Catholic and used to be head of the Central Council of German Catholics.

The new post means she will represent the German government abroad, despite the University of Düsseldorf stripping her of her degree [because of plagiarism], leaving the education specialist with only a high school leaving certificate.

… Florida A&M!  They’ve already page-not-founded their securities fraud guy, an engineering professor who with his BFF, a finance professor at Florida State (How many times must UD tell you to Beware the B-School Boys?  See the category on this blog by that name.), was just found guilty of breaking a whole bunch of securities laws.

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UPDATE: The FSU guy remains on the faculty! That explains their not taking down his department page.

Way to pick ’em, FSU. And hold ’em.

What – you mean like this? You mean the raiders of the lost American college student are beginning to deteriorate?

You mean – like this?

You cursed wave of state probes by attorneys general and the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau! Look what you’ve done to my Goldman Sachs-backed tax-syphoning scheme! I’m melting! I’m melting! What a world! Who would have thought that a good little government like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness…

[T]he fiasco over locker-room bullying between the Miami Dolphins’ Jonathan Martin and Richie Incognito reminded everyone this season how eccentric football now is culturally — not because of a hidden health problem, but just in its explicit, inherent violence. The battle fought in the press between the players’ “sources” unveiled football as a dark, subterranean hive of old-school warrior values and character-building sadism. Taunts and racial imprecations were openly justified, the way military floggings once were: as salutary hide-tougheners.

It’s funny to watch jock schools like Colorado and Chapel Hill hyperventilate about their integrity when football, in all its dark subterranean hiviness, is such an important part of their institutions.

This blog has duly chronicled several sadistic university football coaches (basketball too, of course, but we don’t want this post to get too long) – men who, with each new revelation of their treatment of players, get fired and then passed off to a new school.

Maybe football should be spun out and – in accordance with its actual nature – made just one more non-academic bloodsport:

It is interesting how the increasingly popular spectacle of mixed martial arts (MMA) competition so quickly secured a perimeter of social acceptance for itself. MMA is not only violent; it is violence. But the risks are blatant enough for us not to pity the competitors. (Their locker rooms are probably pretty crude places, too.) Football players, by contrast, are not supposed to be pure, uncivilized instruments of brutality. They are supposed to be technicians, strategists, artists whose work involves only a limited element of cruelty.

Moreover, they are nurtured in a system of universities as “student-athletes,” and a corrupt, increasingly bizarre system at that. The game grew out of educational establishments in the first place. No one is trying to integrate MMA with the curriculum at Notre Dame or Harvard; MMA was invented too late for that.

Think of this observation when you read (as you often read) commentators arguing that the solution to the problem of corrupt university football is to make football an academic major. As the game gets more and more purely violent, its claims to intellectuality, disciplinarity, grow.

Really?

Yet another b-school guy (read UD’s LONG category on this blog titled Beware the B-School Boys) wrings his hands about the criminogenic nature of some of America’s business schools… Which is to say that many MBA programs (in particular Wharton) seem to groom and then graduate real bad asses. What to do? What to do?

Like most of the other hand wringers, this guy’s introducing another whole new revolutionary approach to taking men in America’s most hyper-capitalist educational settings and turning them into women.

See the headline on the guy’s article?

CAN YOU TEACH BUSINESSMEN TO BE ETHICAL?

Forget businesswomen. Either they don’t exist, or if they exist they’re … ethical …? The whole article is men men men.

I guess businesswomen are ethical because they’re not businessmen.

So then the point would be to make businessmen businesswomen. No competitiveness here! We’re collaborative. And if you fuck up and act assertive in class…

MBA programs could ditch their heavy reliance on class participation when assigning grades – a standard that unfairly rewards extroverts and fosters competition among students to impress the professor. Instead, students could be asked to grade each other on their level of professionalism in class. A few of us at NYU-Stern have begun doing this, and we find that it discourages grandstanding and encourages students to build on each other’s comments.

Shh! Don’t say anything, Susie! Just keep your eye on Babsie and tell me whether you think she’s been abnegating herself…

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Ecoute. Collaboration in b-school means Raj Rajaratnam meets his co-conspirators there. B-school brings like-minded criminals together.

