… Delight.

Sideshow Bob and the Missus are now in the spotlight, and the only thing of interest here at University Diaries is their effort to“deep south” Virginia’s public universities.

I guess there’s a reason we differentiate deep and … shallow? south. Apparently up in these parts (‘thesdan UD lives not far from Northern Virginia) you can’t get schools like the University of Virginia to run governor-mandated trials on your laetrile.

Speaking of deep and parts… You may know Sideshow Bob by his former name: Governor Vaginal Probe…

It was self-defense.

… pick up other writers’ scoops without bothering to credit them; now, the New York Times reporter’s rather lax journalistic code has landed her in much bigger trouble.

The New York Times is reviewing an accusation of plagiarism against veteran reporter Carol Vogel, who was charged with lifting a paragraph from a Wikipedia article for a story about Italian Renaissance painter Piero di Cosimo.

UD is aware that it has become fashionable to dismiss plagiarism as of no importance. Everyone, after all, seems to do it. Yet think of it this way – The New York Times – America’s paper of record – is paying one of its senior writers a very good yearly salary to scan and lift Wikipedia pages for it. Speaking only for myself – a longtime NYT subscriber – I am not happy to hear that my subscription money is going toward this activity. I can read Wikipedia on my own; I don’t have to pay the NYT to have its reporters read it and then reproduce it for me.

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UPDATE: If you can find a plagiarist who hasn’t plagiarized plenty before being discovered, do let me know.

… And who will be this week’s university-affiliated shithead with a gun? The University of Arizona’s Peter Steinmetz insists that “he only came to the airport to buy a cup of coffee” the way all of us drive to our city’s international airport to get a cup of coffee, so what’s the big deal? The loaded AR-15 on his shoulder? Would you go to the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport for a cup of coffee without a loaded AR-15 on your shoulder? And you know how when you’re juggling a hot cup of coffee and an AR-15 it can kind of look to some people maybe like you’re aiming your rifle at them? Maybe especially in an airport people might feel uncomfortable with your rifle pointed at them…

But this story is about education. People need to learn the meaning of open carry and not overreact like these silly women.

Steinmetz allegedly removed the rifle from his shoulder, causing the muzzle to face a mother and her 17-year-old daughter. They told police they feared for their lives.

Silly women!

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Scenes from the arraignment:

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN [JUDGE, MARICOPA SUPERIOR COURT]: You are not to possess any weapons.

JUDGE: It means no weapons.

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Background on the trustee.

William Dowling, author of the wonderful Confessions of a Spoilsport: My Life and Hard Times Fighting Sports Corruption at an Old Eastern University, has taught at Rutgers University long enough to track its fall from its glory days as one of the public ivies. In an address to the Peithessophian Society, Dowling asks whether Rutgers can save itself as a university rather than a distillery. The current campus is

swarming with party animals who actively despise anything having to do with thinking or learning, who brag about cheating on exams, who spend most of their time playing video games or getting drunk with their friends, and who … should never have been admitted to college at all.

Note the actively despise. UD has noticed this at many of our football factories: Not just polite indifference to the life of the mind, but active hatred. Think Richie Incognito, the soul of the University of Nebraska. Dowling makes the obvious point that “a life devoted to mind or spirit or intelligence [is] what college is all about.” Yet it’s equally obvious that at Rutgers, as at other schools which have always been, or have decided – like Rutgers – to become jock shops, all the money now goes to coaches.

It’s a sad and sickening degeneration. Only students can arrest it.

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UD thanks Brent for sending her the link to Dowling’s talk.

UD has said it a hundred times: When assembling your writing staff, be willing to pay more for quality people. Matthew Whitaker of Arizona State University has been burned twice:

Professor Whitaker didn’t apologize, but blamed his initial plagiarism on the people he hired to do his research and writing for him.

That was his initial plagiarism. He hasn’t fared any better with his latest crew of writers.

Remember: Diddle me once, shame on you. Diddle me twice, shame on me.

Since turnover at the top is constant, they’ve only been on the job a week or so. The massive ongoing athletic scandals they’ve inherited take up all of their time. If they do get a moment free, it’s taken up with trustees screaming at them that they want a one hundred million dollar new stadium.

