… is that any particular revelation of corruption threatens to set off a chain reaction.

Take your typical southern university system — a crony dumping-ground, a favor-repayment franchise, a post-tailgate barrens of the blitzed and bilious. As with the 2009 Mary Easley scandal at North Carolina State (scroll down for several posts), one fallen crony begats another which begats another yea to everlasting. More recently, the unpleasantness in the University of North Carolina’s Afro-American Studies department has touched off a spate of panic-auditing which has begat more fallen cronies, among them a sporty, well-compensated couple that travels about hither and yon on the taxpayer’s dime.

… that I ignore most of them and only feature the very worst. The Florida A&M hazing death definitely rates inclusion. The family of the student beaten to death on the marching band’s bus has sued, and FAMU has argued that the kid brought it on himself.

This ignores the fact that FAMU has spent decades ignoring a hazing culture that anyone could see was spinning out of control. UD thinks the school should take the fall – might knock some sense into all the other sports factories that do the same sort of thing.

… other sites, was down for most of the afternoon. Her host, GoDaddy, apparently got hacked.

But I’m back, to share with you the Headline of the Day:

MEN CAUGHT WITH TINY PRIMATES IN THEIR UNDERWEAR IN DELHI AIRPORT

The full weight of the tragedy is finally felt.

The Weiss Gallery of Ancient Art will showcase the Museum’s Roman marble portraits and sarcophagi, wall paintings from the vicinity of Pompeii, and floor mosaics from the Roman province of Syria. Here the Museum’s collection of Etruscan and Italic ceramics and bronzes will also be shown, among these a bronze relief fragment depicting warriors on horseback dating to the 6th century BCE, a recent gift of Drs. Arnold-Peter and Yvonne Weiss…

The third gallery, devoted to Materials and Technology, puts on view more Greek and Roman coins from the Museum’s collection than ever before. Among these are a spectacular tetradrachm with a head of the god Dionysos from Naxos in Sicily and a decadrachm with a stunning image of the nymph Arethusa from Syracuse, as well as gold staters from Pergamon dating to the time of Alexander the Great, recent donations from Drs. Peter and Yvonne Weiss.

The Rhode Island School of Design might want to take another look at that spectacular tetradrachm. Might also want to see if there’s anything it can do toward renaming the Weiss Gallery.

As you know if you’re a regular UD reader, this blog takes a keen interest in the details of sandblasting disgraced donors’ names from buildings (Seton Hall specializes in this), and we’ll keep an eye on RISD’s design decisions here, because Weiss of Weiss Gallery has now been found guilty of coin theft. His punishment:

… Weiss must complete 70 hours of community service, give up all 23 coins that were seized from him at the time of arrest and attempt to publish an article on the problem of trading coins with uncertain origins.

One quick piece of advice for Weiss from UD: Contact your colleague, Martin Keller, for names of some organizations that can help with the writing of the article.

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UD thanks Maurice.

Wharton: Forcing Ground of the Great Insiders!

You have to go to Lucky’s speech in Samuel Beckett’s absurdist Waiting for Godot (start at 44:30) even to begin to understand the for-profit college situation in the United States. David Halperin does a nice tidy job of reviewing the mad greed and cynicism and indifference that puts our taxes in the pockets of people who exploit innocents. It won’t change until lobbying changes. And lobbying won’t change.

A writer at Jezebel uses really hurtful language to describe Boston University’s fun-loving hockey players. In the tradition of George Huguely, they call their sexual conquests “kills.” As at the University of Montana, a campus so rape-positive that students must now watch don’t rape, don’t get raped films and then pass a test about them before they can register, it’s all about the athletes.

I mean, it’s also about the bars, boosters, and coaches.

There is a widespread belief that behavior by the [Montana] football team has been tolerated by the program’s infrastructure. Three of the lawyers representing players, for example, are on the National Advisory Board for Grizzly Athletics…

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[O]ne [Boston] team member said [the hockey coach] “cares too much about hurting the important players’ feelings… He’ll criticize, then apologize.”

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[A] shady student-athlete-friendly sports bar … T’s Pub [has been cited as] “part of the problem,” since hockey players could (until recently) drink there for free without showing IDs. [Athletes bring in business.]

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Yes, it takes a village. And why is the village the way it is?

Mayor John Engen of Missoula said the city was cooperating and would make any needed changes. He said he believed the scandal would pass if the public and the students felt the issues had been addressed, but in the meantime, with the football team under a cloud, “it’s hard to know what people are going to pin their hopes and dreams on.”

What else are people going to pin their hopes and dreams on?

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UD proposes that big-time sports universities set aside some part of their enormous athletic budgets to establish Comfort Women dormitories, safe and supervised havens for the teams.

UD thanks her sister.

… because his University of Puebla economics degree is a fake.

… right off!

