… on all counts of fraud. He’s a former football coach at the University of Georgia.

CNN ran the material through plagiarism-flagging software, according to the CNN source. That initial scan, says the source, turned up “two or three things,” which caused a deeper examination of “all of [Marie Louise Gumuchian’s] work.” That uncovered an “insane” number of problems, according to the source.

Fifty stories plagiarized. Probably more. The investigation is ongoing.

As UD always says, plagiarism is like Lays Potato Chips. Bet you can’t copy just one.

As UD also always says, Gumuchian’s next move is too obvious for words. It’s just a matter of which mental disorder she chooses. She’s probably studying the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual even as we blog.

… that a particular sport makes you more likely to murder? Who said football makes you likelier to murder? UD chronicles the notable violence of the game and the off-field violence of some of the players… And since her blog is about universities, she regularly registers her incredulity that many American universities all but define themselves in terms of a game that notoriously damages the brain; but she has never suggested a link between football and murder.

Why then, in the context of Aaron Hernandez (who graced the University of Florida), does the Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins feel compelled to write the following:

Initially, Hernandez’s arrest provoked a number of commentators to associate his violence with NFL. But it doesn’t follow; if there was a real association between football and murder, there would be more Hernandezes. There is a huge difference between men who are talented at a violent game, and a man who is simply, viciously, senselessly violent. If Hernandez is guilty of these additional murders, all it proves is that NFL executives were as fooled as the rest of us by the blankness of his face.

I think this paragraph is worthy of a Scathing Online Schoolmarm scathe. Let’s see how Jenkins does what she does.

Initially, Hernandez’s arrest provoked a number of commentators to associate his violence with NFL. But it doesn’t follow; if there was a real association between football and murder, [Uh, hold on. Note how Jenkins subtly shifts from violence in her first sentence to murder in her second. I’m not aware of people saying football makes you a murderer. I’m aware of plenty of people pointing out the obvious, whether it’s boxing or hockey or football: Sports that put an amazing premium on brutality are likelier to attract and cultivate violent people.] there would be more Hernandezes. There is a huge difference between men who are talented at a violent game, and a man who is simply, viciously, senselessly violent. If Hernandez is guilty of these additional murders, all it proves is that NFL executives were as fooled as the rest of us by the blankness of his face. [This is a version of what SOS calls coacha inconsolata. Poor naive NFL executives! Can’t read faces! Because what you’re looking for in an NFL player is a warm vulnerable approachable sort of face.]

In a subsequent couple of paragraph, Jenkins attempts to refine her argument. Let’s scathe that one too.

Given football’s savage nature it’s tempting to draw a correlation between the NFL and violent crime. Throw in the fact that a lot of high-profile athletes have an undeniable romance with guns. Reuben Fischer Baum, a data cruncher who posts on Deadspin.com, found that NFLers are twice as likely as their male peers to be arrested on weapons charges.

But football by itself is not the culprit. In fact all of the rules of the game are oriented around preventing harm, and penalizing willful injuries. It’s a game of controlled violence, not uncontrolled. As Grossman has written, “the purpose of play is to learn not to hurt members of your society and members of your own species. In a basketball game, or a football game, when one of the players is hurt, the play stops.” A far more likely culprit is the sustained desensitization of video games and other forms of glorified media violence. Grossman argues these are “murder simulators” that actually award points for killing.

SOS loves this. Jenkins cannot avoid stating the empirical obvious truth at some point. Yeah, NFL’ers (and college football players) tend toward really incredible rates of violence. (It’s been a constant argument on this blog that the professional leagues are free to deal with the gun shit, etc., as they would like; but it’s obscene for universities to recruit it, valorize it, and expose their students to it.) But it ain’t the game! It ain’t that these players have been systematically rewarded – with incredible money and acclaim – for their bulk, their menace, their violence, as football becomes more and more violent. No. It’s… video games!

After all, football is fine; football has way non-violent rules.

This point reminds me of something Mr UD routinely does at the beginning of his Comparative Constitutional Law course. He reads to the students a truly inspiring Constitution. Beautifully written, guaranteeing all of the country’s citizens all sorts of excellent rights. Mr UD then asks his students to guess which country’s Constitution this is. They guess various advanced European democracies.

“Sorry, no. North Korea.”

[See this post for background.]

… Smith College graduates will be deprived of the thoughts of Christine Lagarde, chief of the International Monetary Fund. She withdrew this week, under pressure from people who object to the I.M.F.’s role in the “strengthening of imperialist and patriarchal systems.” So, one of the world’s most powerful women will not share insights with one of the nation’s most prominent women’s colleges because of a concern about patriarchy. Evil men — that’ll show ’em.

