Ah, Penn State. Took our eye off that ball for a bit.

Yeshiva University has been hogging the sex abuse limelight lately… But now that PSU’s most recent president, Graham Spanier, has sued Louis Freeh for libel, we must all pop our favorite antiemetic and swivel our attention back there.

UD doubts there’s an antiemetic strong enough for us to look at both campuses at once.

Weird bizarre shameless odd sad and insane are some of the adjectives the Bloomberg Business Week writer I quote in my headline uses in his piece as he tries to figure out why a once reasonably respectable man – a man now under criminal indictment for endangering the welfare of a child – launches an unwinnable lawsuit that can only bring greater disgrace to himself and the university that continues to employ him as a professor.

What can I say… It’s damnably difficult for people who’ve been university presidents, who have flown in (taxpayer-provided) private jets, and who have run massive sports empires, to think ill of themselves. Year after year they get spectacular evaluations from the trustees, who (at places like Penn State and Gordon Gee’s Ohio State) want caretakers who leave the coaches alone. Now suddenly just because some old fart coach got caught in the shower Spanier’s being attacked!

We’ve spent the last year watching several university presidents be destroyed by the sports programs on their campuses. Other presidents (Donna Shalala most notably) have been reduced to little more than NCAA petitioners. Yet UD doubts there’s one university president in America who thinks it can happen to him or her. Spanier’s nutty libel suit emerges out of the toxic, only-in-America combination of presidential grandeur and sports pimping.

No better way to optimize your Novartis-funded results on a Novartis drug than to place a Novartis employee on your faculty and put that person in charge of statistical results. This research protocol all but guarantees that your results will be in line with corporate efforts in this case to establish the drug as effective for pretty much any human ill you can think of. And that is just what happened!

The Novartis plant held the same position in four other Japanese university labs. Truly an impressive effort on the drug-maker’s part.

The much stranger than fiction world of Yeshiva University.

If you’re the plagiarism-positive German university establishment, the last thing you want is a bunch of bloggers investigating and outing biggies like education and defense ministers who plagiarized their dissertations. So it should come as no surprise that the Rectors Conference has come out with the helpful suggestion that these bloggers shut the fuck up.

[T]he Rectors’ Conference – Hochschulrektorenkonferenz, or HRK – seeks to restrict the activities of internet forums like Guttenplag or Vroniplag, which played a key role in developments.

Yes, you go ahead and try to do that. Already 1300-plus German and other academics have petitioned against you. (Ol’ UD is of course among them.)

Here’s the problem, as I see it, for Loose Lips Sink Plagiarists Hippler: He and his organization have no good options. Here are their options.

Option One: Become the butt of free speech jokes.

Option Two: Add publicity and outrage to the campaign to bring legitimacy to German academia, thereby increasing the number of people investigating plagiarism.

Option Three: Remind people of the hilarious details of the von Googleberg case — and of others — thus refreshing and deepening the ridicule your educational institutions have already suffered.

Since they’ve already showed their hand as a secretive, plagiarism-enabling guild, it’s too late for the good rectors to do what they ought to have done. Probably some day, after they’ve suffered enough contempt, they will do it:

Try reading the dissertations your students submit to you. Hell, try working with them as they write their dissertations.

I know how busy and important you are… How unbelievably degrading such scutwork is… I mean, where would you start? For decades you’ve sat on your ass and passed one unseen thesis after another. But a journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.

This phrase appears in an angry editorial written by a Florida International University student. The student is embarrassed that since “2006, the football, men’s basketball, soccer and track and field teams, as well as the women’s cross-country and indoor and outdoor track teams have been sanctioned by the NCAA for poor academic performance at least once.” The basketball team’s APR score is so low, it “received a ban from next year’s postseason and a reduction in practice time.”

The writer, however, goes on to call schools like FIU (he also mentions Duke, Ohio State, and the University of Miami) “sports-accomplished.”

I’m familiar with derogatory terms, like jock shop and football factory. I’m impressed that someone has now come up with this positive term.

Ohio State, University of Miami… these schools have accomplished so much…

A school that’s been little other than a school for scandal for as long as UD can remember. Here’s a recent recap of only its very latest scandals.

UNC currently is on probation for wide-ranging major violations in football, including impermissible benefits from agents to players. The football program was given a postseason ban and other serious sanctions, and the scandal led to the firing of football coach Butch Davis, the retirement of athletic director Dick Baddour and ultimately played a role in the resignation of chancellor Holden Thorp.

In addition, the school has been rocked by an academic scandal that centered around bogus classes in the African-American Studies Department. A significant number of athletes – including many football and men’s basketball players – were enrolled in the classes…

With that as context, the timing of a potential legal and NCAA issue involving the leading scorer on the 2012-13 Tar Heels basketball team is hardly ideal.

As another observer puts it:

UNC has become the butt of jokes and the home of collegiate scandals, inquests, NCAA penalties, disgraced university employees, fired professors and departed football coaches, athletics directors and chancellors.

Yet this same observer claims that before this, UNC boasted

centuries of clean living, academic propriety and athletic purity.

Really? Are you prepared to go with that description? I mean, all grody sports schools do this – they all lament a golden age of propriety and purity, now sadly temporarily tarnished… Penn State was amazing on the subject…

Eh. Let ’em.

Let ’em sit in the local bar bawling into their beer about how great and true it used to be.

… Brazilian soccer.

Or, as a commenter on an article about New Mexico State University’s football team puts it, “I will never understand fans from these terrible academic/athletic schools that need to have their teams competing on the highest level just to have their brains beat in.”

Let NMSU stand for dozens of American universities allowing themselves to bleed out as institutions for the sake of big-time football.

