Say it ain’t so! Two absolutely filthy university football programs meet on the field! Homicidal Hazers v. Tressel’s Prayer Group! C’mon! Everything about this match-up was exciting and fun. The score says a lot of it: 76 – 0, with Tressel’s disciples edging out FAMU’s merry band…

FAMU’s actual band, the famous one that kills its musicians, wasn’t there, despite everyone having been real excited about a match-up between Ohio State’s musicians and FAMU’s during half-time…

[A] hazing death in the FAMU band around the time the OSU contract was signed meant the band is just getting back on its feet now.

Just getting back on its feet… Sweet way to put it… The band’s long-ignored violent rituals finally ended up killing someone… But it’s getting back on its feet again, struggling up like little Colin in A Secret Garden! It’s not that FAMU’s embarrassed that when its bloody band takes the field Ohio fans will add insult to shutout by chanting things, as fans are wont to do…

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Oh, and the whole thing is even prettier than that.

The Florida A&M athletic department is digging out of a $6 million deficit. [And it] is looking for its 10th athletic director in the past 11 years.

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If it’s true that spectacles of this quality are going away, UD is afraid she might not be renewing her decades-long season tickets to such riveting autumnal all-American delights, these front porches of our universities, where what’s best about our academic institutions is broadcast all over the country and to the world.

But you know what? UD‘s been covering American university football for years, and she is absolutely – absolutely – certain that the guy in her headline, the guy trying to scare her, is wrong.

… supports a burqa ban. This time it’s the Swiss, in the canton of Ticino.

Opposition to the burqa has been massive over several European countries. Defenders of this full-body shroud specifically designed for little girls and women are in the embarrassing position of having to declare huge swathes of the population of Europe bigots.

Indeed confusion at the ways of democracy reigns among burqa defenders. One defender is baffled by what she calls an “unlikely alliance of rightwing politicians and feminists.”

It’s unlikelier than that. Not just feminists and rightwing politicians but anti-feminists and leftwing politicians seem united in their rejection of outrageous gender oppression in their midst.

People don’t seem very happy to find out they’ve been plagiarized. They don’t seem very flattered. They don’t seem very receptive to their plagiarists telling them it was all an act of love.

Matthew Welton, for instance – a British poet who teaches at the University of Nottingham – seems to have found it downright sneaky that serial plagiarist C.J. Allen altered Welton’s poems just enough to avoid easy detection. Indeed only Welton himself, on buying a collection of Allen’s poems after one of Allen’s poetry readings, recognized the extensive lifting.

This long article parses the difference between an homage to/being inspired by/doing a free translation of a cited work/etc. and being a lazy motherfucker who takes someone else’s artwork and publishes it as one’s own. The author quotes a friend:

‘There’s a world of difference between Prokofiev formally basing the 2nd movement of his 2nd symphony on the 2nd movement of Beethoven’s Op.111, and Graham Nunn flattening out his notebook alongside a book by Helen Dunmore’.

Yes – it’s not really subtle, is it?

And speaking of subtle: UD has zero interest in the psychological excuses offered by plagiarists when they’ve been found out and when their first line of defense (homage, pastiche, that shit) fails. They’ve always been insecure; when their mother died it really did a number on them…

When the psycho line also fails to generate sympathy, plagiarists move to Position Three, drug and alcohol abuse. I did it because I’m a desperate mess. How did I manage to conduct a grueling book tour, run university seminars, give poetry readings, and produce a new plagiarized book while so debilitated by drugs? I don’t know, but…

(Position Four)…

… I’m happy I’ve been found out! I plagiarized so blatantly in order to be found out! I craved being brought low enough, being hollowed out thoroughly enough, to find my way back to my lost faith. I have recently joined a Catholic parish, spent hours in a confessional box, and experienced forgiveness. I will share my rebirth in my next book.

Cornell, you’re as cold as ice. Simply because your lacrosse players force alcohol down freshmen, you shutter the team! Lacrosse, hazing, and alcohol have always gone together – ask George Huguely – and any university that expects a winning team without bonding rituals rooted in proud histories has another thing coming.

… Kofi Awoonor was killed in the terrorist attack in Kenya.

Florida Atlantic University’s desperation to get people to come to its new stadium grows. As a local columnist pointed out during the prison-naming fiasco, “[FAU] built a $70 million facility that’s nearly empty year-round, even during home football games.”

Specifics? You’re looking at four thousand people scattered around 30,000 seats. And remember how it goes: Four thousand show up… Game doesn’t look promising after a half hour or so… Two thousand begin leaving… The two thousand left stay because they’re too drunk to walk…

Better keep the stadium swimming pools shallow, or you’ll drown your students… Remember Chico State!

