… has these sports teams, see, and some of them are ever so slightly at odds with that ethos… UD has already told you about their hiring as assistant basketball coach Kevin Broadus, a major player in the disgusting SUNY Binghamton scandal… AND that on his official Georgetown page the school has allowed him to expunge all reference to that history.

Add to that Georgetown’s own Mike Rice, as in the current allegations that the school’s women’s basketball coach has a propensity to bully his players.

All utterly typical big-time university sports shit, except that Georgetown thinks it’s better than that.

It’s not sose you’d notice. Yet. Metro’s as busy as ever. On the train, an anxious man in an expensive suit bit his fingernails, and two schoolgirls fiddled with a set of drumsticks.

The man who stands at the top of the Foggy Bottom station warbling about Jesus warbled.

The gloomy interns at the GW Hospital Starbucks kept their heads down, as always.

On the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, UD‘s friend The Dean repeatedly sang out her name as she, the same hazelnut latte in hand as ever, waited to cross the street. She’d seen him last night at a reception for our dean’s list students and he’d been all deanly, but here he was done up in bright yellow and straddling a bicycle.

“Twice in one day I see you!” he said.

“Well,” said UD, “stretching the concept day…” She looked him, a fellow ‘thesdan, over. “You do this every day? You bike in from Bethesda?”

“Yep.”

“Jeez. You make me feel like a lazy good for nothing. How do you avoid traffic?”

“You can take the Crescent Trail all the way in.”

“Jeez.”

“Somebody asked me: Do you like cycling? I said No. This is just the way I happen to get to work.”

… (see background here), we are going to need armories and we are going to need shooting ranges, by way of preparing campus police for crowd control.

Crowd control, in the current context of big-time university sports (start at 1:56), increasingly means keeping people inside the stadium or arena until the game is over.

One way to do this would be to use your tanks and guns to intimidate people into staying. Occasionally, you might have to fire (non-lethal) materials.

Ideally, these armories/shooting ranges would themselves be arenas and stadiums, so that university security personnel could get a realistic sense of crowd, uh, containment.

One central location UD proposes for a national armory of this sort would be Cleveland State University’s Wolstein Center. Like many excitedly built university stadiums (CSU was excited because one of its teams did well one year, and the trustees decided that before you knew it CSU would be king of the world, so they needed a new stadium), this one is an empty, money hemorrhaging mess.

After getting the latest year-end financial report, which again showed a $1 million loss, [CSU] trustees today said the university has to examine all options, even those as improbable as demolishing it.

But whoa! How about renting it out to universities all over the country (world?) for practice? With Berkeley having recently rejected an eight-ton armored truck as “not the best choice for a university setting,” we can anticipate industry offering a line of university-appropriate heavy weaponry – tanks in soft shades, with quotations from Virginia Woolf on them… Some of these could be gathered at Wolstein for use by any university interested in learning how to keep students in their seats.

CSU’s big competition is Florida Atlantic University. FAU is not only located in Florida rather than Ohio, but has a much bigger empty stadium (30,000 vs. 13,000 seats). CSU will have to act fast to secure market share.

America’s broken government, rendered brilliantly by Joshua Keating.

…rocky first day.

… here, on the burqa in England. UD predicts that England will, in a few years, enact legislation – similar to France’s and to a growing number of other European countries – against the burqa.

The university is reviewing footage of students throwing trash at people.

All’s fair in love and Holy War.

Throwing trash at the ref doesn’t really make it, though, does it? Look at the footage. Bunch of white streamers. Does nothing.

Wait til the state mandates carrying your gun to sporting events. Now you’re talking.

The world’s most diplomatic police spokesperson turns his attention to the woman at the University of Wisconsin who got wasted and then waited until very late at night to cross a busy street while texting.

Hong Kong magnate Li Ka-shing said he will donate $130 million to Israel’s leading engineering university, the Technion, to help establish a joint academic venture with a university in China’s Guangdong Province.

The New York Times, May 2008:

Last September, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel courageously broke ranks with her predecessors and met with the Dalai Lama. China predictably objected – soon joined by Merkel’s own vice chancellor and foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who accused her of trying to “showcase” human rights.

