As you recall, we will gather this August in retreat, for one brief moment, far away from the busy bustle of the outer world, to think on our sins and, in sincere repentance, get them hence.

Are there scoffers? Naysayers?

[University sports corruption is] such a point of concern for Mark Emmert that he has convened a retreat for NCAA leaders in August to discuss the problem, play golf, and receive backrubs. The backrubs will be exquisite, and the results of the conference will be hey did we mention backrubs and golf? Seriously, backrubs and golf. That’s really worth the trip alone.

This is the voice of the devil. Do not heed him! The devil wants to banish tax exemptions from luxury boxes and cap what Kentucky can pay John Calipari. Do not heed him!

Gather, instead, with goodly folk like Brother Tressel, and think on how we can make our fellowship yet purer in the sight of God.

… deer who live in the woods behind our house, I cannot resist scenes like this one. Two beautiful fawns, leaping about only a few feet from our deck.

I watched them just now – eight o’clock on a still-light summer evening.

Fireflies made a golden corona around them, and they moved to the music of the wood thrush.

Caroline Wallis is only fourteen years old, but she’s already figured out that, above all else, plagiarism is an act of profound contempt for your audience.

She goes to a middle school for promising writers in Manhattan, and her principal gave her class a graduation speech mainly written by David Foster Wallace.

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UD thanks David for the link.

… (which unfortunately also taught accounting to Gary Foster). It’s by Dave Matter, in the Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune:

Over the last five years, the Big East school has used more than $115 million to cover its athletic department’s spending. That’s almost twice as much as any other major conference athletic department received from its university coffers. And here’s where it gets ugly: State funding cuts have forced Rutgers to withhold $30 million in scheduled raises for its employees.

… Rutgers … is coming off a 4-8 football season and has the Big East’s highest-paid coach in Greg Schiano. At just over $2 million a year, he makes more than any public employee in the state of New Jersey…

… mischief only.

The ex-head of the University of Alberta med school started the fad: When caught plagiarizing, say you did it because you were trying to inspire people.

Now the plagiarizing Wolcott Connecticut superintendent of schools has jumped on the inspirational bandwagon. Like the Alberta guy, he plagiarized a speech he gave to graduating students, sending them off to the future with soaring stolen words. “All I was trying to do was inspire,” he explained.

… learns what an interview is (“[A]n interview is not just an essayistic representation of what a person thinks; it is a report on an encounter between the interviewer and the interviewee.”).

Give that man the Orwell Prize!

Professor Edward Larkin of the University of New Hampshire likes to drive around town on his motorcycle and expose himself to young girls.

Realizing that this behavior constitutes a “major public relations problem for the university,” UNH has, since Larkin’s arrest and conviction for indecent exposure, tried to fire him.

Now an arbitrator has said that it can’t, because cock-flashing, while unpleasant, isn’t a firing offense.

… but it’s uglier when the funds are meant to help minority students; and it’s even uglier than that when the embezzlers are the leadership of a university.

Stanford University’s Eugene Carragee gets it said with beautiful concision.

And with authority: He’s the editor of The Spine Journal, and, as Paul Thacker notes, Carragee has devoted an entire issue of his journal to the appalling ongoing story of Infuse. (This New York Times article, which appeared minutes ago, provides background.)

Paul wonders if this particular revelation of the ghostwriting, conflicts of interest and undisclosed payments behind the promotion and use of a destructive medical device might be “a critical turning point, when we see physicians finally break free from [the] corrupt influence of industry and begin to put patients first and money second.”

UD‘s primary interest is in the ways universities collude – through passivity or cynicism or ineptitude – in the activities of conflicted professors on their faculties.

And it’s not merely collusion. Often these people – easily identified by the 800 or so articles they claim on their cvs to have written (many of these publications are ghost- or guest-written) – are among the highest-profile, most celebrated faculty on campus.

Among the highest-paid, too. Keep that in mind when you read this, from the NYT article:

The median amount of Medtronic money received over time by researchers involved in some studies ranged from $12 million to $16 million, with most of that going to a few individuals…

“A consistent number of people involved with these studies got extraordinary sums,” [Carragee] said.

The surgical operation at play here is known as cash infusion.

We live in a truthy, hoaxy, culture – we all know that. Things are seldom what they seem. Things are helpfully cleaned up for us – made nice and simple and just what we want – without our having to notice a thing. It’s twenty-first century efficiency.

So who’s surprised that a busy high-profile journalist seems to interview people, but actually inserts things they’ve already written into his copy and passes them off as statements made during the interview? He even sets the scene for the citation, gives it dramatic urgency: “After saying this, he falls silent, and we stare at each other for a while. Then he says, in a quieter voice…”

Then he says, a quieter voice, “Page 25, footnote 2, My Memoirs…”

The technique has worked well for Hari. He’s very successful. It’s like that old joke with which this essay begins. I guess Hari knows how to tell them.

… [S]ince 2006, Rutgers has spent more than $115 million to cover athletics spending, a USA TODAY analysis finds. In 2010, Rutgers University said it would withhold scheduled negotiated raises for its employees because of state funding cuts…

[N]o athletics program has matched Rutgers’ subsidies; $115 million is the highest for any public school and nearly twice the subsidy of the next highest school among the power conferences …

… people are paying attention to today’s Supreme Court ruling on violent video games; but there’s a smaller free speech story, also today, involving the South Carolina Supreme Court, that’s arguably more important.

