Ex-Yeshiva University trustee Bernie Madoff knew it, and current Yeshiva University trustee Zygi Wilf knows it. Universities are sunny places for shady people. They shed moral legitimacy. When we hear a person’s an officer and a benefactor of universities we get all warm and runny inside. Good man! Hip hip!

Universities also shed intellectual legitimacy. Let’s say you’re peddling a dietary supplement that probably does jack shit. You however wish to claim it cures all human ills so that you can become a billionaire. You need to give someone at a university – or in a governor’s mansion – enough money to get some legitimate studies of the thing going.

Yes, yes, I know what you’re saying. Catch-22. If it’s a legitimate university, the results won’t go your way.

But you’re only saying that because you lack imagination. The point is to smuggle your guys into the university. Look what Novartis did in Japan! Look what Star Scientific – the diet supplement guys – did at Hopkins!

Earlier this year, Star Scientific disclosed a federal investigation of its securities transactions, and several of the company’s shareholders have subsequently filed lawsuits in federal court — and this month in Richmond Circuit Court — alleging that the company misled its investors about scientific research on Anatabloc.

The lawsuits have focused on the company’s statements about research by two scientists who work at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

The research looked at anatabine’s potential for treating certain types of thyroid disease, but Star Scientific’s stock price took a hit after Johns Hopkins University said the researchers were acting as consultants for the company and not on behalf of the university.

Fine, Catch-23. You might get caught. But a few bad outcomes don’t mean that there aren’t universities just sitting there waiting for you to use them to legitimate your crap. Not all universities are like the University of Virginia which despite the free wheewheewheewhee in a private jet some of its scientists got courtesy of Star Scientific still said no:

According to the indictment, researchers from the University flew by private jet with Virginia’s first lady to a Maryland symposium hosted by Star Scientific in July 2011. It also details a meeting between [the head of Star Scientific] and “senior UVA administrators” in November of that year to discuss UVA “taking the lead role” in seeking state grants to research Star Scientific’s top product. Bob McDonnell allegedly supported the proposal, but the University eventually declined, as evidenced by a string of correspondence months later.

One e-mail included in the indictment has Maureen McDonnell complaining to a staffer: “Gov wants to know why nothing has developed w studies after [Williams] gave $200,000.”

I mean put it together, people! You know you’re gonna get the grants because the governor’s gonna make sure you get them. Win-win! But no – some fuckwits at UVA decide to care about wasting their time and whoring themselves instead of doing actual research. Gawd.

… Freud, the sexual thought of adult Republicans is a dark continent for psychology.

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Josh Marshall on the GOP welcoming women back inside its big tent:

Coming off [Mike] Huckabee’s comments this morning about incentivizing horny women with birth control, Rep. Louis Gohmert says government tries to “lure” single moms into “servitude” with welfare…

‘War on Women? Please. We’re the Ones Who Respect You for Not Being Sluts!’ …

The killing of a teaching assistant by another teaching assistant (with whom he worked) sounds like an act of extreme rage. The killer brought not just a handgun but a knife, and he used both on the victim.

Once he got his rage out of his system, the killer seems to have relaxed quietly just outside the building.

Police say when an officer arrived, he spotted Cousins sitting on the ground outside the building with his hands behind his head.

Head resting in hands would have been What the hell did I just do? I just killed someone and ruined my life.

Hands behind head suggest Ahhhh. That’s done.

What can a new chancellor do (the last one was booted out after his university’s self-righteousness about its academic integrity ran hard up against its decades of bogus courses) but mouth comforting cliches about past wrongs and glorious futures?

That very unhealthy atmosphere of mistrust thing is interesting. It refers to the fact that now all professors at Chapel Hill are, like marine recruits, subject to spot checks to make sure that they’re actually meeting their classes. Apparently they’re no longer trusted to be doing that…

Yet the reality of recent history at Chapel Hill is that everyone from the trustees and the chancellor on down trusted that no real classes were being offered across a number of departments; they trusted that in this way their revenue athletes would be kept on the field and undistracted by mere academics.

