[Football has] become the major theater of American masculine crackup…

[It] would be really good, it would be a really good thing, if the NFL moved its boundaries in such a way as to show some minimal respect for mental health.

… [W]hen a player says he needs time off for mental reasons — … in a sport with a suicide problem — it shouldn’t spark a national conversation on whether he’s soft.

You don’t think it’s true of college too? Read this post, and click on all the links.

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

UD thanks Timothy.

An associate dean at the University of Virginia – apparently a computer expert – “used his UVa email address in making a 2010 online payment to the peer-to-peer [child pornography] network and last year logged into his account from a school IP address, according to the affidavit.”

No bail was granted. He’ll go on trial soon.

Yikes. Brown University couldn’t have that. Student input on Corporation membership would almost certainly have vetoed Steven Cohen and Steven Rattner.

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

UD thanks Roy.

… happens all over the American university, of course; but some forms destroy the institution and some just cheapen it. I think Derek Bok is right that when for-profit businesses start providing instructors for non-profit universities’ online courses, it’s extremely destructive:

[Northeastern University’s online] instructors mostly do come from “the Northeastern family,” [a campus representative] says, meaning people familiar to the university because they are alumni or have taught the course before as lecturers. But on “one or two occasions,” …the university has needed someone, “and Embanet has provided an instructor for us.”

… Mr. Bok sees a “dangerous trend.” Even though campus officials insist that they control hiring decisions, he doubts that a college would veto a company’s recommendation in a situation in which students were waiting for a class, and time to find a teaching assistant was limited. Mr. Bok emphasizes that he is speaking generally, not about any particular institution. But as a matter of principle, he says, “you have crossed the line” by using a private company to recommend teaching assistants.

“You have now delegated an essential academic function, which is choosing who will assist in the teaching function, to a company,” he says. “You could say it’s not very important. But of course, the way principles break down is because the first thing is not very important.”

Similarly, when pharmaceutical companies, through subcontracted ghostwriting firms, write scientific articles for university professors (articles touting their pills), it’s extremely destructive. It goes on quite a bit – as does corporations running university courses – and it’s extremely destructive.

We find out about it when the lawsuits start happening: When students sue schools on the basis of fraud (as they have for some time been suing the tax-syphon for-profit ed providers), and when the government sues yet another corrupt pharma outfit, as it has most recently successfully sued Johnson & Johnson, we see how the deal works, how universities in search of revenue hand over their academic functions to corporations.

In the Johnson and Johnson matter

the case file includes a list of academic researchers who wrote articles for medical journals that the company allegedly used to overstate the benefits and understate the risks of a blockbuster drug…

A primary investigation underlying the case identified 44 articles written by university scientists and colleagues, many of them joint collaborations that included Johnson & Johnson researchers, described as being overseen in some manner by the company.

Yes, let’s do it together! Let’s run the class together; let’s write the article together. After all, we’re both motivated by the same thing: Pure pedagogical or scientific integrity…

UD was warmed to see the name of Joseph Biederman, a man who has arguably done more than anyone to make the world safe for baby Risperdal, among the university scientists working, er, hand in glove, with Johnson & Johnson.

Some university authors — including Joseph Biederman, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard who gained renown for collecting at least $1.6-million in consulting fees from drug makers …appeared to be more personally aware than others of their misrepresentations…

Dr. Biederman, through a lawyer, declined to comment on his work with Risperdal.

Johnson & Johnson will pay a pittance – 2.2 billion – in penalties for having illegally marketed Risperdal. Joe will keep his trap shut and stay at Bok’s Harvard. All quiet on the western front.

It’s truly fascinating to UD that the psychosis at the heart of university and professional football is now, thanks to Richie Incognito, openly discussed.

“Three teams [and two universities, Nebraska and Oregon] employed Richie Incognito… His ability to play to the edge of lawlessness is valued… He is a valued commodity in the NFL…”

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

The NFL generates billions of revenue dollars selling violence. Players are hired to perform acts of mayhem on the field. Such a profession attracts some menacing individuals with checkered citizenship records.

Former NFL coach Jerry Glanville talked about needing “borderline trained killers” on his team. In other words, he needed some Richie Incognitos to compete.

Commissioner Roger Goodell spends a lot of his time suspending players for various misdeeds, but that is just the PR side of the industry. He keeps the corporate sponsors happy by pretending to keep his work force wholesome.

His people will work overtime sanitizing the Miami situation. Look for the league to roll out extensive anti-hazing guidelines.

But the NFL will never change the essence of the sport and endanger the bottom line.

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

[The] NFL was fine with Richie Incognito’s insanity as long as he didn’t cross [the] PR line. …

[W]e don’t really care as long as our own needs are filled. Neither did three NFL teams. Neither did two college football programs.

