Yeah, passing out in piles of beer cans – that’s college students everywhere, not just at tailgates down south.

You start at the beginning, and as you scan one sentence after another, your smile grows. At certain points, your smile goes way wide. Follow UD as she smiles through this article, in the Times-Picayune, New Orleans.

The headline at first looks disturbing, not smile-making.

LSU FALLS IN LOWER HALF
OF SEC IN PLAYER ARRESTS
DURING PAST THREE YEARS

Louisiana State University is trailing other SEC schools, which is… bad?

But wait! In arrests. LSU ranks somewhat lower than some other schools in the number of players arrested over the last three years. So – let’s see how it breaks down.

The arrest of LSU running back Jeremy Hill recently has made for negative headlines for LSU. But when it comes to that subject, LSU is in the lower half of the SEC going back to 2010.

According to an unofficial count tallied by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune in that span, four programs are in double figures [SMILE], led by newcomer Missouri [SMILE.  WELCOME, MISSOURI, AND THANKS FOR BURNISHING, RIGHT AWAY, THE SEC’S FANTASTIC REP!]  with 18, not counting two coaches’ arrest for DWI [BIG SMILE ON THE NOT COUNTING THE COACHES THING. ACTUALLY, LAUGH OUT LOUD.]. Vanderbilt has the fewest with only one in that span.

In between is Florida (17), Georgia (15), Arkansas (12), Ole Miss (11), Auburn and , Kentucky (nine each), Alabama (seven), LSU (six) and Mississippi State, South Carolina, Texas A&M and Tennessee (five each).

LSU fans were divided on whether there was a problem at LSU or if it was more of a universal issue, according to this poll we posted.  [KIND OF AN UNCERTAIN SMILE AS I TRY TO FIGURE OUT THAT EITHER/OR… IS IT A PROBLEM THAT THE ONLY ELEMENT OF YOUR UNIVERSITY ANYONE KNOWS OR CARES ABOUT ROUTINELY FEATURES CRIMINALS?  NAH!  AND SINCE OTHER SCHOOLS ALSO FEATURE CRIMINALS ON THEIR TEAMS, DOES THAT MEAN IT’S UNIVERSAL AND THEREFORE NOT A PROBLEM BUT AN ‘ISSUE’?  IF IT’S UNIVERSAL IS IT LIKE SUN SPOTS OR DECREASED COGNITIVE SKILLS AS YOU MOVE TOWARD YOUR EIGHTIES AND THEREFORE NOT A PROBLEM SO MUCH AS A PERMANENT UNFORTUNATE FEATURE OF EXISTENCE?]

 

 

 

 

UD‘s smile persisted as she scrolled through the comments made by New Orleans locals. She’s particularly fond of the comparative approach many SEC fans take to the problem or issue or universe. Frinstance:

[A]t least the arrests are for fighting, and not for mostly robbery (Alabama). I’d rather have problems for bar brawls, [than] people who were dishonest.

You said it! Bar brawls are nice clean man-on-man violence, not like sneaky robbery. There’s a dignity to bar brawls.

… sings Cinderella; and this year’s Cinderella university story has got to be Rutgers, whose dream to be the Auburn University of the east is coming true, one day at a time. Rutgers has done it all, with amazing focus and commitment:

*** It has moved decisively toward shutting down the academic component of the university for the sake of athletics. The school’s athletic budget is massive; its academic more and more paltry. Eventually Rutgers as “teaching” and “research” “university” will be exclusively online.

*** It has hired and fired presidents with an eye toward greater and greater haplessness and indifference. Its trustees may be close to firing its latest leader, his function of taking the fall for the most recent string of athletic scandals having been fulfilled. Watch for Rutgers’ next presidential offer to go out to Nick Saban.

*** It has decided to retain its latest in a line of allegedly abusive and/or mendacious athletic officials. She and her rhetoric of integrity and triumph will stay; the letter protesting her cruelty as coach – signed by the entire volleyball team she once led – will be ignored.

These, and too many other strategies and initiatives to mention, are the outward manifestations of an American university determined to root out any scholarly residue, and just as determined to compete with Auburn, Texas Tech, Southern Methodist, Kentucky, and LSU for sports supremacy. A bold move, indeed, to go up against the southern powerhouses. But so far, Rutgers is doing everything right.

Have faith in your dream and someday
Your rainbow will come smiling through.

… (close to 900 million dollars in fines of one sort or another; placed under a monitor’s oversight; executives indicted for securities violations, various lawsuits, etc., etc.), so we know Laurie Glimcher really works for the hundreds of thousands in compensation she gets from the corporation. Keeps a good eye on its extensive anti-competitive practices.

Or, you know, I mean, I’m being ironic. Glimcher seems to know how to be a good soldier, and which of us wouldn’t be a good soldier, collecting that sort of compensation for doing very little? Indeed for apparently inquiring very little into the actual operations you’re supposed to be directing?