Instead of Lagarde, the intrepid people at Smith will get arguably the most parochial speaker available: An ex-president of their own school. As for her advice on resisting patriarchy: Be Lloyd Blankfein’s toady…?

Growing? As the Rugrats would put it, Nike University is all growed up. Take a look around at the place. The New York Times says that the University of Oregon’s palais des sports (whose walls do not – yet – say RAPE YOUR ENEMIES, but do say EAT YOUR ENEMIES) is “enough to make an NFL team jealous.” To me, that doesn’t sound like a growing sports culture. It sounds like an accomplished sports culture.

The University of Oregon is, in the particular case, a basketball culture which seems to be fostering a troubling rape culture. Aggression above all.

… State U.

When your football team boasts Richie Incognito and… so many others…

Incognito was suspended (twice) at Nebraska, and you know it’s not easy to get suspended at Nebraska, where character-building coach Tom Osborne let a cornerback play while awaiting trial for second-degree murder. Osborne also retained a defensive lineman who was arrested eight times, convicted four times, and left the heartland accused of multiple sexual assaults, before his induction into Nebraska’s Hall of Fame in 2006. Not to mention Nebraska’s current leader of young men, Bo Pelini, who is still apologizing for an epic carpet-bombing of F-words, an attempt to say exactly what he thought of Nebraska’s fans.

… The Incognito rap sheet includes a note that his peers voted him the NFL’s second-dirtiest player. No. 1 in a Sporting News poll last year was another Nebraska worthy, Ndamukong Suh.

… it’s maybe hard to get worked up about the team currently – allegedly – harboring a linebacker who’s a very professional bicycle thief… I mean, a linebacker who’s part of a very professional bicycle theft ring, made up of himself and fellow hometown-boy-made-good (they met in high school) Lucas Keifer. Both are two of the university’s finest – Keifer is a long-distance runner. So both of these heartlanders are excellent runners… Maybe they should have fled the scene of their theft on one of the bikes – that’d be faster than running, even given their terrific running ability…

I’m not sure why the nation never focuses its attention on teams like Nebraska’s. People seem more comfortable thinking about thugs in Florida or New Jersey schools. Americans are very sentimental about the heartland. But actually Nebraska is one of the most disgusting teams out there. And that’s saying a lot.

**********

UD thanks Dirk.

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Here’s the local press, featuring the writing style Scathing Online Schoolmarm calls coacha inconsolata:

Here is a problem Husker football Coach Bo Pelini certainly doesn’t need or didn’t count on this off season…

Poor Bo! Poor put-upon Bo! Only months removed from the revelation of his own shitheadery/paranoia, Bo must now suffer the slings and arrows of his highly recruited bicycle thief. Dear God! What can we say at this point of this great and good man?

How about… BO‘DIED BUT UNBO‘D…

Sure, these reviews are pretty easy to write. Still, they’re often fun to read.

… which people will be rereading when Penn State’s latest Dear Leader, James Franklin, implodes, taking already-imploded Penn State with him.

Already trailing moronic sexism and the Vanderbilt scandal, James Franklin

feels very much like a modern football coach. He is a walking TED talk. His is the language of a pitchman rather than a professor. He readily admits to being a perfectionist, and he says things like this about coaches, according to Blue-White Illustrated’s Nate Bauer: “They’re control freaks, they’re maniacs, and I’m one of them.”

And that’s the issue: I have no idea if, given the contours of this system, it is possible to be all these things and still maintain one’s ethical framework. I have no idea if a college football coach can be both a control freak and a model citizen, and I don’t think anyone else knows, either. This is, after all, the subtext of the debate Penn State people been waging amongst themselves for the past three years: Was the Paterno mythos inherently flawed? (Hell, you might say that this is the central question inherent to the existence of college football itself.) And this is the same question that lingers now, as the James Franklin era takes hold.

Is the Kim Jong-un mythos inherently flawed? Not if you revel in total control by maniacs. Weinreb cites a recent interview with a Franklin fanatic:

A few weeks ago, Penn State played its spring football game, and Harrisburg Patriot-News columnist David Jones conducted some interviews with fans, and during one of them, he expressed to a young man his thoughts that Penn State would have been better off hiring someone else. The young man was incredulous; the young man said, Have you seen the way this guy recruits? And Jones said yes, and Jones said he worried that Franklin, for all his seeming good will, might cause Penn State trouble at some point down the line. And the response he got weighed heavily on me for days after I read it.

“Yeah, I know,” the young man said. “But I don’t care.”

