Cosmic Convergence

Eight of the fifteen American university football teams that dominate the “most flagrant chaplaincies” list also dominate the “most team arrests” list.

MOST FLAGRANT CHAPLAINCIES“:

Auburn University
University of Georgia
University of South Carolina
Mississippi State University
University of Alabama
University of Tennessee
Louisiana State University
University of Missouri
University of Washington
Georgia Tech
University of Illinois
Florida State University
University of Mississippi
University of Wisconsin
Clemson University

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MOST ARRESTS:

1) Washington State: 31
2) Florida: 24
T-3) Georgia: 22
T-3) Texas A&M: 22
5) Oklahoma: 21
T-6) Iowa State: 20
T-6) Missouri: 20
T-6) Ole Miss: 20
T-6) West Virginia: 20
T-10) Florida State: 19
T-10) Tennessee: 19
T-12) Alabama: 18
T-12) Iowa: 18
T-12) Kentucky: 18
T-15) LSU: 16
T-15) Marshall: 16
T-15) Oregon State: 16
T-15) Pittsburgh: 16
T-19) Arkansas: 14
T-19) Michigan: 14
T-19) Oklahoma State: 14
T-19) Purdue: 14
T-23) Auburn: 13
T-23) Colorado: 13
T-23) Kansas: 13

The University: A Dignity Watch.

Longtime readers know that University Diaries likes to follow the Italianization (background on this term here) of the American university, its step-by-step degradation to the point of no return… The big-time sports schools are the leading edge here, of course; and within that category alcohol-sodden big-time sports schools are the real winners. U President Vows Push for Stadium Liquor Sales is, when you think about it, a really remarkable headline… the university president as booze pusher… spending his time pushing booze for his students through the legislature… the university president as alcohol salesman… on the august occasion of his retirement, we scroll through the president’s achievements… got the state to allow our students to drink in the stands…

So here’s a recent Dignity Watch item: The chancellor of one university boasts that his university, unlike a neighboring university, doesn’t – yet – generate revenue by fucking up its students.

Texas A&M Chancellor John Sharp hasn’t held back lately taking shots at the Longhorns, which for years ruled the state of Texas in college sports.

Sharp had a cutting response to the news two days ago that the Longhorns will begin selling alcohol at football games.

Through a tweet from Gabe Bock of TexAgs radio, Sharp said, “Our athletic program has not reached the point where we require the numbing effects of alcohol.”

And that’s A&M saying that! Texas A&M!

LOL.

[Louisiana State University] defensive lineman Trey Lealaimatafao [was] arrested on Tuesday for allegedly pushing and punching a woman in the face outside Reggie’s bar near the LSU campus … He was allegedly taking money from the pants of another person who was on the ground unconscious at the parking lot outside Reggie’s, and that man’s girlfriend began yelling at Lealaimatafao to stop.

“When she approached him, he pushed her away,” the initial Baton Rouge Police report says. “She continued to scream at him to stop, and he hit her in the face with a closed fist, causing her to fall to the ground.”

… Lealaimatafao was issued a misdemeanor summons last July for stealing a bicycle from the LSU library. He later returned the bike and told police that because the bike was not locked, he thought it was part of a ride for free program, which is available in several cities. Lealaimatafao was redshirted last season at LSU after injuring an arm when he punched through a glass in the LSU weight room.

Fucked up the weight room. Stole a bike. Punched a woman while trying to take money from an unconscious person.

It’s real hard to get released from the LSU team.

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UD thanks John.

“You can’t have the same rules for schools with 100,000-seat football stadiums and athletic budgets of $100 million as you do for institutions with 30,000-seat stadiums and $20 million budgets.”

Sometimes UD likes to imagine people from… well, almost any other country in the world reading things like this. About universities.

“[U]gly, kitsch, ridiculous, and rather childish.”

Scathing Online Schoolmarm might quibble with the order of adjectives here – isn’t childish a bit weaker than ugly, kitsch, ridiculous? Those are stronger words, and I think you should build up to your stronger words to avoid a letdown at the end of a sentence. SOS might have started the list with childish and then continued by means of ascending number of syllables:

kitsch (1)
ugly (2)
ridiculous (4)

“Childish, kitsch, ugly, and rather ridiculous.” Or drop the rather. “Childish, kitsch, ugly, and ridiculous.”

