American university football: The most perverted product of Western culture since The Story of O.

… med students, Evan Dobelle has decided to go down swinging.

… a clear October afternoon, and at one point a full sun was overhead and leaves were swirling down. I put down my rake and lay on the lawn to feel the sun and see the leaves swirling, and everything really was clear: the bright sky, each sharp leaf with red, green, and a bit of rot on its surface landing neatly on the lawn. You rake the leaves down to the street, and every few hours a green truck comes and carts them away, and this too is clear – a nice clear system of gathering and disposal.

Hyperclarified days are rare. This one made me think of Conrad Aiken’s poem, The Room.


Through that window — all else being extinct
Except itself and me — I saw the struggle
Of darkness against darkness. Within the room
It turned and turned, dived downward. Then I saw
How order might — if chaos wished — become:
And saw the darkness crush upon itself,
Contracting powerfully; it was as if
It killed itself: slowly: and with much pain.
Pain. The scene was pain, and nothing but pain.
What else, when chaos draws all forces inward
To shape a single leaf? . . .

Tree of trees!
Remember (when time comes) how chaos died
To shape the shining leaf. Then turn, have courage,
Wrap arms and roots together, be convulsed
With grief, and bring back chaos out of shape.
I will be watching then as I watch now.
I will praise darkness now, but then the leaf.

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The mind, as it turns forward in time, struggles darkly with darkness. I was thinking, all afternoon, about the deaths of people I loved, or loved and hated, or whatever. But anyway diving downward into that chaos which is my own hopeless reckoning with darkness. Not “convulsed with grief” – not courageous enough for that, but certainly wrapping arms and roots together and watching my thoughts.

Watching through the mind’s window whose insistence on seeing it through, seeing through it, makes “all else… extinct.” The effort of drawing up out of chaos, says Aiken, is painful, but there it is, the completed multifarious leaf, shining its edges against the lawn. Ultimately there are cracked walls and burst windows – a painful, earth-altering awakening. Generative, enlightening, painful.

The one black root… the black root: This underlies the clarifying and there’s no denying it. Chaos resumes after the epiphanies; but “remember… how chaos died / To shape the shining leaf.” The one thing and then the other; darkness, light. As you enter into chaos again – the chaos of every vague and grieving life – remember the natural pattern at play, the contraction and expansion. Let the chaos be, live with it, and eventually once again the light will break. Praise both: the darkness and the leaf.

Just this month, there was an incident at Jendouba University in northwest Tunisia, near Algeria. Groups of Salafists – most from outside the university – blockaded it to protest the punishment of some Salafist students who violated the law, and they managed to stop all classes. Exams could not be held, and the students risked losing the entire year as a result. There was no intervention from the police. So, we are in a critical period. The Salafists believe they are above the law and operate in impunity.

As college football stadiums around America get emptier by the minute, we need writers like Dave Bratcher to remind us why we so love those Saturdays in the fall.

As we made our way into the stadium, a few things struck me. These things are applicable to life and need to be mentioned. Across the United States, Saturdays in the fall remind us of what true equality looks like, teach us why keeping score is important, and loyalty is not to be taken lightly.

When fans show up to cheer on their respective teams, discussions about race, religion, wealth, or family lineage do not factor into the discussion. The things which sometimes divide us, even on Sunday morning, are completely irrelevant on Saturday. Nobody cares what color, what church, how much money, or who their parents are. The identifying factors and circumstances of our lives are completely forgotten about when the teams take the field. This is to be praised.

Guess ol’ Dave missed the $100,000 per box luxury seating! Look up, Dave! See the rich people up there, divided behind glass enclosures from the yahoos? Only the rich people in the stadium get to drink alcohol, Dave! These things are applicable to life and need to be mentioned.

… just took one hell of a plunge.

“I hope that [by] using this soft, constructive approach, we can help them and North Asia and the world to be a better place for mankind,” [the conferring university’s president said].

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Sets an interesting precedent.

“The Indian Institute of Technology has awarded an honorary doctorate in criminology to Dawood Ibrahim. ‘I hope that by using this soft, constructive approach, we can help the D-Company and organized crime around the world to be a better activity for mankind,’ IIT’s president said.”

Debating

… Margaret Soltan, Girl Reporter, there’s this.

Er, a law professor is suing his dean for retaliating against him after the law prof accused the dean of sexual harassment.

Among the dean’s alleged sexually harassing behaviors:

The suit said the professor complained [to university authorities] about alleged inappropriate touching and comments involving women colleagues, including a bare-skin, summer-dress “caress” that [the professor, Raymond] Ku and his wife found “unnerving and creepy.”

The lawsuit also claimed the dean questioned Ku about circumcision as the professor prepared to convert to Judaism. Mitchell said the conversion would put Ku in two of his favorite groups — Asian and Jewish, the lawsuit said.

Are you outraged yet?

Well, how about this:

The dean is rumored to have slept with a law student! The dean has been married and divorced four times! Someone told Ku that the dean makes demeaning statements about women! (UD is getting all of this from Ku’s complaint, which you can read here. Scroll down.)

When you combine these transgressions with the dean’s outrageous assertion that Ku has been been put in two of the dean’s favorite groups, it all adds up to …. what? What seems just? A million in damages? Two million?

… involving admissions, financial aid, and national rankings, for some time. Or so it appears. And because the campus newspaper, The Hatchet, has been aggressive in its investigative reporting lately (it broke the now-national need-aware rather than need-blind story), the university can expect its year-long string of bad news stories to lengthen.