And when one had finally had enough of his crap, somebody else was always willing to step up and take a shot on Incognito. Because he helped fill up the seats and turn on the TVs.

… If you can play, any antisocial behavior will be overlooked or at least rationalized, even if it’s borderline psychotic.

Football at the highest level welcomes sociopaths. As long as they don’t cross certain public relations boundaries that threaten the game’s or a team’s bottom line. Then, and only then, does football have a problem with people like Richie Incognito.

The fact is, we like our violence and we like it with an edge. And if once in a while, some crazy outlier takes his helmet off and swings it at another player or stomps on somebody after the whistle, hey, it’s great cooler talk after that dreary Monday morning status meeting, right? And all of us writers and bloggers have something to tee up and get page hits (with an accompanying video), right? I’m doing it now.

And so, we will wring our hands on the panel shows and act as if people like this are somehow out of the ordinary and not part of our slice of humanity while the game we love keeps rewarding them.

Who’s twisted? The outlaw player? Or all of us who help enable him?

OOOOHHH… Le Fooootball… C’EST MOI….

I mean, c’est the University of Miami, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Penn State University, Rutgers University, all them big-time universities out in front with academic fraud, sadistic coaches, child-predator coaches, booster-money-under-the-table players, professional agents drooling over the team… All of these schools have been grooming the next Richie Incognito…

And think about it. What’s the great crisis in university football today? Empty stadiums, that’s what. Why aren’t people coming to the games? Why, why, why?

Well, one possibility is that they’re disgusted by the comprehensive scumminess, the super-insulting farce, of big-time university football. They’ve got this vague feeling there’s something of a disconnect between what you just read up there in this post and the university.

But another possibility, if the guy I just quoted is right, goes in the opposite direction: The sport isn’t violent and twisted enough.

If he’s right, Richie can turn challenge into opportunity and open Incognito Consulting, a boutique firm specializing in turning sadists who get lost in the crowd into psychopaths who make entire stadiums stand up and cheer. Coming soon to a university near you.

An entire issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics is devoted to the notorious corruption of the pharmaceutical industry, and (of abiding interest to University Diaries) the way pharma-supported university research has corrupted universities.

The rise of pharmaceutical-firm-funded university research changes the social context of research, and along with it, the opportunities and constraints on researchers. [Garry C.] Gray uses a case study of a medical school professor’s first experience with pharmaceutical company-sponsored research in order to examine how funding arrangements can constrain research integrity. The case study reveals that there are conflicts between the norms of commercial firms and universities.

That’s the part that interests us, here, at University Diaries.

Read the rest only if you’ve just gargled with an anti-emetic.

Taken by La Kid.

UD was at her desk at GW
(office hours) and saw
the pink-tipped clouds
and went to a better window
out in the hallway (she’s
on the sixth floor) and
it was some show.

We start to see how little Richie Incognito went wrong. His father, Richard Senior, seems to have plastered the house with Rockwell reproductions, which would generate rage in anyone.

At least Thomas Kinkade wasn’t famous yet when Richie grew up. He’d be in jail by now.

This one’s a beaut. I can’t quote it in full, but I’ll quote a little and you have to promise to go here and read the whole thing.

NFL BULLYING SEES INTELLECTUALS
AS PREY, EX-PATRIOTS TACKLE SAYS

Brian Holloway said he was one week into his National Football League career when he learned that his Stanford University education and academic interests would make him a target.

… Holloway said he was fined about $1,500 during his rookie season with the Patriots for reading a legal textbook that the team said was a distraction. He was also ridiculed by teammates for typing LSAT notes during plane rides.

The offensive tackle, who listened to opera for pregame inspiration, said there is an alliance that forms in locker rooms to ostracize players with elite academic backgrounds or eccentric interests.

“When they sense an intellectual is present, they will see that as prey,” Holloway said…

UD is laughing out loud, and she shouldn’t be, because she’s watching her modernism/postmodernism students do some in-class writing as she types this. But she SO loves this article! She demands more shocking exposés along these lines!!

**********

UPDATE: An intellectual defends football:

Football tells us that violence can be beautiful when performed for the sake of a greater good. As American society has become more genteel, that premise has become a cultural fault line — the assumption from which all other assumptions flow. You either believe violence can, in fact, be beautiful, or you don’t. More specifically, you either think that football is a relatively harmless, darned entertaining outlet for the human need to compete, or, frankly, you just haven’t been paying attention.

Violence, for good and ill, is the beauty of it.

