Dave Zirin, on big time university sports:

[The Education Department shouldn’t penalize] the players for basically doing what they have been told to do from the moment they step on to these factories, and that’s what a lot of them are.

When you talk about basketball and football, it’s not coincidence that those are the two sports that do the worst job in graduating players because those are the two revenue-producing sports. Those are the two sports where as soon as you go on campus, a message is sent to you right away. As one former player said to me, a former all-American said, we are not student athletes, we are athlete students. Because as soon as we walk onto campus, we are told what is our job on this campus.

… [P]eople from other countries look at the way we operate in terms of our football and our basketball minor leagues being our colleges, and they think we’re absolutely insane …

Think about it: Our colleges are the country’s football and basketball minor leagues. Now that these places are in terrible financial trouble, think about it again. Our colleges are our minor leagues.

… so don’t expect much coherence. You find me on Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands, and it’s another majorly sunny day, with views all the way to the mainland mountains. We’ve just made the rocky climb to Dún Aenghusa, and we’ve also walked about the island a bit, so I’m rather in the way of nodding off and that’s the truth of it see.

Things here are somewhat surreal, which accounts for the dreamy as well as the sleepy… The shiny black heads of the seals off the little stony beach we just passed were a strange sight. When you pass the islanders, they’re speaking weird soporific Gaelic. Tea and scones in front of a blazing hearth in a thatched cottage at the foot of the old fort deepened the deep calm.

Outside, church bells ring, and bicyclists with broad smiles on their faces follow the curving stone walls of the villages.

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Conversation one flight down at the internet cafe. Here’s what you need to know: The police are currently in the harbor searching for a body. (Could the parallels with Joyce’s Ulysses be any more exact??)

“I don’t think he jumped. It was a fuckin tragedy Christ it’s hard but I don’t think he jumped. He was takin pictures and leanin out and the weather was bad.”

“The weather was bad that night. He didn’t jump. Jesus it was a fuckin accident for sure.”

“Have you had a boat out yet? Any fishing?”

“No, no, not yet.”

Don’t focus on Arne Duncan’s bold ideas for turning sports whorehouses like Syracuse and San Diego State into shining universities on a hill. Focus on the responses of the NCAA.

I’m not going to sully my screen with the actual content of the NCAA’s response to this latest idea. I’m not even going to type the name of the head of the NCAA. There are (to paraphrase Martha’s George) limits. A blog can put up with only so much without it descends a rung or two on the old evolutionary ladder…

But I invite you to go here and read this man’s words for yourself.

A local opinion writer describes perennial top party school, SUNY Albany, and its latest drunken riot. When towns begin to think of local student populations as marauders who threaten their way of life (the SUNY student ghetto “was once a solid middle class neighborhood where people raised their families.”), things haven’t taken a very good turn. The New York Daily News also describes a “debauched and destructive” student culture.

As I note here, SUNY has dumped programs in French, Russian, Italian, classics, and theater, rather than cut back on its sports program – a program as deadbeat as hundreds of SUNY’s students.

Here’s some advice a SUNY Albany student recently gave the university — before the latest student riot:

[E]xercise some sense when admitting students. Stop wasting money on [campus] posters telling me that UA students don’t get drunk every weekend to the point that their brains become an etch-a-sketch. I’ve lived in the student ghetto. I’ve seen your students drunk at 3 a.m. in the middle of the road screaming at the top of their lungs because they think they have the right to walk drunk in a busy road. Your posters are full of lies. Stop admitting students who are going to drink themselves to death and you can save a lot of money in the budget on those stupid posters.

Money for deadbeat sports programs that attract drunks; money for posters around campus lying about the drunks. A constant party school front-runner. The destruction of neighborhoods. Riots. Meanwhile, the dismantling of an academic mission.

SUNY Albany is UD‘s first Online Makeover candidate– the first of several American universities she’ll be nominating, in the months ahead, for closure and then reorganization into exclusively online institutions. These universities are essentially unviable as physical campuses – because of overcrowding, violent student bodies, financial insolvency, reduction to sports venues, academic meltdown, whatever. SUNY Albany has reached the tipping point and should sell its physical plant.

The air was cool but pleasant; the wind was mild. We went to the Burren and the scary cliffs of Moher.

All around us as we drove, the long stone fields of Clare fell away to the ocean.

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At night, in Galway City, we keep seeing belligerent drunks getting into fights.

Everyone’s talking about the economic collapse. People are furious, frustrated. They shake their heads, take long drags on their cigarettes. “There’ll be no getting out of it for ages.” Their faces swell with rage.

Le, a Yale graduate student, was strangled by a lab technician during the course of a “work dispute.” The technician has, since the murder two years ago, maintained his innocence; but with his trial looming he has admitted the crime.

Now, now, let’s not be hasty. As American taxpayers, we should continue to give our money to for-profit schools who, because of insanely high student default rates, are “manag[ing] (some would say, manipulat[ing]) default rates so they look better than they really are.”

