America’s latest big-time embezzler embezzled for twenty years and says he felt “constant and intense guilt” about it.

But how constant and intense can anything be for twenty years straight? UD, for instance, figures she can maintain constant and intense interest in… let’s take something she’s intensely interested in, as interested as this guy, bigshot trustee of the University of Northern Iowa, was in grand theft. So we just had Bloomsday, and UD‘s a James Joyce freak and she read from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the Irish Embassy and the Cosmos Club and spent time preparing all that and talking endlessly with fellow Joyce people and reading and rereading various passages from Ulysses…

Okay so I’d say UD managed to sustain constant and intense interest in Bloomsday, this summer, for around, say, two weeks… How much more difficult to sustain constant and intense guilt for twenty years over your assiduous theft of millions of dollars from innocent people!

You say guilt is different from interest?

Then let’s look at perhaps the most intensely guilt-ridden figure of our time — Franz Kafka. Kafka certainly majorly dragged his ass around Prague, but we also have it on good authority that he was fully capable of having a good time. A reviewer of Kafka’s diaries says that they fail to give the reader a sense of “the humorous and light-hearted Kafka, the man who walked around in the day and earned the respect, fondness, and love of his friends and coworkers.”

Let’s say that – we can only give a rough estimate here – Kafka spent around half of his time feeling guilt; and of the time he felt guilt, let’s say that only about a quarter of that was intense and constant.

And, you know, Kafka did something with that guilt. He wrote guilt-ridden stories like The Judgment to work through it or whatever. This guy, Mr University of Northern Iowa, felt unremitting dripdripdrip guilt over stealing from people for twenty years but not only did he not write one of those quirky weird-prairie short stories about it, he didn’t, say, turn himself in to the authorities, or stop stealing.

Commencement speaker, recipient of an honorary Doctor of Laws degree — Dimon’s the Joe Paterno of Syracuse. Let’s catch up with his latest accomplishment.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) had already lost more than $700 million on synthetic credit bets and Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon was told that number could climb to almost $1 billion when he dismissed press reports about the positions in April as a “tempest in a teapot.”

While JPMorgan booked a $718 million loss on the positions held by its chief investment office in the first quarter, it didn’t publicly specify the loss when releasing the results April 13. When an analyst asked Dimon that day about media coverage of the trades, he dismissed them as a minor issue.

“… [T]he deep structural failings of Italy — an inefficient public sector, a poor demographic outlook, lousy universities, a calamitously slow judicial system — will take years to put right.”

This blog has covered the lousy universities.

http://www.economist.com/node/21558237

… is the latest social psychologist to be Simonized.

Wonderfully, his work had to do with morality. He proved by numbers that tall people are more ethical than short people.

I mean, he proved it until he got Simonized.

De-romancing the stone.

A lot of people are saying this about Penn State football.

But pause.

Reflect.

What is left of Penn State without football? It’s the same question you’d need to ask about the University of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and a host of others. A few scattered academic departments; a demoralized student body transferring out in search of a tailgate; yawning stadia assuming the aspect of meteor craters.

The silence alone will kill most of the stragglers. Campus will come on all scholarly-like, and drinking will go from post-game debauch to post-Soviet despair. Here and there amid the twilight-of-the-superheroes vastation, crazed, tattered philosophy faculty will wail like Diogenes while enflamed remnant-students throw stones at them.

It’s a classic post-Freeh fret from a veteran jock pen. The giveaways are phrases like “our cherished universities” and words like “tragedy” to describe the Penn State story.

Ooh, I was so naive! the writer tells us. Although I’ve been covering university football for decades, I just, I dunno, thought the higher-ups at Penn State were good, decent people… And here comes this Freeh report and JEEZ.

Well, let’s wrap this up by saying I sure hope things will get better now!

F-u-u-u-u-u-ck you.

You know, as well as any random Penn State professor knows, how systemically sick Penn State and plenty of other football factories like it are. You’ve always known. What you’re saying today is what all the hacks are saying to their jock readers:

We are poor little lambs who have lost our way.
Baa, baa, baa.
We are little black sheep who have gone astray.
Baa, baa, baa.

Okay! We bleated our little bleat!

Now…

… back to the luxury box!

… is the motto of many American universities, whether diploma mills or for-profits. Their admissions requirements are can we get you to come and stay long enough for us to collect federal money?

The latest recruiting practices lawsuit is against San Francisco’s Academy of Art .

“The suit claims there were no other legitimate criteria on which the recruiters were judged” beyond hurling bodies forward.