Instead of the evil head of the IMF (Christine Lagarde is also “the first woman to lead a global law firm, [and the first] to be the finance minister of a major industrial country.” She is, as well, a top candidate for head of the European Commission and is talked about as a viable candidate for president of France.), Smith College will get as its commencement speaker the woman who, as a member of the Goldman Sachs “scandal-prone” board, approved Lloyd Blankfein’s notorious multimillion dollar bonuses. (“There’s no indication in [a recent Simmons] interview that Simmons takes her fiduciary responsibilities to Goldman’s shareholders particularly seriously,” wrote Felix Salmon of Simmons’ embarrassing, “snowed by Lloyd,” tenure.) They will get the woman who was rewarded for that approval by getting paid

$323,539 [in 2009] for her work on the [Goldman Sachs] board… [She] will soon leave her position at Goldman with stock that is currently worth about $4.3 million. That was on top of her salary at Brown, which was $576,000 [in 2010].

Yes, the protest against Christine Lagarde has worked! The witch is dead; three cheers for Dorothy.

Here at University Diaries, we never tire of quoting that thing beloved of university football boosters: Give the sport more money because it’s the university’s front porch.

Too true. Every outlet from the New York Times on down today features astoundingly violent (coaches and players) Rutgers University, and you obviously can’t put a price on publicity like this. It’s one thing to become a national laughingstock because of your mad sadistic basketball coach (who can forget the SNL sketch?). You’re moving to a whole other level when you recruit a quarterback who a few nights ago allegedly inflicted permanent brain damage on someone. Someone he seems to have left to die on the streets. Someone currently fighting for his life.

The quarterback, who’s from Minnesota, was named “Minnesota’s Mr Football in 2011.” Too right.

UD‘s not sure how she missed Australia’s Troy Buswell (my headline comes from a 2011 story about his ex-marriage), but along with having committed “11 traffic offences … in one night,” he seems to have plagiarized a report justifying the extreme expense of a taxpayer funded trip he recently took to Europe and Asia.

… campus in the country to start doing some marketing. If you read through these posts about Rutgers, you’ll discover that the school subsidizes its athletics program to the tune of millions and millions of dollars, so the place should be receptive to revenue-generating ideas.

Now that their quarterback-to-be has been arrested for beating a guy possibly to death (the guy is still alive, but in critical condition, having apparently been kicked twice in the head while down, etc.), Rutgers, with its notoriously violent coaches and players, would be a fool not to take advantage of the cachet its name now carries.

What UD is getting at is that the school should market a muscle car, or boxing gloves, or some sort of weapon (not a gun, because the Ruger is a gun, and that sounds too much like Rutger), and call it The Rutger. The name Rutgers is at the moment synonymous in the public mind with brutality; if Rutgers wants to make money, it’s going to have to strike while the iron is hot. There’s always another school (feast your eyes) vying for most sports-related assaults, rapes… And though Rutgers has a little breathing room here, given the sheer volume of violent incidents it has maintained over the last couple of years, you can’t let your guard down.

Get behind the wheel of a Rutger and own the road, baby.

… when you live, as UD does, in the heavily wooded Washington suburbs, hard by Rock Creek. UD’s town, as longtime readers know, is Garrett Park, an arboretum, so all the birds hounded out of high trees by Bethesda development flock to our prolific, carefully tended, big old forest. Predators like owls love the birds, not to mention the rabbits and voles and snakes etc. The orange cat who shows up every afternoon and stands very still on a log alongside one of our woodland paths loves the birds too.

Spring means that all of this and much more (I just had to interrupt my writing to shoo a raccoon away from the trash container – I’m outside) is bursting. It’s Grand Central Nature on the acre around our little brown house, and I’ve spent today observing it.

At five AM we woke to the creaky song of the catbirds. They seem to have reproduced recently, and they and their offspring are buzzing the house big time. They were soon joined in song by the thrushes, whose voice is lovely and famous (one is supposed to feel privileged to have thrushes in the garden) but, as I’ve mentioned in seasons past on this blog, never-ending. Thrushes are loud and they don’t quit.

To my immediate right, in the upper branches of a honeysuckle, is a very active thrush nest, so we will be getting yet more thrush song.

All day rabbits have strewn the lawns front and back. I seldom see solitary rabbits anymore; it’s all coalitions.

Midday I was clearing one of the paths, and I heard a close-by and unfamiliar bird call. Suddenly a few feet away from me was a pileated woodpecker tapping a poplar.

Pleased to see a vine twining along one of our fences, I snipped a group of three leaflets to take them inside for identification. Good thing I was wearing gloves. Poison ivy.

Rotund bees press into the white azalea blossoms.

As I was cutting back the front yard azaleas this morning, one of my neighbors walked by. “Happy Mother’s Day, Margaret!” he called.

