[I]n some instances our academic standards are higher than Vanderbilts. That’s right[: We] had a player be ineligible to play this year that would have been good to go at 13 other SEC schools and I know of at least one more who was cleared to play by the NCAA but not by [the] academic arsehole[s] at Tennessee.

When it comes to university sports, it doesn’t get any more pathological than the University of Kentucky, a perennially corrupt player constantly featured on this blog.

These details from the Eric Smart scientific misconduct scandal on that campus round out the picture of UK as one of America’s most third-world universities, featuring not only an intensely corrupt athletics division, but a high-profile research lab whose now-disgraced director seems to have been protected by people in the administration.

Tim Bricker, the former chair of pediatrics, wrote [Smart] a recommendation letter to the state’s teacher certification agency, calling him “an outstanding teacher.” Bricker is thought to have also removed a letter of reprimand from Smart’s personnel file that detailed his yearlong probation for sexual harassment and creating a hostile work environment in his lab.

Another update on Brown University’s highest-profile trustee.

… I’ve wanted the University of Southern Mississippi (you owe it to yourself to read the entire article, plus the letter at the end) to be stupider than the University of Massachusetts. I’ve assumed that that deep south school would obviously be dumber than a school in my enlightened part of the country.

Yet they’re actually neck and neck. They’re actually destroying themselves at the same rate, for the same reason. They’re both sports fuck-ups.

6,385 people showed up for U Mass’s most recent football game — played far from campus in Gillette Stadium (where the big boys play!), which offers 68,756 seats.

So let’s see. UD stinks at math, but… 6,385 / 68,756… That’s, uh (pause for phone call to Mr UD) … 9.3%!!!

OR (pause for visit to Percentage Calculator) … that’s 9.2864622723835%!!!!

Of course, “students and taxpayers [are] picking up the tab.”

General Subbaswamy has announced from his bunker that “we haven’t completely mobilized the alumni yet.” His last job was at the University of Kentucky, so he knows university sports.

***************

UD thanks Andre.

“I don’t know if it approaches crisis [with the Jovan Belcher murder-suicide]; perhaps it does, but it’s at a crossroads because there’s an issue about the fundamental nature of the game. It’s so popular and so profitable, but it takes a tremendous toll on many of those who play it. Not just body, but as we’re now learning, mind and emotions,” Costas said on “Piers Morgan Tonight.”

“And it’s a legitimate question to ask whether, for some players at least, the toll that the game takes, brain trauma, medications that they may take, enhance performance or deal with pain, all those things. The culture of the league increases the likelihood of abhorrent behavior. It’s possible.”

It’s a comfort to know that the same culture pertains at quite a few of our university football and basketball programs.

… Dean Cecilia Chang.

… Rothkos … Then ……

… This week, I stopped by St. Andrews Plaza in Lower Manhattan to see Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, and his deputy, Richard Zabel, the former head of the criminal division. Both said they couldn’t discuss any pending cases. But many people who work in financial markets “are highly skilled at cost-benefit analysis,” Mr. Bharara told me. “They’re highly intelligent. They’ve been to the best schools. They weigh the risk of getting caught against the potential reward, and they decide it’s worth the risk. We’re trying to tilt that equation.”

… For the most part, inside traders aren’t hardened criminals but rational decision-makers. When confronted by an F.B.I. agent in his front yard, [Mathew] Martoma fainted.

So what we’ve created with our best schools is a class of sensitive, rational, ethically keen criminals who do not think of themselves as criminals. They faint when they see the FBI coming.

I suppose it’s a sort of cultural accomplishment. Me, I prefer the old school.

The Wharton School of Business. UD has lost count of how many graduates, just this year, have been indicted for incredibly high-level fraud.

[Craig] Toll … [is] charged with defrauding … investors out of $40 million, and scamming the federal government out of … $10 million [he was] given to help finance construction of a Haitian factory to build homes for hurricane victims.

Toll, 64, is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.

… [He is charged with] 23 counts of fraud and money laundering

Do you suppose anyone at Wharton notices how many of their graduates are criminals, or are under indictment? Or are, like Brown University’s highest-profile trustee, getting buzzed by the SEC an awful lot?