The ur-text for thinking about the style and content of lists is The Importance of Being Earnest:

ALGERNON. [Speaking very rapidly.] Cecily, ever since I first looked upon your wonderful and incomparable beauty, I have dared to love you wildly, passionately, devotedly, hopelessly.

CECILY. I don’t think that you should tell me that you love me wildly, passionately, devotedly, hopelessly. Hopelessly doesn’t seem to make much sense, does it?

Doesn’t make much sense and is, again, a bit of a letdown.

In the case of practically bankrupt Louisiana State University finding money to buy “a ‘lazy river’ on the LSU campus in the shape of the letters L-S-U,” it doesn’t really matter how the LSU Faculty Senate president organized his list – the remarkable nature of the construction certainly comes across. Students whose campus is in the tank will soon be literally in the tank, paddling while Rome burns.

More dispatches from the university’s front porch.

[A]s an out-of-state transfer student [at Louisiana State University], I was not quite ready for the insanity that ensued during football season. I was shocked at the number of students I saw around me that were consistently vomiting, and I had never seen so many students be carried out on stretchers before.

Yet these are precisely the students who eventually turn into the university’s most generous alumni.

One way for universities to save money while retaining loyal alumni would be to forgo the costly football thing altogether and simply, at the Welcome New Students party, spike the punch with Ipecac.

Then, after students have puked their guts out, beat them up.

“According to a March 2012 police report, [David] Dismukes crashed his car into the car of a process server who said Dismukes was attempting to avoid being served a subpoena in connection with his 2012 study.”

Whoa. What? A university professor is being served a subpoena because of his research, and he rams the server’s car?

Let’s try and unpack this…

Back in ’12 you find this article, in which an economist dumps all over a paper Dismukes (a director of Louisiana State University’s Center for Energy Studies) wrote. The paper purports to demonstrate that so-called legacy lawsuits, where individuals sue oil companies for damage they may have done to their land, cost citizens of Louisiana “30,000 jobs and $1.5 billion in wages over the past eight years.” The paper is waved all over the state by the oil companies as they seek to make it more difficult for people to file these sorts of lawsuits.

Testifying in front of the state legislature on the question of amending filing procedures, the economist, W. Ed Whitelaw, said:

[T]he analysis omits a relevant variable. Dismukes included data from 2005 and 2006, when the Louisiana energy industry was battered by two hurricanes, and stops his analysis in 2007.

“He fails to mention Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Rita anywhere in the report,” Whitelaw said.

“In our opinion, the Dismukes document fails to meet … professional standards. And this failure matters to the degree that the Dismukes document is fatally flawed, both theoretically and empirically. Nowhere does Dr. Dismukes present a coherent economic model linking legacy lawsuits and decisions to drill in Louisiana.”

Ah c’mon. Just a couple itty bitty hurricanes…

And turns out not only do the oil people really like this study; it’s their study.

Dismukes’ emails, obtained through a public records request by the state and the Vermilion Parish School Board, show a study he authored in 2012 used data given to him by Exxon Mobil, distorted facts to support his thesis and purposely concealed oil companies’ involvement in his research… The emails show the involvement of the Exxon Mobil and Chevron Corporation in Dismukes’ research, and he said in an email given to The Daily Reveille that he was under pressure to produce the report. In another email, he said he wasn’t sure how he would “fess-up” to where some of the information used in his study came from because it was provided by an oil company.

If the server comes at Dismukes again, will he ram again? Stay tuned.

La vie au sports factory.

Fine Arts and Rat Feces at Louisiana State University.

When the ceramics studio ceiling crashed into a large sink that just about every student in the building uses, people around campus started paying attention to the [Studio Arts] building’s long list of issues. Problems with the building, which was constructed in 1924, date back much further and are not limited to that one studio.

One of students’ biggest concerns is lead paint and asbestos they have identified throughout the building using home test kits.

… There is exposed wiring throughout the building, some of which is near students’ lockers in the main hallway. When the ceiling leaks — which it often does in many places — students fear the mix of electricity and water and avoid going to their lockers.

Restrooms are not cleaned regularly and rat feces often appear throughout the building, [a student] said.

“I haven’t seen Facility Services in here until the ceiling collapsed,” she said. “Once we started the protest stuff, then we started seeing them here and there. … We’re only starting to get attention now that we’re speaking out about it.”

