“When something becomes a religion, we don’t choose the actions that are most likely to solve [any particular] problem,” said [Jonathan] Haidt, the author of the 2012 best seller “The Righteous Mind” and a professor at New York University. “We do the things that are the most ritually satisfying.”
He added that what he saw in footage of the confrontation at Middlebury “was a modern-day auto-da-fé: the celebration of a religious rite by burning the blasphemer.”
The protesters didn’t use [Charles] Murray’s presence as an occasion to hone the most eloquent, irrefutable retort to him. They swarmed and swore.
The claim here is that a segment of intelligent American college students was – at least for the duration of a gathering – a tribe, swarming and swearing with the righteous, violent, ritually satisfying, ways of its tribe. This is the villagers of The Lottery, assuring themselves of an orderly world and a good harvest by stoning a chosen villager.
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If you’re going to go to college, and you have these tribal tendencies, they can fall roughly two ways – call them Football and Foliage. Foliage refers to private small landscaped tribal grounds, Football public large arena’d grounds. Here’s how one commentator describes and justifies the latter:
Look at the shirtless boys with faces and torsos painted in the school colors; look at the cheerleaders on the fields, the ‘waves’ surging through the stands.
American universities, those temples of reason (at their best), are tribes… If you want your students to become loyal, giving alumni, you must turn them into members of a tribe.
Paradoxically, the temple of reason, if it is to survive financially, must turn its students into a tribe. It must use all of its resources to do exactly the opposite of what universities are supposed to do — sustain and strengthen human reason. Tribal fraternities, tribal football teams, tribal fans — these are the often dangerous ritual actors some public campuses encourage.
Some private campuses offer the ritual satisfaction of enforced intellectual loyalties.
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Andrew Sullivan on religious aspects of the event.
If you happen to see the world in a different way, if you’re a liberal or libertarian or even, gasp, a conservative, if you believe that a university is a place where any idea, however loathsome, can be debated and refuted, you are not just wrong, you are immoral. If you think that arguments and ideas can have a life independent of “white supremacy,” you are complicit in evil. And you are not just complicit, your heresy is a direct threat to others, and therefore needs to be extinguished. You can’t reason with heresy. You have to ban it. It will contaminate others’ souls, and wound them irreparably.
… [At one point,] the students start clapping in unison, and you can feel the hysteria rising, as the chants grow louder. “Your message is hatred. We will not tolerate it!” The final climactic chant is “Shut it down! Shut it down!” It feels like something out of The Crucible. Most of the students have never read a word of Murray’s — and many professors who supported the shutdown admitted as much. But the intersectional zeal is so great he must be banished — even to the point of physical violence.
This matters, it seems to me, because reason and empirical debate are essential to the functioning of a liberal democracy. We need a common discourse to deliberate. We need facts independent of anyone’s ideology or political side, if we are to survive as a free and democratic society. Trump has surely shown us this. And if a university cannot allow these facts and arguments to be freely engaged, then nowhere is safe. Universities are the sanctuary cities of reason. If reason must be subordinate to ideology even there, our experiment in self-government is over.
Liberal democracy is suffering from a concussion as surely as Allison [Stanger] is.
He recruited a criminal onto his team. Nothing to notice there; virtually all universities take risks on certain players. But when this freshman immediately got to work at WMU, attacking a woman at gunpoint before suiting up for even one game, the feckless Fleck broke out with torrents of bullshit about what he’d done by bringing this man into the WMU community. Let’s listen.
Let’s listen, keeping in mind that it took a local news station less than an hour to find the player’s criminal record. WMU says it doesn’t do that… It doesn’t look at players’ criminal records because I dunno who ever heard of criminal behavior among football players? Why waste your time with that? WMU says it’s considering doing that now, going forward and all.
