Nah! The latest arrest was only for armed robbery and attempted murder! Wait til he actually kills someone!

Oklahoma State, which so avidly recruited the running back to its freshman class, has this to say:

An OSU athletic department spokesperson said a press release concerning the arrest would be posted as a general statement but is not expecting one to be issued at this time.

A general statement regarding the arrest… Hm… We see that one of our freshmen has been arrested for attempted murder… Hm…

But not at this time! No, not yet! Let’s wait until all the facts are in. Otherwise, we’re rushing to judgment, like those guys on our recruiting staff who said Whoa, maybe not this guy… Only eighteen and look at his priors…

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Sportsprose-wise, there’s some great shit here:

The accusations levied against Thomas are significant, and one can only assume that Oklahoma State might have second thoughts about him if he is ultimately charged.

Thomas has a ton of talent, but OSU can’t afford much bad publicity in the wake of an extensive expose released by SI.com regarding the football program last year. [Oy, don’t make me read all five parts again! Short version: OSU football stinks to high heaven.]

There is no question that Thomas deserves his day in court, however, he is faced with an uphill battle. This looks bad for him regardless, but perhaps he will be able to learn from it and become a better person moving forward.

What’s not to like in this prose, Scathing Online Schoolmarm would like to know? The last paragraph puts four cliches in two sentences and leaves us feeling warm and runny at the thought of how much OSU’s man is going to learn from having tried to murder someone.

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Only for those who think they can handle it: UD‘s chronicle of the last few years of sports life at one of America’s largest toxic dumps, Oklahoma State University.

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“For more on your favorite athletes and their troubles with the law, visit us at thefumble.com.”

It’s how you get the job done.

“The large, well-funded universities have hired large compliance staffs who literally escort athletes to class each day to meet the increased requirements,” complains the latest president (before him there was Patricia Slade) of Texas Southern University, one of America’s most notorious dropout factories. TSU’s president fails to see why schools which happen not to be able to afford escorts should be punished by the NCAA for low grades among their athletes. This outraged columnist agrees that just because some schools can’t afford to service their athletes fully, that doesn’t make them lesser schools.

Not that plenty of other social psychologists around the world don’t fudge their research results; but those working in the Netherlands currently dominate the field, with Jens Forster (German, but works in Amsterdam) the latest high-profile example.

SUCCESSOR TO DIEDERIK STAPEL REVEALED one newspaper puts it, recalling the notorious fraudster who earned a lengthy New York Times profile featuring a moody, gray sweater/frayed jeans, self-portrait. If Jens Forster, with his Art Garfunkel vibe, plays his cards right, he could score a Rolling Stone cover.

But he will have to play by the Stapel playbook. “I am in therapy every week. I hate myself,” Stapel tells the NYT guy. Self-hatred is good, very good, and Forster should definitely go with it, though he obviously shouldn’t use Stapel’s exact words. His larger self-description should, once again, cleave pretty closely to Stapel’s while avoiding obvious borrowing. Here’s Stapel.

His lifelong obsession with elegance and order, he said, led him to concoct sexy results that journals found attractive. “It was a quest for aesthetics, for beauty — instead of the truth,” he said. He described his behavior as an addiction that drove him to carry out acts of increasingly daring fraud, like a junkie seeking a bigger and better high.

The addiction and junkie bit, and the noble quest for beauty bit, are both excellent and should be retained, though again with slightly different wording. Example:

I was, from a young age, more sensitive to the beauty of the world than other people; and as I became older, this sensitivity became – I don’t know – call it a hypersensitivity. To the point where I developed almost what you might call a dependency on beautiful results.

Oh wow, you’re right! I guess I wasn’t looking closely. A ‘student success’ fee forty percent of which went to the athletics program? My mistake. I’ll fix that right away.

Not real democratic, either – the fee was imposed without a student vote (for background on the fee in particular and yucky Arizona State in general, go here, here, and here), since they’d only vote against it… And as for its constitutionality, here’s the argument:

The state Constitution says that university “instruction …shall be as nearly free as possible.” The state Supreme Court has shied away from second-guessing the composition and cost of a college education, and how the costs should be allocated. But this fee is a clear-cut violation.

The athletic fee has nothing to do with the “instruction” a student will receive. Requiring that it be paid to gain access to that instruction, ipso facto, means that the instruction is not “as nearly free as possible.” It could be $150 closer to free.

