Rape, rape, rape, go the fraternities; and now some of the complainants are coming out from anonymity, naming themselves (Wesleyan’s latest allegedly raped student is Cabri Chamberlin) and speaking directly to the media. That can be very compelling. A young woman telling her story can be very difficult for a frat to go up against in the court of public opinion.

And there have been two recent frat rapes at Wesleyan! Plus one almost-rape!! (Scroll down to this long article’s next to last paragraph.) This definitely goes against the school’s rep as a sylvan progressive civilized sort of place… People are saying that Wesleyan’s going to go the way of some other schools and shut down its fraternity system.

To which UD says: ATTENTION Dartmouth College Admissions Committee: HOLD ONTO YOUR HATS. For those east coasters for whom Zoo Mass simply won’t do – class-wise – you are kind of it now, if you know what I mean… The other Ivies either don’t feature your famous “intoxicating nihilism,” or they try and fail. No one does it like Dartmouth, and word’s getting out, especially after that Rolling Stone piece and all. An avalanche of applications for admission is on its way!

… who cynically and with arrant disregard recruit violent and troubled men to their campuses and then make them sports heroes until they kill someone… UD is fascinated by the ways these universities do damage control. It’s especially intriguing to watch, er, repeat offenders deal with the body count.

Take nice little University of Maine. A pleasant inoffensive sort of place, except that their coaches are really unlucky in love. Jovan Belcher, and now “[Zedric] Joseph is the second former UMaine football player in just over a year to be linked to a murder.” Yes, two in a row, and of course in both cases there was evidence – in their pre-college past, and in their college behavior – that they were dangerous people. But, you know, exposing your undergraduates to people like Belcher and Joseph is all part of the game. Students at the University of Nebraska knew that risking standing in a line behind Richie Incognito was the price you paid for winning games. It’s all part of winning games.

But okay let’s see how you mop up the mess if you’re U Maine. First, as Deadspin’s Sean Newell points out, you take a page from Joseph Stalin’s book and unperson him. You just rub him out. You literally – as Yeshiva did with trustee Bernard Madoff – erase him from all real and virtual university surfaces. What… Belcher? Who…?

Almost one year to the day after he shot and killed his girlfriend before driving to the Kansas City Chiefs’ facility where he shot and killed himself in front of his coach and general manager, Jovan Belcher is no longer on the banner.

You know, the banner. The BIG banner that hangs in U Maine stadium boasting about their guys now in the NFL.

Newell then notes some of the guys still on the banner:

… Maine and Steelers lineman Justin Strzelczyk … drove 15 miles of a 40-mile high speed chase on three wheels, flipping off and throwing beer bottles at state troopers along the way. The chase, which began because of a hit and run, ended when he sped into oncoming traffic and collided head-on with a tanker, killing him instantly.

Strzelczyk, 6 feet 6 inches and 300 pounds, was a monstrous presence on the Steelers’ offensive line from 1990-98. He was known for his friendly, banjo-playing spirit and gluttony for combat. He spiraled downward after retirement, however, enduring a divorce and dabbling with steroid-like substances, and soon before his death complained of depression and hearing voices from what he called “the evil ones.”

It was later determined Strzelczyk’s showed signs of CTE.

Among the less-troubled on the banner are Stephen Cooper, Lofa Tatupu and Daren Stone. Cooper, a former San Diego Charger, was found holding 1,000 anabolic steroid pills during a traffic stop while at UMaine. He was later suspended four games by the NFL when he tested positive for ephedra. Both Lofa Tatupu and Daren Stone had their own minor scrapes with the law and were charged with DUIs.

The other classic response ingredients (this goes on at all schools where this sort of thing happens) involve focusing on

1. the shock and anguish of the coaches (How could anyone have seen this coming? They were like sons to me. etc.)

2. the tragic loss to the team’s win record (Defense is going to have trouble recovering from this absence from the lineup…)

3. the tragic nature of life in general (the school’s most articulate and sad-faced administrator blinks in front of the cameras and talks of the essential wounded enigma of being as such)

4. the remarkable compassion and competence of the school’s mental health professionals as they rush to deal with traumatized students

5. the way this has made the school a stronger place by bringing us all together through adversity.

Yes, yes, that’s how it’s gone, and no one’s surprised that John Junker, someone affiliated with universities and their use of public money, is now routinely referred to as a “kingpin.”

Criminal, university-affiliated, public money gangs being what they are, we shouldn’t expect only game fixing, gun violence, DUIs, theft of public funds for running decades-long pretend-class scams, and all the other low-level stuff to be the only news we get out of big-time university sports in America, the place where Richie Incognito got his education. We should also expect, at the highest level, at the level of the most powerful men in college football, to hear about bribing politicians, breaking campaign finance laws, diverting millions of dollars of public funds for strip clubs and all that other sex stuff that Nevin Shapiro made even more famous than it already was. As all of these guys will explain to you if you’ll only sit down and listen, there’s a certain culture associated with university football, see… A certain world that’s being admitted to the country’s universities… And coaches and boosters and university presidents (here’s looking at you, Graham Spanier) have to play to it.

