… Scroll down to Colbert Report clip. Start at 2:41 and realize the emptiness behind your religious delusions.

A commenter responds to Texas Tech coach Tommy Tuberville’s latest run-in with the law:

… Texas Tech head coach Tommy Tuberville has now been linked to two [fraud schemes] in the past year. Tuberville was listed as an investor in former Georgia coach Jim Donnan‘s “retail liquidation company”, GLC, which turned out to be a Ponzi scheme. Now, Tuberville is the subject of Huntsville Times report that lists him as the focal point of a fraud case involving an Auburn-based investment company.

What the commenter overlooks is that you can’t make TTU look bad, because TTU has been way, way worse than bad for years. Tuberville? Texas Tech recently announced that they’re raising his salary by $500,000. Good timing! He’s got a lot of investors to pay off! Plus attorneys to hire!

Texas Tech hired disgraced Attorney General Alberto Gonzales – paid him $100,000 to teach one course.

Texas Tech hired mad Mike Leach, then fired him when he allegedly concussed one too many players, and is now the object of an incredibly expensive lawsuit he filed against the school.

You don’t make sewers like TTU look bad.

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UD thanks Dave.

A writer for The Atlantic applauds Santorum’s attack on universities as secular, amoral indoctrination machines.

What can UD say to this? Her love for the liberal arts college dare not speak its name! For who would listen to UD?

UD! The very incarnation of the enemy! A denizen of the darkness – Washington DC. A woman who works outside the home. A woman who thinks state-mandated transvaginal ultrasounds are a bad idea…

Well but okay, let’s perform a transcranial ultrasound on UD – right here, right now. Let’s ask UD‘s head to respond to the claim that professors value reason more than faith, and intellectual achievement more than moral achievement.

Moving the wand around… Hold on… Left brain, right brain…

Here’s the deal. Liberal arts universities are founded on reason and intellectuality. Reason and the exercise of the intellect are constitutive of the university.

Morality? These constituents are seen to be profound goods. The capacity to appraise your world in an informed, flexible, dispassionate way tends to give you greater depth, sympathy, and agency in your dealings with various aspects of that world.

So universities don’t value intellectuality more than morality; they are intellectual institutions whose foundational commitment – a moral one – is to free thought, and thus they will study every idea and belief of significance, including ideas having to do with morality and faith. While they are studying these things, they will bracket – to the extent possible – the personal contingencies of the people in the room. This one’s a Christian Scientist; that one idolizes Christopher Hitchens. Fine. For the purposes of understanding together a worthwhile object of study, we will put those differences and affiliations aside.

Professors will not indoctrinate you into trashing your convictions, but we will engage you in exercises that ask you to step outside of them for a little while.

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Let’s get more personal. Do I, Madame Professor, value intellectual achievement more than moral achievement, reason more than faith?

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You know what? None of your business. When I’m in the university classroom, I value the life of the mind, I value modeling for my students “learning for the sheer joy of it, with the aim of deepening their understanding of culture, nature, and, ultimately, themselves.” (That’s Andrew Delbanco, in an otherwise tepid recent defense of liberal education.) The Atlantic writer’s job is not to follow me out of the classroom onto the subway and into my church, synagogue, coven, brothel, gutter, sleazy pickup bar or monastery so as to determine the relative value for me of faith and reason and intellect and morality. His job is to judge me, and my university, in terms of what our peculiar institution is.

A university is – among other things – a hideout from people who don’t understand what it means to make an effort to be intellectually dispassionate.

… (“Thickening Our Receipts”) from Garrett Park, Maryland.

The professor only talked about things on the PowerPoint, and after class he posted the PowerPoints on Blackboard.

After we figured that out, no one took notes.

We didn’t have a single homework assignment due in the class. We only had six papers, and in all of those papers, we were allowed to use the PowerPoints as sources. So each day, I showed up physically, but not mentally, ultimately wasting both my own time and the professor’s. And I still received an A in the class… If you’re worried about students not showing up, it’s time to up your game.

This University of Nebraska student notes the latest trend in the morgue classroom: Mandatory attendance policies. No one wants to be in a morgue, so no one shows up. The coroner, glancing up from his slides, takes umbrage: I will not be left alone in the dark! To stand here in blackness listening to the sound of my own voice reading a textbook – it is too terrible! So he forces the students to sit – formaldehyded row after row – or they flunk the course.

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Really – if you don’t make the morgue mandatory, no one will show up. A student at the University of Texas Arlington thinks his psych and algebra classes have around fifty students in them, but

it’s hard to tell when no one comes.

… Attendance isn’t mandatory, and my instructor posts all of the PowerPoint presentations to Blackboard. So rather than have a PowerPoint read to me, which I can find online, I’d much rather meet with my Freshman Leaders on Campus group or get some actual work done.

My math class runs on a similar dynamic.

Is dynamic quite the word?

Trevor Hodge, professor of ancient technology, seems to have had a good life.

… this side of … eh. I’m thinking nothing compares. For sheer vulgarity, sheer classlessness, sheer idiocy, SIUC can’t be beat. UD has watched in disbelief over many years as this campus, with its plagiarizing, political hack leadership, its tanking student body (who would want to go there?), its mindless, grandiose “Saluki Way” sports expenditures, and its empty stadium, just keeps scratching its balls. (Scroll down on this page for earlier posts.)

