Amid all the bad world news, some truly good news.

So here’s where the ethos of the serious university hits up against a perfectly reasonable question from a person outside the university.

The greatest damage UNC’s corruption has done is not to its students’ degrees (despite all the coverage and hoo-hah, no one cares about what happened at UNC, and they won’t look at its graduates’ degrees any differently than they did before), but to the American university as such.

Why? Go back to those empty classrooms nobody noticed. Of course many people did notice; but they were in on the game. What about everyone else?

Serious American universities, like the American economy, ultimately run on trust. They are special places in part because there isn’t anyone racing around checking to see if you’re meeting your class. The assumption at serious universities is that faculty obviously meet their classes. It is that kind of community. It is a serious place full of serious people, both students and faculty.

UNC isn’t a serious university anymore (it can become one again); at UNC, in the wake of the scandal, all professors are subject to spot checks. At UNC

administrators are making surprise inspections in class to make sure courses are actually taking place.

You’re in the army now, fella! Sheets on tight? Maybe I’ll just burst in on you some afternoon…

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That is why no one noticed the empty classrooms. No one was looking. Everyone was trusting that a tenured professor, the chair of a department, a researcher in a recognized field, would – duh! – meet his classes. Are you kidding me?

UNC has fucked it up for all of us, especially those sentenced to life at a sports factory. Because now that the lid has fallen off UNC, it’s going to fall off a lot of other schools. Don’t forget that a critical mass of these absurdity-based institutions has been growing: Exactly the same academic hoax has been reported on at Auburn, SUNY Binghamton, etc. Everyone knows that a variant of the UNC scheme operates at virtually all of the big-time sports schools, and now that we’re paying attention, we can expect dozens of other unshocking revelations from other campuses.

The UNC thing goes straight to the heart of what distinguishes universities from all other institutions, all other workplaces. The university is an odd creature, a rare thing. Bartlett Giamatti called it “a free and ordered space.” Get it? Free and ordered?

It’s also a delicate thing. Our friends from the southland have really done a number on it.

There’s too much deflection out there already and a pervasive, practiced defensiveness that’s without even a whiff of contrition.

What’s essentially behind that response: Everyone does it. We just got caught.

Really? Wow.

The ribald rabbi with the radio schools us on… rabbis.

After a pleasant metro ride this morning with La Kid – she got out at Dupont Circle – I transferred at Metro Center, and then boarded a train to my stop, Foggy Bottom. On the Foggy Bottom train, across from me, sat Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (slender, dressed in elegant black, her hair white/blond like Camilla Parker-Bowles’) and her daughter. Just like us, they chatted about her daughter’s Halloween party plans for this weekend, and just like us they exchanged a kiss as one of them (the mother in this case) got off at her stop.

The “everybody does it” sentiment is so widely held when it comes to academic fraud and big-time college athletics that it’s almost impossible for any individual instance to shock or even register with the national public anymore. It doesn’t matter that UNC athletes received a collective GPA of 3.61 in their “paper” classes and a 1.91 in their “real” ones; this isn’t the type of cheating that grabs attention these days. Show us some money changing hands or a star player getting caught stealing something funny from an easily mockable location. Give us something we can turn into a joke that will make our co-workers laugh.

Eventually this country will begin ranking colleges exclusively in terms of how academic their sports scandals are. The more scholarly content in the scandal, the higher the college’s academic rating.

… Halloween.

I think that was its mistake right there. The name gave too much away. Better choice: Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

… FAMU is like any other American university.

[A lawyer for the defense in the Florida A&M marching band hazing/manslaughter trial noted that] students at the University of Florida have organized “Tough Mudder” teams for a competition so demanding and hazardous that participants are required to sign a “death waiver.” He also noted that University of Central Florida students have volunteered to compete in the “Warrior Dash,” an obstacle race that includes a crawl through a tent known as the “Poop House.”

… two months.”

Look sharp, lads! At schools like yours, the two-month number is usually closer to ten.

When there’s a university in your midst, it so heightens the tone.

The Morgantown Police Dept. ordered equipment and supplies officers would need to better control a crowd or riot in the future. The inventory, which totals $28,209.13, includes riots shields, smoke rounds, pepper spray cans and pepper balls, gas masks and equipment needed to release pepper balls into a crowd.

Who came up with the idea putting the word “University” together with “West Virginia” in the first place?

At the two minute mark on Weekend Update, University of North Carolina students defend themselves.

Al Sharpton on the people who run the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

He’s got a point. Sports/money types exploiting black athletes.

… from UD on a spectacular sunny afternoon by the Atlantic. She’s sitting on the front deck of her hotel, awaiting, with a large crowd, the start of the parade. There are already plenty of costumed dogs to be seen parading the boardwalk in all the familiar getups: bumblebee, convict, butterfly, cheerleader, superhero, ballerina, pirate, princess, skeleton, witch, hotdog, hamburger.

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Distant music.

It’s windy, clear.

“Here it comes!”

Saints Come Marching In –
marching band.

Huge numbers of apparently happy
costumed dogs marching down the
boardwalk. As always, UD
is amazed at the polite long-suffering
dogs and the proud owners.

(UD thanks her sister
for taking the pictures.)

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UD got up insanely early this morning to walk the beach while the evening sky transformed to pastel. The scenery people sent three container ships to glide bejeweled along the horizon so that UD could enjoy maximum-picturesque.

Gradually, behind a low bank of black/gray clouds, the orange disk emerged. Foreground: Black shadowy gulls.

Owen needs to explain more than her failure to mention to anyone a grotesque situation in the AFAM department. In response to a “Board of Governors member who asked [Owen in 2012] if the academic support staff was steering athletes to particular classes,” she responded:

“I hope not. I believe that they understand their responsibility to support the student and to help them make wise choices, but it is not in their purview to direct students to particular courses.”

However – given the fact that she’s been disciplined – she probably knew perfectly well that that’s exactly what was happening: Academic support staff were steering athletes to bogus classes.

Then there’s Owen’s remarkable lack of curiosity.

[Owen] learned roughly nine years ago that the department was offering far more independent studies than it could manage, and told [head of AFAM chair Julius] Nyang’oro to reduce them, the report said. But she never investigated why there were so many in the first place.

Yes, Julius, how about bringing them down from 150 to, say, 100? That would be more seemly…

It all makes UD nostalgic for Thomas Petee, chair of Auburn University’s “dumping ground for athletes,” aka the sociology department. Petee, like Nyang’oro, worked his balls off, typically taking on dozens and dozens of independent study students a semester.

Indeed, keep in mind, if you want to create a dumping ground for athletes in your university, that these guys – Petee and Nyang’oro – were both department chairs. That’s important. For bogus course schemes to work at maximum efficiency at sports factories like Auburn and Chapel Hill you really need a department chair to run them, because chairs have more institutional power than regular faculty, and because regular faculty in totally deeply corrupt departments can be counted on to keep their traps shut. They don’t want to piss off the chair, who must be hugely powerful – untouchable – if he’s able to get away with what he’s been getting away with for decades.

It’s obviously icing on the cake if you’ve got a dean in on it too.