As sophomore Ryan Gall of Grosse Point, Mich., said of Ole Miss, “I understand why people fail out. I don’t understand why people transfer. If [coach] Hugh Freeze starts winning more games, this place will become the No. 1 destination of the SEC.”

A Columbia University student, on the laptop in the classroom.

Take, for example, an instance of tweeting while listening to a lecture: It’s tempting to think that we can divide our attention between a professor’s analysis of the Cold War and a clever 140 characters, but it would be more accurate to think of this as a series of micro-episodes, as we alternate brief bursts of attention between the two possible stimuli to which we may attend. Each one is a distraction that impedes our performance on the primary task.

… along various backyard paths I’ve
made, I discovered one of these:

(I found this cleaned-up button here.
Mine is soaking in soap and
warm water.).

It’s a vintage Post Office Department
button, dating anywhere from the late
nineteenth century to 1940.

Here’s one in the Postal Museum.

Since his arrest in Italy, [Mark] Weinberger, [a plastic surgeon found guilty of fraud,] has been locked up at the city’s federal Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he claimed to cook meals for inmates and teach yoga classes, according to the Chicago Tribune. In addition, Weinberger conducted a class on non-violence in which he “personally scripts Socractic dialogues taking place between various historical figures,” the paper reported.

Kaleigh Robins, a 21-year-old [Indiana University] student, said the atmosphere at tailgates has changed — in part because of an increased police presence.

“I’ve never been ID’d before at a tailgate before now,” Robins said.

Students also are banned from playing music at the tailgates, and she said there are no longer any “handles” — half-gallon bottles of liquor that are staples at college parties.

“It’s kind of sad,” she said.

Kristi Tan, a 23-year-old recent IU graduate, agreed.

“It’s like old glory died down…”

It’s a choice.

The Harry Potter language suggests that the most outrageously scandalous loser among American universities – SUNY Binghamton – got that way due to evil visited upon it by outside forces. But SUNY was the architect of its own doom, having waged a cynical and greedy campaign for Division I glory. Now it gets to enjoy years of pathetic budgets and vile publicity.

The local newspaper grapples with the amazingly violent University of Massachusetts student body.

The dean helps the reporter understand this profoundly complex problem: Why do so many of the young men the school has admitted destroy neighborhoods and physically attack the police? It’s in their nature. Look to the developmental spectrum. It’s all part of the price of doing business for the university. Boys will be boys, and we admit them knowing they can’t help where they are on the spectrum.

We’ve got it all – the article written before the stabbing (one of several fights) at our first basketball event of the season (“We have the best fans in college basketball!”), and the article written after the place was evacuated and the stabbed guy was taken to the hospital (“We were saddened to learn…”).

Students and administration at Syracuse seem to be taking a lot of comfort from the fact that the guy who was stabbed, and the guys in all the other fights (“[The police] received multiple reports of fights breaking out in the concourse areas near the concession stands prior to receiving a report of the stabbing…”), weren’t students, but so what? If your university has created perfect conditions for riots (the event is free and open to the public and being shitfaced is de rigueur), you’re not going to be impervious to the weaponry by virtue of having a student i.d.

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

The solution won’t be to change the nature of the event. The event recruits fans who will purchase tickets, and the school needs the money. The solution – a familiar one, adding delight to these free-spirited celebrations – will be to turn the arena into a police state.

… at play.

I wonder what in their admissions essays must have made Berkeley decide to admit them.

I hope, in my legal career, to have an opportunity to torture, behead, and play with the dead bodies of birds.

**************
UD thanks David.

More on Cardale Jones the truth-teller:

His tweet, if inartful and perhaps ill-advised, was actually correct on the merits: he was not given a scholarship to play school.

For background, go here.

… a Chinese novelist, wins the Nobel. Presumably we’re all off to read, among his novels, Big Breasts and Wide Hips (1996).

… if you’re the New York Times editorial page, we expect better of you.

If Pakistan has a future, it is embodied in Malala Yousafzai. Yet the Taliban so feared this 14-year-old girl that they tried to assassinate her. Her supposed offense? Her want of an education and her public advocation for it.

As La Kid (UD‘s daughter, if you’re new to this site) would say, AWKward.

Here’s what you do.

You drop supposed.

You sit down and think about how confused your use of the phrase “want of an education” makes your reader. Do you mean desire for? Do you mean lack of?

You change advocation – which is certainly a word, and it means what you want it to mean, but it’s seldom used – to advocacy.

You think some more about how the way you’ve written the sentence makes it sound as though Malala is advocating for an education that’s wanting.

… attended, and among university observers generally, there’s a good deal of comment about the American university bubble. About how MOOCs and outrageous tuition and clouded job prospects are going to shut down or seriously shrink brick and mortar academic institutions…

At Harvard, Bill Kristol said the bubble thing after UD pointed out – in response to a lot of doom and gloom talk among her fellow attendees – that just outside the venue of our conference masses of people from around the world were using battering rams to gain admission to Harvard, a school whose almost forty billion dollar endowment looked to her like one hell of a tough bubble. And people said the obvious stuff about how exceptional Harvard is, etc.

Yet Harvard is one of maybe thirty spectacular private and public schools in the United States to which the battering ram image applies. Everyone’s writing today about the wealthy Chinese couple suing a former Harvard professor after they gave him over two million dollars to get their sons into Harvard or someplace similar. (The wise writer at Gawker points out their fatal mistake: “Always, always bribe the school directly. Can’t stress this enough.”)

I thought China was cleaning our clock. Instead the Chinese, the Indians, tens of thousands of Americans, and vast numbers of people from other countries, seem to be keeping the university bubble at bay.

Football brings so many obvious gifts to universities – broken budgets, academic fraud, a chance to become intimate on a daily basis not only with the local police, but often with the FBI… But there’s a more nuanced sort of gift football offers academic institutions, and this has to do with the atmosphere, the ethos, the gestalt, of these intellectual settings. It involves bringing coaches to campus and giving them the highest salary in the state and allowing them and their staff to impose Stalinist standards on student journalists.

Here are two of many examples of authoritarian coaches trying to shut down a free press at American universities. I mean, of course we know that virtually all university football programs refuse to discuss – or only very selectively discuss – their budgets (Penn State, before it was forced by circumstance to disclose all sorts of things to the world, was notoriously paranoid about any form of disclosure); but here we’re talking about the actual bullying of a free press.

The latest case of this activity – ever so slightly at odds with the nature of universities – has occurred at the University of Kansas, whose football coach is touchy about the fact that he’s doing a wretched job, and who considers campus journalists the functional equivalent of cheerleaders. This post’s title quotes a commenter on an article about the coach’s efforts to intimidate a staffer on the KU newspaper, and indeed the situation is very simple and very familiar from other big-time sports schools: You bully people on the field, you bully people off the field. Name of the game.

The coach tweets his incredulity:

Team slammed by our own school newspaper. Amazing!

Whoever heard of a university newspaper criticizing its own football team?? Amazing! So the coach had his staff tell the reporter he’d better shut up if he wants continued access.

As Deadspin puts it:

Weis is off to a 1-4 start in his first season at KU. Here’s a change in tone, Kansas: The shitty, incompetent coach of your shitty, incompetent football program had his pwecious fweewings hurt by the fucking school newspaper, and in response, your idiot factotum—instead of telling Weis to shut the fuck up and to concentrate on not losing by 40 to State next time—decided to be a smarmy, bullying little PR shit. Way to go, assholes.

*****************
UD thanks Dave.