It’s so totally part of the tradition of big-time athletics that now somehow it’s the legitimate faculty at Chapel Hill who have to be folded in to the shit stew cooked up by the athletics department and the university’s administration. Now, because of the money cynicism of provosts and trustees, actual professors are treated like sneaks and fakes. There’s no better demonstration of the way big-time sports destroys the very heart of universities.

But no worries! The new chancellor assures us that she’s nailed 95 theses to the library door, all about how icky and corrupt academics at the university used to be, but now that they’ve done the 95 thingies it’s all great.

… is Kevin O’Leary, a man who models b-school values so well that only Yeshiva University’s Ezra Merkin and Brown University’s Steven Cohen come close. We in the US can learn a lot from the capitalists up north.

Here’s Kev on the fact that “the 85 richest people in the world hold more wealth than the 3.5 billion poorest people.”

“It’s fantastic and this is a great thing because it inspires everybody, gets them motivation to look up to the one percent and say, ‘I want to become one of those people, I’m going to fight hard to get up to the top,’” he said. “This is fantastic news and of course I applaud it. What can be wrong with this?”

Atta boy, Kev! And bravo UWO. You really know how to pick ’em.

UD is quoted in today’s Bloomberg News on the Yeshiva University disaster.

A Virginia Tech student does the math.

And what’s it add up to?

She’s going to a school that spits on education and worships football.

A student has been found dead in his dorm room on the Mount Vernon campus of George Washington University.

Police “have not classified [it] as a homicide.”

They will possibly be looking into whether the student’s death was alcohol-related. Or whether it was suicide.

Or whether the student had underlying health problems (a weak heart, for instance).

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Sean Keefer, a native of Oregon, and a student in GW’s honors program who was pursuing a degree in Math and Computer Science, died.

… it seems a little odd that Colorado State University is apparently about to impose extreme budget cuts.

A professor at CSU Pueblo sent out an email complaining about the cuts in colorful language (he called the chancellor a “hitman”) and promptly had his university email closed down (it has recently been restored). He probably faces other forms of punishment.

Go here for all the familiar stupid obscene reasons a school in CSU Pueblo’s position is part of a system building a new stadium (scroll down).

And when you’ve finished reading, wonder not at the rage that produced the “hitman” email.

… this one at at Purdue, where a teaching assistant sought out and shot a fellow teaching assistant to death, are unknown. Both worked for an engineering school professor. The killer apparently walked calmly to the classroom where he knew the victim would be, shot him multiple times, and then walked around a bit, waiting to be arrested.

Let us speculate.

The dead man was dating a woman the killer wanted to date.

The dead man was impressing the professor more than the killer was, and this enraged the killer.

The victim had ridiculed or put down the shooter in some way.

The victim and the shooter had had an earlier altercation, and this was payback.

The killer is a psychopath. (Very unlikely. They either kill themselves after they finish killing, or, like Amy Bishop, they drop the gun in a trash bin and proceed to go out to dinner with their husband. Bishop considered herself far too clever ever to be caught.)

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UPDATE: Hints begin to emerge:

[B]oth a Purdue professor who worked with him and a Purdue student say he could be rude and disliked being told he was wrong…

Purdue Professor Thomas Talavage describes Cousins as intense and aggressive about his projects. He says Cousins “didn’t like to be told he was wrong.”

UD is reminded of another university workplace murder: Annie Le’s killing at Yale. Some of the people who knew her murderer, who worked with Le, “described him as a ‘control freak’ who was competitive in sports, compulsive about his work habits and controlling in his romantic relationships.”

Tetched in the head University of Tennessee (follow its mad sports program here) is now, after years of medically unsupervised activity, in unbelievably deep shit.

… [F]our losing seasons in the last five years, and home attendance has steadily declined… Tennessee fired Derek Dooley following this past season and owes him $5 million. That’s after paying Phillip Fulmer a $6 million buyout (over 48 months) when he was forced out following the 2008 season.

… Tennessee’s reserves have been depleted by $21 million in transfers back to the university over the last three years and $11.4 million in buyouts to fired coaches in football, basketball and baseball, as well as administrators. Former Tennessee athletic director Mike Hamilton walked away in 2011 with a $1.335 million buyout.