It’s embarrassing, but

The daily scandals that expose corruption and deception in business are not merely the doing of isolated crooks. They are the result of an amoral culture that we — business-school professors — helped foster.

Look at the dean of Columbia University’s business school, for goodness sake.

B-school people seem to think that if they keep producing worried rhetoric and new ethics institutes we’ll forget the nature of the amoral culture their schools reflect and many of their graduates inhabit.

Down she swoops, from the emerital ether, to speak the truth to the new management team at this year’s scandal-plagued darling, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Scandal-management-wise Chapel Hill has done the thing, the thing that every jock school does when the shit truly hits the fan – it has dumped its previous management and put in a team of deer-in-the-headlight innocents who can say

Well we weren’t here for the long Nyang’oro Nightmare so we don’t really know what’s going on but we’re pure-hearted people doing our best in a bad situation, etc etc etc.

UD applauds the move, it’s a fine move, it’s an obvious move.

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But, as Orwell wrote:

‘He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.’

You can bring in the deer to try to control the present, but it’s the pesky past …

Madeline Levine swooped in from the past, and (so far at least) the deer have not been able to herd her.

“During the year that I served as interim dean I was made aware of the serious academic deficiencies that some of our newly recruited athletes would have to overcome if they were ever to succeed at UNC,” Levine wrote. “From what I was told … I thought it highly probable that one of these students was functionally illiterate.”

She wrote that she went to the university provost, who was then Bernadette Gray-Little, now chancellor at the University of Kansas.

She said she was “told what I already knew – that the decision had been made to grant special admission to this student and there was nothing to be done about it by then. That was true, but I still feel guilty that I let the matter drop and did not publicly express my dismay.”

One likes Levine’s continued guilt – it sounds right, it sounds real. One believes Levine.

Levine … accused the university of resisting efforts to get to the bottom of a long-running academic fraud scandal that is drawing sustained national attention since it made The New York Times’ front page on New Year’s Day. She said Dean took the wrong tack two weeks ago in publicly lambasting whistle-blower Mary Willingham, a former learning specialist in the athletes’ tutoring program. Willingham said her research found that more than half of 183 athletes specially tested for learning deficiencies over an eight-year period could not read at a high-school level.

“Mary Willingham was courageous in speaking out about her experience as a reading specialist and academic counselor for such students,” Levine wrote. “It is appalling that the highest officials at UNC – before it became clear that attacking a whistle-blower is not a smart PR move – mounted a concerted public attack on the accuracy of Ms. Willingham’s statistical analysis and, by implication, against her personally, while steadfastly refusing to engage with the core issue that concerns her: the exploitation of student-athletes and the concomitant abuse of the academic values by which a great university should live.”

… Yeshiva University because “the statutes of limitations have expired decades ago, and no exceptions apply.”

The lawyers for the plaintiffs will appeal.

I plan to title my editorial response to the WSJ’s editorial Journalnacht.

If they come back at me hard and I have to escalate things, I’ll title the next round Wallstreetjournalpurgisnacht.

I am hoping a Mexican publication weighs in, so I can title my response Nachosnacht.

I am also hoping a fellow Rilkean weighs in, so I can title my response Gedichteandienacht.

Eventually, when all of this calms down and I write a mature summation, I will title it Stillenacht.

… university near you.

Makes them sound so righteous, doesn’t it? Getting all vigorously defensive in the name of our students…

Of course, when it came to educating them (the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill is a university) we were utterly vigorless… We went out of our way to choose department chairs who took defenseless students and defrauded them…

But that’s because the students were so vigorous! Panting on the track every morning getting ready for that day’s concussion tackle …

A lot of people – and, more to the point, a lot of money – depended on these guys to defend UNC’s honor on the field. Now we’re doing right by the guys in keeping away from the press details of their abuse.

… point out that despite the outrageously bad graduation rate of revenue athletes at Florida State University, many of whom are minority —

Of all the teams that played in the bowl series, Florida State’s has the lowest graduation rate. Sixty-five of the 94 students on the team—69 percent—are black. Based on an analysis of the past four cohorts of black male athletes at Florida State, only 24 of those 65 are predicted to graduate within six years.

— the overall black student graduation rate at Florida State is excellent.