You dig as much as you want, you can say you have something, you don’t have something, you can dig as a head coach as much as you want and it is what it is at this point, and you just have to be able to use it for the future players as you continue to recruit them… There is zero tolerance for anything like that within our culture. Zero… I brought those two gentlemen [there were two WMU football players involved; this guy’s teammate “ordered the victim to take her shirt off, while holding a gun to her forehead, according to the testimony.”] into our culture and if I would have told you I knew what was going to happen, I wouldn’t have obviously done that because that’s not what our culture’s about. I feel like I failed because I couldn’t work in their lives to get them to not make that decision. We do everything we possibly can, every single day, to teach and promote decision making and we will continue to do that.
Ya gotta admit that in years of my recording scummy things scummy coaches say, this drivel (produced by probably the highest paid person at that university) rules. The big lie pompously reiterated (Zero. Zero.). Reiterated use of a voice one can only call the subliterate subjunctive. The obscene hypocrisy.
That’s what you pay your university coach for though, ain’t it? You’re after a guy who doesn’t give a shit about importing dangerous people to university towns if they can play football.
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UPDATE: I mean, really. Why has Fleck not been fired? Jesus.
… is quite the spectacle for the violence-lovers among us. First there’s coach Leach himself, accused of abusing players at Texas Tech; then a couple of weeks ago a whole bunch of WSU football players apparently beat two students at a campus party; and now this:
According to Pullman Police, [WSU football player Shalom] Luani got agitated on Wednesday because his pizza order at Dominos was taking too long. Some other customers asked him to leave, and once outside, he got into a fight with a WSU student and broke the student’s nose.
There’s obviously good team coordination under Leach, because their regular reduction of select WSU students to a pulp has a remarkable about-the-head consistency: The players at the party apparently broke a student’s jaw, whereas here you have Luani breaking a student’s nose. Keeping it all highly localized. Good coaching looks like this.
So the question is what’s next? By UD‘s calculation (no one has yet given a clear number on the party attack), you’re beginning to see serious team depletion as significant numbers of players are suspended or removed because people are starting to notice the numbers of WSU students getting bloodied by them. It is, after all, really a numbers game: How many bloodied students can universities tolerate in order to attract the most aggressive football players to their campuses? Let’s say that right now WSU has two such students, with all the lawsuits and trials and publicity attending them. How many more before they fire Leach (and you really don’t want to fire extremely expensive, extremely litigious, Mike Leach) and try to find a coach who cares a bit more than Mike does what assholes he recruits.
These are the sorts of decisions that take up most of the time of the trustees at universities like WSU. How much blood do we mop up before we dump Leach?
At this late date in the history of scandalous Baylor University, we shouldn’t be surprised that this very assertively Christian University lacks the basic moral clarity a local newspaper columnist displays. “[W]hat Zamora did was illegal. But to me it’s not about the legality and more about what Zamora’s actions say about him as a person. A good, kindhearted, person doesn’t abuse innocent animals.”
[Baylor] fans just endured a disgusting sexual assault scandal and many are having a hard time supporting the team after that. But we were told all the guilty parties were removed from the team, so we’re not rooting for sexual predators. Baylor shouldn’t turn around and ask those who stood by them to root for an animal abuser.
Actually, Baylor just stonewalled – rather than endured – its way through a sexual assault scandal. It was dragged kicking and screaming to doing the right thing.
Baylor University is that most curious thing: a Christian institution seemingly designed to encourage cruelty and viciousness.
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What I’m talking about at Baylor goes beyond the moral dissonance demanded of all serious football fans – you must adore a sport so freakishly violent that its beau idéal is Richie Incognito, even as you tell yourself you’re adoring clean-cut all-American fun.
But that’s nothing. That’s step one. Now place yourself at Baylor. Or at Notre Dame. Pile university and Christianity on top of all that dissonance. Reconcile vast mass worship of a hyper-concussive sport, quite a few of whose standout players feature, on the field and in their private lives, exactly the sort of lunatic aggression you’d expect, with some stubborn vestigial notion in your mind, some vague remembrance, that the bloody ritual you’re adoring takes place on hallowed intellectual and spiritual ground.