I’m talking about the ongoing implosion of Righthaven, generally referred to as a copyright troll. (Background here.) As Steve Green reports in Vegas Inc., two groups in South Carolina have now

asked the court to find that Righthaven’s business model is the “unauthorized practice of law” and to “enjoin Righthaven from operating in South Carolina.”

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Everyone who blogs has an interest in the fate of Righthaven, which, according to the complaint before the South Carolina court, “subjects [bloggers] to endless litigation over injuries it did not suffer for claims it does not own.”

… is arrested for a chain of pharmacy thefts. Twenty years old. A freshman.

It’s everywhere. So many of the stories that present themselves to the general world, and to university-minded UD, are, lately, all about SEX.

Like the ongoing tale my friend Philip calls “the profs and pros scandal.”

But there are so many others… And so I thought we might take a look at a sex poem. A poem that wants to share some thoughts about sex.

Here we go, stanza by stanza.

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Unnatural Selections: A Meditation upon Witnessing a Bullfrog Fucking a Rock

by Jim Dodge

Amalgam of electric jelly,
constellated neural knots
in the briny binary soup,
as surely as stimulus prods response
brains are made to choose.

[Starts with a physical description of the human brain, center of understanding and volition, starry glory of that most divinely advanced animal, the human, who can use it to choose. To act intelligently.]

And through a major error in pattern recognition
or a significant cognitive fault,
the bullfrogs brain has selected
a two-pound rock
as the object of his rampant affection,
a rock (to my admittedly mammalian eye)
that neither resembles
nor even vaguely suggests
the female of his species.

[Pity the cerebrally underdeveloped frog, whose brain has chosen poorly.]

He does seem to be enjoying himself
in a blunted sort of way,
but since the rock so obviously remains unmoved
one suspects it’s not the blending of sweet oblivions
that fuels his persistence,
but a serious kink in a feedback loop–
or perhaps just kinkiness in general.
The less compassionate might even call him
the quintessentially insensitive male.

[More on that last thing here. Plus, there’s no knowing what floats your boat, and it’s not my place to judge… What’s sneaking in here is a sense that the frog may not be so different from us. Us being men.]

Assuming a pan-species gender bond
and a common fret,
I advise my amphibious pal,
“Hey, I don’t think she’s playing hard to get.
That’s the literal case you’re up against, Jack–
true story, buddy; stone fact.
And I’d be fraternally remiss if I didn’t share
my deep and eminently reasonable doubt
that she’ll be worn down
however long and spectacular the ardor.”

[We’re both guys; lemme tell you. I know what it’s like to pursue a woman and come up against frigidity or rigidity or whatever. I know the difference between a cockteaser and rockteaser. Give it up.]

Ignoring my counsel
as completely as he has my presence,
the bullfrog continues his fruitless assault
with that brain-locked commitment to folly
which invariably accompanies
dumb, bug-eyed lust.

[With “dumb, bug-eyed lust,” our John Donneian metaphor sheds its clothing and steps forth as a naked truth about frog and man. Under the influence of lust, the high mammalian and low amphibian brain are equally dumb.]

But, in fairness,
whose brain hasn’t shorted out in a slosh of hormones
or, igniting like a shattered jug of gas,
fireballed into a howling maelstrom
where a rock indeed might seem a port?

[Grenouille, c’est moi. Although I think he’s still claiming only men are this dumb.]

One can only conclude
that such impelling concupiscence
serves as a species’ life-insurance,
sort of a procreative override
of any decision requiring thought,
thought being notoriously prey to thinking,
and the more one thinks about thinking
the thinkier it gets.

[An argument from evolution here. If we (men?) weren’t like this, the human species would have died out, since the bigger your brain gets, the more you think, and the more you think, the less you act. Sexually. All the out-of-control-sexually guys we’ve been reading about lately are hopelessly caught in procreative override.]

Therefore, though the brain is made to choose,
its very existence ultimately depends
on the generative supremacy of brainless desire–
for with all respect to Monsieur Descartes
you am before you can think you are.
Dirt-drive compulsions riding powerful desires
render any choice moot, along with
reason, morality, taste, manners,
and all those other jars of glitter
we pour on the sticky and raw.

[You wouldn’t even get a brain – you wouldn’t even be born – if the human world weren’t full of mindlessly horny men humping anything. The rest of it – reason, etc. – is icing on the horn.]

The hard truth is we never chose to choose:
not the brains we use to pick
between competing explanations for our sexual mess
nor these hearts we’ve burdened with our blunders
in the name of love.
Do whatever we decide we will,
the choice isn’t free;
we live at the mercy of more pressing needs.

[The turgid truth is that we’re always between a rock and a hard place, always at the mercy of evolutionary drives. We can put on little Freud suits and come up with “explanations for our sexual mess,” but it’s nature-driven hormones.]

Thus, urges urgently surging,
we mount a few rocks by mistake.
A bit more embarrassing than most of our foolishness, true–
but so what?
The power of the imperative
coupled with the law of averages
virtually guarantees enough will get it right
to make more brains to be made up
about exactly what steps to take
toward what we think we need to do
on this stony journey between delusion and mirage–
when to move, where to hide our dreams–
a journey where we finally learn
freedom is not a choice
a brain is free to choose.

[We’re condemned by birth to this bizarre unfree freedom in which we hop about trying to do this and to do that until we eventually land on a live one.]

Fortunately, my warty friend,
the soul is built to cruise.

[A very Donneian conclusion. Wanton-prisoners we may be, but we have a soul as well as body, and the soul can truly wander free.]