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.

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.