Junker will go to jail for a bit, but don’t make no nevermind.

“There’s something about [the] society [of other people] and useful short-term distractions that takes your mind off [the fear of death],” remarks Julian Barnes, author of a whole book about the fear of death.

UD thinks that the people of Allen, Texas have much to teach us in this regard, having produced a gigantic, expensive, communal, engrossing distraction in their sixty million dollar high school football stadium that, two years after construction, has had to be shut down because of structural flaws.

One needs to look past the cruel verdict by one observer (see my headline) in this article’s comment thread and instead appreciate – even marvel at – the way an entire town has figured out how to do an end run around the whole timor mortis conturbat me thing by creating a massive unsound edifice around which the town will be able to rally and fight and pray for decades to come.

************

Centuries from now The Allen Stadium will have become the state’s sphinx, its obelisk, its omphalos, its ultima thule, around which, in seasonal rituals, people will gather and chant Who built this? Why?

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UD thanks John.

Fine Arts and Rat Feces at Louisiana State University.

… When the ceramics studio ceiling crashed into a large sink that just about every student in the building uses, people around campus started paying attention to the [Studio Arts] building’s long list of issues. Problems with the building, which was constructed in 1924, date back much further and are not limited to that one studio.

One of students’ biggest concerns is lead paint and asbestos they have identified throughout the building using home test kits.

… There is exposed wiring throughout the building, some of which is near students’ lockers in the main hallway. When the ceiling leaks — which it often does in many places — students fear the mix of electricity and water and avoid going to their lockers.

Restrooms are not cleaned regularly and rat feces often appear throughout the building, [a student] said.

“I haven’t seen Facility Services in here until the ceiling collapsed,” she said. “Once we started the protest stuff, then we started seeing them here and there. … We’re only starting to get attention now that we’re speaking out about it.”

… At various times, the Studio Arts Building has been home to squirrels, rats, a raccoon and during summer 2013, a homeless man, she said.

“The shabbiness draws random people to it,” [a student] said.

… [On the up side, the building is] brimming with the kind of quirkiness that only art students could come up with… Someone drew the outline of a house around a hole in a wall where a rat that students named Leroy once lived.

Go, Rats! I mean, Tigers.

One hell of an all-American headline.

A great obituary from UD‘s summer stomping grounds, the beaches of Delaware.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Then this letter, from Richard Joel, president of junk status Yeshiva University, is for you. Appreciate its thoroughness, candor, and clarity about that school’s calamitous situation. Appreciate its reality-based approach to the disaster Joel and his trustees – past and present – have brought upon the school.

Where else but at never-a-dull-moment FAMU (put that acronym in my search engine for many earlier posts about FAMU’s homicidal marching band, its other high-level thieves, etc.) would the dean be in jail for stealing tens of thousands of dollars from students?

This post’s title headlined some articles about this event that were published earlier today. He’s now the former dean.

UD has said it before and she says it again: There are few nuttier locations in this country than Penn State’s Happy Valley.

… Chicago State University, bankrolled almost exclusively by taxpayers (it has vanishingly few students, and is losing them at a rate of about 20% a year, so it’s certainly not getting much in tuition), stands out. I guess it stands out because it’s a university, and most of us continue to assume that universities have more dignity or whatever than other public institutions.

It may be because of this moral/emotional over-investment of ours that a Chicago judge and jury have recently come down so very hard on outrageously corrupt and inept CSU. As Jodi Cohen reports, having found in favor of a whistle blower –

[James Crowley was] awarded $2 million in punitive damages and $480,000 in back pay after a jury decided last month that he was fired in retaliation for reporting alleged misconduct by university president Wayne Watson and other top officials.

– the judge has now decided to increase Crowley’s award.

Circuit Court Judge James McCarthy decided to double Crowley’s back pay, as allowed under state law. Crowley had been earning $120,000 a year when he was fired. McCarthy also Tuesday ordered Chicago State to pay $60,000 in interest on the back pay. That brings the total payout to just more than $3 million.

The judge will rule following a hearing set for May on whether Chicago State should also pay Crowley’s attorney’s fees, and on terms of reemployment.

“It is quite clear from the verdict that Mr. Crowley is to be given his employment back,” the judge said.

The term slam dunk comes to mind. The sentence Someone is really really pissed. comes to mind.

Yet why (as UD has asked more than once before on this blog) does CSU exist? Why has it not been folded into another university? Why has it not been shut down? CSU is as much of a scandalous tax syphon as any for-profit school-for-scandal.

… poll? What’s its secret?

Well, it’s a matter of priorities. Look at its public university system.

[I]t’s hard to find $900 million for a 60,000-seat domed college football stadium for a program that has had a winning record once in the last 13 years and resorted to giving away tickets for free to get people to go to its last home opener.

