Well, yes… All of us with anything other than them itty bitty brains you see in the truly athletified recognize the Beckettian absurdity of big-time university sports. And it’s noble for Larry Bennett, a political science professor at DePaul, to go up against the surreal inevitability which is a new empty money-hemorrhaging basketball stadium there. But… you know…

There’s gonna be a university casino too! Bennett thinks

DePaul University should not be associated with it. […] By joining this project to DePaul we would be signaling that its institutional ethics are precariously situational.

But believe me, DePaul is so far past Bennett with this idea… I hear it’s looking into massage parlors too…

… nothing?

But the worst psychiatrists – and the merely mediocre – and the greedy – are. With hideous effects on our autonomy and our bank accounts.

That’s why, as David Brooks urges, we should regard the DSM with enormous skepticism.

… sings Cinderella; and this year’s Cinderella university story has got to be Rutgers, whose dream to be the Auburn University of the east is coming true, one day at a time. Rutgers has done it all, with amazing focus and commitment:

*** It has moved decisively toward shutting down the academic component of the university for the sake of athletics. The school’s athletic budget is massive; its academic more and more paltry. Eventually Rutgers as “teaching” and “research” “university” will be exclusively online.

*** It has hired and fired presidents with an eye toward greater and greater haplessness and indifference. Its trustees may be close to firing its latest leader, his function of taking the fall for the most recent string of athletic scandals having been fulfilled. Watch for Rutgers’ next presidential offer to go out to Nick Saban.

*** It has decided to retain its latest in a line of allegedly abusive and/or mendacious athletic officials. She and her rhetoric of integrity and triumph will stay; the letter protesting her cruelty as coach – signed by the entire volleyball team she once led – will be ignored.

These, and too many other strategies and initiatives to mention, are the outward manifestations of an American university determined to root out any scholarly residue, and just as determined to compete with Auburn, Texas Tech, Southern Methodist, Kentucky, and LSU for sports supremacy. A bold move, indeed, to go up against the southern powerhouses. But so far, Rutgers is doing everything right.

Have faith in your dream and someday
Your rainbow will come smiling through.

… says what needs to be said about sex segregation and hate speech in British universities.

Boris Johnson, in The Daily Telegraph:

The universities need to be much, much tougher in their monitoring of Islamic societies. It is utterly wrong to have segregated meetings in a state-funded centre of learning. If visiting speakers start some Islamist schtick – and seek either to call for or justify violence – then the authorities need to summon the police.

… These Islamist evangelists have no allegiance to the western society they live in and whose benefits systems they abuse: far from it – their avowed intent is to create a sexist and homophobic Muslim caliphate.

This blog has watched with bafflement as one British university after another colludes with sex segregationists and people who call for the murder of homosexuals. She truly has no idea why these schools do that. Depraved indifference?

Perhaps Boris Johnson’s opinion piece will help them begin to think about the matter.

And it’s Rutgers. At Rutgers, you bankrupt the school subsidizing athletics. At Rutgers, all that money you took from students buys coaches who abuse students. So that’s, uh, students buying their own abuse. Strange goings-on at a university.

At Rutgers, the new athletic director brought in to clean up the program after problems with abusive coaches turns out – allegedly – to have been an abusive coach.

In smaller ways, too, the new clean-up person at Rutgers already looks like an embarrassment.

[Julie] Hermann was also a central figure in a 1997 discrimination lawsuit filed against the University of Tennessee.

Former assistant volleyball coach Ginger Hineline claimed that she was discouraged from becoming pregnant while working under Hermann.

Hermann made remarks at Hineline’s June 1994 wedding that became central to the lawsuit, which ended with a jury siding with Hineline and awarding her $150,000.

Hermann denied the existence of the video at her introductory news conference at Rutgers on May 15.

“There’s a video? I’m sorry, did you say there’s a video? There’s no video, trust me,” Hermann said.

But The Star-Ledger posted a video on its website, showing Hermann at the nuptials joking that she hoped Hineline would not get pregnant any time soon.

I’m sorry, there’s a video, trust me.