‘Don’t be concerned about the smoke, folks. We braked hard for awhile back there and kicked up some dust. Everything’s fine.’

‘This is Clarence at the Cafe Car. The Cafe Car is not now at this time currently open because of technical difficulties. Once the technical difficulties are resolved I will make an announcement that the Cafe Car is open. The Cafe Car is now currently not open. Thank you.’

‘Provincetown is next. A reminder that if you’re in the Quiet Car you must be very very very quiet. We don’t want any drama in the Quiet Car today.’

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

UD‘s on an Acela train back to Garrett Park, Maryland, Land of Downed Trees.

The benighted University of Hawaii – a bad school with a bad football team that’s always getting arrested (background here) – rigged up a Stevie Wonder concert to benefit athletics…

No one told Stevie Wonder, however.

The university spent $200,000 to organize the concert, however.

The university isn’t sure who it gave the money to, however.

It’s trying to get the money back. But it doesn’t remember who it gave it to.

The University of Hawaii. Isn’t she lovely?

What’s that? What was that you said? Professor? Sandusky a professor?

Ask yourself: What’s the most powerful constituency on a university campus? It’s almost always the professors. When professors get together they are very powerful. Where were Penn State’s professors when… Well, whenever? Why didn’t that totally fucked by football school have at least one Thomas Palaima, one William Dowling, one faculty member who spoke out about how sick the place was? You don’t have to have known anything about Sandusky to know the school was a football whore.

But no. Not only did the Penn State professors – displaying real degeneracy, franchement – just look the other way as their school turned into a cult of personality. Not one of them opened their trap to say… I mean, you don’t even have to write an essay! Just say you’re embarrassed! Just complain to the school paper now and then!

For that matter, where are the professors now? Where’s the formal statement from the faculty about how horrible these events are, etc? Why did it take Louis Freeh to complain about the culture of sport at Penn State? What happened to the headline that should have said

PENN STATE PROFESSOR ATTACKS CULTURE OF SPORT ON CAMPUS

Where did that go? Or – even better:

PENN STATE PROFESSORS ATTACK CULTURE OF SPORT ON CAMPUS

The problem with vehement, outraged post-Freeh Report opinion pieces like this one, which breathlessly recounts the excruciating filth of university football in this country, is that these pieces — we’ll see tons of them in the next forty-eight hours — are simply little system flushes, little emetics, little confessionals, for the very sports guys who’ve happily been covering the game for years. I hope they feel better now. But tomorrow they’ll be back at it, back playing the game that they love as much as Paterno’s happy little North Koreans did. All for football! All for the Beloved Leader!

When this story first broke … Paterno said, “This is not a football scandal and should not be treated as one.”

Many agreed. Many still do, including some misguided alumni and football All-Americans and … surely those numbskull students who marched on campus, embraced Paterno’s statue on campus and protested his firing without any regard for the victims.

The problem is concluding that because Sandusky’s reprehensible acts did not lead to a competitive advantage, the football program shouldn’t pay. But the cover-up changes that. What the powers at Penn State did was beyond anything any college athletic program has ever done, beyond free clothes or free rent and academic fraud.

To hell with a free Camaro. We’re talking about sweeping allegations of a child sex offender under the rug in order to protect a school’s image, fundraising and recruiting. There is no more extreme example of a lack of institutional control.

Penn State deserves to be hit hard.

… Paterno and the powers at Penn State were too concerned about the ramifications, off and on the field. That makes it a football scandal, as well.

Jeff Schultz, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

… conclusions about Penn State. Thanks to football, the school has become a pathetic inbred place, hopelessly in thrall in the sort of hero worship that makes the worshiped behave with arrant disregard.

Now the adults on campus will – far too late – move in to remove Paterno’s name from the library and various professorships. It will be harder to convince the true believers to remove his statue from the stadium, but in time that will happen too.

As we all await the Freeh report on Penn State (it will be released today), consider the Joe Paterno statue. Consider universities with a penchant for putting up statues of their living coaches and presidents — like Mountain State University in West Virginia (photo of its statuesque, just-fled, president here, along with details of its loss of accreditation). Ask yourself which sort of political leaders have statues of themselves dotting the landscape. Ask yourself why faculty members at Penn State weren’t so embarrassed by the cult of personality on their campus – a cult that made Paterno and his inner circle untouchable for years — that they opposed that statue.

You say it wouldn’t have done any good to oppose it? Of course it wouldn’t. That doesn’t matter. You’re supposed to go on record as caring about these sorts of things.