Now that she’s dean of Weill Cornell Medical College, Cornell defends her directorship against suggestions of conflict of interest by insisting on the importance of such university/corporate partnerships.

But what is the nature of the partnership here? Under her watch, Bristol-Myers Squibb was for years was one of the most law-breaking anti-competitive corporations around. Under her watch, one executive after another quit in disgrace.

In the local paper, a geology professor defends his work.

I must respond to the recent letter to the editor by Ms. Meredith Berg strongly critical of my upcoming talk at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls on St. Croix Valley geology. … Ms. Berg is correct that I will not be spending time on a young-earth or Biblical flood model for the St. Croix Valley. In my 50 years of studying and doing geology here and around the world I have not seen a shred of geological evidence for this, and it would do my audience a disservice to spend time on it.

Yes, Scathing Online Schoolmarm notes that this sentence is triply redundant (unpredictable, predict, in advance), but it comes from a reasonably thoughtful consideration of suicide. I like the way the guy – a psychiatry professor – says he does understand suicide, even though the meme, the thing, the trope, the conceit, is that suicide’s all enigmatic.

Because it is at its essence a perceptual disorder, [depression] causes one to see the entire world as pain. It feels painful inside, but it also feels painful outside.

When a person is depressed, the entire world is disturbed and distressed, so there is nowhere to escape. And it is this fact that makes suicide so seductive, because it seems to offer the one available escape option.

(Go here for an elaboration on this from David Foster Wallace.)

This writer goes on to say that “the means for committing suicide should be removed from the environment.” He’s talking about the home. We can’t do much about a world brimming with suicide locations.

And yet even as we speak Cornell and NYU, who’ve had suicide clusters, are both futzing with their environment in just this way. Cornell is netting its bridges, and NYU is digitally shielding its high-atrium library.

Yesterday afternoon, I rested a pair of scissors on top of one of my split rail fence posts while I was mulching. When I reached for it later, my hand fell on a cicada shell.

The screaming coming off the trees for the last week, I now realized, was late-summer cicadas.

I looked for a cicada poem, and here it is.

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

Cicada

I want to tell him what it is to crave darkness,
to want to crawl headfirst into a dirt-warm womb
to sleep, to wait seventeen years,
to emerge again.

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

These are the seventeen-year ones, not this summer’s smaller emergence, and the poet uses their long underground life and the way, once they emerge, their wail can sound like a warning siren, to make a point about human life.

He begins with his memory of a younger brother who, having gestated for seventeen years, suddenly left home forever with a bang.

The “warning wail of insects” tells us that “repudiation is fast like a whirlwind.”

Meaning?

Meaning it’s pretty easy and exciting to ditch it all and with the fervor and disdain of youth do your own fine full life. When you’re that young you don’t see that “all you live is leaving.” Life is something we have to leave, and most of life – whether we dramatically repudiate or undramatically persist in it – is departure of one sort or another, the loss of this, the erosion of that.

Our experience of the passage of time deepens our tendency to be borne back ceaselessly into the past, since adult life moves toward deterioration and makes our youth seem an icon of wholeness.

The brother’s repudiation is therefore both “arrant” and “orphic” – extreme (plus, given the closeness of “errant,” in error), and mysterious, unaccountable.

Even obviously future-oriented thoughts – provoked, say, by looking at your pregnant wife – are “still so much like trying to find something / once lost.” Pregnant to bursting with his own future, the brother has broken through the door into – illusion, dissolution (things falls apart), the immutable truth of all lives. The drone of the cicada tolls this immutability: that we slow down, undone as much by the pull of mortality as by the impulse to disbelieve it.

So listen to the cicada; consider its incredibly patient rhythms, its relationship to darkness and light; hear it tell our fast fragile passage through existence. Seeing as “we are all so helpless,” adopt pity rather than disdain. Pity for everyone, including yourself.

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

The poem reminds me of Philip Larkin’s Poetry of Departures.

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

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo’c’sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren’t so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.

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

UD thanks John Blair for permission to reprint the poem, which appears in The Green Girls (LSU Press, 2003). His most recent book of poems is The Occasions of Paradise.

Donna Shalala’s University of Miami certainly knows how to keep it coming. They know if you want your sports program to be number one on the disgust parade, things have to keep happening. We all know the history:

In 1994 there were allegations that Miami-based rapper Luther Campbell and former Miami players performing in the NFL were offering cash for big hits—50 bucks a fumble, 200 bucks an interception.

In May 1995 an NCAA investigation found that positive drug tests of various Hurricane players had been withheld by the football program a week before the January Orange Bowl. Later in 1995, the NCAA found Miami guilty of eight different categories of rules violations. Among them: excessive financial awards, Pell Grant fraud, pay-for-play payouts, and failure to follow its own drug-testing policy. In 2006 Miami football players were involved in two brawls, one with LSU in the Peach Bowl and the other during the regular season with Florida International, in which safety Anthony Reddick was said to have used his helmet as a weapon.