… At various times, the Studio Arts Building has been home to squirrels, rats, a raccoon and during summer 2013, a homeless man, she said.

“The shabbiness draws random people to it,” [a student] said.

… [On the up side, the building is] brimming with the kind of quirkiness that only art students could come up with… Someone drew the outline of a house around a hole in a wall where a rat that students named Leroy once lived.

Go, Rats! I mean, Tigers.

“[At] some big-time sports institutions, the academic mission has nearly vanished beneath this never-ebbing wave of sports mania.”

What’s nice about this rather typical appraisal of America’s many football schools is that the writer names names. I mean, he doesn’t say this school and that school are no longer schools. He simply provides the data and lets you arrive at the obvious conclusion.

So the standouts, the almost-entirely-without-discernable-academic-missions, are:

University of Arkansas
University of Nebraska
University of Oklahoma
Auburn University

These are the Big Four, the prime nullities, that this particular author highlights – schools that spend huge sums on games and stadiums and all, and vanishingly little on education. So little that their academic mission is pretty much gone. There are plenty of other such places, including almost every school in West Virginia.

These four schools naturally take up a lot of air time on University Diaries, each of them a massive military industrial academic fraud violence against women drunk driving plus all them other naughty big boy thangs complex. Nebraska loved to death two of America’s current high-profile bad boys – Richie Incognito and Dominic Raiola – so that place (along with the University of Florida ’cause of loved-up Aaron Hernandez) is at the top of Google News lately. But Auburn, with its long tradition of massive cheating, and its board of trustees packed with former Auburn athletes, is perennially in the news, as are vastly corrupt Arkansas and Oklahoma…

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Speaking of tradition — that whole tradition thing, so important to all of these schools, can really backfire. Just like Penn State, all four schools on this guy’s list seem to think they have these glorious traditions…

When things go wrong in nullity schools, when the essential scumminess of what they’re about becomes too public, they often try to play this tradition card, as if the act of reminding people of the essential glory of what they’ve always been about will make people’s backs straighten… Yet these places forget that although they might have won many games over a long period of time, the scumminess was always there and everyone knows it…

So – here’s an example of the problem.

Louisiana State University is trying to get its students to stop commanding their game day opponents, in unison, on national television, to suck their dicks. How to go about this?

LSU decided to initiate something called Tradition Matters, which is essentially a series of notices all over campus, signed by the president of the school, asking students to stop saying suck my dick in unison on national television.

An LSU student journalist writes:

I didn’t realize how sleazy [the cheer] made my university look until I sat in a press box last season and watched my professional colleagues shake their heads in disgust.

Yet in what way will an appeal to LSU’s traditions help the matter? LSU qua football school has always been pretty sleazy… Indeed sleaziness is kind of a point of pride for the entire state of Louisiana... traditionally… It seems fully in keeping with Louisiana’s traditions that the president of an academic institution there would devote his time and the institution’s money to plastering campus with a plea that its scholars not get drunk and invite a national television audience to suck their dicks…

********************************

So you see the problem. Nullity schools cannot make an appeal to their academic traditions, to the ethos of reason and moral reflection at the heart of non-null universities; they are forced to make an appeal to their athletic traditions. But athletic traditions at schools like these are as much about decades of publicly pleading for people to fellate you as they are about clean-limbed sportsmanship.

Ooch. Ouch. Eech.

It was just a matter of time before Time put this in a headline.

If you didn’t click on the link, here ’tis:

FOOTBALL: A WASTE OF TAXPAYERS’ MONEY

Lordy, lordy. When it hits the headlines of Time!

You, dear taxpayer, are footing the bill for football through an outrageous series of giveaways to billionaire team owners and public universities that put pigskin before sheepskin.

Billionaire team owners like Yeshiva University trustee/convicted fraudster Zygi Wilf… What American could object to handing her taxes over to the likes of Zygi??

Okay, so let’s see what the Time guy has to say.

… Rutgers’ athletics programs get a subsidy from the university of about $29 million a year, the lion’s share of which goes to the Scarlet Knights football team. As the flagship state university of New Jersey, that money is not only coming out of tuition and fees paid by students but out of the pockets of Garden State taxpayers.

