… The sort of stories that rise above all other stories and become master narratives…
The University of Virginia gang rape story, which riveted national attention onto issues of alcohol, fraternities, and sexual violence on campus, broke only a few days ago; and now an Ohio State football player who had been complaining about the psychological effects of his sports-related concussions has been found dead in a dumpster behind his apartment building. He had shot himself.
The news coverage of this suicide has been gigantic. News coverage of the UVa rape has also been gigantic. Why?
UD has argued that the particular gang rape described in Rolling Stone magazine took off in the media because of that publication’s high profile, and because the article was extremely well-written, putting the reader at the scene with great immediacy, and in this way heightening everyone’s sense of the intimately vile and lurid nature of that form of assault. It also took off because of the great distance between the public perception of venerable honorable well-bred UVa and the reality of rapist-alcoholic UVa. The UVa gang rape has become the paradigmatic university rape story; its details are so grotesque, the damage done to its victim so grievous, that huge numbers of people know about it, make reference to it, understand the crime of rape through it.
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Similarly, the pitiable tale of Kosta Karageorge is, even in its first few hours (it just broke), becoming iconic of college football. As with the Rolling Stone piece, this is for a number of reasons.
Like the UVa story, it exhibits striking irony. This football hero’s nightmare end, his act of unimaginable despair and self-hatred, happened in the midst of football season – a time of perpetually-renewed optimism and communal excitement. Literally at the same time as Ohio State fans were rocking in their seats, a missing player from the team was dressing all in black, walking to a dumpster, climbing into it, and shooting himself to death.
So we have not only this irony, this sardonic and sickening counterpoint to the happy game-day narrative, but we have it in real time. That drama is one of the reasons why this story will carry farther than the several other CTE-related suicides we’ve been reading about.
Karageorge’s story is also about a very young man, and most of the CTE stories so far have been about older, retired players.
Defenders of football’s safety will point out that most of Karageorge’s college athletic career was about wrestling, not football. That’s true. But he has obviously been playing – practicing – football for some time in order to qualify for the team. Could the combined effects of wrestling and football smackdowns have damaged his brain?
Only the results of his autopsy will reveal whether Karageorge had chronic traumatic encephalopathy. If he did, his story will assume even more archetypal significance.
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Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, with its battered denizens of the ashbin, has covered some of this territory.
Readers tend to think the play is ridiculous. Outrageous. Impossible.
… is that it flushes out comrades in arms — people like the eminent sociologist John Shelton Reed, a man who was there (extremely well-positioned, in fact, at the now-notorious University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) long before UD stumbled onto the corrupt university athletics scene. Long before UD began wondering what to do about coach salaries, perks, and buyouts bankrupting schools, for instance, Reed was on the case, as in a 1997 Wall Street Journal piece, where he wonders why professors don’t run amateur student/athlete sports:
It shouldn’t be hard to find professors — or to recruit “professors” — willing to work with the varsity teams. This would be in addition to their regular teaching loads, of course, and there’d be no extra pay — no more than for faculty members who work with other student organizations.
And there’d have to be restrictions on outside income. Just as we hold athletes to higher standards than other students, so we’d have to expect more of their coaches than of other faculty members. If we’re really going to keep college athletics amateur, student-athletes should be served by “teacher-coaches.” Better yet, let’s not call them coaches at all. Let’s call them “faculty advisers.”
Only trouble is, how do you get rid of a losing coach if he has tenure?
Reed sent me another “golden oldie,” as he called it, this one from way back in 1987. It’s an essay in which he evokes the special something in the air down south during football season.
Like the other piece, it’s mainly about farcical levels of corruption down those parts when it comes to keeping hopeless students academically eligible, dealing with team criminality, etc., etc.
But it’s also got some great local details:
People used to alter the road signs around here to read things like “Interstate 85/Wake Forest 0.”
And it ends with words of wisdom:
For a college or university, assimilating semi-professional athletics is like building a perpetual-motion machine: some do better than others; but the undertaking is impossible in the first place.
With incredulity? Or because he was so drunk everything made him laugh?
Anyway. Apparently you can do things like this in FSU’s Tallahassee, but it’s harder in Orlando.
Galvin must have known it’d be harder, because he offered not merely a ticket to see amazing Central Florida University play football. He offered season tickets.
… has died.
Here’s Part One, and here’s Part Two, of a close reading UD did of his poem My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer.
UD likes her way of putting it.
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San Diego State University also scored a great headline in England’s Independent newspaper:
WORLD’S WORST HUMANS
WAVE DILDOS AT
ANTI-RAPE PROTESTERS
Way to go, SDSU! This is generating even more publicity than your six-fraternity drug cartel.
The local paper goes there.
