It’s another when good universities like the University of Michigan spin out of control. Off they go, one after another expensive (to Michigan taxpayers) football player… And the players get that all-important incredibly condescending send-off from the coach:

“Fitz made a poor decision and has been suspended indefinitely because of that action,” Michigan coach Brady Hoke said in a statement released Monday afternoon. “There are expectations that come with being a football student-athlete at the University of Michigan and those responsibilities were not met in this instance.

“We will use this as an opportunity to educate Fitz and make sure he understands the high standards that we have established within our program.”

As if this asshole didn’t recruit the guy. More becoming would be the coach saying something like The pattern of university-destroying misbehavior on the part of so many members of our most high-profile teams means that something is wrong with our recruiting strategy. We will try to do a better job. But no – he has to lecture the player on how he’s going to get educated blah blah. Better to educate the coach in avoiding cynical recruitment decisions.

But anyway. Doesn’t matter. UM’s disgusting and expensive hiring and firing of the likes of Rick Rodriguez… I mean, we’re supposed to forget about all that… Put it aside the way Penn State people put aside one unsettling event after another over decades. North Carolina Chapel Hill is already a laughingstock; U Mich is probably next. On with the farce.

Yes, well said, and this we all know.

The writer insists that cold hard cash, rather than any “abstraction,” accounts for college football’s disgusting culture:

Culture sounds like an abstraction, but it’s really not. Money is driving the culture.

Yet UD would argue that culture is driving the money. Indeed, when the writer tries to get at the culture, he’s vague, clearly inadequate:

College sports remain an intoxicating spectacle, rich with custom and a young, loyal, emotional audience. It sweeps us into the moment, thrills us, suspends our common sense. The forces behind college sports know we won’t turn away, even as coaches skip out on teams and superstar athletes (quite understandably) depart school early. They know we are hooked, and they can count on our cognitive dissonance.

This descriptive language fails to distinguish the sick giant (compellingly embodied by hulking affectless Sandusky) of big-time university football and basketball from amateur campus athletics – from all good sports spectacles, for that matter. The writer is also wrong about the nature of the audience. It is neither particularly young nor particularly loyal. The moneyed fans (and they’re all that count for the purposes of the money argument) are older guys – forties, fifties, sixties… T. Boone Pickens is around 500… And the reason so many big programs are in deep financial shit is because fans abandon teams in droves when they start on a losing streak. Some fans are loyal, sure. Many fans flee the stadium when the team sucks. Plus when the economy’s in the dumpster they abandon their season tickets and luxury boxes. In response, the university ups the price of everyone’s ticket (gotta pay for the 300 million stadium upgrade and the new incredibly expensive coach who will turn the team around and the incredibly expensive severance pay for the exiting coach who by the way is also talking about suing the school), making matters worse.

And why are so many universities dominated by a culture that “sweeps us into the moment, thrills us, suspends our common sense”? Do these sounds like intellectual values? I mean, thrills us, okay. The rest of it?

No, the writer needs to disentangle some of what he’s written and think about sports factories as places where people have eagerly betrayed the life of the mind.

… has died.

Among many other things, she was a physics professor at UC San Diego.

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Charming memories of time spent in libraries.

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Schmaltzy, but why not.

NOW we’re getting serious. Now the big shit shows up. Now Jim Stanley Asphalt pulls a red dump truck up to UD‘s curb. Hitched to the truck is a flatbed (?) truck on which stand…

WHAT? WHAT? I don’t know what these machines are called. Earth mover? Yellow sit-on thing that smooths things out? Is UD going to go outside and ask these guys to NAME their vehicles?

Les UDs figured that since last week’s machines – the ones that powered over our already in bad shape driveway to remove our downed trees – reduced our driveway to rubble, this would be a good time to get the driveway resurfaced. One guy digs at the rubble a bit while another guy maneuvers into place the small yellow scoopy thing. Now two guys are shoveling soil and rubble into the scoop while the scoop thing reverses down the driveway. The guy driving the scoop is wearing a yellow, well-ironed, pristine, polo shirt (this is greater Bethesda).

So lots more shoveling into scoops going on, plus one guy, sitting on my front lawn, has a bunch of long yellow poles and is trying to open a roundish container of some sort…. Oh, it has a pump handle and the guy is pumping it while standing in my driveway…

Okay, here’s EXACTLY what they’re going to do. I’m taking this from the contract.

Paving driveway of 405 square feet with asphalt. Mill asphalt down at street to meet back flush. Edge grass back and apply a tack coating so two layers bond as one. Machine lay 2″ of topping asphalt and power roll with a 3-5 ton asphalt roller. Bank all edges on a 45 degree angle. Clean up jobsite before leaving.

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The dump truck has, you know, leaned its back thing down and the scoop thing is now receiving asphalt into itself from the back thing … Hey, it’s smokin’ out there! … Or I guess it’s not asphalt yet. Tar? Okay so the long poles are rakes and the guys are smoothing the tar with them.

Plus they’re using the back of a shovel.

They’re talking in Spanish and laughing loudly. HEY YOU LAUGHIN’ AT ME? YOU LAUGHIN’ AT ME MAN? I think they’re laughing at my driveway.

Smokin’ again. Guy in sit-on smooth-thing goes back to dump truck, opens back of dump truck, and more black stuff – tar, no? – comes pouring out.

Watching these guys, I’d say it looks as though they’re putting dark chocolate icing on a cake.

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Now the yellow smoother thing is rolling over the rich chocolaty tar and making it look lighter — more like a driveway. Long streaks of steamy liquid are coming off the roller.

The green of my liriope looks elegant against the new dark surface.

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Now the guy in the polo shirt is approaching my front door. He rings the bell! He asks for a check. UD takes out her checkbook and writes him a check. He smiles and thanks her for the work and drives all his machines away.