Let us once more, on this blog, attempt to understand the masochism that insists – against the simple sanity of one’s own university president, and a state senator – that hurling your expensive team against opponents who will always beat you by ten, twenty, thirty, forty points is a good thing.

I don’t want you to think that anyone from NMSU actually goes to these games. I mean, a few people do, but for most in the NMSU community, group psychosis apparently has its limits. Most people there prefer not to purchase pricey tickets in order to watch the players for their school get their brains bashed in.

At the same time, though, enough NMSU people want to get seasonally excited about new coaches and paradigms and shit that they refuse to let the president and the state senator divert football money toward, uh, education. An anti-intellectual school in an anti-intellectual state, NMSU’s thing is to sit on its ass being stupid while its team gets brained. Our purpose is to figure out why this is.

It’s not the spectacle of the brain bashing itself, since few attend the games. If attendance were good, our problem would be solved: We love gore, and the NMSU football team guarantees it. But people avert their eyes.

Since total massive loss is equally guaranteed, could a campy delectation of failure itself have set in? Are the denizens of NMSU Wildean rascals…?

No. They are sincere, ever-hopeful, dog-like fans.

Here’s the best I can do. The Buddha speaks always of compassion, and what’s going on at NMSU is a communal exemplification of this primary virtue. The hopelessly broken – ever freshly broken – body of this football team exteriorizes for an entire community the first noble truth of human suffering. The team is a precious sacrificial vessel through which, ritualistically, NMSU attains not intellectual but spiritual enlightenment.

… (he wrote me once to ask whether one should be drunk when reading Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano), is the author of the notorious, and apparently very funny, Fake Steven Knapp parody Twitter account (Knapp is George Washington University’s president).

UD says apparently because she has not read Hunter’s parody; but she vividly remembers him as a rough-and-tumble class presence who would likely have the knack for this sort of thing. The Washington Post wrote about Hunter last year.

Anyway, he’s looking to pass the thing on to a new Twitterer (he feels it’s time for him to stop), and, in a badly written article (“he’s ready to give up the comedic reigns and hand the torch over to a new, fitting replacement”), In the Capital spreads the word about Hunter’s search for a replacement.

… is currently being sued for about three times what it lost by investing in its much-honored ex-trustee Bernard Madoff’s fund.

It’s not easy to keep up with the financial and sexual scandals at Yeshiva University, so don’t try. UD will do it for you.

“Canadian medical schools have some explaining to do.”

A recent study reveals practically non-existent conflict of interest policies at many med schools there.

Northern Ontario School of Medicine takes pride of place, having apparently zero meaningful conflict of interest policies, but the main point is clear: In common with some med schools in the United States, ghostwriting, as well as general corporate influence in the classroom and lab, is rampant up north.

No, there are no alternatives; none at all. The outgoing president of obscure Nicholls University (big-time athletics was going to put it on the map, but …) reviews the athletics-generated academic fraud plus APR-score penalties that marked his term in office. (The article is behind a paywall.)

Hulbert complains that “it is hard to fight battles with a state government that takes money away from higher education.” But Hulbert doesn’t mean higher education; he means athletics facilities. He’s upset with the state because it won’t fund athletics facilities.

President Hulbert does not grasp the distinction between athletic facilities and educational facilities.

So far. But as the humanities dean at Tunisia’s University of Manouba goes on to note, the Salafists remain a very serious threat. They’re after full veiling (note the photo that accompanies the linked article) and full segregation of female university students. The “University of Manouba [has become] a battleground between fundamentalist Muslims intent on turning Tunisia into an Islamic state and secular forces trying to maintain the country’s existing constitutional rights and legal system.” It’s an ugly fight, a protracted struggle for democracy against the forces of violent reaction.

A few months ago, enraged at the dean’s defense of democratic principles, a Salafist mob showed up at Manouba.

Carrying the black flag of the salafists and shouting “Allahu Akbar,” they demanded that the dean come forward for retribution.

Kazdaghli was watching from his office window when Khaoula Rachidi, a young woman majoring in French literature, climbed a wall and reached to tear down the salafist flag. She was tossed to the ground by a large, bearded man, but her bravery inspired her fellow students to swarm the parapet and run the Tunisian flag back up the pole.

“It was a woman who stirred them into action,” says Kazdaghli. “The men had been standing around, watching what was happening, but as soon as a woman threw herself into the fray, they woke up and remembered who they were.”

Kazdaghli on the niqab:

“Our métier demands communication,” he says. “Confidence is reciprocal. I have to know with whom I am speaking. Women can travel to the university and enter the gates wearing their niqabs, but in the classroom and during exams they have to show their faces.”

Even something as simple as taking attendance or confirming the identity of someone sitting for an exam requires exposure. When Kazdaghli’s office was sacked, he had no way of recognizing the two black-robed figures who were throwing his papers on the floor. Only when they yelled that they were the victims of unfair disciplinary procedures was he able to identify these two out of the university’s 27,000 students.

“I can’t have two kinds of students in class, those with whom I can communicate, and those with whom I can’t. This is an important principle, that people have equal access to knowledge.”

… admissions standards.

UD often finds poetry in the comments section of articles about big-time sports. This morsel appears after an article that has Urban Meyer, doting dad of Aaron Hernandez and fellow troubled tots at the University of Florida, sermonizing about how we’re all being terribly judgmental and “irresponsible” to recall Urban’s crime-clogged time at that school. How dare everyone suggest, in light of Hernandez’s murder charges, that Meyer’s recruitment and retention policies at UF somehow enabled Hernandez in his life of crime!

Like Jim Tressel, Urban Meyer is a man of God.

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When cornered, hide behind God.

When truly cornered, hide behind the little women.