One reason [Colorado State University] pushed so hard to play an annual game against [the University of Colorado] in Denver was the potential ticket revenue. Sports Authority Field at Mile High, where the Denver Broncos play their home games, holds more than double the 32,500-seat capacity of CSU’s Hughes Stadium.

CSU could bring in more than $1 million in revenue, Kowalczyk said, even after game expenses are deducted, if it were to sell its full allotment of tickets. Instead, the school won’t come close to its budgeted goal of $800,000 in ticket revenue from this game.

But… we could have brought in more than a million… if we’d sold the tickets…!

UD had to look at excellerate for awhile… Think about it…

Since it isn’t a word, she found no definition for it. The inventive Urban Dictionary has a definition for excelerate –

To succeed at something so quickly you excelerate.

– which gets at the brilliance of the mistake. It’s actually a portmanteau – “a blend of two … words or morphemes into one new word.” To excel; and to accelerate.

Anyway, it’s a word a commenter uses after a Wall Street Journal article updates us on the wretched thing that is law school now. Very few jobs. Applications way down.

Makes UC Irvine and – even more – U Mass look terribly clever. Taxpayers in these states get to subsidize these bright new law schools.

The first sentence of this University of Idaho student’s evisceration of the classroom laptop says it all. Technology has defeated the classroom. Online is the wave of the future; and the only question is what universities are going to do with those howling spaces all over campus.

… into being,” writes Elaine Scarry in Beauty and Being Just.

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, Spring and Fall, keeps doing that – spinning off songs and films inspired by it, more than a century after it was written.

Not copies. Scarry didn’t mean exact copies. Aesthetic ripples, echoes.

As in the just-released film, Margaret, which features “an English class recitation of [this] stirring and enigmatic Victorian poem addressed to a young girl of that name.” Spring and Fall is a very morbid poem, and the film has a morbid theme — a kind of coming of age via coming to grips with death theme — that fits the Hopkins poem nicely. When you’re young, you cry over dead things in a babyish visceral way, but you don’t really understand death yet. You’re a kind of mindless sentimentalist, a kitsch-meister. When you’re older, you get it – you understand precisely what death is, and why you’re crying over it. It’s the same fact of death generating the same grief when you’re eight and when you’re eighty, but you have to get significantly past eight to realize this, to feel the reality of death. Apparently the film Margaret is all about the main character’s passage from innocence to experience in this regard.

Hopkins takes this process of death-realization one step further at the very end of the poem:

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Our profoundest death-haunting is of course our intimation of our own mortality, so a third phase in this eerie maturation involves a movement somewhat away from despair over other people’s annihilation and toward anticipatory pity for ourselves — toward a sense of our own fragility, our implication in the common fate. The slightly wobbly, slow, vulnerable, meditative, confiding, whispery setting of the Hopkins lines that Natalie Merchant wrote and performed – with a simple melancholy guitar along for the ride – seems to UD quite a good capture of the poem. Here’s the poem.

Spring and Fall

So, you’re crying because the leaves are falling, and all the golden colors are vanishing. Fine. Cry. Your pure emotions make you feel for everything. You feel as much for one dead leaf as you do for human beings, which is pretty strange, but goes to your indiscriminate, innocent, open, heart, unacquainted with the night.

Once you’ve gotten your share of human suffering and death, massive piles of leaves will leave you unmoved. Maturation means losing cosmic, undifferentiated feeling, and directing things like grief where they belong: toward the people you love and lose. Weeping isn’t just acting out now, a visceral reaction to random loss-tableaux; now you will weep and know why.

It doesn’t matter that you don’t yet realize your grief, that you think of your tears as exclusively about the leaves. You’re young. Enjoy it while you can. But even though you can’t articulate the truer, later grief, you probably, even now, intuit it. Probably even now some ghostly soulful understanding in you guesses what underlies childish tears: Grief for all of blighted humankind.

And even more deeply underlying: Grief for your own blightedness.

A 2010 report showed more than $800 million in student fees were used to subsidize athletic programs annually, he said. Vanderbilt spends $10 million-$15 million a year to support its athletics program — at a cost of $2,000-$3,000 per student each year, [Vanderbilt economics professor John] Siegfried said.