The six year graduation rate is 72.7 and 74.1 for Black and White students, respectively.

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UD thanks her readers.

From a review of a new documentary about one of America’s most bizarre locales.

After [Penn State’s Jerry] Sandusky was convicted on 45 counts of child abuse, Penn State was treated as a national pariah, hit with a $60 million fine and forced to forfeit 13 years of football victories, based on the premise that it had put athletic accomplishment above ethical conduct. As if that were somehow unique among American universities! Here’s the parallel: People in Happy Valley tried to blame Penn State’s problem on Jerry Sandusky, and people in America tried to blame college football’s problems on Penn State…

… I’m not claiming there’s some obvious solution to the hive-mind, groupthink, blame-the-media mentality we see in “Happy Valley,” which seems like a constitutive element of human psychology that’s not limited to Penn State or college football or America.

… [N]obody in Happy Valley wanted to hear anything bad about the demigods who ran their beloved football program, until it became necessary to pull down their idols and cast them out of the temple.

A few more comments, if I may, on the Tom Perkins business.

One of UD’s father-in-law’s friends was the architect and painter Serge Chermayeff (Les UDs have one of his paintings). UD recalls being told that, at the very end of his life, Chermayeff told Soltan he felt sure the world was, as it were, going with him – that the end of the world was close. I don’t know if he meant via nuclear warfare or what, but he clearly meant that in dying he was taking the rest of the world down with him.

UD‘s theory about old men who were very big personalities for much of their lives – people like Perkins – is that their resentment over having to die can take the form of insisting that everything else die with them. They missed nothing during their lives; they’re damned if they’re going to miss anything after their deaths.

This would explain, in part, the otherwise bizarre theory Perkin’s peddling, the belief he’s excited about, which involves a kind of armageddon in which the violent majority will French revolutionize the rich minority. In this scenario, Perkins guarantees that none of his fellow super-rich, with whom he’s been competing all of his life, will beat him in the ultimate competition. Everyone gets slaughtered.

As Michael Kinsley writes in “Mine is Longer than Yours”:

This is the game that really counts. Perhaps you imagine that, as eternity approaches, the petty ambitions and rivalries of this life melt away. Perhaps they do. That doesn’t mean that the competition is over. It means that the biggest competition of all is about to start.

At 82, Perkins – one of life’s enormous winners – is in the very thick of the biggest competition of all. He is looking for a way – any way – not to lose it.

All for T. Boone!

So if it’s not for the money, or to spur applications, or to attract better students [studies show university sports accomplishes none of these things], what is the point of building big college sports programs, primarily football and basketball?

Here’s my unsurprising theory:

There are groups of alumni who are very passionate about their teams. I’m talking very passionate. They go to all the games or watch them on TV; they populate the online fans sites; they obsess over recruiting. They are very vocal when things aren’t going well for State U., and some of them sit on university boards, or in state legislatures, or belong to powerful alumni organizations. While their numbers as a percentage of all alums may not be large, they can make a lot of noise.

If they are UNC fans, they do not like losing to Duke. If they are N.C. State fans, they do not like losing to UNC.

It’s that this column, which wants us to regard Perkins as a pathetic irrelevant old man who says stupid things, rather than as an important national voice saying something worth noticing, overlooks a fundamental fact about the Perkins story. As Paul Krugman writes:

You may say that this is just one crazy guy and wonder why The [Wall Street] Journal would publish such a thing. But Mr. Perkins isn’t that much of an outlier. He isn’t even the first finance titan to compare advocates of progressive taxation to Nazis. Back in 2010 Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and chief executive of the Blackstone Group, declared that proposals to eliminate tax loopholes for hedge fund and private-equity managers were “like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

And there are a number of other plutocrats who manage to keep Hitler out of their remarks but who nonetheless hold, and loudly express, political and economic views that combine paranoia and megalomania in equal measure.

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Eric Cantor:

There are politicians and others who want to demonize people that have earned success in certain sectors of our society. They claim that these people have now made enough, and haven’t paid their fair share. But, pitting Americans against one another tends to deflate the aspirational spirit of our people and fade the American dream.

Lawrence Kudlow, mocking the opposition:

“How dare they be successful earners and investors… Should we go out and shoot [the super-rich] for their success?”