FSU is another school that should put itself entirely online.

During my spring semester at Florida State University last year, I took an art history course that met at 10 a.m. in a lecture hall across campus — at a location prohibitively distant from my dormitory at that point in my life. Apart from quiz and test dates, I showed up to the class exactly three times that semester: the first day of syllabus overview, the second day when I realized the professor was reading directly from PowerPoint presentations posted online and the third day midway through the semester when I found an attendance policy in the syllabus.

Regular readers know that UD uses the phrase the mephitic factor to designate the intensity of bad smells in the air on this or that American campus at any given time.

Brown University, a fancy Ivy League institution, is an example of a High Mephitic Factor school — its gathering emanations of corruption and wrongdoing of late have an elite feel to them, coming from famous scientists on the faculty, and from sophisticated, wealthy trustees.

Auburn University, a school without academic or social distinction, represents the much more typical Low Mephitic Factor, where the shitty smell in the quads has to do with athletes and their associates who cheat — on the field, and in the classroom.

High or low, the mephitic factor is almost always about the same thing: greed. Pastor Newton pimped his son Cam to Mississippi State; now that same son is at Auburn, and it’s only a matter of time before the NCAA proves that the father pimped the son to Auburn too. Until then, Newton gets to play, and the campus gets to keep that smell.

[People at the NCAA] know (and believe they can prove) that Cecil Newton demanded money for Cam’s commitment, thanks to the Mississippi State evidence. They cannot prove that he made the same demand of Auburn, or that Cam was aware of his father’s pay-for-play schemes. This sounds as believable as a hooker not knowing she’s being pimped out, but it’s not about what probably happened. It’s about what can be proven, and as of this moment, it cannot be proven that Cam Newton or Auburn did anything against the rules.

Brown could clear some of the bad air; but that would mean acknowledging what’s going on there, not merely with one of its trustees, but, soon enough, in all likelihood, with another. The scientist, the trustees… After awhile, the campus smells, and schools that care about that, schools that have something to lose by way of integrity, need to act.

… Mike Leach.

A perfect match.

For World AIDS Day:

UD has long been haunted by the song Fairy Book Lines, words by Charles Barber, music, Donald St. Pierre.

You can hear a bit of the song here, on the Amazon page for the AIDS Quilt Songbook (scroll down for music samples).

For me, the drifty music and drifty words capture the bitter business of dying. They capture the peculiar process by which the body, in a modern world of medicine, returns to earth.

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Death be nimble –
life was quick
Efficiency’s a modern trope
To be expected
with impatience
Not less
when bearing death
Or a low-burning illness
slow as memory.

The slow-covering growth,
so like nature,
Slowly returning the body to earth,
adrift in underground.

… win this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

A university’s real mission, which ought to make everything else pale by comparison, involves the education of young people and the advancement of knowledge. It is not to play football on television.

From an editorial about the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in the News and Observer.

… Miami gets a bad rap as a university with no money. If that’s what you truly believe, take some time to go walk around the downtown medical campus. Start exploring and you’ll never feel like UM has a lack of funds ever again. The money is absolutely there; the only question is the willingness to spend it on athletics.

… PLEASE STOP thinking or insinuating that [President] Donna Shalala and [athletic director] Kirby [Hocutt] don’t want to win, or that they’d prefer to have a bunch of Rhodes Scholars who lose four or five games per year. That sentiment is beyond ridiculous. Both the president and athletic director want to win badly, but obviously want to do so the right way – with players going to class and not revisiting UM’s “Thug U” days.

When I think back to great UM teams, I don’t remember a bunch of guys getting arrested or failing out of school. Sure, there were some rough around the edges guys, but in all reality, no more than any other school.

Words of wisdom from one of America’s stupidest schools.

“[I]nstead of providing a solid pathway to the middle class, (for-profits) are paving a path into the subbasement of the American economy.”

From a just-issued report on for-profit colleges.

… from University Diaries at her satellite campus, Inside Higher Education.

You have to admit he’s original.

His is the last recipe on the page: Gabe: Roasted Turkey Ravioli. If you like it, subscribe, and then click on LIKE IT to vote for it. If Gabe gets enough votes, he wins a scholarship to attend the Culinary Institute of America.

You’ve met UD‘s Garrett Park neighbor, the insanely precocious chef Gabe Mandel, on this blog before.

He’s also been featured in the Washington Post.

A vault in Nanterre
Is the location where
They’re keeping a bunch of Picassos.

Monsieur Le Guennec?
The master’s vieux mec?
I fear that his asso is grasso.

Killing becomes a drug, and it is really addictive. [Turn the sound down on the link.] I had a really hard time with this problem when I returned to the United States, because turning this addiction off was impossible… I still feel the addictions running through my blood and throughout my body, but now I know how to keep myself composed and keep order in myself, my mind.

Whatever else you want to say about this writing, produced by an American veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, you have to admit it’s pretty good. Straightforward, direct, honest. The image of the addictions “running” through the writer’s blood is excellent.

The essay in which it appeared earned an A in a college writing course. Indeed, so impressed was the writer’s professor that she encouraged him to publish it in the school newspaper.

That’s when administrators saw it. They’ve barred him from campus until he gets a psychiatric evaluation.

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Journalists covering the story have had no difficulty finding an idiot to insist that a writer who stresses the control he now has over himself has actually written “a cry for help… [He] clearly wants and needs a psychiatric consultation.”

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Here’s how the college should have handled this. By all means call the guy in for a chat with the provost or whoever. Don’t immediately hit him up with You’re scary. You need to get your head examined. Just talk to him. Have a campus shrink join you for the chat. Give him a chance to demonstrate that he’s okay – a reflective, damaged person working out his thoughts about his experiences in an essay.

Maybe the chat reveals that he is unhinged. Then the college can in good conscience make him keep his distance. But just because a person has written in an unnerving way about what it means to be a soldier does not mean he should be silenced.

… there’s beer, get used to it.

… rape?

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