… Day.

UD offers this poem, composed of Antrel Rolle’s comments about his friend Nevin Shapiro.

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WHAT’S TRUE AND WHAT’S NOT TRUE

To me it doesn’t matter
What’s true and what’s not true.

… says UD (in an echo of Tolstoy’s famous “happy families” remark). UD has studied plagiarists for many years on this blog, and they are astonishingly similar to one another.

Bahman Bakhtiari, a University of Utah political scientist who has just lost his job, is true to the form.

First, he is a serial plagiarist. UD cannot think of any instance of professorial or artistic plagiarism about which she’s written on this blog where the plagiarist did not turn out to have plagiarized quite a lot before his or her latest plagiarism.

Second, he plagiarizes promiscuously. Anything – a scholarly article, a grant proposal, an opinion piece, a syllabus – can be an occasion for plagiarizing.

And third, he blames his troubles on other people. Graduate students, laboratory subordinates, and editorial assistants are the plagiarist’s traditional fall guys, but anyone will serve, and Bakhtiari offers a broad array of enemies who sought to undo him.

… that only in sports writing are mixed metaphors considered okay. I mean, here’s the first paragraph of a New York Times piece about the latest Miami thing and about how nobody involved will be punished very severely because the people running the games are greedy amoral shits, etc.

As college sports officials confront yet another cheating scandal — this one involving Miami, the latest in a conga line of blue-chip programs that have recently stumbled into the crosshairs of N.C.A.A. investigators — speculation over the extent of the fallout intensified Wednesday.

A conga line made up of blue chips stumbles into crosshairs which emit fallout.

SOS doesn’t find this a very lucid sentence. Good writing is supposed to clarify, not to muddy. But never mind.

Matt Hayes, of Sporting News, correctly anticipates that stories about Donna Shalala’s professional football team bring the NCAA that much closer to extinction.

Why the hell should the multimillionaires running college football and basketball have to deal with some dipshit organization run by college presidents who put fine businessmen like John Junker out of business? Junker is our business, and the NCAA doesn’t seem to get that.

Sure, the organization is basically toothless; but it’s forced us to come up with all sorts of fake coursework for our team members… Sometimes it forces us to take important players off the field just when we need them… It takes our wins away… Shit like that…

Secession is the only way. Places like Auburn and Clemson and Miami and Alabama know exactly what they are, and they’ll thank us for finally allowing them to be what they are.

And don’t forget: With the NCAA and its financial penalties out of the way, there’s that much more to go around.

How did things come to this, Donna Shalala? What have you done to deserve this? Maybe it’s that $1.2 million salary.

This Dead Spin blogger is only the first of many writers who in the next few days will turn their attention to the woman who has presided over all of the amazing events at the University of Miami – hiring Charles Nemeroff, fielding the most violent university football team ever, enabling Nevin Shapiro for years… Miami, in UD‘s opinion, is just a scummy school, and Shalala has let it get that way. She should go.

Nevin Shapiro, who orchestrated a $930 million Ponzi scheme and is serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison, told Yahoo! Sports that he gave [University of Miami] Hurricanes players gifts such as money, jewelry and yacht trips, as well as paid for sex parties, bounties on opposing players and even an abortion for a player’s girlfriend.

And it’s all alleged to have happened under the watch of former Miami athletic director Paul Dee, the former chairman of the NCAA committee on infractions …

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“Former Miami athletic director Paul Dee sat in judgment of USC and others while all of this went on under his nose.”

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“The hypocrisy of the NCAA makes me sick,” [one university president] told the Press-Telegram. “To allow institutions like Miami and Nebraska to chair and oversee its infractions committee is like putting foxes in charge of the henhouse.”

Why do people associated with conferences and schools make up the majority of the 10-person infractions committee?

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UD readers have already met the much-loved University of Miami sports benefactor – the “living scholar” after whom the Nevin Shapiro Student Athlete Lounge is named… Was named… Don’t know who it’s named after now… Allen Stanford?

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The sort of thing the University of Miami did during the Nevin Era will, I think, strike anyone as fully in line with the ethos of any serious American university:

Three sources, including two former Miami football players, confirmed that Shapiro offered bounties.

The booster told Yahoo! Sports he had a number of individual payouts for “hit of the game” and “big plays.” He also put bounties on specific players, including Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow and a three-year standing bounty on Seminoles quarterback Chris Rix from 2002 to 2004, offering $5,000 to any player who knocked him out of a game.

“We pounded the (expletive) out of that kid,” Shapiro said of Rix. “Watch the tape of those games. You’ll see so many big hits on him. Guys were all going after that $5,000 in cash. [Jon] Vilma tried to kill him – just crushed him – a couple of times trying to get that $5,000. And he almost got it, too.”