It should be difficult to enjoy yourself unadulteratedly under these conditions, as the bullies, brawlers, domestic abusers, rapists, and animal floggers (fuck academic cheaters; forget cheaters; c’est entendu) bloody each other down there…
But hey. Turns out not only isn’t it difficult; it’s easy. It’s a pleasure.
Because – to state the bleeding obvious – violence is the primary object of worship in the world of Baylor University. You’re sitting in Waco – home of last year’s enormous bikers-with-guns melee/massacre. You’re sitting in the heart of Trump territory. Your choice for national leader is the man who has turned a presidential election into The Rime of the Ancient Tackler.
Strangely, you don’t even like nobly violent people; you cheer on chickenshits like Trump – a man who crapped all over a war hero because he was captured and “I like people who weren’t captured.” You cheer on players who beat up women, children, and animals.
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Some like it hot.
Hot and bloody.
It’s the Baylor way.
They’re not just big and bad.
If coaches, they may be the highest paid people in the state.
If players, they’re sports heroes. They get huge scholarships plus under the table payments. Bogus professors and bogus disciplines are invented just for them. All of the best buildings on campus are off limits to everyone but these students, with some interesting results.
The big and bad people – and of course not everyone on your big-time college team is a bad person – may bring a new kind of violence to campus, often working as the team that they are to beat the shit out of male students and sexually assault/film themselves sexually assaulting female.
The president and trustees of places like the University of Nebraska seem to consider what people like Richie Incognito do to their students acceptable collateral damage, and students seem to agree it’s worth it because you need people big and bad enough to beat the shit out of opposing players, and you might not be able to confine to the field or the court the generally violent disposition of big and bad people. Here’s a Rutgers scholar (Rutgers has distinguished itself for coach and player violence) showing his stuff.
I mean, lots of people drink and carouse and get into trouble in college. C’est entendu. But these guys are built like brick shithouses and they work as a team. You do the math.
These are the first felony arrests for a Georgia football player since Johnathan Taylor in June 2014 on domestic violence charges.
These are the second and third arrests of a Georgia football player this spring. Defensive lineman Jonathan Ledbetter was arrested last month on two misdemeanor alcohol charges.
First felonies since all the way back in… 2014! Things are looking up for University of Georgia football!
Well, yes. We all do.
The Bible thing allows you to differentiate between West Virginia University, where locals call Morgantown “a drinking town with a football problem,” and Baylor, which seems to have low rates of alcohol consumption, but shares UWV’s burning commitment to recruiting the best players regardless of, er, violent propensities.
At both schools there’s an unsettling conflation of football and the school’s spirit of choice (alcohol, God). And at both schools, whether they regard their players as Christian Soldiers or Frat Boys on Steroids, violence appears to be totally okay.
Goes without saying that guns and gangs (Baylor’s home, Waco, is in the headlines for biker/police shoot-outs) make up much of the rest of the social fabric at these locations.
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And don’t forget sex. Nobody competes with the University of Montana and Grizzlyville (used to be Missoula, but the football team is the Grizzlies) for broad-shouldered sexual assault. But Baylor’s in there trying.
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Anyone with the intestinal fortitude to examine the deep structure of Baylor – as in, how do you actually produce places like Baylor and Waco? – will tend to gravitate toward the school’s board of trustees, where a Bobby Lowder-like figure name of Buddy Jones seems to run the school and the town.
Buddy’s real enthusiastic about Baylor. Back in 2012, when they won a few games and all, his response was this:
“We like to use biblical analogies, and this is a year of biblical proportions,” Buddy Jones, a regent at the university, told the New York Times in 2012. “As we would say in Christendom, it’s like an early rapture.”
When his vision of the proper role of the booster was threatened by the alumni association, Jones (then chairman of the board of trustees) wrote to a fellow zealot that he couldn’t wait to
put on camp (sic) and load my weapons and go hunting for BAA game. Licking my chops.
Buddy’s official trustee statement has a rapturous boy/girl thing going to explain the nature of the school:
“Baylor’s uniqueness is her commitment to quality higher education by adapting to the 21st century, while never straying from her deep roots in God’s word and her role in his plan for mankind.”