I thought I was paying attention…

It began with the Oct. 24 candidate’s debate at Virginia Tech, the site of the worst mass shooting by an individual in U.S. history. In response to a question, Cuccinelli boasted of his A rating from the NRA.

And then McAuliffe did something surprising: He said he didn’t give a fig about the powerful lobby’s rating. And, oh, by the way, he had earned an F.

See, here’s the thing. Even though (wow – fun red helicopter landing at the White House as I write) Senator Paul assures us plagiarism is no biggie and the whole thing’s been cooked up by haters, newspapers really don’t appreciate being used as data dumps by people too busy and important to bother actually writing anything for them.

If you ask UD, the whole rich famous important person as plagiarist thing (as opposed to desperate pathetic high school superintendents and the like) is really about the culture of entitlement – a culture a lot of people (see another reference to helicopters, just below this post) really really don’t like. Monsieur Tea Party looks – post-plagiarism – like exactly what he is, which is just about as far from a populist as you can get. He looks like a high-handed give-a-shit SOB who breaks rules and blows things off because he can. Because he’s got a squad of staffers doing everything for him. Rand Paul’s initial response to the plagiarism revelation was echt entitled person. UD believes she can put it into two words. It is: Fuck You.

This response has made things worse for Rand Paul, so he’s gone to Entitled Option Two: He’s blamed it all on said squad and fired everybody in sight. Let’s see how that works out for him. Meanwhile, the Washington Times rightly rids itself of a parasite.

… it’s about helicopters.

The Ira Rennert – Michael Bloomberg lifestyle seems finally to have alienated New Yorkers.

Throughout the race, Mr. de Blasio overshadowed his opponent by channeling New Yorkers’ rising frustrations with income inequality…

I’m sure, as Greg Mankiw, Eric Cantor, and Lawrence Kudlow insist, it’s all just petty envy. Once these millions of New Yorkers understand that their progressive politics are simply an embarrassing epiphenomenon of their desire to be as rich as Ira Rennert, no doubt they’ll go back to voting for the I’ll land my fucking helicopter wherever and whenever I fucking want crowd.

… An official who consistently used his elected office to promote policies that shamed, marginalized, and patronized women and other minorities was met with a “no.” … The vote may have been close, but in the end Virginians, especially women, showed that they simply don’t believe that the commonwealth of Virginia should be in the business of discriminating against homosexuals, legislating an extreme anti-sodomy agenda, shuttering Planned Parenthood clinics, pressing an invasive trans-vaginal ultrasound law, and supporting a draconian illegal immigration law…

Cuccinelli was proudly and self-avowedly one of the most activist attorneys general the commonwealth had ever seen. From the very outset, his political ambition was to impose upon the state a social and religious code that may have made perfect sense to him, his supporters, and his conscience, but came across as extreme, hateful, and intrusive to most everyone else.

… Virginia women who were mostly affronted by talk of trans-vaginal ultrasounds and clinic closures and constraints on birth control, know a whole lot about what they need to be protected from and when. And today they voted to “protect” themselves from Ken Cuccinelli.

… says UD, smuggling in another totally random musical reference…

Mes amis, you and I will never know the depths of the no-end-in-sight greedy human heart. Jour prospère! But isn’t damn near a million dollars a year (when you throw in all the goodies) prosperous enough for a university president? And the president of SUNY Upstate med school, David Smith, was about to be appointed the new president at Penn State at another huge salary… Poor wretched Penn State, which not only needs to pick its amis with much greater care than it has in the past, but needs to recover from the sixty million plus dollars it’s had to pay out because of its ami Jerry Sandusky.

Enfin, it hired an excellent search firm, a fine tooth comb kind of search firm, and the firm reported to Penn State as well as to SUNY that … well, call him “Paddy” Smith:

Smith’s outside money has been coming from two companies during recent years that are linked to SUNY Upstate: Medbest Medical Management Inc. and Pediatrics Service Group LLP.

Where else is the dude gonna get an extra four hundred thousand a year? From students? He has no choice but to take bribes from companies who get contracts with SUNY! What’s the point of being president of a whole university if you can’t shake down your vendors?

Smith’s unapproved arrangements added substantially to his pay, according to a Nov. 1 letter to Smith from SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher. In the letter, she alerts Smith to a recent review of his income and says he accepted $349,295 from the outside sources without Zimpher’s approval.

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

I gotta say – this is one of the few cases of a search firm actually being worth real money. The last thing insanely scandal-scarred Penn State needs is a brand new president they immediately have to fire (paying out a huge severance!) because he’s – reportedly – a sneaky little liar.

Isaacson Miller is the name of the search firm: Make a note of it. The no-end-in-sight greedy heart? E strano! E strano! In other words, fuggedaboutit. But you can always hire a good search firm.