CNBC calls it the “dirty little secret” of for-profit universities (most of their dirty stuff is public, not that anybody cares). They’re paying default management companies to “mak[e] sure default rates don’t exceed … statutory limits in the first two (and now three) years after a student gets a loan.”

Education Undersecretary James Kvaal frets about the “use of deferments and forbearances in a manner that leaves borrowers less able to repay their loans, but would delay any default until after the two-year window used to measure school default rates.”

Their worthless educations have made the students unemployable, or woefully underemployed. Now their loan repayments are going to go UP because the default managers are pressuring them to restructure.

A just-published Chronicle of Higher Ed analysis has shown that for-profits are “aggressively using ‘default management’ tools to mask problematic rates of default.”

It’s a beautiful thing when truly free marketeers get their hands on the education market, isn’t it? These aren’t non-profit pussies! Go go go boys! Take my tax dollars and do your thing!

… runs the Detroit Free Press headline. But as Drew Sharp points out, at Ohio State University the football coach isn’t the only fraud.

When reporters asked university president E. Gordon Gee during that comical news conference Tuesday night whether he contemplated firing the head coach, Gee smirked that he hoped Tressel wouldn’t fire him. It was meant to be a joke, but there was nothing funny about it.

That remark told you all you need to know about the barefaced corruption and misplaced priorities of major college athletics.

With a 3-13 record, the UNM baseball team plays in an “empty” stadium.

Monday the UNM Board of Regents approved the use of a $2 million Severance Tax Bond, which was allocated by the 2010 Legislature for a new baseball complex.

“It’s not money that could be used somewhere else on campus,” Krebs said. “If we didn’t use it specifically for this project it would revert … to the state.”

And while the state is in need of more money, the athletic department says this is money well spent.

An impoverished university, its academics gutted, builds a new baseball stadium for a team without spectators.

In the wake of a student’s suicide, Brandeis faculty meet with a representative of the Psychiatric Counseling Center, who explains that because of confidentiality rules, “Every single one of the suicides [at Brandeis] has a backstory that I can’t tell you about.”

It’s understandable that, as this post’s headline notes, students don’t want their professors knowing their medical stuff. On the other hand, this means we can’t be of much help when a student’s in crisis. After decades of teaching, I’ve only seen a couple of manifestly troubled students in my classes.

Awkward. Quinnipiac Law School’s registrar (she’s also an academic dean there) has to stay home for six months onaccounta she committed major financial fraud and conspiracy and this is part of her sentence.

Finding no reason to remove this person from a position of responsibility, the university will somehow operate with an “away” registrar… I guess they’ll bundle all the grades and deliver them to her house. Students unhappy with their grades might want to pay her a visit, since altering legal documents is part of her M.O.

A newspaper reader describes the leadership of the University of Alabama:

For the person that called about Jim Tressel running Ohio State: Who do you think runs the University of Alabama? It’s definitely not any of the presidents or trustees or board members or anyone else like that. His name is Nick Saban. He runs everything at the University of Alabama.

William Bowen, former president of Princeton, in an interview:

I’m not a fan of huge salaries for presidents of academic institutions. These are hard jobs. But people don’t really do them for the money. What kind of message do you really want to convey concerning the nature of the institution and its leadership? I always thought that it was important to convey a message of we’re all in this together. If you as president earn so much more than everyone else, it’s hard to argue that we’re all in this together.

It’s an old-fashioned answer, and one that doesn’t really take into account profound changes in the American university. Under “huge salaries,” he has in mind presidents who earn more than one million dollars a year. One of Bowen’s successors at Princeton now works for for-profit DeVry, whose chief executives typically earn between twenty and one hundred million dollars a year, as do the leaders of most other for-profit universities. That’s the wave of the higher ed future, not a bunch of paupers pulling down $800,000 year and throwing money away on student scholarships and shit.

… UD‘s now in Dublin. The city is currently sporting classic Irish weather: exuberantly sunny one moment – opening up amazing, long O’Connell Street vistas – and then wham. A wet black blanket of cloud.

Somewhere in Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time, he quotes from his lover’s Paris notebooks. Back in Paris after years away, the lover describes feeling the drag of nostalgia.

It’s a little like that for me, being in Dublin after having spent a lot of time here when I was much younger.

I’m glad to see O’Connell isn’t gussied up the way I worried it might be. This is still an old and somewhat thready city – the Dublin I recall.

I see the Liffey River and O’Connell Street in two ways, really: With my own particular nostalgias, and with the more objective eyes of someone who reads and re-reads Joyce’s Ulysses. I see not merely scenes from that novel, but scenes from Joyce’s life along the river and street, as I (my feet aching from the long airport corridors) walk and walk, taking it in.

So true. And so seldom said. We’re supposed to weep for coaches who recruit upstanding young scholar athletes who turn out to be criminals. How could the coaches have known?

Their rap sheets?

“You can’t win big in college sports unless you’re corrupt and lawless,” Steve Rosenbloom goes on to explain.