Nor can ASU credibly argue that the athletic fee is a user charge, even though a certain number of seats at events will be set aside for students free of additional charges. After all, the fee replaces the ultimate user charge: If you want to see a game, buy a ticket.

The heart of this argument’s problem, of course, lies here: The athletic fee has nothing to do with the “instruction” a student will receive. The chair of the regents begs to differ:

There are no plans to end the athletic tuition waivers, he said. Sports is part of the universities, he said, just as the arts and the medical school are. ASU had 517 student athletes compete in nine men’s sports and 12 women’s sports in 2011.

“To think of sports as something that isn’t an integral part of the university is inappropriate,” he said. “Sports is part of the life experience we want people to have.”

Get it? The Dear Leader says thinking of university sports as in any way different from liberal arts or medical school courses is inappropriate and that sort of thinking had better be stopped right now. The Dear Leader wants you to have certain experiences and goddammit you’re going to have them, whether they’re only about coughing up money for other people to attend football games. Watching football games is part of your instruction at ASU, with the same status as watching a physicist lecture about the beginning of the universe. That’s just the way we roll in America’s stupidest state.

… who died today.

Awaking in New York

Curtains forcing their will
against the wind,
children sleep,
exchanging dreams with
seraphim. The city
drags itself awake on
subway straps; and
I, an alarm, awake as a
rumor of war,
lie stretching into dawn,
unasked and unheeded.

This small lyric lacks the florid, sentimental feel of a lot of her other work (prose, poetry, music). In its place there’s the held-back powerfully suggestive contents of an interesting consciousness. A consciousness coming to consciousness in the big city, feeling the drag of sleep against the imperative to wake, feeling the temptation not to get up and struggle, not to take up arms in life and try to fight your way to clarity, to fight against the world’s injustice. And feeling too the larger futility of being “unasked and unheeded” by a world of passive indifferent strap-hangers. Yet she will “force her will” on the world, will be the winds of change, a “rumor of war.” The line “lie stretching into dawn” is wonderful, especially the word “stretching,” implying as it does not just physically stretching as one awakes, but increasing in understanding.

The poem puts UD in mind of a famous Henry James statement:

Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong: beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.

But not good enough for Smith College’s commencement. Oh no. Not pure enough. You wouldn’t want a powerful woman, would you? Powerful women have power, and power is nasty. Power is just really icky.

Why not open carry them on the campus of UC Santa Barbara? UD is sure you’ll be welcomed as heroes.

… grass. … They also apparently smoke it.

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“[I]f Weis is fired after this season, he will get paid around $24 million not to coach two football teams.”

Make it three, Charlie! Go for three!

In a rousing letter to the editor of the local newspaper (“If we aspire to be known as one of America’s great universities, we are going to need to act like we are one of those universities today! That is what is called vision! When we believe in our vision; when we support our faculty; when we support our staff; when we support our administration; when we support our coaches and athletic director; and yes, when we support our board of regents; success will be ours! It takes courage to stand tall in the face of criticism. It takes heart to support our student-athletes who are giving it their all, each time that enter a competition. It takes special people to take NMSU to a new place, and I believe we are in a place in our history, with people of passion, who can help us get there!”) the chair of perennial loser New Mexico State University’s board of trustees reminds his indifferent, pissed off community (i.e., no one goes to the football games, and everyone’s pissed that people like this trustee are bleeding them financially in order to subsidize an athletic program about which no one cares) about our old friend, Athletics as the Front Porch of the University. Nothing else has the capacity to receive the amount of media coverage athletics does! If you understood anything about marketing brands, you’d know that!

Chairman Mike overlooks – fails to mention? – what all anti-intellectuals who somehow end up running American universities overlook. See, branding goes both ways. All that attention sports gives you goes both ways. Don’t get it yet? Let me make it as simple as possible for you. When you’re like New Mexico State, and your sports program is profoundly, repeatedly, embarrassing, the embarrassment always goes way-national. Ask Keith Olbermann, who’s gotten incredible mileage out of NMSU’s pathetic attempts to get anyone – anyone – to sit through one of its games. Ask the ESPN anchors who covered a recent NMSU basketball game where the team and a group of fans responded to having lost (NMSU almost always loses) by rioting.

Ask anyone who has followed NMSU’s efforts to hire an offensive line coach (UD‘s not sure what this position’s salary is, but let’s guess around $200,000. In 2013, NMSU’s head football coach made $363,000.):

[Chris] Symington replaced Steve Marshall, and was the third offensive line coach over the past year for the Aggies. Symington departs as the second offensive line coach over the past year to never coach a game with the program.

