“If you find it aberrant that the athletic director and the vice president of a university are taking their orders from a football coach, welcome to the state of Pennsylvania.

… Gary Schultz and Tim Curley are facing jail time; [former Penn State president] Graham Spanier needs to follow.

… Maybe the booster money will stop coming in as they realize that this was an institution-wide decision to harm children.

And maybe, just maybe, the enormous sum of payments due to be paid out in civil lawsuits, in a state already struggling with a budget deficit, will be too deep for the university’s pockets, forcing the university into bankruptcy.”

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1242628-penn-state-university-making-life-better-now-go-away

… the man.

Ah say ah say ah think we need to sit down and talk to the boys about uh thinkin.

The [University of Georgia] Bulldogs seem cursed by arrested development, discipline problems, team infractions and other self-destructive habits that induce rage and worry among fans (like me). If I had suggestions that I thought would make a real difference, as opposed to sounding like blog blather (stop recruiting high school kids who are treated like gods, convince the cops in Athens to look the other way like they do in other college towns), I’d list them.

Unlike Southern Methodist University (the last university program to be shut down):

At SMU, the violations expressly gave it a competitive advantage.

Jerry Sandusky wasn’t a crisis: a football team that had gone 5-7 the season before in 2000 was a crisis. What had happened to a 10-year-old boy wasn’t a tragedy; losing to Toledo at home on national television was a tragedy.

As revelations about Joe Paterno grow, the embarrassment of the Modern Language Association having as its director a person whose academic title is Paterno Family Professor grows.

University football in America is very rich, very corrupt, and to some degree in search of legitimacy. One lesson for universities to be drawn from the Penn State fiasco: Football is already well on its way toward becoming completely independent of whatever university used to house it. Go with that. Crossover stuff like the Paterno thing will bring you to grief.

Or, more often, for the sake of athletic failure. Strange.

… is the title of my latest post at Inside Higher Education.

I’m not sure I’m understanding all of this background on the derecho, but I think it explains why our friends the Elkins, who during the storm pulled their car over to the side of the road (they had just left our house after an evening of dim sum), tell us that “the car seemed pretty close to levitating.”

Les UDs remain at UD’s sister’s house (she’s the Morrissey fanatic, and the producer of my Udemy lectures) in upper Montgomery County, where ceiling fans and refrigerators still hum.

You’d be surprised. You’d be surprised how many security cameras are already in place around your office. You’d be surprised how quickly and easily police can rig up a security camera if they think you’re doing something weird.

So when Western Michigan University suspected that the chair of occupational therapy (scroll down) was buying aMAzing, er, cameras for himself out of an endowment fund, they pointed a camera at his office door and filmed the fool returning everything the day after said suspicions were communicated to him.

Auditors have also discovered that he has routinely been “reimbursed for mileage he never logged.”

He goes on trial for embezzlement soon.

If you’ve read this blog for any period of time, you know that UD has covered plenty of stories that involve thieves and hoaxers on campus being caught by security cameras.

La Vie en Dose.

… took this photo of
UD‘s backyard after
the massive storms
last night.

Click on the image!
Much better view.

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

We’d just said goodnight to our friends the Elkins (we were arguing about whether voting is irrational and best avoided), and just as they drove away the night sky exploded with wind and lightning. You know that Les UDs live in a small house surrounded by big trees.

As we put away glasses and plates, the wind built to an impossible intensity, and we could hear trees crashing close up. Time to go to the basement.

The lights in the house flickered and everything went black.

Mr UD opened two folding chairs and we sat in the dark (punch line of a Jewish joke), watching the non-stop lightning illuminate our little ground-level windows, and hearing the wind rage and rage and rage. This was something I’d never experienced in Garrett Park.

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

We’re simply ridiculously lucky that nothing hit our house. The trees even left our lawn furniture alone. Limbs fell just short of the house, just short of the deck.

UD spent this morning cleaning debris from her front yard – lots had fallen there, but nothing she couldn’t move. She had to stop every few minutes to talk to neighbors, who gathered in growing crowds to chat about the damage in town. A scientist here who worked in UD’s father’s lab has apparently lost his house – a tree broke it in half.

… this Sunday night, on my other blog, at Inside Higher Education.

Responding to a question about his summer plans, [Chief Justice] Roberts quipped that he thought his planned trip to Malta to teach a class was a “good idea.”

More gun trouble among our student athletes.

Background on recent difficulties.

I could only find a list for 2008-2010.

It all came together in the University of Georgia winning the 2010 Fulmer Cup.

The tradition continues.

These updates end in April. Already out of date.