I mean, name any school that doesn’t offer $5,000 extra in scholarship money to an athlete who can kill a competing player.

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Anyway, the writer I quoted up there, the one pointing out that the Miami AD who oversaw the whorehouse during the Nevin years was also NCAA infractions chair… His thing is that the current head of the NCAA is a “detriment to the NCAA” because he’s “not a reformer.”

It’s true that Mark Emmert will do nothing, just as his predecessor did nothing, to rid American universities of the ever-erupting shit-volcano which is big-time football and basketball. But that doesn’t make him a detriment to the NCAA. Uh-uh. Au contraire. How do you think the NCAA chooses its leaders? The point of the NCAA, like any organization, is to sustain itself, not reform itself out of existence. For that, you need a guy as mercenary and cynical as the NCAA itself.

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UD thanks her friend Ralph for linking her to the Yahoo story.

— it’s the only school in America actively trying to transform itself from a university to a jockshop — has been chronicled, step by step on this blog.

And now, rather in the way San Diego State’s last president reduced it to shabby jockery and then retired from the mess he’d made, the president of Rutgers, having presided to his satisfaction over the reduction of his school to a sports whore, will soon take a well-deserved rest.

UD‘s friend Roy sends her the latest article detailing what Richard McCormick has done to a once-proud school.

In its lame, cynical, stupid way, the university tech office has begun its utterly predictable retreat from all of the devices it’s been foisting on students in classrooms, and on professors and administrators in meetings. Turns out it’s rude and unproductive to stare at a screen! And here we all thought it was so Real World, so frabjous, so multi-taskular!

I mean, let’s not even talk about online high schools and universities… Let’s just not go there at all. A moment of silence, rather, for those lost minds and souls.

Let’s just talk about the atmosphere in wired Duke University gatherings.

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And are you surprised that it’s the Office of Information Technology that’s getting its ass out of online first? Don’t be. They’re the ones who follow the studies and know exactly what’s up. So they’ve gone from being arrogant pushers of wired classrooms and meeting rooms – they’ve gone from ridiculing resistance to their electronics as antediluvian – to what we see now.

Now they’re Big Momma and Big Poppa, lecturing their immature, screen-addicted kiddies on how they have to grow up and throw it all away.

(A little historical self-consciousness will serve all of us well in this matter, by the way. Five years from now, these same people will start in on us again about how collaborative, interactive, Real World, and cutting edge the latest tech machines are.)

Yeah, so now the head of tech at Duke announces he’s had it with tech in meetings because it makes nothing happen; and a Duke professor announces it causes anxiety; and another Duke professor announces it makes you stupid.

Wow. Pretty much everyone without a financial or emotional investment in the technology knew this, said this, and published this ten years ago. I guess we had to waste the educations of hundreds of Duke students and spend a lot of their tuition on technology before Duke began to get to the same place.

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Oh, but there are hold-outs. There remain true believers.

To minimize distraction in the classroom, some faculty ask students to put away laptops – but that’s not always the best approach, said Lynne O’Brien, director of academic technology and instructional services for Perkins Library.

Instructors are better off asking students to work together in pairs, calling on individuals and using other strategies to engage participants, so “you’re at risk if you’re not paying attention,” O’Brien said.

O’Brien clings to the Barney approach: Okay kiddies now choose a partner and let’s learn Heidegger together, as a team! What’s on your screen, Katie! Ooh, that’s great! Show Jodie! And Billy – over there – are you paying attention, Billy? I’m afraid you’re not…

In the course of a massive fraud trial, details of university life in the state of Texas.

Admission to the Pirogov med school in Moscow has always been pretty straightforward: You give the head of the school thousands of rubles, and he lets you in.

The Russian government figured it had gotten around this system by instituting a standardized exam, and mandating that the university admit the highest scorers.

The head of the school sat down and scratched his head and came up with a solution.

Announce you’ve admitted a class of high scorers. Then a few weeks later announce that none of the high scorers has chosen to attend Pirogov, so you’ve admitted instead the traditional cohort.

Would have worked, too, except for some damn blogger who figured out the scheme.

International soccer’s governing body has always been a punchline for corruption in sports. They make the NCAA look like UNICEF.

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Yes, my dear little brothers in sport, our retreat last week was all about this primary fact: We stink to high heaven.

What will we do about it?

Nothing.

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I mean, look up there. Two posts up. Headline Among the Company’s Expenses…

Do you seriously expect us to fuck with that?

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Sweetie, I hear you. But it’s too late to get rid of the scum. And our next President, Rick Perry, wouldn’t hear of it.

My best advice to you: Try to get a job at a school that’s not a sports factory. There are plenty of fine colleges and universities in this country.

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Another comparison.