Marshall, who replaced Bart Miller in January, departed the program for an assistant offensive line coaching position with the Green Bay Packers of the NFL.

The Aggies have had a revolving door at the offensive line post for a number of years. Prior to Marshall, there was Jason Lenzmeier (who was hired by the University of New Mexico following the 2011 season), Brad Bedell (hired by Arkansas State following the 2012 campaign) and Miller (hired by Florida Atlantic following this past season).

Considering Marshall’s sudden departure — he arrived in January, coached spring football with the program and then left — Symington’s hire appeared to be a good one.

Imagine all the money and administrative time that’s been taken up at NMSU with the saga of the vanishing coaches. I wonder why they all keep vanishing? And now everyone’s talking about the latest one, Symington, who looked so good…

Las Cruces police cited Chris Symington twice in a four-day span for huffing compressed air, the second incident unfolding Tuesday morning inside the bathroom of a Las Cruces drug store… Sunday night, Symington received his first criminal citation after a different LCPD officer found him “slumped over sitting in his vehicle and apparently having seizures,” a police report states.

That officer reported he saw Symington inhale compressed air from a canister.

Yes, when your university is so desperate to find yet another coach that you’re willing to scrape the bottom of the canister, nothing else going on at your university will receive the amount of media coverage the fall-out will.

Keep it up, NMSU! Go Aggies!

… or people will think that your institution’s tendency toward ignoring – enabling? – academic corruption continues.

So the new faculty chair at sports-fucked University of North Carolina Chapel Hill says the following:

“First and foremost, no one, there is not a single person in this University that thinks that what has happened is defensible or acceptable,” Dr. Cairns says. “It’s happened over a long period of time and all of the investigations that have been done have demonstrated that.”

This short statement includes an obvious untruth and a muddled attempt to say something good… But because it’s muddled it ends up sounding bad.

There are plenty of people at Chapel Hill who think it’s perfectly acceptable to suspend academic integrity for the sake of keeping big-time athletes eligible. UD is absolutely certain similar – but less outrageous – class activities are going on at Chapel Hill among coaches, professors, academic advisors, and players. So why should Cairns say otherwise? It’s obviously, on the face of it, wrong to say that absolutely everyone on that campus thinks bogus classes are unacceptable. Since all readers know this, Cairns’ comment is insulting to our intelligence.

His second comment is insulting to his intelligence. “It’s happened over a long period of time and all of the investigations that have been done have demonstrated that.” Yes. Right. Your university, where, you proclaim, there is not a single person who thinks bogus classes are acceptable, kept an elaborate system of bogus classes going for years and years; the professor running the bogus show was handsomely rewarded for years and years. Yes. So, uh, hurray? So God forbid the situation was just a fleeting anomaly?

Cairns needs a little pr training.

So here’s what it’s like right now, three twittering chicks with their necks outstretched and mouths hysterically open, gulping the worms galore their parents are finding all over UD‘s half acre. This nature story is taking place midway up a honeysuckle bush a few yards to my left as I sit in our office with one of the windows open. There’s also a hummingbird nest in the front azaleas, but I’m not observing that one. It’s so small – they’re so fragile – let them be.

Plus there’s a culture story taking place a few yards away and directly in front of me in our driveway: The installation of a new water heater for Les Soltans. Their old one stopped working after almost twenty years, a lifespan unheard of dans le monde chauffe-eau. (Les Soltans specialize in superannuated appliances – their washer/dryer was also Margaret and Munro Leaf’s washer/dryer, and Margaret died in 1988.)

Yikes. Even as I type this, one of the guys – Kevin? – is right behind me in my bathroom using the sink to make strange hissing sounds. I’m staying here! I don’t want to know! Just let me know when you want me to pull out the checkbook!

I’m truly looking forward to washing my hair.

With its way-believable plot (six year old girl escapes Holocaust; is raised by wolves; shoots and kills a Nazi along the way), who could have guessed Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years would turn out to be made up? I mean okay – if she’d said she was three years old, raised by aliens, and blew up a Nazi arsenal, maybe we would have become suspicious…

…has hit 6,000! The course is free – take a look. Enroll.

If you want to look at a sample lecture, I’d recommend Lecture 11, Philip Larkin and W.H. Auden.