Yes, the machinery grinds on – coaches still get overpaid, games take place, student and state money is sent down the drain… and President-for-Life Glenn Poshard smiles on, a Brezhnev unaware the USSR has been dismantled…

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The athletic director senses that student anger has now morphed into apathy, and it makes him nervous:

“I can live with anger even though it’s not pleasant. I think what is happening now is we’re slipping into a little bit of apathy, and that’s a little more dangerous. Our fan base has kind of turned, my gut tells me, from anger to a little apathy and that’s what concerns me.”

Right now, the school is giving the molto sucky basketball coach

$762,500 per year, and SIUC would have to pay Lowery twice that amount to buy him out of the final two years of his contract.

But no worries: They’re in great shape to make a payout.

[W]hen the losses started coming, attendance straggled. SIUC averaged 3,299 fans in an arena that underwent a $29.9 million renovation two years ago, down from a high of 7,743 in 2006-07. Additionally, [the AD] said season-ticket revenue is down considerably and the scholarship fund has taken a hit.

Statement from Florida Representative Allen West:

President Obama is …very adept at promulgating deceptive language masquerading as policy, actually just insidious political gimmickry. This “tax policy” is an example as well as today’s speech on his “energy policy” shall be. Here is the bottom line, last night it took 70 dollars to fill the tank of my 2008 H3 Hummer…

Just how much more are Americans supposed to put up with?

It’s down to Anne Sinclair and Cambridge University.

They’re the last entities willing to hang out with Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Documents released by South Carolina State University reveal it spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring big names to homecoming last year, and only made tens of thousands in return.

… University officials did not respond to questions Thursday asking for insight into the documents, but they appear to show S.C. State spent more than $250,000 to bring Young Jeezy, Charlie Wilson, Chrisette Michele, Ace Hood and Future to campus for an Oct. 7 concert.

That doesn’t include about $30,000 university departments say they’re owed for their work on the event.

But the documents only show S.C. State receiving about $70,000 in revenue from the event…

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… On February 10, school president Dr. George Cooper fired eight university workers in a one-day firing frenzy.

… [T]he documents released Thursday … include pages and pages of talent contracts, financial agreements and event logistics for last fall’s Homecoming concert. The agreements the school brokered with musical acts like Young Jeezy and Charlie Wilson, among others, document thousands of dollars in expenditures for the event. The fired employees’ names and/or signatures appear on the documents.

A cold sunny morning.
An old orange fox appears
Along the deer path.

Suddenly I realize
All of the squirrels in the garden
Have disappeared.

… runs the headline, but the cause of death of MIT undergraduate Brian Anderson simply hasn’t yet been determined. No foul play, and no clear signs of suicide.

Here are two other possibilities:

Maybe Anderson had an underlying health problem – weak heart, epilepsy. He may have had a condition of which he himself was not aware.

The other possibility that has to be considered is alcohol/drugs.

UD has spent part of this weekend setting up the equipment Udemy sent her. She has been asked to prepare a series of lectures for The Faculty Project. Like Professor Garland, she has received her microphone, and some other stuff, from Udemy, and with her sister’s help she has begun to learn how to use it.

Her subject will be poetry. She will start writing the lectures as soon as she feels ready to use the technology.

UD hopes some of her readers will be interested in clicking on her course and communing with her that way. She will post updates here on University Diaries, as each lecture goes online.

… on higher education.

This post, by a recent University of Virginia graduate, is the best reflection on convicted murderer George Huguely I’ve so far seen. He captures the upper-crust/crapulous, gracious living/coked to the gills thing at the heart of many elite prep schools and colleges.

[A]mong athletes, lacrosse players are among the biggest partiers, according to a National Collegiate Athletic Association report published this year looking at substance use among college athletes.

… The survey found that male and female lacrosse players are more likely than any other kind of athlete to take amphetamines like Adderall, which many at U. Va., including Love, were prescribed for attention deficit disorder. And roughly 95 percent of the country’s male lacrosse players drank, the study claimed. Among women players, 85 percent consumed alcohol.

Two years ago, in the immediate wake of the crime, another college lacrosse player wrote well about his culture:

Aggression and alcohol abuse, of course, are hardly the province of lacrosse alone when it comes to men’s college athletics. But, when it comes alongside lacrosse, there’s an implied element of absolute indifference and arrogance as well.

He recalled something the lacrosse coach at Virginia said in a 1999 interview, long before his player Huguely murdered:

“Alcohol and lacrosse have gone hand-in-hand since my days at Brown [University] in the 1970s,” Starsia told The Washington Post… “Whether it is post-game celebrations or just in general, there was something about the sport and alcohol…”

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People don’t like being called arrogant and indifferent. Look at the comment thread on this Washingtonian piece.

Not the first bunch of comments; scroll down to the last five or six. These are enraged, indignant Huguely insiders insisting they did do things. They were not indifferent; they are not responsible. But as Anthony Schneck notes:

Although [the Huguely] story made national headlines in part because it seemed so shocking and unusual, the culture that allowed it to happen is not exceptional to UVA; it’s easy to protect the already privileged…

Easy; and far easier now than it was when The Great Gatsby, this culture’s iconic text (it features golf rather than lacrosse), was written. In Fitzgerald’s novel, Daisy Buchanan is protected after she kills a woman. Today’s Buchanans are vastly more Hummered up.