These stories include – for good measure – the messy and mysterious firing of the business school dean, and another charge of system-gaming, this one alleging the inflation of GW’s endowment growth by its investment officers.

The investment story includes this yummy morsel:

[The whistle blower] also claims that she had previously “questioned [the Chief Investment Officer’s] ethics,” pointing to his private consulting services as a conflict of interest.

She said after confronting him about his monthly trips to the Bahamas for the private consulting, he announced that he would end his outside consulting services.

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UD‘s student, Jacob Garner, with whom she’s working on his senior thesis about David Foster Wallace (Jacob just got back from the University of Texas, where he went – with GW research fellowship money! – to look at Wallace’s papers) notes in his Hatchet column that in fact GW had no reason to lie about its need-aware policy:

When you look at the actual issue – why GW needs to be need-aware – it starts to make sense. People will understand. So why lie?

GW’s endowment of $1.3 billion hardly rivals those of need-blind colleges Northwestern and New York universities, with endowments that stand at about $7 and $3 billion respectively.

Administrators are searching for ways to bring in as much money as they can, and being need-aware is an obvious way to increase tuition revenue. But administrators shouldn’t be lying about our admissions policies.

If you can work up any tears over Phoenix cutting thousands of jobs you’ll cry at anything.

The proper response is good riddance.

UD‘s faith in scams remains strong; she’s sure some other outfit will figure out how to take billions of our tax dollars in order not to educate Americans. Perhaps Phoenix itself will regroup to scam another day. But for the moment, what good news.

… Yeshiva could not have done any better. A university whose sexual and financial scandals dwarf the sexual and financial scandals of all other American universities; where the vilest sexual abusers continue to be hired and kept on the faculty until pressure from journalists forces Yeshiva to fire them; where the school’s long history of sexual abusers means that it now faces hundreds of millions of dollars in potential settlement costs from a massive ongoing lawsuit… A school perfectly happy to keep Bernard Madoff on its board of trustees long after suspicions of his massive criminality were rampant but hysterically punitive when a woman student wrote a short story with mild sexual content…

And here it goes again. You simply cannot keep Yeshiva University from being the most obscenely hypocritical university in America.

Within twenty-four hours of [a Yeshiva student] posting [a] survey [about sex], the University Dean of Students contacted [her] via email and phone informing her that her housing scholarship had been revoked.

No whores wanted here! We’re a religious establishment! What would Zygmunt Wilf and Ira Rennert and Julius Berman say! What shamelessness!

Outrage among students at Yeshiva’s disgusting behavior forced the school to back down. Good thing, because FIRE would have had a field day with this.

Yeshiva University: You simply cannot keep a bad school down.

What you gonna do when she is gone?

If you’re the University of Alabama, famed for your rabid fans and regally compensated coach, you’re going to “review photos and video of the [student] section during games to determine which organizations are leaving early and violators could have block seating privileges taken away.”

So, uh, let’s step back and review.

Although we are assured that fan rabidity is positively mythic at Alabama (you can’t walk for all the statues of coaches all over campus; watch for Penn State’s toppled Paterno statue to be re-erected with full honors at UA), everybody walks out once it’s clear the team has won the game. In the most recent case, victory was obvious well before half-time, see, and the stands emptied…

But get a load of those stands! Part of the wild carefree business of being a Bama fan is constant electronic surveillance. Whee! And just so you know, kiddo — Your school is watching your every move, and if you leave your fucking seat your name is entered on UA’s Enemies of the Tide list and you will be punished. Okay? ‘Kay?

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UD has written a good deal – and she will write more as the problem intensifies – about what she calls fantasms: the vanishing fans of university football. She has suggested some remedies for the situation short of UA’s (and other schools’) petty and doomed-to-fail procedures. (What do all the cameras pick up when they’re filming – for a national audience – students who don’t want to be there? Students who are drunk and displeased? Expect an uptick in mooning.)

Short of the placement in the stands of animatronic fans (not all universities will want to go this route), UD sees no alternative to the use of drones. The Phantom (Fantom?) Drone is available at Amazon for under five hundred dollars and can, with, say, five or so others, continually buzz the student section in such a way as to make use of any mounted weaponry unnecessary.

… To the rogue’s gallery that runs and has run Yeshiva University, we must add Julius Berman, who continues to hold a place of honor on one of that farcically scandal-ridden university’s boards of trustees. Berman’s chair emeritus of the all-boys board of Yeshiva’s seminary. And like several of his amazing Yeshiva compatriots, he sure does know how to get into trouble.

[Susan Fuhrman, head of Teachers College Columbia University,] finds the birth of alternative teacher schools “upsetting.” “I worry about cutting that kind of preparation off from the scholarship and from emerging research” that a university offers, she said. “It can sound like I feel threatened. I don’t. But it just worries me as a trend.”

There are 3.3 million public school teachers in America, and they probably can’t all be trained by start-ups. Raising up the standards of our university programs should be an urgent priority. But one reason for the widespread mediocrity is that universities have had a cozy, lucrative monopoly. It’s about time the leaders of our education schools did feel threatened.

This blog has for years followed the scandal of America’s schools of education. Their notorious mediocrity continues to generate alternative forms of preparation for the profession.

[U]niversities have proved largely immutable. Educators, including some inside these institutions, say universities have treated education programs as “cash cows.” The schools see no incentive to change because they have plenty of applicants willing to pay full tuition, the programs are relatively cheap to run, and they are accountable to no one except accrediting agencies run by, you guessed it, education schools. It’s a contented cartel.