An award-winning B-School Boy, PCP, UGA… these acronyms add up to a naked angry slimy mess inside a trash truck’s hopper …

The spectacle of this student fighting with the cops for his right to die in a mobile dumpster was impressive even on a campus famous for its immensities of trash. Crowds of student onlookers apparently took lots of videos.

It’s all very primal, isn’t it? Curled naked inside the dark wet womb, UGA’s finest sticks his thumb in his mouth, dilates his eyes and cries No! In thunder.

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UD thanks John.

Those pesky night games, during which wasted tailgaters turn the campus into a reeking dump, will go on. After all:

Athletics director Damon Evans said Wednesday that he hoped to find a healthy balance between the early kickoffs and the games under the lights …but said television contracts with CBS and ESPN would ultimately outweigh many of the school’s desires.

Professor of Law Peter Appel, of the University of Georgia, “has been invited to train federal wilderness managers at the Arthur Carhart National Wilderness Training Center, a facility in Missoula, Mont., run jointly by all federal agencies responsible for wilderness management.” Appel specializes in environmental law, and knows something about managing wildernesses in particular.

UD thinks Appel should take a hard look at the wilderness right outside his window — the seventy tons of broken glass and human shit in front of the University of Georgia law school — and think about how to manage that. Think globally, act locally. This wilderness stares Appel and his fellow law professors right in the face … right in the nose … after every football game on campus.

The university has no idea what to do about it. It gets worse every year, and this year, with the opening game, it’s so bad that it’s become a very big scandal.

UD‘s been studying the problem, reading lots of news articles, blog entries, and comment threads about it. The University of Georgia Law School Wilderness Area, it turns out, has a number of interesting features.

For instance, the wilderness is created not merely by thousands of drunk tailgaters hurling bottles at each other and shitting in the doorways of Professor Appel’s law school building. The drunks begin the process, to be sure; but after they leave, the derelict of Athens show up to loot the place. Whatever trash has managed to find a bin is now overturned in search of valuables that the drunks may have left behind.

Once we know these sorts of details, once we understand the rhythms of this ecosystem, perhaps we can do something to manage it. Contraceptives in the beer, so tailgaters don’t reproduce? UD‘s not an expert; she doesn’t really know. But there must be professors, in the law school and elsewhere at the University of Georgia, interested in studying the wilderness just outside their doors.

“You’re just a lightweight,” Mr. Trump snapped, raising his voice and pointing a finger [at a journalist] in anger. “Don’t talk to me that — don’t talk — I’m the president of the United States. Don’t ever talk to the president that way.”

Ubus always think that they can talk like gutter trash, but everyone must address them as if they’re the highest of the high. It don’t work that way, babe.

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Staging by Alfred Jarry.

… Sayreville thing), allow UD to reiterate her position.

This is a blog about universities and the problems with them. UD‘s interest in football (which under normal conditions would have to grow to become cursory) is restricted to what it’s doing to our universities.

UD (as you know if you read this blog) calls football The Freak Show That Ate the American University.

As for football outside the university: UD recognizes that millions of Americans need regular, massive, violent, pissed to the gills spectacles. She’s had little to say about the NFL, the tax exempt non-profit organization to which the nation has given the job of mounting the spectacles. Similarly, she’s had little on this blog to say about NASCAR. If universities began fielding NASCAR teams, she’d begin talking about it.

That there is a world of blood-lust outside the university is unremarkable. That universities – outposts of civil reasoning – are sometimes little more than football camps is quite remarkable. The university, as institution, starts out so high that its transformation into a football camp represents a resounding fall into the gutter.

We all know the schools that have really let themselves go – Penn State, Rutgers, Alabama, University of North Carolina, University of Georgia, Auburn, University of Miami, etc. – and we all know the obvious stuff covered by journalists: systemic cheating, sometimes orchestrated by professors; systemic corruption by money; high rates of player crime; budget-busting payouts of fired coaches. This blog covers that stuff, but also tries to evoke the daily, on-the-ground scummy environment that football camp university students and professors endure.

I don’t mean simply, for instance, the humiliation of being threatened all the time by coaches and high ranking administrators who are angry with you because you don’t go to games, or because you leave games early. How many emails per day does a typical University of Alabama student get from the school’s enraged multimillionaire coach harassing her about her non-attendance? How bad is she willing to be made to feel because she is focused on university studies? How often must she be made to defend her preference for reading over watching steroid poppers break each others’ skulls?

I also mean the literal filth of the university football camp. I mean the University of Georgia’s long struggle with post-tailgate trash all over campus (trash that includes human waste). I mean North Carolina State’s similar problem, concisely expressed by a campus journalist: “[W]hen the students get drunk, they don’t really care what goes where.”