Was Buddy the genius behind the groom’s cake at his daughter’s wedding?
[The cake was] an edible replica of Baylor’s … new stadium with a saluting bear in the middle. But perhaps the most impressive part of the cake is the video screen, which looks like it actually works. At the very least, it had a light in it that gave the illusion of working.
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So much of this comes together this Saturday night, when a match-up between two of the nation’s scummiest football schools – LSU and Bama – will feature a political candidate’s prostitutes and patriots ad. Layers upon layers upon layers.
One of their players was just jailed for domestic violence; another is out with a concussion. After the worst loss in the school’s history a few days ago (58-0), the school fired the football coach. Virtually no one attended that game, so UM has to figure out how to get someone – anyone – to buy a UM football ticket.
Plus they’ve now got to pay the coach his no doubt enormous buyout.
And meanwhile they don’t have a coach.
… is how they seem to sing it at Baylor University, a Christian school apparently, but far more committed to football (and basketball) than to anything spiritual… I mean, if you go by the sorts of things that happen there…
For instance, it’s a very violent place, which seems to UD (she’s no expert) rather at odds with the Christian ethos. One of their basketball players a few years ago “punched Texas Tech forward Jordan Barncastle … breaking Barncastle’s nose and causing both benches to clear.” Although concussed during a recent game, Baylor’s quarterback insisted it was nothing and that despite some fogginess and a headache he’d be back out there again right away because nothing’s more important than winning at football. And
In January, 2014, Tevin Elliott, a defensive end out of Mount Pleasant, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for twice assaulting a former Baylor student in 2012. During that trial, two other women testified that Elliott assaulted them. A fourth alleged victim was not called to testify.
And now everyone’s abuzz with the latest Baylor violence: Under the same coach as Elliott’s, another football player is going to jail for sexual assault on a Baylor student. And this player had already been “kicked off the Boise State football team after punching and choking his girlfriend.” It looks very much as though the Baylor coach knew about this violent past.
But hey. If there’s one thing you’ve learned reading this blog, it’s that plenty of American universities will open their arms to woman beaters if the guys can catch a football. And the schools will do all they can to lie and cover up and victim-blame (Baylor carried out a wretchedly inept internal investigation.) until the bad stuff their football players do goes away. Or maybe it doesn’t go away.
And… uh… this seems to be the Christian way. I mean… One of America’s leading Christian universities keeps doing it.
Baylor’s president is Ken Starr. That Ken Starr. Investigator extraordinaire.
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Read this if you can stomach it. Baylor is a sister school to Florida State University, with similar cooperation by local media and law enforcement. Absolutely disgusting.
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UD thanks dmf.
Last week it was Florida State; this week it’s San Jose State. Both universities have dumped two football players in the same week because of violence, though at FSU they’re like totally into beating women up, while at SJSU it’s a combo play: One guy beat a woman up, and the other guy hit a fellow player in the head with a skateboard. So hard that the guy’s in the hospital with broken facial bones. It was “a reaction to some displeasure with how [the player he hit] was encouraging his teammate during the team’s workout earlier Tuesday.”
Bottom line: A lot of your university’s sports heroes – coaches as well as players – are seriously scary people. That’s why even though many of them quite often do horrible things – crimes of violence – they almost never get prosecuted. Everyone’s too scared.
Some of these people are scary for obvious Richie Incognito reasons: They’ve been recruited because they’re humongous, violent motherfuckers and you really really really do not want to be anywhere in their way. Or in their vicinity. We all had a very good laugh when we saw this take on Rutgers coach Mike Rice (start at 1:05), but it’s kind of nervous laughter, isn’t it? It’s kind of like I cannot believe that a highly paid, high-profile representative of a university is a violent psycho… I don’t want to believe this…
I love my team! Want to cheer them on! Want them to win!
Oh. But in order to win a lot of teams seem to need psycho coaches who recruit angry motherfuckers like Richie Incognito.