In late April, lawyers for [Steven A.] Cohen and his firm met with federal prosecutors in Manhattan to make their best case argument about why the hedge fund billionaire and his SAC Capital Advisors should not be charged with criminal wrongdoing. But people familiar with that meeting said the lengthy presentation did not impress federal prosecutors, who are now considering whether to use a racketeering law aimed at prosecuting the Mafia and drug gangs to pursue a criminal case against Cohen’s hedge fund.

Always good, here at University Diaries, to look in on foreign fraternities and their way-cool activities. Here in the States, fraternities shuttle between good deeds at the local hospital and parties where they drink themselves to death. In Germany, it’s more retro, more teutonic, more… er… let’s not go any farther forward in time…

Our boys dress down; their boys love a man in cadet slacks. Our boys carry Bud cans; theirs carry rapiers. Ours stagger en masse down State U Boulevard; theirs stage torch-light parades.

All my checks and cash and fees,
To Charlie Weis we bend our knees.
All for coaches! All for coaches!’

Scathing Online Schoolmarm hopes not. Whatever they are pouring over the cache is likely to degrade the value of their evidence against a guy who “[f]or close to 30 years, he has been a community safety officer supervisor at UC Santa Cruz.”

SOS thinks the Santa Cruz police department means pore.

The culture clash in this story about a man who has apparently been stashing an arsenal of guns and ammo in the walls of his mobile home as he prepares for some massive theft is noteworthy. For thirty years Mr Assault Rifle has been hiding out among the peace-loving hippies of UC Santa Cruz. Good cover.

Fadela Amara, “[French] founder of the activist group Ni Putes Ni Soumises, translated as ‘Neither Whores nor Submissive,’ and later … the Secretary of State for Urban Policies,” spoke a couple of days ago about France’s anti-burqa law at the University of Chicago’s International House (UD lived in an apartment directly across the street from I House when she studied there).

Amara knows France’s fundamentalist ghettos well; she has watched them become cults of “forced marriage, polygamy, [female] circumcision, and violence against women.” Outlawing the full burqa (the law had seventy percent support among the French) has had some effect on

[t]he strategy of radical Islamists … to send in veiled women to force unveiled women to wear the burqa. And this is a real battle that has been going on for 15 years in France. And women who do not wear the veil, who were refusing to wear the veil, have been harassed and attacked, either verbally or physically — verbally by insulting them and calling them sluts, because for them these are not women who are respectable…. So we decided to stop all of this. And to act in a way to protect the women who were resisting in these neighborhoods.

Israel – where any woman who boards certain buses or walks on certain streets can be assured of being called a slut and spat on – could learn from the way France is dealing with its fundamentalist bullies.

… life on campus becomes so degrading, that students take desperate measures. UD vividly remembers the American University students who, stuck with a president whose corruption had become a national disgrace, simply drove all day up and down AU’s main drag, honking their horns and calling out to people on the sidewalk to help them get rid of the pest. They emblazoned their cars with signs like PRESIDENT LADNER: WE’LL HELP YOU MOVE.

All of Washington laughed; the tactic worked. Ladner resigned.

Jake Mayfield’s similarly desperate online petition (I just signed it; if this blog’s long chronicle of the mind-wastage of big-time university sports has meant anything to you, you should consider signing it too) is unlikely to work. New Mexico State University (background here) is much too far gone for anyone to make much of a difference. Unlike AU, located in an intellectually ambitious state (well, district), NMSU is located in what UD calls one of our Right-Not-To-Think states. Imagine trying to explain – let alone get support for – an academic university in Nevada, Alaska, Hawaii, New Mexico. Not gonna happen.

Still, there’s nobility in what Mayfield (a recent NMSU grad) is doing; it’s an important gesture, and one worth supporting.

… are enough for public health officials to declare an outbreak there.

A large alumni reunion will take place nonetheless; participants are being cautioned to wash their hands a lot, avoid kissing everyone in sight, etc.

… a new pair of glasses.

La Kid has returned to Dublin
from Malta. She continues her
internship in the literary
department of the Abbey Theatre.

… deal.