I’m not gonna do that thing where I say They started as monasteries and other religious-type entities and look how far they’ve fallen! I’m not gonna say universities – much less American universities – must continue to represent a higher, purer, realm of activity than, say, Myrtle Beach Bike Week.

No, no, let it rip. Let sex-scandal-soaked University of Minnesota produce as a finalist for regent a football player with exposure issues. Let UMN’s current regents grumble about having been left out of the hiring and compensation decisions around their incoming multimillionaire football coach (background on him here). Let the probable upcoming scandal and massive buyout of this guy’s contract also weigh heavily on the pointless dithering trustees. Fine. Fine.

Go ahead and make universities places where highly paid employees routinely injure students so badly they have to be hospitalized. Where brainwork means concussions. Football players with exposure issues are part of the grand legacy of American universities, as are sadistic-training hospitalizations. As are – at some of our highest profile schools – child rape, gang rape, and woman battering.

But consider this:

I don’t want to scare you, but more and more people are talking about a fundamental change in the higher education of this country. More and more people are talking about a minor league for football.

And American universities had better watch out, or it’s ave atque vale Richie Incognito, Johnny Manziel, and Peyton Manning. These guys are not merely the heroes of schools like Nebraska and Tennessee – they’re the trustees of the future. Their ethos is the school ethos. All the money and the passion and the very identity of the university follow them. What happens when American teenagers are able to go directly into a minor league system and bypass the university?

UD‘s friend David Ridpath is all excited.

For anyone that loves football at all levels and wants college football in a more educational setting along with providing more talent for the NFL, it is simply a no brainer.

A lot of people are excited. But if you’re a university, ask yourself: What happens to the trillion dollars you’ve already invested in new stadiums and all that shit? You’re already looking at seriously declining attendance at the games, and serious resistance to paying vaster and vaster student athletic fees. Much more fundamentally, you are football. Nebraska, Penn State, a hundred others – What happens when a few grade-conscious pussies tiptoe out on the field for you? As Mrs Dalloway put it – the death of the soul…

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UD thanks Charlie.

Ah, America. The head of the Myrtle Beach Merchants Association, gearing up for this year’s Memorial Day crowd, touches delicately on last year, when “three people died and seven were injured in eight shootings.” … And still those little things remain…

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Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco. The Spinnaker Club in Panama City Beach. These places, and whatever place this year’s melees in Myrtle Beach will choose, are emerging as icons of a peculiar form of capitalism — the form you get when you combine a society of the spectacle with guns and a totally unhinged profit motive.

It’s odd. The rhetoric of these massive motorcycle rallies is one of personal freedom, yet the events instantly turn their locales into police states. Read the details of the security presence and restriction of movement in Myrtle Beach.

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People are starting to notice the same thing at university football games. Because the drunken crowd is so nasty, everyone’s under heavy surveillance.

Only in America.

The all-American beach town speaks.