More recently, the Nevin Shapiro scandal wiped all other sports stories off the pages for weeks. And just yesterday some ex-football coach sued the school for mucho money.

Can you imagine how much all this shit is costing the school? I’m not talking reputation costs. UM went into the reputation toilet long ago. I’m talking dollars. How much of this university’s budget goes for sports pay-offs?

…[E]ven if we concede the point that athletics gives every school massive national exposure, it still does not address the lingering question: to what end is all this exposure?

Do athletics truly promote the academic mission of schools such as [Louisiana State University]? [Its president] certainly seems to think so, as he gushes that weekly televised football games give viewers “a chance to see what LSU is about.” How so exactly? Is LSU about being able to toss an inflated pig bladder around a old cow pasture? Even if television viewers manage to catch the repeated airings of LSU’s promotional spot that airs during commercial breaks in the football games, doesn’t the fact that the game is 60 minutes long (not counting breaks) and the ad 30-60 seconds long tell the viewers much more about where LSU’s true priorities are than any of the content of that advertisement?

… [I]nstead of spending millions to fulfill sports fans’ primal urge for watching virile, young men bang each other on the football field shouldn’t colleges and universities be about encouraging both their students and the public to seek after those things which are of true and lasting importance in life?

A couple of economists go there.

[M]any prominent universities would lose their main claim to fame. Alabama and LSU produce a large amount of revenue and notoriety from football without much in the way of first-rate academics to back it up. Schools would have to compete more on academics to be nationally prominent, which would again boost American education.

Or those schools might become what UD predicts (economists aren’t the only people who can make predictions!) the University of Massachusetts will become: Exclusively online institutions.

———————

UD thanks Dave.

… in victory.

But if you think they’re going to go down without a fight, you don’t know LSU.

… the core values of a university.”

As the nation slips into post-Happy Valley tristesse, people like the ex-president of the University of Michigan begin to tell the truth about big-time university football. Turns out football isn’t the university’s front porch. It’s the shower stalls out back. Plus, as this guy notes, big-time football is in fact an aggressor against the university, a predatory embodiment of anti-university attitudes and behaviors: Groupthink, authoritarianism, fanaticism, secrecy, brawn over brain.

As we slip, too, back into business as usual at university sports programs – the coach arrested for his third DUI and afterwards put right back to work coaching; a player only dismissed from a team after his fourth arrest – it’s good to recall that this campus activity is structurally corrupt, subject at all times to sex scandals, money scandals, crime scandals. When you consider all the elements in play in football – recruitment, staff salaries, tailgating, alcohol, the absurdity of the NCAA, academic cheating, a culture of secrecy, etc. – you know that Shalala’s Miami and Spanier’s Penn St. are chapters in a never-ending story.

[A] Louisiana State University assistant professor identified a new species of pancake batfish in the Gulf of Mexico last year, and the discovery was recognized by the International Institute for Species Exploration as being one of 2010’s top 10 new species. While LSU didn’t increase his $85,000 pay, he did get a nice note of congratulations from the provost, he said.

Across the Baton Rouge campus, Les Miles is having a good year, too. His top-ranked LSU football team is undefeated… Miles will make an extra $200,000 on top of his $3.75 million-a-year salary if they win the title, and $300,000 more for winning the national crown.

… “We are not doing this, [said the professor,] for monetary gain.”

… “These coaches aren’t motivated by the bonuses,” said Scott Minto, director of the San Diego State University Sports MBA program. “It is about creating a legacy. National titles do that.”

Alabama Athletic Director Mal Moore said neither [Nick] Saban [$4.7 million annual salary with the chance of an additional $525,000] nor other coaches are in the business for the money.

Nobody’s in it for the money!

… sends her this article by Allen Sanderson, who proposes a sin tax on

college football games. Yes, I am advocating that we impose steep taxes on all intercollegiate football advertising, television broadcasts, logo merchandise sales, and gate receipts.

… This money could be set aside to provide funding for the ex-players to return to earn a degree, enter a graduate program, and/or start a small business.

Fans and universities benefit enormously from [the] exploitation [of players]. It is no stretch to treat this as in the same category as smoking, drinking, gorging ourselves on hot dogs and nachos, most of which we do in the stands or our family rooms while these exploited workers toil for our entertainment and the coach’s yacht. As citizens we should be above having our entertainment whims sated on the backs of these youngsters. Will it put an end to the cesspools at Ohio State, Oregon, Miami, USC, Auburn, LSU and …? No…

Nice, the way he calls them cesspools. UD‘s been doing that for years, but no one at those schools seems to mind that multiple people call them cesspools. Strange.