“Thanks, and the same to you!” trilled idiot UD. “I mean the same to your wife.”

… is a stranger and more difficult poem than Moritz’s (see the post below this one), but it says similar things about mothers. Both poets go restlessly in search of reality, essence, the thing in itself, imperishable being — hypostasis. Moritz sees its traces in his inexplicable deathless adolescent journals; with the advent of a new year, Gizzi finds himself set on a similar search – for true foundations that might free him into a new bold authentic life.

But his first stanza notes his cowardice:

For why am I afraid to sing
the fundamental shape of awe
should I now begin to sing the silvered back of
the winter willow spear
the sparkling agate blue
would this blade and this sky free me to speak
intransitive lack –

Why is he afraid to be full-throated in his expression of the basic bliss of being? Could he use the blade, the spear, of the willow leaf to cut himself free from repression? Is it just a matter of launching his poem, his song, in praise of nature? If he trusts the poetry, will it lead him to the light?

Of what am I afraid
of what lies in back of me of day
these stars scattered as far as the I
what world and wherefore
will it shake free
why now in the mind of an afternoon is a daisy
for a while
flagrant and alive

Yeah well and if I do happen to gain access to the world of light, to essential being, what if it scares the shit out of me? “What world?” the poet quite reasonably asks. The mind has mountains, says Gerard Manley Hopkins, and it also has light years in it (“stars scattered as far as the I”), and maybe we don’t want to know our own capacities, our deepest and most distant possibilities. What will access to essences “shake free”?

For every icon of flagrant aliveness, there’s this:

Then what of night
of hours’ unpredicated bad luck and the rot
it clings to
fathomless on the far side in winter dark

Hey shadow world when a thing comes back
comes back unseen but felt and no longer itself
what then
what silver world mirrors tarnished lenses
what fortune what fate
and the forms not themselves but only itself the sky
by water and wind shaken
I am born in silvered dark

Maybe all I really evoke when I boldly gain access to awe is the felt disappearance of me from the world, my transformation from a living human form to a thing, an object. The forms not themselves but only itself. I am earthy material; for the moment life is breathed into me; but I am ultimately earthy material only. What I live in this life is not really light but dark occasionally “silvered” by shafts of light.

between the hypostatic scenes of breathing
and becoming the thing I see
are they not the same

You got your basic death anxiety here, babe; courage to poke into the truth is courage to reckon with your ultimate permanent thinginess.

So like Moritz Gizzi will spend the rest of the poem remarking upon the shabby unreadable enigma of the material world, a world whose (again post-industrial) rusting speaks of some once-vibrant, once-lofty world-infancy from which the poet has fallen away.

Things don’t look good on the street today
beside a tower in a rusting lot
one is a condition the other mystery
even this afternoon light so kind and nourishing
a towering absence vibrating air

The tower is an object, part of our conditioned, transitive (see his first stanza; he’s after the intransitive) world; our “rusting lot” (our fortune, our fate, is to rust) is an unconditional mystery, one particularly hard to fathom and tolerate given the flagrant and alive afternoon daisy, not to mention whatever invisible force is making the afternoon light so glorious. How can we handle this impossible duality?

Shake and I see pots from old shake
and I see cities anew
I see robes shake I see desert
I see the farthing in us all the ghost of day
the day inside night as tones decay
and border air
it is the old songs and the present wind I sing
and say I love the unknown sound in a word

Shake yourself into the truth and you see the truth: One’s own transient, insubstantial being, everyone’s brief afternoon (the farthing in us all the ghost of day). So okay, the poet will try to sing both: the old songs and the present wind; and meanwhile why not rest, as the Buddhists say, in the mystery? Why not – instead of restless hypostasis-seeking – find a way to love the unknown sound?

Okay, and finally la mama:

Mother where from did you leave me on the sleeve
of a dying word
of impish laughter in the midst my joy
I compel and confess open form
my cracked hinged picture doubled

I can’t remember now if I made a pact with the devil
when I was young
when I was high
on a sidewalk I hear “buy a sweatshirt?” and think
buy a shirt from the sweat of children
hell
I’m just taking a walk in the sun in a poem
and this sound
caught in the most recent coup

Somewhat querulous question, that. But anyway the target here would be the speaker’s mother, because she gave him life into this weird world of joy and dying, this place where the poet does indeed find the courage to confess, openly, his hopeless entanglement in blissful being and hideous anticipatory thinginess.

The specific, daily place where the poet’s truest consciousness resides is in a kind of lifelong auditory sensitivity to the way in which the tragic night-ghost-decay truth sidles – it’s a humane tolerable pun-like way – into the poet’s high-noon walk. (The hell of the sweat of children.)