Sure it’s hard. Sure! No one ever said life was easy. But the state of Nevada knows what matters, and UD is sure it will devote millions of dollars to this initiative.

And anyway you can’t say Nevada students don’t care about basketball! The other night, UNLV’s student body president got so excited he got thrown out of a game!!

“I was the leader of our group,” said [Mark] Ciavola, a 39-year-old political science major and the campaign manager for Nevada Rep. Joe Heck, R-Las Vegas.

“If you feel you have to escort someone out, you escort the leader, but multiple people on both sides were yelling and gesturing,” he said. “None of the [University of Nevada, Reno] fans were ejected for throwing things at us, but perhaps no one saw that.”

More detail from Ciavola:

… Ciavola had tried to lead a group of about 50 UNLV fans around the perimeter of the court to chant “Rebels,” something he had done at last year’s game between the two teams.

He said they were stopped by a security guard or police officer who told them to return to the bleachers or they all would be thrown out of the game.

‘We went back to our seats, but as UNR starting tying up the game things really got heated and the entire stadium started chanting “F— the Rebels,’” Ciavola said. “The section in front of us was flipping us off and throwing things at us – a water bottle and crushed up paper — and finally we gestured back at them.”

A paper claiming to have found a simple way to turn mature cells back into stem cells (via a process called STAP) has now been disavowed by one of its co-authors. Almost from the moment it was published, questions were raised about the exact nature of the cells used, about duplication of images, about plagiarism, and about reproducibility.

It will almost certainly be retracted.

At Stanford the nasty aroma
Wafting westward from Mathew Martoma
Has become so intense
That it seemed to make sense
To decide to revoke his diploma.

… on it.

More broadly and less literally, Gillian Clarke, the national poet of Wales, describes her own currency:

If money were water, the contents of my wallet might have flowed through pure streams and filthy gutters, might be guilty, bloodstained, diseased. The pesos passed through the fingers of drug dealers and gunmen, maybe. The cheque could be traced from its innocent signatory back through bank, investor, to hedge funds, futures, skulduggery, I am sure. They are just paper promises, earned for writing, for reading, for teaching poetry. The coins we throw into the charity box have passed through the hands of saints and thieves, without a doubt.

Clarke’s capsule history of filthy lucre is part of an argument she’s making against some of the finalists in a poetry contest dropping out of consideration when they discovered the prize money came from a hedge fund.

Broadening out yet more the problem some people have with money, Philip Larkin writes that money is filthy because it “sings” the long human history of twisted compulsion, acquisitiveness, and grubbiness… Money is about our sad, grandiose, never fulfillable, and often intensely destructive dreams…

I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down
From long french windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

Spartan, dour Larkin would perhaps have agreed with spartan, dour Christopher Lasch that “Luxury is morally repugnant,” that in democracies there should be “a moral condemnation of great wealth.”

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So okay. But universities – like everyone and everything else – still need money, and most people believe that educating people and making research possible are good uses of it. That’s why universities get amazing tax breaks; but, again, the discomfort about immense accumulation and/or inappropriate use of university money is also why many people think continued tax breaks for multi-billionaire schools like Harvard and Princeton are wrong. It’s why some people are unhappy when billionaire alumni choose to direct hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to these same multi-billionaire schools. As Lasch suggests (other political theorists, like Michael Sandel, seem to agree), there’s something icky – something positively undemocratic – about grotesque huge personal fortunes and – in the case of universities – about grotesquely huge endowments.

And then there’s the problem of where university dollars come from. Apartheid South Africa was an overwhelmingly uncontroversial sort of divestment target, involving too many traces of cocaine, if you will, for many people to accept.

More subtle is the provenance of dollars from individuals like the Koch brothers, who hold libertarian, Tea Party-esque social and political views many people find repellent.

Catholic University has just accepted a million dollars from the Kochs to study that elusive and evanescent thing, “principled entrepreneurship.” A vocal group of Catholics has protested the gift, citing “the Kochs’s opposition to the expansion of Medicaid, hostility to public unions, and support for global warming denialists,” and pointing to the current Pope’s excoriation of “unfettered capitalism.”

Virtually all popes, far as I know, rail against unfettered capitalism, so that one (I’m sure Catholic U. has in the past taken lots of money from unfettered capitalists) doesn’t really fly; and libertarianism is certainly a respectable political position… Hell, all of the Koch’s positions, while maybe not smelling like a rose, are within the bounds of civil discourse.

You’re on safer ground when, as with apartheid, you look at what people and institutions actually do. So, for instance, when a Koch-funded group offered, a few years ago, to fund two economics professorships at Florida State University on the condition that people from the Koch-funded group get veto power over the appointments (the professors had to be sufficiently free-market and anti-regulatory in their orientation), a clear line was crossed. Similarly, also at FSU, “BB&T, the bank holding company, funds an ethics course on the condition that Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’ be required reading.”

These two seem pretty obvious examples of outside groups using their money to influence what goes on in the classroom.