Kevin Carey lifts discussion of jock school University of North Carolina Chapel Hill to the higher, existential level that was always implicit in nihilistic events there.

Like all universities, particularly those with prestige, [UNC] depends on the idea that it actually exists…

Yes. But this is postmodern America, and the school might be a simulacrum. Lots of universities – all the online ones – are simulacra.

The writing that follows Carey’s words about the non-existence of UNC is so strong that I would like to quote it in its entirety.

UNC Chapel Hill is not a coherent undergraduate institution. It’s a holding company that provides shared marketing, finance, and physical plant services for a group of autonomous departments, which are in turn holding companies for autonomous scholars who teach as they please. This is the only possible explanation for the years-long, wholly undetected operation of the African and Afro-American Studies Department credit fraud scam. Or, rather, it’s the only possible explanation other than a huge, organization-wide conspiracy in which the university administration, department, and football team colluded to hand out fake grades to hundreds of athletes.

The university, of course, vehemently denies that anything resembling the latter scenario is true. Despite damning emails between [Julius] Nyang’oro and the athletic department, UNC is desperately selling the story that the entire credit fraud operation was the work of just two people–Nyang’oro and an assistant–and involved no athletic department wrongdoing of any kind. That’s because while academic misconduct gets you nothing more than a wrist-slap from your accreditor and [a] year of sad/absurd “monitoring” in which the university administration randomly checks classes to make sure they actually exist, athletic misconduct can cost the university things it actually cares about, like money, bowl appearances, and athletic scholarships.

In other words, the only way for UNC administrators to avoid blame for gross academic misconduct is to admit that academic conduct was never their concern.

Meanwhile, the football team must be saved because the intense tribal loyalty generated by big-time sports is one of the chief mechanisms employed by universities to create the illusion that they exist. I’ve lived in Chapel Hill and experienced the closest thing to full-scale Dionysian revelry one is likely to find in modern America, on Franklin Street after the men’s basketball team won it all. It was thrilling. It felt like we were one people, all of us, conquerors. But it was also an illusion (I wasn’t a student at the time), a false consciousness manufactured by the university to conceal its non-existence as an academic institution.

The cynicism and dishonesty inherent to that seep into the cracks of university life, occasionally as outright criminality but far more often as mediocrity and simple indifference. If Julius Nyang’oro had simply bothered to show up in a room on campus from time to time, say something–anything–to some “student” athletes, and hand out a bunch of A-minuses, he never would have been caught. In the modern non-university, he wouldn’t even have been doing something wrong.

Rush University medical center has on its faculty Alan Hirsch, creator of a magic powder of interest to the Federal Trade Commission.

Pish posh. The man is currently the highest-profile trustee of one of this nation’s great universities. How dare you say he deserves prison.

[Interviewer] – [T]he accusation is that this goes back as many as 200 classes into the 1990s and that this department was being used to inflate athletes’ grades. But at this point, has there been any clear connection made between this department, this professor and higher-ups in the athletic department?

[News and Observer Reporter] – No. There haven’t been. The connections have been with the tutoring program for athletes. We obtained, you know, correspondence that showed that the tutoring program, you know, they knew that these classes weren’t meeting.

See how we all have to wait and pretend to be idiots until events force the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill to admit the full conspiracy? You know what UD would like to see, just for the fun of it? An interview with UNC trustee and official trustee sports booster Dwight Stone. Dwight heads The Educational Foundation, aka Ram’s Club, and UD‘d love to ask him about what he’s been ramming through that organization … But Dwight’s the top and the tutoring program is the bottom, and it’ll be quite a while, and many bureaucratic layers, before we get to what the most responsible body of all – the board of trustees – was doing while the University of North Carolina went from a university to a punch line.

I speculated in this earlier post about the mysterious death, in custody, of a young Yale professor. He’d gotten violent with police (they had come to his house because of domestic violence) and had sustained a mild injury in the scuffle. He was then put in jail for the night. During the night he died, and not by suicide.

The wound sounded too small to have done him in. What then?

Samuel See was only 34, but the medical examiner has concluded that he had had a small heart attack a few days before his arrest; See also had meth in him. He died of “acute methamphetamine and amphetamine intoxication with recent myocardial infarct.” Meth is real bad for your heart. I’m going to assume the heart attack was meth-related.

So when I say cascade I mean a bunch of things seem to have conspired to kill him:

1. the heart attack;

2. the mental as well as additional physical trauma from the domestic violence/arrest violence;

3. being incarcerated and therefore not having his health and welfare closely monitored.

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UPDATE from the Yale Daily News: Background on See’s harrowing personal problems.

… (it’s on tomorrow night) features a great photo of Brown University’s most high-profile trustee, Steven Cohen. He’s dressed up as a king who plays golf.

[The SEC’s] pursuit of [Brown University trustee Steven] Cohen has been compared to Captain Ahab’s quest to vanquish the White Whale. Preet Bharara’s investigation into insider trading in the hedge-fund industry has already led to the convictions of former Galleon Group founder [and high-profile University of Pennsylvania donor] Raj Rajaratnam and former Goldman Sachs director and McKinsey managing director Rajat Gupta. Rajaratnam is currently serving an 11-year prison sentence, and last year Gupta was sentenced to two years in prison. Bharara says the U.S. Wall Street insider trading investigation is ongoing.

