[M]ost professors, even conservative ones, will avoid institutions they know are restricting academic freedom. They know that in such places, because of whom it might upset, they may not be able to engage in the research they wish to explore and cover topics relevant to their academic discipline.

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UD calls Florida Little Hungary: Like that country, it’s shutting down its best schools (Hungary hounded out Central European University) to make the world safe for professors like John Eastman.

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Texas is the other state you don’t want to be in if you’re a self-respecting academic. Look how the state’s lieutenant governor started blubbering when one of Texas A&M’s most impressive professors said something negative about him.

OTOH: Take a trip down memory lane here at UD about the filthy jockshop which is A&M, and recall that ganging up on professors while kissing the ass of characters like Johnny Manziel is Job One at that school.

The event went off rather better than the hilarious DeSantis campaign launch. 90 of the school’s 119 graduates attended.

YES!

Stung by taunts from rival strongman Donald Trump about the DeSantis candidate’s recent loss in the Jacksonville mayoral race, the Florida governor, in a show of force, is reportedly readying a battery of six hypersonic KH-47M2 Kinzhal (“Dagger”) air-launched missiles for deployment Thursday at the New College alternative commencement.

The New College students’ $131,000 war chest has apparently been significantly enhanced by Bob Iger, who sources report has been reassuring close associates that every possible defensive weapon, including Patriot air defense interceptors, is being made available to the commencement. “It will certainly get bumpy on Thursday,” said one of the organizers; “but our main worry is that a desperate DeSantis will turn to nuclear weapons.”

“The point at which your business plan requires divine intervention is the point at which you have a solvency problem,” said prosecutor Andrew Mark Thomas in closing arguments…

LOL. Scenes from America’s latest edition of Elmer Gantry.

A suicide cluster (seven of the deaths were suicides) emerges at North Carolina State, and the dreadful thing is that each suicide risks nudging another student on the edge over the edge. Suicide is contagious.

This is presumably (aside from privacy/family considerations) why the school fails to describe methods – you don’t want to give on-the-precipice students ideas.

 “In any community there is always a certain number of people who are on the edge, and something as emotionally charged as a suicide (or multiple suicides) in the community (especially a small community) is frequently enough to tip more of them over.“

What we do know about the school’s suicides is suggestive. Anyone who followed the male/Asian clusters at other engineering schools not that long ago will wonder about the ethnicity of some of the students at NC State/engineering who may have killed themselves.

How many were gun suicides? UD wouldn’t be surprised if it were one hundred percent. It’s North Carolina, where guns are everywhere. Guns would help account for the school’s high number: With a gun you almost never, as it were, miss. Every other method gives you a bit of a fighting chance.

As for the draining, shell-shocked sensation NC students who are watching all of this report feeling: Well yeah. Jesus.

Pity this simple man who thinks his smart, hardworking, working class son getting admitted to one of the two or three best undergraduate institutions in the world is something to be proud of. His bitter son has endlessly tried taking the wind out of that parental sail, instructing him in Yale’s “hostility to the Almighty and disparagement of America.” 

Yea, woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets. 

But after all these years, Dad still won’t listen, still fails to perceive a Yale education as pure “indoctrination,” a re-education camp in hate America first. His son pats himself on the back for having withstood undergrad and grad school at Yale with his love of country intact!

Though UD wonders about the sort of masochistic orientation that would not only stay in a cesspool for four years (had he not yet heard of transferring?), but extend the agony by staying there for law school.

UD knows it’s none of her business, but did Ron also have his girlfriends tie him down and beat him with a copy of Soul on Ice?

The numbers are out. As you’d expect, many prospective college students seem likely to avoid Ensouled Zygote states.

OTOH: If you’re a teenage girl for whom rape, drunkenness, berserk athletes/frat boys, gun and gang violence, self-righteous Christian/sexist administrations, and absolutely no abortion in the state, sounds like the ideal higher ed environment, UD (who has followed these schools for years) recommends the following:

Baylor University

Florida State University

Jackson State University

Louisiana State Baton Rouge

As with all lists, not all of these schools will feature all of your desiderata, though Baylor comes closest to ticking off all the elements you’re looking for.

Our friends and neighbors in DC sometimes ask us why we don’t subscribe to the Washington Post — why we subscribe instead to the New York Times.

In part it’s about the incomparable Sunday NYT crossword puzzle.

But for both Les UDs, it’s also because there’s only one newspaper where paragraphs like the one in this post’s title – a single paragraph from a long article which sensitively and minutely explores a tragic chapter in the life of a high-profile New Yorker – are routine.