Who knows why Les UDs keep skirting disaster? During this immense storm (it’s still going on), I looked outside to see a very large tree limb on our car – a heavy thick central limb and many smaller limbs, all bristling with leaves and twigs…. The sight would have been very pretty if it weren’t sitting on our car.

UD went out there in the rain and noted that it wasn’t exactly on our car but rather had sort of mainly fallen on the street and only lightly tangentially fallen on our car. I couldn’t see any damage. I pulled on the main limb. Much too heavy to move.

“Do you like a challenge?” I asked Mr UD when I got back inside. He squared his shoulders, marched out there, and did in fact move the whole thing closer to the curb. I stood about pointlessly, repeating Don’t hoit yourself!, as if this amusing New York accent would make the incident amusing.

Mr UD then drove off to get dinner while UD took out her lopper and lopped the limbs that lay in the lane. She laboriously lopped the leaves that lived down the lane.

While lopping, UD talked to herself about how interesting it was that her neighbors kept driving by, very carefully making their way around the thing, and then in a very neighborly and sympathetic way waving at me, but not stopping to help.

Soon enough, though, a town maintenance man came by, his white truck emblazoned on both sides with Washington Redskins flags. He took over.

It’s an archetypal American story, told here by Johnny Cash (scroll down), and rendered just as poignantly by the University of Iowa’s president on her Hangover Regret tour.

Given that she presides over the the nation’s second-ranked party school, she now muses about the wisdom of having signed a big high-profile deal with Anheuser-Busch:

“I’m not sure it’s worth the revenues we’re getting for our athletic department,” Mason said at a taping Friday for Iowa Public Television’s “Iowa Press.” “I probably would reconsider. More than likely not even do it.”

The university has been fighting its party-school image for years and has tried to push the message of “safe, responsible, legal,” Mason said. That seemed to fit with Anheuser-Busch’s pitch for drinking responsibly.

But recently, the university’s Tigerhawk logo appeared on posters advertising drink specials at Iowa City bars, a move not approved by the university.

You can appreciate the president’s logic:

1. After fighting our party school image for years, Iowa appears at the number two slot on the most recent list.

2. Therefore, inking deals that make our school’s logo virtually indistinguishable from the corporate image of the nation’s biggest beer distributor might NOT be the best way to fight our party school image.

Presidential leadership. It doesn’t get any better than this!

… aimed at students protesting the campus visit of Mr One Percent, Eric Cantor — a banner reading

GET IN OUR BRACKET

— so students at Georgetown University are marketing their investment fund to fellow students with the tagline

BECOME THE ONE PERCENT.

Much huffing and puffing about it here. But really – it’s a clever slogan, and it has helped attract a lot of investors.

… can be as big as all outdoors.

In 1997, the owner of a massive cattle ranch in Wyoming gave it to Colorado State University and the University of Wyoming “for hands-on agriculture education.” But the universities say “the working ranch isn’t a very practical place for students to learn,” and have now put it up for sale.

The donor threatens to sue, since it seems to her that the universities “violated the gift agreement by insufficiently promoting the ranch to university faculty as an available educational tool.”

Why hasn’t the educational set-up worked? “To date, the ranch has had 25 interns and employees from both universities studying geology, range and wildlife management, and equine studies.” That’s in fourteen years.

The same University of Wyoming newspaper, in another article on the subject, increases the number:

In the past, the ranch has had more than 50 interns from a wide variety of fields, including art and geology. Japanese ranchers have visited, and students from Europe have asked to intern at the ranch.

That’s still ridiculously tiny.

To UD’s madly idealizing, hopelessly coastal mind, 50,000 gorgeous acres, a working cattle ranch, should be a spectacular acquisition for a land-grant university interested in maintaining and improving a state’s traditional way of life. It should also be attractive to a university’s art departments, to environmentalists, to scientists…

UW dean of the College of Agriculture, Francis Galey, told the AP, “It’s a very, very efficient and lean working operation. So the way it was set up staffing-wise, there just wasn’t a way to accommodate the teaching we wanted to do.”

I’m not sure what this means. No one on the staff was willing to teach? Isn’t that what the professor is supposed to do? Or am I picking up the possibility that the staff simply wasn’t very cooperative with the whole educational thing — wanted to be left alone to do its work? Disrupted classes?

Wyoming’s student paper writes:

The hidden message is that more educated ranchers do not work the land. They work in management and let unskilled workers work the land. This shift in ranch politics will mean fewer jobs and less state revenue. Family run ranches will quickly become a thing of the past, confined to western movies and stories told by grandparents.

In this Working Ranch article, more reasons emerge, mainly having to do with difficult access and hard winters and the fact that both universities have closer similar facilities (which maybe undermines the claim about the sale’s hidden message).

The darkest theory is that the schools just held onto the land as long as they had to legally and are now selling it because it’s insanely valuable. They’ll get around twenty million, apparently. They say the money will go to agricultural scholarships, but I wonder…