For a long time, UD went with stupidity as an explanation, because business-model party schools like San Diego State University have to admit a lot of stupid people. Then – for similar party school reasons – UD went with wasted, because being drunk certainly helps make it possible for men to hurl eggs and dildos at women …
(By the way: Remember what UD told you about a similar civil war at the University of Virginia, where frat boys are destroying anti-violence exhibits and, when asked to stop, loudly threatening the people asking them to stop? As with San Diego State, don’t expect the pro-rape forces to surrender without a fight. And those SDSU frats don’t fool around: The last DEA raid on them uncovered a number of guns, plus an impressive cash reserve. )
But it’s occurred to her that the editorial board of U-T San Diego is probably right: Group psychosis looks most plausible.
Let’s put it this way: Drug-running, gang-banging, eat-my-puke pledging fraternities are tailored to appeal to some of America’s most promising sociopaths-in-training. If you want to understand these people, read the chapter in The Story of O when O is brought to a become-a-slave sorority, and instantly goes from a psychopathic masochist to a psychopathic sadist.
UD wouldn’t think of denying that the personal traits honed in some of America’s highest-profile fraternities can be traded up to a career at Goldman Sachs. And, uh, Lehman Brothers…? She understands why predatory capitalism is called predatory capitalism. She sees perfectly well the through-line between secretive all-male sado-masochistic loyalty and this blessed bountiful land.
She just wonders why this form of social interaction dominates so many of our universities.
It hasn’t been a great few weeks for [University of Tennessee] athletics. Between NCAA investigations, resignations, suspensions and rape allegations, the news cycle has been overwhelmingly negative. Such an environment has made it easy to forget the many positives surrounding Tennessee athletics. So, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, here are five reasons Vol fans should be thankful.
Unlike George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, all American university campuses know the truth about big-time athletics. They know precisely the difference between truth and illusion.
They have no illusions that big-time athletes are students. Watch the parade of prevaricators at the University of North Carolina who are shocked – shocked! – to find that academic fraud is going on there. We know they’re lying; they know they’re lying. It’s all very strange.
Yet on it goes. As his school goes the way of virtually all big-time sports schools, a University of Michigan regent offers an if/then:
If [academics and big-time athletics] can’t coexist, then intercollegiate athletics is truly an illusion.”
Yes, if and only if… Because… uh… We haven’t settled the question! Not enough data. Votes aren’t yet all counted.
But while you’re counting them, don’t forget that where academic fraud is concerned, Michigan’s tally is below Chapel Hill:
[In 2008,] Prof. John Hagen … was accused of assisting student-athletes in maintaining eligibility by teaching independent study courses that were well below University standards of academic rigor. In Hagen’s courses, the student-athletes had an average GPA of 3.62, whereas their average in other classes was a 2.57. Some students were found to have spent only 15 minutes with Hagen every two weeks, but earned up to four credits for the class. Hagen taught 294 independent studies courses from Fall 2004 to Fall 2007, 251 of which were to student-athletes. After months of investigation, the allegations were dropped…
Dropped! Dropped! Even Chapel Hill couldn’t find a way to drop them.
Truth or illusion. These people feel compelled to carry on as though we’re too stupid to see the difference. They of course see the difference all too clearly. They just don’t give a shit.
Universities don’t get much worse than San Diego State, an epicenter of the drug trade, a money-hemorraghing sports joke, and a school run (though considering what goes down there, is anyone actually running it?) by a president whose greed so outraged the local community that legislators moved toward imposing mandatory salary caps on executive pay there.
And now, with the eyes of America on the issue of rape on campus, SDSU’s fraternities, apparently looking for something to do since an unusually big drug raid two years ago shut down their main activity, have decided that their contribution to the crisis will be assaulting women and pitching dildos.
Where are you, President Hirshman? The local suckers pay you almost half a million dollars to do something. But what is that thing?
Drugs and violence. Violence and drugs. If you take away your students’ drugs, they turn to violence. (“[S]even students have reported being raped at SDSU this year, one about 24 hours after a protest last Friday night against sexism and sexual violence.”) For some of your students, those are apparently the only two behavioral options.
UD says, Maybe it would be safer to give them back the drugs.
Snow and then sun,
snow again and then
sun again, on this
beautiful Friday
after Thanksgiving.
Taken just now on
UD‘s deck, her snow-
capped radishes
gleaming in the sun.
In college, he will learn he is still different and be treated as such. He may live in an athlete only dorm and receive special food, tutoring services, and attention. Many colleges will give him credits for classes he never took and go to great lengths to find him instructors who are athlete friendly. In fact, if you are the rare breed of athlete who is academically smart, you will anger your coach when your academics interfere with training, practice, or games.
