Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear…

… an onion, with layer upon layer…”

And it ain’t just the Torah, as the ultra-orthodox of Israel have discovered.

An ad agency put a billboard up in their neighborhood; the billboard promoted awareness of violence against women.

On that billboard, the agency put the photograph of a woman.

They did this knowing that the nice people in that neighborhood would immediately walk over to the billboard and rip the image of the woman to shreds.

But these men are Torah scholars! These men must know about the onion!

Less than 24 hours after the poster went up, just as [the ad agency] had predicted, the face of the woman in the poster was ripped off … revealing a message that read, “International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women 25.11.03.”

Not to worry, though. I’m sure the haredim will set fires under what remains of the billboard.

[The University of Alabama’s] athletic department gave $6.8 million back to the school’s academic side for 2011-12, according to a university spokesperson. Len Elmore, an attorney, a basketball analyst and a member of the Knight Commission, scoffed at that number.

“What did Alabama generate in revenue with football — $60 million, $70 million, $80 million?” he asked. “So they gave back less than 10 percent?”

… academic vs. athletics spending at American universities.

A newspaper in Alabama has wasted no time in noting that, for instance, “[University of Alabama Birmingham] spent less per student on academics in 2011 than four years earlier, [while its] athletic spending rate per athlete increased 30 percent.”

Hyuk. That’s how y’all stay Alabam’.

And, uh, at least it’s money well spent!

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Even when not factoring in athletic scholarship costs, a pricey category for schools that can rapidly increase, the athletic spending rate was still higher than academic spending. A big factor was the growth in coaching salaries, which increased on average by 54 percent among the five major conferences, compared to 24 percent for all FBS schools.

The database defines academic spending per student as direct and indirect costs associated to educating students. Examples include expenses for instruction, department research, student services, and a portion of academic, institutional and operations support. It does not include spending related to other university activities.

… the Kennedy Center Honors and Christmas in Washington. She’s part of a chorus backing up various performers at both events. And, as ever, UD will provide breathless commentary on her kid’s experiences of rehearsals and events.

Here she is in 2009, showing up at 1:48 (long blond hair, glasses), backing up Sting as he honors Bruce Springsteen.

(I already know who she’s singing with, and who this performer is honoring, at this year’s Kennedy Center Honors, but I’m not allowed to say.)

West Virginia’s national image is shaped more by [West Virginia University’s] football program than anything else. One of my long-time traditions is to take an annual vacation in Las Vegas. For years, if I wore a West Virginia hat or other garb, I’d be greeted with “You guys are good” … During a recent trip, the comments were a virtually unanimous: “You guys are no good.”

There’s no retort to that. They’re right.

Nick Cohen, in the Spectator, is as shocked and embarrassed as the rest of us that leaders at British universities have officially condoned separate but equal.

Universities UK is taking a momentous step, which goes against 150 years of struggle for women’s emancipation… They want to allow segregation at public meetings in publicly financed institutions. Or to put it another way, obscurantist clerics are trying to take over public spaces, and the universities are going along with them… . Rosa Parks … fought back. Naively, I assumed that her battle had been won. Now it looks like we must fight it all over again.

And once again let UD note that the very momentousness of this step, its outrageous offense to universities and to free societies, seems to have been a healthy shock to many people’s systems.

Thank God they’ve got broadcasting standards.

Just a little icing on the cake for the chair of African and Afro-American Studies at once-respectable University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. $12,000 for teaching a summer course that didn’t exist … A summer course for UNC athletes …

UD likes the way the campus paper puts it:

… Julius Nyang’oro has been indicted by a grand jury after a year-and-a-half-long State Bureau of Investigation probe found that he allegedly received $12,000 for teaching a class he never taught.

Yes, someone’s finally gotten around to indicting the guy for teaching a class he never taught. What can Chapel Hill say? The latest chancellor (last one resigned in disgrace) insists everything’s hunky-dory now and they’re back to being a real live university, but it sort of goes beyond embarrassing when a highly compensated chair of a high-profile department might go to jail for obtaining property by false pretenses.

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This article lists all the current sports scandals at clown-school UNC.

Clown-school seem a little over the top? The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill offered “more than 200 confirmed or suspected no-show classes going as far back as the mid-1990s, plus more than 500 grade changes that are either confirmed or suspected to be unauthorized.”

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Put Nyang’oro in my search engine for a walk down memory lane.

The petition to rescind the endorsement of sexual apartheid at British universities is already at seven thousand signatures.