It all adds up to a massive police state – nanny state – presence at the games. Two hundred armed police glare at two thousand drunk and despondent (team lost; alcohol’s a depressant) students furiously slashing at the water in their baby pools…

The degradation of being president of hopeless-loser New Mexico State University.

… that Les UDs watched the other night, UD set about looking for ways to visualize American university football. She set about looking for visual equivalents of a situation that everyone realizes is totally, totally nuts.

The BBC thing got her thinking, because it represented a clever solution to an obvious problem: How do you make visually compelling a massive and impossible to grasp abstraction (infinity)? How do you make visually compelling a bunch of unkempt mathematicians and physicists droning about a massive abstraction?

The producers solved the problem by doing things like putting one of the mathematicians on a trampoline and filming him bouncing up and down while his voice-over droned.

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True, bouncing on a trampoline has nothing to do with infinity, but it was something to watch while the mathematician droned.

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Everyone talks about the sickening farce of university football, and there are always new books coming out chock-full of shocking language about the farce… And there are routine visuals of players’ and coaches’ mugshots and their long days in court… routine visuals of the brand-new cost-overrun stadium on game day with 10,000 rather than 60,000 fans in it (two or three thousand at the very end of the shut-out)… routine viral YouTubes of the interview with the coach who earns five million dollars a year by telling the national press to fuck itself. Yes, there are these, and many things like these.

Yet all are small separate clips that don’t capture in a meaningful, artful, way the full reality of university football — neither the way it impoverishes and degrades intellectual institutions, nor the way campus officials from the president on down smilingly and excitedly assure us that things are great, or they will be great in a minute.

So UD looked for an extended, precise, visual evocation of the situation of university football in America.

As she thought about it, she remembered a favorite film of her mother’s – Bread and Chocolate – which featured a scene of Italian guest workers in Switzerland living in a chicken coop.

What my mother loved about the scene was the smiling, proud, and excited way the covered-with-feathers proprietor of this shelter welcomed the film’s hero to it.

You don’t need to understand Italian to understand 1:17:00 to 1:25:00 in this film. These few minutes from this film capture the proud coach welcoming you to his excellent university, where football is, as everyone says, the “front porch” of the institution. Are things less than totally ideal? Less than perfect according to some impossible standard? But of course!

But look at the beautiful campus big-time football has given us! What better proof of the way football unites us all in school pride! How lucky we are to live in this sports paradise.

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The analogy falls short in this way: The guest worker paid for his dwelling by working on the chicken farm. All of us, one way or another, pay real money, through the nose, to maintain America’s system of university football.

To review.

… has done it again.

Brainless, amusing, and bizarre, like some beyond-woebegone character in Evelyn Waugh, FSU (follow its tales-of-the-weird history by typing FSU into my search engine) has now generated a healthy trade in t-shirts depicting its quarterback as Jesus Christ.

Look for the crucifixion scene t-shirt once the NCAA gets wind of this.

… about MOOCs.

My MOOC on poetry, by the way, now has 3,764 students. Feel free to give it a whirl.

Oh, by the applicant. The writing sample is supposed to be written by the applicant.…

All four [Vanderbilt University football players] await trial on Oct. 16 and are free on bond. [Jaborian] McKenzie even transferred to Alcorn State University in Mississippi and played in the team’s season opener. However, the university president said he was removed from the team Thursday night and the school had made a mistake allowing him on.

Well excuuuuuuuuse me!

… is the headline of UD‘s latest reporting for the Garrett Park Bugle, her hometown newspaper in Maryland.

… but its students can.

The governor of Louisiana thought he’d figured out how to rid the state of Southern University, a total money-pit bearing no resemblance to a university. He was going to merge it with a better university. But that doesn’t seem to be happening.

In 2001, Southern had a 5% graduation rate. That rate is now 8%.

As the governor tries to do something about this scandal, Southern devolves into farce, the latest act of which involves a fired professor who just kept teaching and being paid because no one noticed he was still there.

He was fired as part of an emergency two years ago, when

enrollment declines and state budget cuts prompted Southern to declare a financial emergency, called exigency — in this case, a 20-month process that allowed the university leeway to cut academic programs and lay off tenured faculty.

Those enrollment declines are going to be the only thing that will eventually be able to shut Southern down. It’s fun to be in the audience for the last acts of a farce, but no one wants to be onstage. When no one goes to your school, you have to stop existing.

Or do you? Maybe Southern can figure out a way to keep going. Maybe administrators can designate one another professors and set up classes for themselves.