We’ve been talking about that forever on this blog; but while everyone else sees it as a problem, we see it as intellectual progress.

Now … how can that happen? You take a real squeaky clean athletics program like Auburn and you hire TWO dirty coaches in succession! Bowman was spozed to be the good guy who replaced the bad guy, but he’s another bad guy! It’s just like when the University of Southern California appointed Varma to replace Puliafito! Well, I’m sure head coach Bruce Pearl don’t know anything about it.

… at a better time.

Minnesota: Not just rape: Gang rape!

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Well, UM used to be a respectable school, and now that it’s going down the tubes the wise men are gathering (see this article and its various theories) to explain what happened.

The short version is of course reputational death by football. Like this:

ICK FACTOR ——-> INSTITUTIONAL FINANCIAL COLLAPSE

That is, your scummy team and its scummy coaches generate such massive alienation/disgust that the school hemorrhages money and reputation in every direction – ticket sales, coach buyouts, athletic facility debt repayment, lawsuits, SNL skits, declining enrollment, declining alumni support (see the comment in this post’s headline), blahblah.

Problem is, you can get this outcome in two wildly different ways: Through a president who’s nothing but a football coach, and through a president who is simply appalled to discover that a person of his or her cerebral delicacy is at a jock school, and who refuses to sully him or herself with the brainless assholes at Athletes’ Village. You can be Ken Starr of blessed memory (Ken’s still playing the last down); or you can be UM’s Eric Kaler. You can be President Booster (Oklahoma’s David Boren has held on the longest with this unremittingly nauseating approach) or President I’m Better Than This, Dammit! and you will still run an extremely high risk of implosion. Forces that transcend your provincial world (see this Bloomberg series) are in play, and only a genius tactician (like coach, president, chancellor, head trustee, and reincarnation of Jesus Christ Nick Saban) is going to be able to thread his way through the blockers.

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UD thanks Keith.

Now that’s pretty, ain’t it? You can always count on the profit motive to generate people like Jeff here, who explains La Nouvelle Vague for us.

Empty seats in all the student sections? Big deal. Universities don’t care whether people who have anything to do with them go to football games! Especially since students are poor. Not to mention sloppy drunks. Plus, as an economist at Temple University (which will probably build a new stadium although virtually none of its students attend football games) explains:

“[T]oday’s students aren’t coming to games. That’s a problem all over college football. Even at Minnesota, student attendance didn’t increase from when they played at the Metrodome.”

It’s a national trend, see. We’ve been following the trend on this blog for quite some time. But who cares? Why should Temple care? Only the silent invisible corporate guys in the luxury suites produce any real revenue; the whole show’s for them.

I mean, the whole show’s also for tv networks – they set when the games start, how they’re run, etc.

It’s a beautiful synergy, when you think about it. Players who aren’t students perform in front of local businesspeople who aren’t alumni. These two groups also have in common massive subsidies from… uh… from the students who don’t go to the games. And from all the rest of us.

And listen – if the only two audiences that matter are the guys in the upper decks plus the national tv audience, why build a traditional yawning stadium at all? UD proposes introducing what she calls boutique stadia, on the model of boutique hotels: Small, luxurious, extremely expensive, with vastly more amenities which would include an expanded bar, a gym and a spa and … hell… bedrooms.

Moving right along.

William Dowling, author of the wonderful Confessions of a Spoilsport: My Life and Hard Times Fighting Sports Corruption at an Old Eastern University, has taught at Rutgers University long enough to track its fall from its glory days as one of the public ivies. In an address to the Peithessophian Society, Dowling asks whether Rutgers can save itself as a university rather than a distillery. The current campus is

swarming with party animals who actively despise anything having to do with thinking or learning, who brag about cheating on exams, who spend most of their time playing video games or getting drunk with their friends, and who … should never have been admitted to college at all.

Note the actively despise. UD has noticed this at many of our football factories: Not just polite indifference to the life of the mind, but active hatred. Think Richie Incognito, the soul of the University of Nebraska. Dowling makes the obvious point that “a life devoted to mind or spirit or intelligence [is] what college is all about.” Yet it’s equally obvious that at Rutgers, as at other schools which have always been, or have decided – like Rutgers – to become jock shops, all the money now goes to coaches.

It’s a sad and sickening degeneration. Only students can arrest it.

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UD thanks Brent for sending her the link to Dowling’s talk.