Hell, maybe Wharton’s proud of it. You have to figure there are tons more graduates out there successfully defrauding people.

… has been suspended without pay because of plagiarism.

That’s it. That’s all the school will say, and no journalist has anything to add so far.

This is a pity. It’s actually kind of irresponsible. Students and colleagues have a right to know how extensively he plagiarized, what in particular he plagiarized, etc. This sort of non-announcement leaves us uncertain whether Clinton Beckford has plagiarized everything he’s written, or just a few things. A lot of his publications are co-authored. Did his associates also plagiarize?

… from the collective “rich, fat, tired” mind of America is about to released. The most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – a megaton Memories of Overdevelopment, As I Lay Diagnosing, and Diazepam Comes for the Archbishop – will soon hit the shelves.

Stephen Dedalus, in Ulysses, called Irish art “the cracked looking-glass of a servant.” The DSM is the cracked looking-glass of a master. It is our pill-dependent, Alexandrine culture’s most soul-searching, compendious, self-expression yet.

Allen Frances, who was there when the DSM started to explode, has consistently warned against pathologizing an entire country. Many other people – and many mental health organizations – have done the same. But our family practitioners remain weirdly dependent upon this obese mashup, this encyclical of enervation.

The best that can be said about it is that it adequately conveys what we have become.

… exiting the National Building Museum after performing in Christmas in Washington:

Everyone went absolutely nuts for Psy – we were all doing Gangnam Style dancing. He wasn’t very friendly though. Just kind of nodded to the chorus. I think he’s under a lot of strain because of his anti-American thing!

We sang with Diana Ross and they put me in the front row … So I was singing with Diana Ross, just behind her, and looking at the President just a few feet away from me. I was practically crying. I was crying, at the end of the song.

I think you’ll be able to see me when it airs – but only during the Diana Ross. The final medley was with the two other choruses, and I was standing way back.

The food at the reception was amazing.

Just because Ellis Johnson has landed on his feet with an $800,000 per-year contract at Auburn University doesn’t mean that Southern Miss is off the hook for any of his $2.1 million buyout.

… [At a faculty meeting, Aubrey] Lucas affirmed that contracts are being examined more carefully, though he did not elaborate in what ways. He also stated that he intends to put a better payout clause in the contract of the next head football coach.

Thanks to a report on a national sports website called Deadspin, it has become commonplace to assume that Johnson’s buyout will be paid with the $2.125 million that Southern Miss will receive for its football game in 2013 with the University of Nebraska.

In fact, Lucas said school officials aren’t planning to pay any of it with the game revenue, stating that other pressing issues will require the money, such as the ongoing athletic department debt and the loss of revenue from the steep decline in ticket sales throughout the year.

As for the buyout, it’s actually greater than $2.1 million when you take into account the assistant coaches that will need to be bought out once a new coach brings in his staff.

Lucas said that school is on the hook for $1.1 million for this fiscal year (ending July 1, 2013) for the contracts of Johnson and his assistant coaches…

Then the school will have to foot an additional $1.95 million for the next three fiscal years for Johnson and the assistants that remain under contract.

… What’s really surprising me are those who believe as I do that two players on the [football] team have committed serious criminal acts – sexual assault in one case, and rape in another — but assumed that I’d support the team anyway, just as they are.

[A]s a thought exercise, how many predators would have to be on the team before you’d no longer feel like cheering?

… [T]he man Lizzy accused had a history of behavior that should have kept him from being recruited in the first place.

… “I’ve watched almost every game this season and there’s not a single time that I don’t feel extreme anger when I see [the accused] on the field,” said Kaliegh Fields, a Saint Mary’s junior who went with Lizzy to the police station. “Once I start thinking about the people who put the school’s success in a sport over the life of a young woman, I can’t help but feel disgust. Everyone’s always saying how God’s on Notre Dame’s side,” she added. “And I think, ‘How could he be?’”

Melinda Henneberger, Washington Post

One of UD‘s many Turkish MOOC students (check out her poetry MOOC here) comments that she’s “very bored.”

UD now has 1,702 students. She hopes not all are bored.