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Why are university students en masse refusing to go to football games? Everyone’s worried about it. Michigan State’s AD says it’s “embarrassing,” but he doesn’t think it’s embarrassing that a coach putting on shows no one wants to go to makes three million dollars a year. One sports writer calls the non-compliant University of Miami student fans “pathetic,” but he doesn’t ask himself whether rational people might prefer not to be identified with a pathetically corrupt program. Florida A&M is all upset that no one goes to their football games. Does it occur to them that people would prefer not to have to think about manslaughter when they see a marching band?

The university is reviewing footage of students throwing trash at people.

All’s fair in love and Holy War.

Throwing trash at the ref doesn’t really make it, though, does it? Look at the footage. Bunch of white streamers. Does nothing.

Wait til the state mandates carrying your gun to sporting events. Now you’re talking.

Nice ambiguity there, huh? To what does “they,” in Joe Nocera’s sentence refer? The teams or the universities?

I guess he means it to refer to the teams; but, if so, should he not at least have reversed the order – between the universities and the teams, and stop pretending they have any ‘educational’ value (and why put educational in quotation marks?)? Nocera presumably believes some universities have either educational or ‘educational’ value…

Consider too the content of his claim. Nocera’s one of many writers who, faced with the superscummy world big-time athletics has brought to America’s universities, urges that we “create some real separation” between athletics and universities.

Easy to say, Joe. What the fuck, pray tell, might you mean? When two people who can’t stand each other but find themselves married decide to really deal with that, they separate. Real separation means you live in different places and have little to nothing to do with one another. But I doubt Joe has in mind this clean a break.

I mean, plenty of people are calling for universities whose campuses are routinely trashed — literally and figuratively — by their sports programs to spin them off, to have a merely symbolic association with a local professional team that continues to carry the name of the university. That’s one way to go. But there are many more people, like Nocera, who seem to think that universities and big-time sports can be separated and yet reconciled, can have broken up and still live together under the same roof.

There are many reasons why this is impossible, prominent among them the simple dynamism of the phenomenon itself: Every year, unstoppably, scandals get more lurid, more expensive, more absolutely disgusting. Every year, coaches and players get more out of control, gain more power. Every year, the shreds of academic integrity these schools have managed to maintain shred yet more. Every year, more and more classes are cancelled to make way for games and for the dictates of the media conglomerates that now run the university show. Etc. Nocera’s column happens to be about university presidents destroyed by their athletic programs, but that’s only one of countless corruptions intrinsic to the decision to import professional sports — whose even more repulsive scandals (the latest being baseball boys and their steroids) Americans really seem to get off on — to universities. So you can put the smell over there, as it were, but it’s always going to work its way deep into your nostrils.

And I’m afraid absolute separation won’t fly either. I mean the idea of spinning off the teams, professionalizing them, but keeping University of Georgia in their name. Let me explain why.

Think of alum fandom as a delicate and nuanced perfume. It has a note of nostalgia, a bouquet of beer, a hint of hazing… studded about with the scent of sorority and the fragrance of frat. Alum fans are connected to their team through memories of sadistic initiation rituals, drunken stumbles into lakes, and other cherished keepsakes. Pack up the team and send it across town and you rip those memories from their moorings. Won’t work.

A lawyer writes an opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor. Excerpt:

… Congress should prevent federal research grants or subsidies from being awarded to any educational institution that pays greater compensation on average to its football or basketball coaches than it does on average to its tenured faculty members.

Any school that pays more to those who coach big time sports than to those who teach students academic subjects shows its true colors. No taxpayer should pay money to such a school…

Every now and then UD stumbles on pieces like these. They’re the product of a disbelief that turns to rage when people serious about universities start to examine what’s going on.

Some people decide the thing to do is go after the university’s tax exempt status. Others say spin already-professional university sports programs off and make them an independent affiliate of the university, with the players paid athletes rather than unpaid pretend students. This writer would make schools that pay their coaches six million dollars a year while their classrooms sink into ruin ineligible for federal research funds.

It’s unlikely any of these ideas will go anywhere. For one thing, contemporary America is much more about entertainment than seriousness, and our universities, many of them, reflect that priority. In going up against crass campus sports programs, you’re going up against an entire culture.

And you’re going up against deep-lying needs. The people of Alabama don’t see Nick Saban as a coach. He’s a savior. A god. He will make their sad lives happy, their shame pride. Variants of this fervency prevail at all big sports schools, where no amount of criminality, greed, and contempt for the values of universities on the part of teams and coaches diminishes their on-field aura.

A third problem is that people never really look directly at universities. We sentimentalize the places. You’d think, for instance, that people would be able to look directly at the University of Georgia Law School Wilderness Area and conclude the obvious: The University of Georgia isn’t a university; it’s a tailgaters’ trash dump. And indeed until it finds a way to stop being a dump and start being a university, it probably shouldn’t get federal funds.

But it’s like the most photographed barn in America in White Noise. No one, says a character in the novel, sees the barn.

No one sees the dump.