Don’t let the vice-chancellors who issued the endorsement get away with the segregation of women at their universities.

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On some level, this action is so grotesque that UD continues to have trouble believing that it has happened.

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But it has happened. Aux armes.

$350 an hour for copying a clutch of Wikipedia pages: While his students go into debt and fail to get jobs, a Georgetown law professor shows everyone exactly how postmodern simulacral culture works. He gets an expert witness for the prosecution gig and lifts much of his expert report from the web. Look Ma – No hands! And I’m getting $350 an hour at the same time! Are you proud of me?

But now he’s gone and fucked up the case.

“[James] Feinerman’s pervasive plagiarism from this unreliable and error-prone source, which has been rejected by federal courts all over the country, casts serious doubt on the reliability of his entire testimony,” … said [a defense lawyer] in a court filing.

Now you know what Feinerman’s gonna say when he’s finally forced to say something. You know because for years you’ve been reading this blog on the subject of the atelier crowd, right? Feinerman’s gonna blame it on the people he hired to write his expert report for him.

Really, really look Ma no hands.

This sentence could come from a contemporary American commentary on the Kaplanization of our once-great universities; or it could come from a contemporary American commentary on the NFLization of our once-great universities.

This particular sentence happens to be about the sporty arm of the pincer movement; and coming as it does from Texas, of all places, it tells you something. It tells you something about why immense new Adzillatronned university football and basketball stadiums are full of gaping holes during even the biggest games… Why a growing branch of the digital and design industries is now devoted to making an empty silence look like a crowded blow-out on network tv…

The author of this commentary is telling you why people are leaving the American university stadium, but you don’t want to listen because you know that the problems are too basic to fix.

If college football is just entertainment, and entertainment is just a product, and products are created to make money, then I start to feel a little silly investing emotional energy in the A&M – LSU game. More and more the institution carries the distracting odor of a swindle. It’s hard to tell whether I’m the mark or whether I’m in on the grift.

… It’s hard to say what should happen with college football. Paying the players would certainly be fairer, but it would finish off whatever remains of an institution that once meant far more than money. The arcane rules put in place to protect college athletics from market forces have spawned a densely complex culture of cheating, a tradition almost as old as the sport. How long can Universities, bastions of enlightened rational values, continue this charade? What toll is it taking on the wider goals of those institutions?

College football may be a necessary casualty of a freer, more prosperous world. We are all likely to cling to the remains at least a little while longer. Maybe someday (next year?), when the Longhorns’ helmets are sporting a giant BestBuy logo and the program is playing two additional highly-paid exhibition games each year against the likes of Abilene Christian and the fighting Javelinas of A&M Kingsville we’ll finally have to give it up.

Try his first paragraph this way:

If a college education is just entertainment, and entertainment is just a product, and products are created to make money, then I start to feel a little silly investing emotional energy in the game. More and more the institution carries the distracting odor of a swindle. It’s hard to tell whether I’m the mark or whether I’m in on the grift.

Except that in the Kaplanization case, it’s not just emotional energy that’s lacking when the professor is a coached happy face on a jiggly screen full of funny little games. It’s also of course intellectual energy.

Stadium seats will go the same way as classroom seats: Eventually all university activity will jiggle on-screen. Imagine the University of Phoenix with a sports channel.

… “Segregation Now, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever.”

The petition condemning sanctioned gender apartheid in British universities is here.

— the Marshall University football team manages to do it all: It gives an already intellectually-challenged state the gift of a high-profile jock-schlock university; it keeps the school barefoot and poor by extorting immense athletic fees from students; it refuses to allow anyone to examine its finances; and – of course – goes without saying – its team is in and out of jail.

UD likes the delicacy of this lede about the latest detainee:

An off-field incident has cast a bit of a pall over Marshall’s clinching of its first-ever Conference USA division title.

Oh teehee yes to be sure there was a wee incident wasn’t there? What was it… Oh yes one of our running backs beat the shit out of his girlfriend, burst a wine bottle on his bathroom floor with such force it broke the tiles, and then obstructed the police, didn’t he? My goodness. His second arrest in seven months. Dear me. But think of all the pressure he was under for the division title game! Ever heard of blowing off steam?

He’ll be back on the team in no time.

It’s deja vu all over again for NIU as police arrest a freshman storing in his dorm room the same make of weapon another student used five years ago to kill several students during a geology class.

Ah, the Glock, the Glock, gun of choice for campus paranoids…

Not that this guy only kept a Glock. Try body armor and an AR-15 rifle. A freshman can’t be too careful these days.