When first I saw you
And your shining prison
I felt the sun had
Only just arisen

O CEO!
CEO of GEO!
Pray go away!
Pray GOOOOOOOoooo awayyyyyy!

… deal to name its stadium after a company that runs prisons.

Was a prison company our first choice? No. But let’s face it, for a $6 million donation we probably would have sold the stadium naming rights to Massengill and called the stadium The Douche Dome.

We were desperate. We built a $70 million facility that’s nearly empty year-round, even during home football games, and for two years, nobody was biting on the naming rights.

Luigi Frati, the Rector of La Sapienza University in Rome, has become one of the most notorious figures in [a] scandal which local media have dubbed “Parentopoli” – or “Relative-gate”.

A doctor by training, Professor Frati has, both as rector and formerly as head of the university’s medical faculty, overseen the promotion of his wife from being a local high school history teacher, to becoming Professor of Medical History.

His daughter also gained a post as Professor of Legal Medicine – without any specific medical education. And his son was made an associate professor in cardiology aged just 31, one of the youngest Italians to gain such an appointment.

He has denied claims of nepotism, insisting that all his loved-ones just happen to be the best qualified.

… Yale.

Most scandal-befouled sports factories – North Carolina, Penn State – are embarrassed by how far they’ve let themselves go. They seem to retain a sense of what they once were, or could have been, before they dissolved.

But UD will give this to Auburn University: It is what it is — the sports and leisure sewer of the American collegiate landscape — and it’s proud of it. No hiding its head in shame for Auburn after its countless athletic scandals; it has a belligerent insistence on total squalor, total contempt for the concept “university,” that one can’t help but admire.

Now it’s building an amusement park for everyone there, featuring

a 50-foot rock climbing wall with an auto-belaying system, four bordering caves for lateral climbing, a a 20-foot wet rock climbing wall in the 20,000 gallon leisure activity pool, a 45-person hot tub in the shape of a tiger paw and a third of a mile indoor track with a corkscrew formation and 10 feet of altitude.

Tiger paw because that’s the mascot, dummy. Here’s a photograph of forty-five people or so (doing something they’d never be caught dead doing at Auburn), in case you want to start picturing the hot tub.

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UD thanks a reader from Auburn.

FAU, also known as Find Another University, is enjoying the kind of global publicity you can’t put a price on. Its new stadium, named after a notorious prison, has been inaugurated by none other than Stephen Colbert:

http://www.sbnation.com/college-football/2013/2/22/4017374/stephen-colbert-fau-football-stadium-geo-group

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UD thanks Daniel.

When you’re a dying jock school, the last thing to go is your sports program.

South Carolina State will probably be shut down or absorbed into another institution in a few years. Few people enroll. It’s totally corrupt. It has almost no money. It’s such a boringly absolute fiasco that people don’t even pay attention to it anymore.

Its sports teams are also in the toilet; but in a recent interview the school’s athletics director put it all in perspective:

[The AD] said it is important to the athletics department and to the university for the football and men’s basketball programs to experience success. At a school in financial crisis with dwindling enrollment, athletics accomplishments can provide a morale boost for the student body.

Let’s spend the few dollars we were able to free from the grip of thieving trustees and administrators on games! Let’s go out with a smile.

This article about Boise State University captures – in a truly unsettling way – the sordid, delusional nature of the American jock school.

The main point of the piece is the financial hemorrhaging of the sports program. No surprise there. Fewer and fewer people go to university games, so ticket sales at many schools are in the toilet.

But along the way, the writer notes that Boise – a not very impressive university, which might want to spend a bit on its educational offerings – is building a $22 million dollar football stadium. That the stadium will be named after a coach who presided over a program so filthy that even the NCAA noticed is in no way awkward, assures Boise’s president. The people who gave the money liked the guy (now coaching for another school), and they get to call the shots.

In fact the article is full of blithe reassurances from the Blanche DuBois running Boise: The fans will be back; the stadium’s name, honoring a miscreant, is way cool; athletics is going to be a big moneymaker any day now. So it goes.

… a college and – allegedly – uses his knowledge  of its financial systems to steal from it.

While he was acting president of Southern Vermont College, James Beckwith apparently withdrew large sums from it and placed them in his personal account to pay down mortgages.

Beckwith has committed suicide.

… University of Iowa professor is dumping on ethanol, and this pisses me off so I write to my buddy – President Pro Tem, Regents, University of Iowa, and I say Bruce, what the fuck?  So Bruce – prominent contributor to Governor Brandstad’s campaigns, by the way, and himself an ethanol guy – contacts the university’s president and complains about this “uninformed” professor who says bad things about ethanol and Bruce says let’s do an intervention,  have him talk to the industry, etc.  And she says sure, and next thing you know this guy – just because he criticized ethanol at an academic conference – has the university president and industry and a trustee breathing down his neck!

Is this a great country or what?

… UD‘s Inside Higher Education post about the Columbia University physics professor now under review by the school for his non-standard approach to quantum mechanics, can be found here.

… I would join SeekingArrangement.com.” A Columbia University student, fresh out of a physics class where the professor took off his clothes in front of a film about 9/11, wonders why her required class requires her to watch things like this.

There are of course precedents. Denis Rancourt didn’t strip, but he did other crazy political shit in what were ostensibly courses about physics.

What is it about physics? I guess you take the big picture, and then it becomes imperative that you WAKE UP BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE! your captive audience.

It’s always possible, of course, that Emlyn Hughes is having a mental breakdown in front of his class.  Plenty of precedent for that too, sadly.

And, finally, it’s possible Hughes is just a mad attention slut.

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UD thanks Jon.

… down to a science.

… Southern Methodist University today, shall we? There are scads of colleges and universities in this country, but only a few – Florida A&M, Penn State, University of Miami, University of North Carolina – get to hog the spotlight. So profound is our ‘radically present’ orientation (to quote the theorists of postmodernity) that we tend to miss precisely those schools with the deepest histories of squalor.

In the case of SMU, which adds piquancy to its sordidness by including a religious denomination in its name, it’s been notably vile ever since its long-ago death penalty, a signal distinction within a national landscape of dirty sports programs. SMU has not let the fact that the program remains moribund stop it from accumulating – last year – a one hundred million dollar athletic deficit.

Nor has the fantastic campus culture of the sports factory faltered in the wake of SMU’s misfortune. Secrecy about the budget even as they soak the students for higher and higher athletics fees? Check. Sodden frat boys befouling all they touch? Check. Violent hazing? Check. I mean, that last one – hazing – hit the news today, but it got lost, since hazing and sexual assault and all that seem de rigueur, comme il faut and la chose normale at SMU. I just thought I’d draw your attention to it for a moment.

“The relationship between professors and their doctoral candidates has often been minimized down to a lazy wave-through.”

There are many illuminating statements in this interview with a German ghostwriter of dissertations.

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Markets work in funny ways.

Instead of creating a backlash against ghostwriters, however, cases like Guttenberg’s have actually had the opposite effect. His case was actually how many people first learned about the existence of doctoral ghostwriters at all. Since the beginning of the 2000’s, the number of ghostwriters … has risen and prices have fallen for the service.

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The interviewed ghostwriter shares the self-justifying bullshit that gets him through the night.

“Everything is for sale: sex, people, doctorates. I am only a cog in the wheels of capitalism.”

You keep telling yourself that, honey.