It’s become quite the cat and mouse game between Brown University’s Steven Cohen and law enforcement. Does someone in Brown’s English department teach Melville? There’s a great opportunity here to spice up the Moby lecture:

So powerful and persistent a metaphor has the Ahab/whale struggle become that we encounter it in the media’s account of our trustee Steve Cohen’s white whale-esque evasion of capture (so far!) by “Ahab” Bharara …

Tomorrow night, Brown has a rare opportunity to model for its students how to become a success in life: Frontline is featuring the university’s highest-profile trustee in a special report titled To Catch a Trader. UD hears echoes of To Catch a Thief in that title, but that’s probably just her.

Longtime readers know that UD has a little house in the wilds of upstate New York. (Here’s the area of the house, in all its glorious back of beyondness.) Not much you’d call an event ever happens there. On the evening of July 4, you can sit in the front field and watch silent fireworks pop over the Catskill range. On other evenings, you can watch galaxies and satellites and shooting stars in a true dark sky.

Soon, maybe, you’ll be able to see and hear drones.

The new central NY drone test area doesn’t yet reach as far south as our place; but it’s not that far, as the drone flies.

UD understands that “all the pieces appear to be lining up for the eventual introduction of routine aerial surveillance in American life, a development that would profoundly change the character of public life in the United States.” She is in fact very interested (as is her hero, Don DeLillo) in the fate of privacy generally in postmodern America. She’s old-fashioned enough to find it strange, thinking of herself stepping onto the side deck of her country house of a morning and looking up at a little whirlygig that might be transmitting to Fort Drum the number of chips in her chocolate chip scone.

God knows I’m a good target. There’s nobody else around – just Les UDs on the top of their hill, in their house at the end of a driveway edged by evergreens planted by our long-ago neighbor Wojciech Fangor. (“At the beginning of the ’50s, he started to work with architects such as Stanislaw Zamecznik, Oskar Hansen, Zbigniew Ichnatowicz and Jerzy Sołtan.”)

Les UDs hope to be there in August. Maybe it’ll be The Summer of the Drones.

Why does Yale need to accumulate $20.8 billion?

Things like the Constance Bagley story are one reason. A contract-to-contract business school professor who’s been canned (she was apparently told she’d get another five year appointment if she did okay, and she seems to have done okay) has sued the school and three professors for age and gender discrimination. She’s an impressive person, apparently a good teacher and scholar, and she’ll probably force a large settlement out of the place.

But Yale (which has weathered very high-profile sexual misconduct problems lately) can afford such suits because of that massive endowment.

The bottom line is that whatever programs see themselves protecting (a certain intellectual orientation, a certain culture, whatever) by expelling people who don’t fit in can continue to be protected because the school will pay through the nose when those people sue.

The modern American university (and professional) football game attracts fewer and fewer inside-the-stadium people (there’s much research and hand-wringing going on about this at the NCAA), but many schools do continue to attract large crowds of pointlessly milling drunks outside the stadium on game day. They piss in the street, get in fights, and occasionally kill each other — not that different from what some of the frats on campus get up to…

As stadiums empty, we can expect to see an imbalance between inside and out, in which a football game is played in front of no one except the band, and at the same time a massive sodden riot is staged outside the game. Universities with on-campus stadiums will have the most to lose as these marauders make their way onto the quads and into the libraries. The University of Georgia has been dealing with the phenomenon for a number of years now, so perhaps it can give other institutions advice on crowd control.

UD has a category on this blog called Where the Simulacrum Ends, and it chronicles the many ways in which high-tech postmodern American culture is making the nuisance of conducting an actual life – a life outside of one’s bedroom, kitchen, and tinted-window car – a thing of the past.

This category has things in common with another UD category – Online Makeover – because among the education-related de-actualizing she chronicles (here, “actual” means going to public buildings and being with other physical humans) is the transformation of the country’s universities to – well, the strongest current model is Southern New Hampshire University, but pretty much everyone else is bringing up the rear. Public life in general in the United States is disappearing, and universities are no exception.

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And of course that most salient feature of our higher education institutions – their football games – is also undergoing obsolescence. It’s happening in the professional leagues; it’s happening in the university leagues.

Before long, players may be performing in front of empty stands, with those most interested in the game sitting or standing miles away.

Why should anyone care, though? Ticket sales are no longer the main source of revenue for sports leagues. That may be a fair economical point to be made, but is there nothing to say about the toll this may take on integrity of the games played? Does the game gain a feel of becoming more of a simulation that we score through fantasy points as opposed to real-live action taking place right in front of our eyes?

Integrity… integrity… That strange word seems the core of this statement, yet what does it mean? What does it mean to say that a university or a football game has integrity?

… things must indeed be getting dire.

Three of the four clubs in the [professional football] playoffs can’t sell all their tickets…

[E]ven at the college level, where coaches are paid multiples of millions annually, where loyalty to the old school has all but disappeared and the players, no longer satisfied with a free education (such as it might be) and public adulation before they retire to bagging groceries or drawing unemployment checks, are demanding part of the loot at the gate.

You might think that it would occur to the owners, or university presidents who are the owners at the college level, that strangling the golden goose is not a long-term strategy for success.

For a moment there, it looked as if a disgruntled ex-member was going to fuck with Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s kill ratio. But no worries.

We make them a special kind of student, the student-athlete [football player], and tolerate their thuggishness and discount the brains we are knowingly damaging, and then discard them.

… in Jail.”

Brown University’s highest-profile trustee misses it by a hair’s breadth. Whew!