As with NFL stadium deals, such lavish, publicly financed gifts are the norm for college football. With the exception of a tiny handful of programs – Ohio State, University of Texas, LSU, and perhaps three or four more – virtually every athletic program at every public NCAA Division I school is subsidized even as administrators plead poverty when it comes to resources for faculty and, as you know, education. Especially in an age of busted government budgets, even the most rabid sports fan should agree that it’s an outrage that the highest-paid public employee in a majority of states is a college football coach (in another 13, it’s a basketball coach). It’s far better to be broke and have a cellar-dwelling NFL franchise, right?

If you watch football this weekend, recognize that most of the drama and meaning is taking place off the field. The way the college and pro games are built on subsidies and giveaways neatly encapsulates crony capitalism at its worst – and helps to explain why taxes go up even as it seems there’s never enough money for basic government functions.

Killjoy. Why not pile it on? Why not talk about Temple? Here’s Deadspin on the subject.

Temple University announced today that it will drop seven intercollegiate sports: baseball, softball, men’s crew, women’s rowing, men’s gymnastics, and men’s track and field, both indoor and outdoor. This is a cautionary tale about trying become a football school.

The cuts will save just $3 million of Temple athletics’ $44 million annual budget, or not much more than it costs to run one of the FBS’s worst football teams (and run it at a loss). About 150 athletes students are out of luck, though the school announced it will honor their scholarships until they graduate or transfer. The nine full-time coaches aren’t so lucky… Rather than drop out of Division 1A, as seemed likely and logical, Temple stayed independent and decided to spend. They moved into an NFL stadium, paying more than $265,000 per home game in rent. They clambered into the MAC, but kept their eyes on a bigger prize. Moderate on-field success spurred further budget inflation. Finally, they made the leap back to the Big East—just as the Big East fell apart… The chase for bigtime football is a pyramid scheme, and the Owls remain afloat at the expense of those sports on the bottom. What happens when the con man runs out of suckers?

They needn’t worry. When it comes to the American taxpayer, there’s a sucker born every minute.

“The value of the institution is being compromised at every level in order to pursue ever greater revenue opportunities.”

This sentence could come from a contemporary American commentary on the Kaplanization of our once-great universities; or it could come from a contemporary American commentary on the NFLization of our once-great universities.

This particular sentence happens to be about the sporty arm of the pincer movement; and coming as it does from Texas, of all places, it tells you something. It tells you something about why immense new Adzillatronned university football and basketball stadiums are full of gaping holes during even the biggest games… Why a growing branch of the digital and design industries is now devoted to making an empty silence look like a crowded blow-out on network tv…

The author of this commentary is telling you why people are leaving the American university stadium, but you don’t want to listen because you know that the problems are too basic to fix.

If college football is just entertainment, and entertainment is just a product, and products are created to make money, then I start to feel a little silly investing emotional energy in the A&M – LSU game. More and more the institution carries the distracting odor of a swindle. It’s hard to tell whether I’m the mark or whether I’m in on the grift.

… It’s hard to say what should happen with college football. Paying the players would certainly be fairer, but it would finish off whatever remains of an institution that once meant far more than money. The arcane rules put in place to protect college athletics from market forces have spawned a densely complex culture of cheating, a tradition almost as old as the sport. How long can Universities, bastions of enlightened rational values, continue this charade? What toll is it taking on the wider goals of those institutions?

College football may be a necessary casualty of a freer, more prosperous world. We are all likely to cling to the remains at least a little while longer. Maybe someday (next year?), when the Longhorns’ helmets are sporting a giant BestBuy logo and the program is playing two additional highly-paid exhibition games each year against the likes of Abilene Christian and the fighting Javelinas of A&M Kingsville we’ll finally have to give it up.

Try his first paragraph this way:

If a college education is just entertainment, and entertainment is just a product, and products are created to make money, then I start to feel a little silly investing emotional energy in the game. More and more the institution carries the distracting odor of a swindle. It’s hard to tell whether I’m the mark or whether I’m in on the grift.

Except that in the Kaplanization case, it’s not just emotional energy that’s lacking when the professor is a coached happy face on a jiggly screen full of funny little games. It’s also of course intellectual energy.

Stadium seats will go the same way as classroom seats: Eventually all university activity will jiggle on-screen. Imagine the University of Phoenix with a sports channel.

Forming crowds of violent shits is the University of Massachusetts’ most cherished, most venerable…

tradition; the university itself is clearly proud of it, since after decades of totally pissed vileness it continues to respond with soft words… Continues to set things up on campus to achieve optimal pillaging. They riot when they’ve been sleeping; they riot when they’re awake; they riot when they’ve been bad or good — so let them RIOT for goodness’ sake!