Now Steinmeier has one-upped himself, refusing to meet with the Dalai Lama while the Tibetan spiritual leader was on a five-day visit to Germany …

France 24, September 2013:

Germany’s centre-left parliamentary opposition leader Frank-Walter Steinmeier denied allegations Sunday that he plagiarised parts of his PhD thesis after similar charges have claimed several political scalps in recent years. … [E]conomics professor Uwe Kamenz of Muenster in North Rhine-Westphalia had said he found “extensive” evidence of plagiarism in Steinmeier’s 1991 law thesis.

OSU can see the trend as well as anyone else. When you’ve given everything your university has to football, it’s pretty important that people go to the games.

But people aren’t going to the games.

Which makes you, a university, a school, really, rather than a playing field, look pretty fucking stupid.

What to do?

Current stop-gap measures are incentive-based (see post below): Give students who stay in the stands two thousand dollars. If students promise to stay at least until halftime give them free drinks, free burgers, a stuffed toy, Legos.

But people tend to resent, after awhile, being infantilized. They tend to catch on to what’s happening.

This is where the Ambush vehicle comes in. The moment students start pouring out of a stupid pointless game, just roll that baby to the middle of the field and slowly, slowly, ever so slowly, revolve her turret… Give fans a good view of the big guy (one of the players?) up there on her “roof-mounted shielded traversing gun turret able to fit a 7.62 mm medium or 12.7mm heavy class machine gun.” They’ll get the message without your having to fire one shot!

Wussy little Berkeley ain’t biting yet.

Last year, when University of California-Berkeley campus police tried to buy an 8-ton armored truck, university officials canceled the order, saying such a vehicle was “not the best choice for a university setting.”

But give it time. You know how guys are when it comes to having the best toys.

Students don’t go to football games; or they go and then leave after twenty minutes. Some universities burger and booze students to make them stay put; New Mexico State University pays them.

… ESPN host Keith Olbermann lambasted NMSU President Carruthers as the worst person in the sports world.

“In NCAA college football you can pay the coaches, you can pay the ADs, you can pay the announcers, yet you can’t pay the players, but now you can pay the fans too!” an outraged Olbermann told his ESPN audience. “New Mexico State University’s Garrey ‘We-will-bribe-you-to-sit-through-this-garbage’ Carruthers. Today’s worst person in the sports world.”

What glorious things our universities have turned into.

Readers who have followed my coverage of hapless Central Michigan University will be unsurprised by this headline in the school’s newspaper:

OTHER STATE UNIVERSITIES ARE FLOURISHING; WHAT’S WRONG WITH US?

(My headline is from the article’s comment thread.)

It’s not just those huge athletic deficits – the product of years of all-American asininity about the glories of football… oh, here’s another post about the glories of CMU football… It’s also about a truly pathetic board of trustees… a pass-the-buck president… And a general no-one’s-home aspect to the place. Of course students are beginning to notice.

On the David Gilmour dust-up.

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But there’s an important line missing from the first paragraph: The piece should start with this quotation from a Don DeLillo novel:

“DON’T YOU REALIZE THAT AS LONG AS YOU HAVE TO SIT DOWN TO PEE, YOU’LL NEVER BE A DOMINANT FORCE IN THE WORLD?”

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My IHE post has now been corrected.

From a progressive British blog. We will see more and more European regions vote overwhelmingly against the burqa.

Backed by Arabian petrodollars, the Salafi movement has gained significant influence in [British] mosques, schools, Muslim organisations and communities. This has led to increased pressure on girls and women to cede to regressive patriarchy – from vigilante ”Muslim Patrols” enforcing dress codes on the streets of London, to gender segregated events at our universities, and a school in Tower Hamlets forcing girls young as 11 year old to wear the face veil.

This blog has followed gender segregation at British universities and will continue to do so as long as cowardice on the part of administrators allows it to continue. This blog will not follow the ongoing story of eleven-year-olds put into burqas because it simply hasn’t got the heart. I’ve got my own forms of cowardice, and one of them involves the inability to pay sustained attention to particularly gruesome instances of child abuse.

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UD thanks her sister for the link to the article.