Replete is the word I find,
These days, most often in mind.
I sit down with family to eat.
There it is again: Replete.
… tell a high-level Washington DC gathering of university administrators (they were there to talk about the, er, problem of college athletics) that the solution was easy: “Make athletic directors and coaches professors.”
UD, from her seat at the back of the room, silently applauded the man on his genius. “Yes,” she thought. “He has understood that if you wave a wand and declare the athletic staff professors, you destroy any ability the university has to defend itself as anything other than a sports team. There’s no longer an athletic side and an academic side; there’s no longer any protest from professors that too much of the budget goes to athletics; there’s no longer any concept of academic integrity that might be corrupted by athletics. It’s the final triumph of athletics over academics.”
This was years ago – before the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill went this man’s idea one better and somehow allowed an administrator who essentially worked for the athletics department to be a professor (she didn’t teach, but Deborah Crowder acted as a professor in almost every other way), and before Youngstown State University made a tarnished football coach its president. These were positive trends from the genius’s point of view, but then Penn State came along, and a lot of people seem to have decided that a university run in significant ways by its football team was not a good idea. So that was a setback.
You see these power tensions (does athletics run the school? should it?) at a school so academically bad that there shouldn’t be any sports program there at all: Florida A&M. Yet FAMU has so powerful a sports program (and sports ethos – for decades the university looked the other way while its untouchably powerful marching band hazed members to within an inch of their lives — and then last year the university kept looking the other way while the band did succeed in actually killing a member) that the trustees are in the humiliating position of begging the president to fire an athletics director they can’t fire. The AD is brand new; the president is brand new — FAMU has had to turn over a lot of new leaves in the wake of the bad publicity its manslaughtering marching band brought. Continues to bring, as multiple manslaughter trials (one person has already been found guilty) proceed.
And now, while that beleaguered school’s trustees ought to be talking about how to teach the few students who continue to apply to FAMU, they’re spending all their time talking about the sports program. No one goes to the games; the new AD is fucking up left and right; the athletics budget is so huge it’s killing what’s left of the school… and not only that, but…
[Trustee Rufus] Montgomery also was critical of correspondence coming out of the athletics department to the trustees, saying the emails contained numerous spelling and grammar errors.
“It’s ridiculous. It’s embarrassing,” Montgomery said. “Please don’t let this happen again with athletics.”
But how are you going to keep it from happening? The only solution will cost the school more money in its athletics budget. They’re going to have to hire someone to rewrite the correspondence.
FAMU is a really interesting case right now. Like a lot of universities, it has for decades acted on the belief that a big noisy sports program is the front porch of the university. What do you do when the sports program at your school turns out to be the university’s front funeral parlor?
There’s no question that a program that beats people to death puts a damper on things. Fewer students apply. Very few students go to games. You’re losing so much sports revenue that you increase tuition big time, which turns off yet more applicants.
FAMU, UD thinks, could go either way. It could go the way of the genius and athleticize the whole school. Make the new AD the provost; keep pouring money into the football program, etc. Or it could suspend all or part of its athletics program and concentrate on academics.
You and I know which one it’ll be.
Here’s an example, from a Georgetown University senior who argues in the school paper (the piece has now been taken down) (the piece seems to have been put back up) that his recent mugging by gunpoint in Georgetown was a product of economic disparities.
Who am I to stand from my perch of privilege, surrounded by million-dollar homes and paying for a $60,000 education, to condemn these young men as ‘thugs?’ … It’s precisely this kind of ‘otherization’ that fuels the problem …
As young people, we need to devote real energy to solving what are collective challenges. Until we do so, we should get comfortable with sporadic muggings and break-ins. I can hardly blame [the muggers]. The cards are all in our hands, and we’re not playing them.
Amid this clutch of cliches, a single word really stands out – otherization.
The writer has enhanced this already lovely term by growing quotation marks for it.
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The conservative press is having lots of fun with this student’s effort to understand his mugger. SOS, as always, is more concerned with the lamentable prose he has brought to his claims, the learned raid on the articulate (to mess with TS Eliot a bit) this writing represents.
Especially if you’re going to argue something unpopular (people in our cities who stick guns in our faces and force us to the ground at night in order to take all of our goods should be objects of sympathy), you need your writing to be really good. In this particular case, you somehow need your words to convey your grasp of the complexity of the problem of crime, and your understanding that most of your readers aren’t going to agree with your position on it, even as you defend your non-standard take. Instead, this writing seems to flaunt the superior morality of the writer, a person able to rise above the lowly rage and terror the rest of us are likely to have felt in his situation. SOS knows he didn’t mean to convey this, but precisely the use of super-abstract jargon like otherization suggests a weirdly disengaged, hyper-theoretical disposition …