U Mass Amherst is one of those schools which (let’s be honest) knows it would have to shut down if it didn’t admit its cohort, and the U Mass cohort happens to be gangs of alcoholic bullies from the eastern seaboard. Similarly, if Ole Miss systematically shunned Confederacy loyalists with a big thirst, they’d lose a significant chunk of their incoming class. Most universities are dominated by a representative slice of the American pie; U Mass Amherst, Ole Miss, LSU, Clemson, Auburn, Alabama, Cal State Chico … these schools are not. They play the role of the freaks of this blog, the frenzied teetering muttering mad uncles of the American university family. When you give their students guns, as at Oklahoma State, you witness all manner of amazing things.

The Mind of the South…

… as the title of that great book had it, is a real mystery. But one thing UD can conclude from following universities like Ole Miss is that the whole idea of democracy doesn’t seem to have penetrated very far. There was the state rep who in 2011 introduced Mississippi House Bill 1106:

AN ACT TO AMEND SECTION 37-115-1, MISSISSIPPI CODE OF 1972,
1 TO PROVIDE THAT THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI SHALL BEAR THE
2 NICKNAME “OLE MISS REBELS”; TO PROVIDE THAT THE UNIVERSITY’S
3 MASCOT SHALL BE “COLONEL REBEL”; TO REQUIRE THAT THE UNIVERSITY’S
4 BAND SHALL PLAY “DIXIE” AND “FROM DIXIE WITH LOVE” AT HOME AND
5 AWAY FOOTBALL AND BASKETBALL GAMES AT WHICH THE BAND, OR SOME
6 PORTION OF THE BAND, IS PRESENT; AND FOR RELATED PURPOSES.

YOU VILL PLAY DIXIE OR ELSE, YOU HEAR?

And now there’s the letter just sent to all Physical Plant employees by the Director of said plant, in which he excoriates an employee who was found to have been rooting, electronically, for LSU during an Ole Miss/LSU football game. See, you’re in Mississippi. Ain’t none of your high and mighty “free speech” here…

[T]he posted [pro LSU] comments have been viewed negatively by the administration and have brought into question the individual making the comments and his ability to make sound and wise decisions.

Oh, and another thing.

[U]nder no circumstances should an employee don any clothing while on the clock that is not reflective of support for the University of Mississippi.

Bit of linguistic ambiguity there, eh? Can you just, uh, wear clothing? Or is every day on the clock an adventure in Ole Miss worship?

Anyway. If you’re on the Old Miss campus, just check this UD post for what you can sing, wear, and say.

On the up side – You can drink anything.

******************
UD thanks Marcie.

Read the comments on certain articles and you’ll discern, in some of them…

… the deep structure, if you will, of a situation. Example: Jockschool Louisiana State University is jacking up game ticket and parking prices because the program loses millions every year, and will lose more with every year, into the foreseeable future.

A few comments on the article:

Jesus H. Christ, ALLEVA. [Alleva is the athletic director.] You pay 4.6 million a year to ONE guy [- Les Miles, football coach -] and your ENTIRE DEPARTMENT is in the whole half of his salary? So whats your grand idea? Make the thousands of fans pay more instead of cutting elsewhere? … Ask [Les Miles] to take a pay cut to keep LSU football alive without going into the fans’ pockets. Asking 1 man to sacrifce or 100,000 men? You wanna bet on what the answer will be? Pathetic.

—————-

[I]t’s bad enough you make loyal fans pay a kick back for the RIGHT to buy a ticket …. now you charge for parking that has been free for years … I could take my family to eat at Ruth’s Chris [Steakhouse] for less then what a coke and hot dog cost … Les Miles makes more then probably the rest of his coaches combined and the man can’t tell time … he recruits thugs and benches kids because he has his favorites… costing us national championships …

—————–

the real issue is where is all the tv money, merchandising money, ticket money, bowl game money, etc etc ???? would love to see a breakdown of expenditures to see where the WASTE really is going.

American university students don’t even show up for games with major SEC implications!

And this was Florida-LSU! This is a huge rivalry game that holds major SEC implications each season.

I guess HDTV and air conditioning wins out but that just makes me sad.

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