Hm. Hm. Yes, it’s a problem…
Around midnight on April 12, 2014, Oregon State student Michael Davis said he and a friend had been arguing with some football players about cutting in line at a bar and he had fallen to the ground with one of them while fending off a punch. As Davis stood up, tight end Tyler Perry ran up and punched him in the head, knocking him to the ground, the police report states.
According to the report, Davis said a friend who played football told him that he “shouldn’t call the cops. We won’t have a starting lineup next year.” Another person involved in the incident said he “knew the males to be OSU football players so did not really want them in any trouble.”
Days after the incident, Davis said that one of his professors noticed several football players milling outside the door of a classroom and the professor told him to exit through a different door because she was afraid they were going to harass him.
Fuck, man. What did I tell you? Stay out of the way.
But hey. UD, qua professor, finds the bit about the professor really interesting. Look at the intriguing relationships and experiences you can have as a professor at a major sports school! There you are lecturing on Marcel Proust or the Burgess Shale, and you notice that outside your classroom door there’s all these big guys from the team milling about!
It’s like living in Naples, and I don’t mean Florida! It’s like – there they are! You know them. Your students know them. The police know them. The judges know them. Everyone knows them. They run the place, and they can do anything they want because they scare the shit out of everyone.
Yes, turns out there’s nothing sacred even about the classrooms at the big sports universities. Of course, we already knew that from Julius Nyang’oro’s University of North Carolina… Nothing sacred there at all… Nothing even semi-sacred… Professors are just as scared as everyone else.
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UD thanks the several readers who linked her to the ESPN article.
What can we say about Texas Tech University that hasn’t already been said? This is truly America’s university, with all of our, uh, more internationally notorious tendencies.
Violence? Wow. Yup. Look at their lineup of coaches over the last ten years or so. The ones whose contracts or lawsuits or whatever they’re still dealing with (UD assumes TTU’s huge legal expenses “related to football” are included in the $95 million). Some were dangerous drunks. Some liked to beat up on players. One even punched one of his assistant coaches. On camera.
Provincial? What other university in America would give a disgraced former attorney general/crony $100,000 a year to teach one course?
Un peu ivre? Sure. Tailgating is a bit of an issue.
Sports and nothing but sports? Well, it done got all that money (guess I should say it done spent all that money) plus all that big-time football and last time I looked it ranked #156. As a university, I mean! Ha ha. As an arena it’s doing great.
You started the process in high school… continue it in college! … and finish it altogether when you go professional…
[Y]ou see all those former players with CTE on television, or in person, and you can’t help but wonder if you might be among them someday, and you can’t help but ask yourself whether it’s worth the trade-off.
In the end, this is probably a good thing for professional football, at least in the short term. It is a young man’s game for a reason, but in the longer term, it does make you wonder if the NFL can ever stem the tide, as the players themselves become increasingly disposable. What happens if the game continues to be more and more compressed by its own violence?
On that compression idea: Maybe you’ll start to see players retire during their university years. The need for fresh blood will make freshman players a hot commodity, while juniors and seniors will be shunted into special on-campus hospital/retirement homes once they’ve gone gaga.
The plus for the university community will be an increase in student opportunities for Volunteer Points.
University Diaries has been tracking this meme for about a year. A guy recounts in lurid detail this lurid sport that – as described – only a moral degenerate would follow, let alone get excited about every week.
[L]ast year was uniquely disastrous for the game. Heisman-winner Jameis Winston’s off-the-field behavior—rape allegations, petty theft, a brief suspension for obscenity—stalked a league already burdened with lawsuits from former athletes … [T]he best running back was suspended for whipping his son with a branch, domestic abuse cases seemed to materialize weekly, and the Ray Rice saga exposed the commissioner to be exactly as dense and cynical as many already feared…
Then the guy comes up with elaborate theories as to why he keeps excitedly watching the game anyway. But, as in this latest article, one really obvious explanation doesn’t occur to the guy. He loves violence, and the more violence the better.
After all, as he himself notes, football is more popular than ever.