“[P]rotecting and enhancing the integrity of intercollegiate athletics” … is the equivalent …of upholding the gold standard of the government of Somalia.

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And never forget who’s running the show.

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“It’s a circus. And the NCAA is running behind the elephants with shovels.”

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College football and men’s basketball are multi-billion-dollar businesses being run as an illegal cartel. So don’t say Congress or the President shouldn’t be “wasting time” on sports.

If the President and Congress make it clear to the university presidents that the system is completely unacceptable and they will lose all the tax breaks they currently enjoy if they do not do a complete tear-down, that will force action.

It sounds impossible. So did going to the moon. Sometimes you need to attempt the impossible. Especially when the current situation is completely sickening to witness.

Until recently, the University’s directory listed Villarreal as an administrator in the Division of Biology and Medicine. In an email to The [Brown University] Herald, Mark Nickel, Brown’s interim director of news and communications, called the listing”a professional and collegial courtesy” during Villarreal’s training at Rhode Island hospital. Villarreal was not an administrator…

Brown’s corporate denialist explains that a Brown administrator was not an administrator… That, you know, Brown writes these things in its web pages out of courtesy…

There’s no setting more courteous than your university’s medical school. Courtesy listings which call people administrators when they’re not administrators, and – more commonly – professors when they’re not professors. Courtesy (aka guest) authorships on research papers. Courtesy visits from pharma reps…

I declare, it’s like the first five minutes of Gone With the Wind over there! Everybody dressed in crinoline and bowing and scraping and extending courtesies left and right…

When reality bumps up against these exquisite poses, it’s always unpleasant. Robert Villareal, recent undergrad and medical school student at Brown, has already organized an impressive criminal drug distribution network.

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And speaking of backtracking, Brown has also been having second thoughts about one of its more idiotic money-making ideas: interest-rate swaps. As one financial advisor comments:

“The basic assumptions were wrong… Under ideal circumstance they could have worked out, but what are the chances when you have a 30-year deal that everything would go exactly as predicted?”

Brown has unloaded, at a cost of five million dollars, one of the swaps; there are two others which will cost them twenty million to unload. Two of the three swaps are with Goldman Sachs, on whose board Brown’s president sat for ten years. Reporters want to talk to her, and to Goldman, about that connection, but

Michael DuVally, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs, declined to comment.

Ruth Simmons, Brown’s president since 2001, resigned from the Goldman Sachs board in February 2010 after 10 years. Calls seeking comment from her spokeswoman, Marisa Quinn, weren’t returned.

Don’t be pretty much nobody smarter than a University of Florida Gators fan.

I mean no surprise there …it’s a university and all!

Gators fans spend loads – not just hundreds on each season ticket, but thousands on something UF calls a “contribution” before they even get the right to pay for one of the state’s most prized commodities: admission to a Gators football game …

Did I say admission? Hell, any jerk can get admission. These thousand dollar babies admit you not only to a guaranteed air-conditioned lounge but to a pre-game buffet!

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Hey but what’s this? You say the Gators eat shit this year and some dummies are dropping their season deal? Leaving precious commodity gaps all over the stadium? Nobody wants to see a three thousand dollar seat sitting empty! What does that say about fan loyalty? How does it make the loyal fan in the next seat, who’s out tens of thousands of dollars for a privilege few people seem to want, feel?

It’s kind of lose/lose when you think about it. Figure you’ve spent all that cash and grazed the pre-game buff and inhaled the lounge … figure you’ve even gotten drunk as a skunk.

Now everything’s set for the big payoff… what we lady folk call The Big O — a winning game! Only it don’t happen. What happens is that the other team wins.

Well don’t you feel like a chump. All that money just to pig out, get drunk, access air conditioning, and watch your guys lose. You get up from that thousand dollar seat unsteadily, and you drive home pissed every which way.

The other lose part of the lose/lose thing I’m suggesting here is that you go to the next game and you set yourself down in your thousand dollar seat and the guy next to you spends the whole game telling you how much less he paid for the seat than you did ’cause UF is so desperate it’s practically giving them away. Plus the team loses again. Haw!

… and wants to say two things:

1. Your comments and emails – and poems! – have cheered her up immensely. Thank you.

2. When doctors want to show you affection, they squeeze your toes. UD finds this custom adorable.

More later.

… here, she goes in for some surgery tomorrow. She thanks her readers for their kind wishes.

She should be fine, but she’ll be out of it for a day or two.

UD‘s notorious for posting every day. But I very much doubt I’ll be able to post tomorrow.

I mean, maybe I can post tomorrow… But my subject matter is unlikely to be very universityesque.

More like Wow …. Look ……… My own …. personal …. handheld …. morphine dispenser …

Anyway, ne quittez pas.