… at a university in Jordan. Daily brawls, with buildings on fire and serious weapons in play. Depending on which report you read, it’s tribal violence, or Saudi students pissed that campus women aren’t in burqas, or a combination of these things, or who the hell knows.

Penn State football was hit with a four-year postseason ban, the loss of 40 scholarships over four years and a $60 million fine as a result of the cover up in the Jerry Sandusky scandal.

In addition, all Penn State wins from 1998-2011 will be vacated. The fine is equal to one year’s gross revenue…

The penalties cripple Penn State football, putting it as close to the death penalty without the NCAA actually applying the rarely-used sanction. The program will be limited to 15 scholarships beginning for the next four years beginning in 2013. The normal limit is 25 per year.

If you want to see a bunch of guys in suits talk to a bunch of other guys in suits, go here.

In August 2011, a panel of 54 university presidents — personally selected by [NCAA head Mark] Emmert — assembled in Indianapolis for a two-day retreat. Fed up with scandals that had overwhelmed college sports, they resolved to take action. So, in rapid fashion, they pushed forward a number of dramatic reforms. These included raising the graduation-rate standards to be eligible for postseason play, rewriting the NCAA rulebook, revamping the NCAA penalty process, allowing schools to offer multiyear athletic scholarships and allowing schools to give up to a $2,000 stipend to help move scholarships toward the actual cost of attendance.

The lead quote the NCAA used in its news release from the event is quite telling.

“What stands out, above everything else, is the unanimity of thinking among university presidents who were assembled,” a president said. “There is an unwavering determination to change a number of things about intercollegiate athletics today. Presidents are fed up with the rule breaking that is out there.”

Which president said those words? Spanier, who, at the time, knew he was allowing an accused child rapist on his campus.

Whether it’s Joe Paterno at Penn State or Dr. J. Paul Muizelaar at University of California Davis, you really want to keep an eye on your overpaid and overlaureled personnel. Eventually the money and adulation will do to them what it does to pretty much everyone. It will make them believe their own publicity, and it will make them consider themselves free to do what they like, immune from consequences.

Immunity is Muizelaar’s medical speciality; he’s a research surgeon who tries to activate patients’ immune systems to fight cancers. Together with another faculty member, he’s been intrigued by the possibility that introducing bacteria into the heads of people with late-stage brain cancer might activate their immune system and in the process attack the disease.

Well and good; but these guys seem not to have felt the need to get institutional approval for this human experimentation. Of course, no problem getting the patients’ approval; they’re desperate. But precisely because people are desperate and therefore susceptible to dangerous and unproven procedures, you’ve got things like institutional review boards and all.

The guys are now banned from human research. Davis risks losing its federal research funding altogether.

… of America’s multiple university football scandals is touched on in this letter to the editor:

The juxtaposition of a cartoon about the Penn State scandal and Steve Ford’s column July 15 on the [University of North Carolina] athletics/academic mess caused me to think that, in a perverse way, UNC-Chapel Hill should thank Penn State. If the national media were not caught up in Penn State’s football-related criminality, they might be focused on UNC’s mendacity instead.

It’s like – how far back does your football scandal memory go? Isn’t the University of Miami already gone? Everybody was mega-fretting over that one so recently… And the letter writer’s right – Chapel Hill’s beyond-grotesque academic scandal (and unlike Penn State and U Miami, Chapel Hill has until recently been seen as a serious university) has evaporated in the Penn State shower-mist.

It’s an American thing. UD’s married to a Pole who comes from an old accomplished family. He remembers everything and everyone from the fourteenth century on. UD’s a typical American. Comes from nuthin and can’t remember – doesn’t know – anything from more than a couple of generations back.

In the case of football scandals, Americans can’t remember anything from more than a month back.

While the death penalty is not believed to be in effect here, some think that the [NCAA] penalty [against Penn State] might actually be longer and considered more harmful than the death penalty, and [it has] been labeled as “unprecedented.”

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What could be worse than death itself?

A long arid life in which without football scholarships your university devolves into…

… dear God, into a university.

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Try to imagine the president’s official response:

Like Vice President Cheney in the aftermath of 9/11, Joe Paterno’s statue is being escorted to a secure location.

I have decided that it is in the best interest of our university and public safety to remove the statue and store it in a secure location.

Gotta be secure because Penn State risks a breakaway group of partisans stealing it and reestablishing the cult.

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UD thanks Phiala.

UD is interviewed about MOOCs in the George Washington University newspaper.

[In today’s] college football world… football is the big rat that keeps the university wheel turning.

It’s clear, vivid, a beaut.

That’s a Southern Methodist University professor waxing nostalgic about the few precious non-football-dominated years the place got after its program was shut down for massive corruption.

Note his language: SMU got a breather. A welcome breather.

Football at a place like today’s bad boy, Penn State (there are tons of identical locations in the US), is a total environment, a macroculture, a ship of fools, a village idiotocracy, a cretin collective, a deeply settled dunciad. If you give it the death penalty, if you shut it down, you’re going to create a situation of collective psychic numbing (the term comes from Robert Jay Lifton’s groundbreaking work on traumatized cultures).

If you want to know what post-death penalty Happy Valley will look like on the ground, go here, to the Jim Morrison grave/pilgrimage site in Paris. After Paterno’s official statue is taken down, his followers will construct their own and will, like Morrison’s people, camp out there. As they give way to despair, they will place more and more Jim Beam bottles along the statue’s surfaces until it, like Morrison’s memorial, becomes a famous object d’art, a gawker magnet. Happy Valley will become a curiosity, its revenue now derived from tourists who come to stare.

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Uh-oh.

As it prepares to cash in on student drinking, the University of Minnesota reminds us that its preferred focus remains academics.

Iowa’s different.