That $11.4 million figure doesn’t count the $5 million owed to Dooley, nor an additional $2 million to his assistants.

It’s worse than that. The reeling drunks running the show have much more public cash than that dribbling out of their mouths. Plus we can anticipate plenty of player scandals and all that Chapel Hill stuff…

What to do?

Well, if you’re the University of Tennessee I tell you what. You do one thing and one thing only: RUN AWAY!!!! You’ve made your bed; now you have to …

RUN AWAY!!!!!!!

Don’t nobody get to watch us whiles we chew the fat ’bout our next move: A new stadium, fire the next coach and give him a ten million dollar buyout… We’re runnin’ the joint see and we do it our way and fuck you all.

A board that makes recommendations about the direction of the University of Tennessee’s athletic department reversed a longstanding policy last year, leading to closed-door meetings, little written documentation and questions from the press and transparency advocates… Transparency advocates counter that the university is a public institution, and its doings should be public record. The fact that two athletic board members are also on UT’s Board of Trustees caught the eye of the Tennessee Press Association’s Frank Gibson.

Madison Holleran, a beautiful, smart, athletically gifted nineteen year old U Penn freshman, killed herself last Friday. She jumped from the top of a parking garage in downtown Philadelphia.

Already the story has appeared in Time magazine, and lots of other media outlets.

Holleran’s is the sort of suicide that gets attention.

It gets singled out because it’s a big shock. Unless there was a suicide note (right now it looks as if there wasn’t), this one was a real stunner. An extremely young woman with absolutely everything going for her (that’s how it looked, anyway) and with nothing we know of signalling depression does this thing.

In almost every case like Holleran’s I’ve covered on this blog, there was prior evidence (sometimes a little; sometimes a lot) of mental unbalance. Sometimes there was a note; sometimes a recent cryptic note on a Facebook page now made sense.

Frequently these deaths were – like Holleran’s – first-year students, which suggests that something in the transition to a new school, a new life, triggered the trouble.

In any case, the particular peril you’re in when you’re young and depressed is impulsivity – the pull toward the sudden jump. Go here for an extract from a New York Times article about youth, depression, impulsivity, and suicide. And here for a more lengthy discussion of the subject.

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UPDATE: As her father tells it, it does indeed seem to have been stress over a new school, new pressures. She had been seriously depressed. And she did leave a note.

Lots of this stuff coming out now.

Whether he realizes it or not, my son likes watching football for the same reason I did: because it’s intimate time with his dad. If I didn’t let watching football become one of the things we shared, if I told him it’s something I regret, he might take to it anyway. But it would be less likely. And if he made it to adulthood without heartwarming memories of sitting alongside his old man watching other men pulverize their bodies and minds, he’d be more able to rationally decide whether professional football is something a decent society should allow.

All my life I’ve heard that women are irrational.

Baby, women don’t know from irrational.

A music professor named Sandy
Used a U-issued Mac to be randy.
He tried not to be caught
But he outright forgot
That they had his IP address handy.

This of course is the deepest nightmare of every jock-school trustee and president. It’s much deeper than current worries about tanking ticket sales. You can still maybe bell-and-whistle tanking ticket sales; you can imagine ways of turning a stadium into, I don’t know, something that in significant ways resembles a really plush, high-tech, Las Vegas gambling hall/hotel/restaurant. But you can’t change the system of recruitment and cheating; you can’t stop the fact that Florida State University’s revenue-athlete graduation rate is a sick joke, or that the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, qua academic institution, is a sick joke. Lying and cheating your way around this problem is starting not to work. That’s the nightmare. Because the guy making the comment in my headline is saying that he can’t identify with the people playing on the gridiron anymore; that he feels like a jerk trying to pretend they are part of the college world.

Eventually the remnant true believers will trickle down, as it were, to the south, where the few locations that have always been honest about being football stadiums and nothing else (Auburn, Clemson, Alabama) will continue to stage games. Eventually most of the audience for the games will be like the tourists who go to “Old West” towns to watch pretend shoot-outs.