Turnover at the top level of the proprietors’ coaches is equally constant. The five million dollar a year coach they hired a few months ago just beat up one of his players and then got drunk and crashed his Porsche. If they let him go, they owe him a three million dollar buyout. Even if they pay it out, he’ll sue the school for defamation or something, and that’s one more layer of litigation on top of deep hardened lava flows of sports-related litigation.

Naturally, his stadium is empty. More precisely, it’s half empty at the start of games, and then, by the second half, it’s almost entirely empty. The team actually wins a lot of its games – the proprietor is totally stumped as to why no one shows up. He’s only just begun running a failing sports factory. He doesn’t understand.

But here he is – new guy on the block – and he’s being interviewed by the local booster press. Which asks him about the empty stadium.

Here is what he says. Here is what the new president of Florida Atlantic University – the school so desperate to get naming rights to its new stadium that it signed a deal with a prison – has to say about that.

“It’s unacceptable for seats to be empty.”

Unacceptable. Do you hear? I, the latest proprietor of this desperately failing endeavor, declare here and now that empty seats are unacceptable. I will do such things,– What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be The terrors of the earth.

Clueless academic bastion of one of America’s most corrupt and incompetent outposts, the University of Hawaii is constantly losing presidents, chancellors, and – most of all – money.

Tom Apple, chancellor of the flagship campus, is now fired after two years of a five-year contract, so buying out those last three years will represent yet more pointless expenditure.

And when it comes to pointless expenditure, only the public university systems of Hawaii’s mentally challenged sister states – Nevada, New Mexico, and Alaska – compete. Put hawaii in my search engine for all the gruesome details of this truly comatose institution.

… would be out two games, tops.

But it’s a university, see. A university. And what does that mean? What does university mean?

It means that although – just like the NFL – a university like the University of Oklahoma specializes in admitting really wacko football players (so do plenty of other universities, like the University of Nebraska, which adored – still adores – Richie Incognito), a university differs from the NFL in…

Come to think of it, for football factories like OU, there isn’t any difference. When one of your heavily recruited wackos breaks a woman’s face, you suspend him for awhile and then …

Who knows. The freshman whose face the player apparently broke is speaking out big-time, which is a major bummer if – as per tradition – you’re trying to hush the thing up. You might – you’re a university, after all – have to drop the guy from the team.

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UD thanks JND for the link.

… California.

The university, where people aren’t supposed to be this dumb.

During the interviews, the two players “began texting each other, trying to get their stories straight,” the affidavit said.

Oh, plus they took photos of themselves doing it.

But of course the front porchers are right. This particular sexual assault is a BIG story, with the national press taking note of every single detail.

Cuz this is the University of Texas! Biggest front porch of ’em all.

There is without question an important discussion to have — an unheated discussion not made for sports radio — about why violence against women and football seem to walk arm-in-arm. We could discuss the inability for football players to compartmentalize violence, taking the hyper-aggression of their sport home with them — something that affects families in the armed forces as well. There is a discussion we need to have about its connection to traumatic brain injury, and the ways that some of the side effects according to the NFL’s own neurologists, are mood swings, fits of temper and the inability to connect emotionally with the people in their lives. There especially is a discussion we need to have about a culture of entitlement that starts in high school and runs even more profoundly in college football, where young men produce billions in revenue and are often “rewarded”, since they can’t be paid, with a warped value system that says women are there to be taken.

The [University of Michigan athletic] department has run ads on its blog, its electronic billboard, on TV and even at a street stand during the Ann Arbor art fair, urging fans to buy football tickets. If those unprecedented efforts didn’t tell us how eager they must be to unload tickets by the thousands, the email this week to its golf club members, announcing free tickets for anyone who asks, removed any doubt. If you went to Michigan, live in Michigan or can find Michigan on a map, don’t be surprised when the athletic department offers you free Michigan football tickets. It’s a boon for those who’ve already dropped their tickets – and a bust for those who have already paid full price for theirs.

LOL. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar gets it said.