That may explain why schools with Division I teams tend to charge higher tuition than those without such teams, he said.

Studies also have shown schools with Division I teams don’t receive significantly more student applications than those that don’t have such teams, he said.

So why did 109 universities upgrade their sports programs to higher divisions in the 1990s?

“Are they all stupid?” Siegfried said. “I don’t think so.”

Big-time sports programs have been shown to generate sports-related media attention for universities. Schools with Division I football programs also typically receive 8 percent more from their respective states by way of financial support, he said.

Schools with sports teams that have winning records typically see higher attendance at sports events, he said. However, they also often feel compelled to pay their coaches competitive salaries, a problem Siegfried called the “prisoner’s dilemma.”

“All that happens is they get paid more and more and more,” he said of coaches.

… without all the other unwelcome news stories swirling around the University of Miami. But with each event, the place looks more and more like a scandal-magnet.

Online education programs at community colleges and for-profit schools have “serious” vulnerability to financial-aid fraud rings, which have become a growing problem, according to letter by a government watchdog agency made public on Thursday.

… Usually a fraud operation’s ringleader will enroll one or two “straw” students in a distance-education program in exchange for a portion of the financial-aid award.

Here’s one in UD‘s neighborhood – a couple of hours ago, police announced that a man with a rifle was seen on the campus of Georgetown University Law Center.

Many of these stories turn out to be false. People saw something, but it turned out not to be a person with a weapon. Some, of course, turn out to be all too true.

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They’ve already called off the search.

On the other hand, here’s a nice urban detail for you:

In the process of their search, the police did find a gun near a tree close to campus, but they determined it was unconnected with the incident.

A student at Brown University assesses the presidency of Ruth Simmons.

Simmons took a voluntary pay cut from Brown of about $100,000, but that turned out to be a symbolic gesture when she stepped down from her $323,000-a-year gig on the board of directors of Goldman Sachs with $5.7 million in company stock.

Her resignation from Goldman, though, came only after she had tied Brown to the billions in bailout-backed executive bonuses she approved as a member of Goldman’s compensation committee, drawing the ire of the national media and dragging the University into the recession’s starkest example of tone-deaf corporate greed.

We’ve had years to examine for-profit education results at the higher education level. Companies like University of Phoenix and others cost taxpayers money, provide subpar education, serve as diploma mills, and prey on students who may never be able to pay back the tens of thousands of dollars in student loans they take on. They even prey on military veterans and active-duty service members.

We should be terrified of this happening to our public schools. Yet here it is happening nonetheless, all across the country.

This is Mr UD‘s verdict on every one of UD‘s efforts to come up with a catchy title for a post about the 92-year-old Polish farmer who since the Second World War has been hiding in an outhouse 300 “works of art from the Renaissance and German baroque periods, with the oldest painting dating back to 1532.”

From Bauhaus to Outhouse
The Hoard Shot Round the World
Grünewald Acres
Farm Follows Function

Looking at them, UD must admit the justice of Mr UD‘s judgment. She’s having a bad pun day.

They also look at handwriting.

Plus there’s an algorithm.

… a veteran who fought in Afghanistan, dies in urban violence near campus.

He had met a friend and the friend’s girlfriend at a McDonald’s near the university campus at about 2 a.m. Friday. That’s when three men, possibly college students, harassed and provoked customers in the eatery, which caused an exchange of words between the groups, Paul Casey said.

Patrick Casey walked outside with his party and stood between his friend and one of the men from the group. As tensions appeared to subside, the unidentified man pounded Patrick Casey in the side of the head and ran off with the others, his father said.

“He was trying to step up and protect his friend,” Paul Casey said, citing what his son’s friend told him.

BISHOP SYMPOSIUM ATTRACKS SCHOLARS, POET’S DEVOTEES

From the Vassar student paper. They’ll probably correct it soon, but go there now and enjoy this wonderful word, which folds into itself both hate and love …

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Rats. They fixed it. A commenter called them on it.