Notre Dame’s rector says exactly the right thing in the wake of Dominique Venner, a far-right activist protesting France’s legalization of same-sex marriage, having stuck a gun down his throat and fired in front of schoolchildren visiting the cathedral. It takes a special sort of madman to make a bloody spectacle of himself in a church full of children.

[A University of Notre Dame hockey player] was asked to leave Brothers Bar and Grill Sunday night after patrons accused him of taking beer from their tables. [Police say the player] punched the [restaurant’s] 35-year-old manager in the face and stepped on her head when she fell.

… I guess. When we were at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, Maryland decades ago, UD‘s then-boyfriend, David Kosofsky (brother of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick), took it into his head that we should pretend to be Israelis. Little UD must have passively gone along, but the evil genius was David; and UD remembers how horrified and trapped she felt when she realized that the inane scheme was working all too well — that people at the school indeed assumed he wasn’t lying (what kind of a freak would lie about such a thing?) and in a kindly way inquired about their backgrounds, asked if there were special foods they should prepare for them at dinner, wondered if they’d been traumatized by that country’s difficult history, etc., etc.

UD felt shame. She insisted that David figure out a way to stop the game.

To this day, UD can’t enjoy the whole Sacha Baron Cohen thing, where you laugh at the efforts of well-meaning people to be polite and understanding toward some fake identity you’ve made them believe in. The word for this is cruel, and it’s not exactly news that everyone has the capacity to be cruel, and that some people have a large capacity.

As to the Manti Te’o hoax at Notre Dame, UD can only say what she’s said for so long in this blog category (hoaxes are so common, they’ve got their own category on University Diaries): The world is full of vaguely sociopathic game-players, and, you know, let the buyer beware. Walk down your street of dreams – don’t let me stop you – but do yourself a favor and wonder occasionally if the uncannily exact match between certain inspirational stories on offer (see also Lance Armstrong) and your desires in regard to inspiration is just too close for credibility.

I’m a sap too – I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. But as an inveterate hoax-watcher, I do begin to see patterns.

This thoughtful take on the Steubenville lads reminds UD of something she’s noticed about local coverage of university athletes who’ve been arrested for sexual assault or hazing or DUI or theft or gun play or whatever.

Katie Heaney wonders why reporters often devote a couple of sentences at the beginning of the article to the charges themselves, and then spend the rest of the piece talking about how the team’s defense is going to be weakened while the guy’s on trial, but there’s this other guy, a freshman, and this might be a huge break for him and he might rise to the occasion… Reporters often jump right to the win/loss implications of a sudden, er, removal of a key player from the lineup. They’re writing a sports piece with a bit of crime attached to it.

In the case of Steubenville’s multiple accused athletes – high school guys about to go to the universities that recruited them to play football – Heaney asks

[D]o we need to know how many state championships they’ve won? Do we need to know how much the suspects, if convicted, will be missed by their teammates and fans?

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This goes to the rape culture of certain towns and schools – a culture whose existence these places indignantly deny. Pathetic Penn State will insist to its dying day that Sandusky was a grotesque anomaly, that nothing in its engrossing pleasure in violent games had anything to do with current events there. Notre Dame looks the other way. Montana looks the other way…

UD isn’t sure why it’s so difficult for these places to own their violence. They produce violence all the time – on the field, off the field. Steubenville produces young men – local heroes – who film themselves being violent. Football gets more violent by the day, and these places are right there, fashioning young men fully up to the challenge of brutalizing and being brutalized at the highest levels.

Think of the post-nuclear athletic games in Nevil Shute’s On the Beach if you want a sense of where these places are headed: “They’re doing it because they like to do it, honey.”

… What’s really surprising me are those who believe as I do that two players on the [football] team have committed serious criminal acts – sexual assault in one case, and rape in another — but assumed that I’d support the team anyway, just as they are.

[A]s a thought exercise, how many predators would have to be on the team before you’d no longer feel like cheering?

… [T]he man Lizzy accused had a history of behavior that should have kept him from being recruited in the first place.

… “I’ve watched almost every game this season and there’s not a single time that I don’t feel extreme anger when I see [the accused] on the field,” said Kaliegh Fields, a Saint Mary’s junior who went with Lizzy to the police station. “Once I start thinking about the people who put the school’s success in a sport over the life of a young woman, I can’t help but feel disgust. Everyone’s always saying how God’s on Notre Dame’s side,” she added. “And I think, ‘How could he be?’”

Melinda Henneberger, Washington Post

[T]here is documentation for [fired Notre Dame football coach Charlie Weis] to have received approximately $8.7 million since he left the school. That figure could rise to close to $19 million once the school reports its payments through the end of his contract in 2015.

Since leaving Notre Dame, Weis has kept working as a high-profile and highly paid coach. He was the Kansas City Chiefs’ offensive coordinator in 2010, the University of Florida’s offensive coordinator in 2011 and in December 2011 was hired as the University of Kansas’ head coach.

His contract with Florida was scheduled to pay him $875,000 for the 2011 season. Kansas gave him a five-year deal that is scheduled to pay him $2.5 million for the 2012 season.

Notre Dame’s Most Revered Father Jenky
Made its faculty members quite crenky:
“This embarrassing shmoe
Called the Prez Uncle Joe.
We are going give him a spenky.”

… insist on some grand meaning and seem to satirize human efforts at grand meaning. So here, on the upper edge of Courthouse Rock, is the Sphinx, only more massive and ruined and mysterious, its face high to the sun. And here at the rock’s base is a caryatid, only far more flowing and classical than anything on the Acropolis. Openings onto Petra, and long lines of inscribed stelae, are everywhere.

The rocks say We’ve condensed into ourselves all the monumental constructions of humanity. All of your monuments are imitations.

But of course it goes the other way. In my mind are all those places, spiritual and civic monuments, and I bring them with me to this place, and see them all around me.

A Picasso profile of Jacqueline appears on a rock next to the famous chapel. The same rock grins with rows of Notre Dame gargoyles.

One rock is a pile of clay from Rodin’s studio.

Most big-time college football programs are operated by state-funded institutions of higher learning with a few notable exceptions, such as Stanford and Notre Dame. One would think that those who rail against big government would cry out for dismantling these publicly-funded entertainments.

… [Penn State] is a great university that, like many others, had been led away from its essential mission decades ago and now finally may have been shaken into taking action.

Roger Abrams

Alma mater, ’tis of thee…

“The doping, the raping and the shooting,” is how he refers to his last few months at Oklahoma, where he was 157-24-1 and won three national championships. He points out with his rebel streak that “the academia, the presidents and the board of regents” always get upset when he describes that time that way, but the descriptions are accurate and efficient, if cold. The people around the library always get a little uncomfortable when the athletic department is unmasked like that and brought out into the light, but Switzer has spent his life around the good and bad of sports. He knows this ugly, beautiful beast. And he cuts to the heart of some issues when he points out that the coach who doesn’t loosen his morals is going to lose to the one who does – or, like [Miami’s Randy] Shannon, lose his job.

“Why did you recruit the guy who shot his roommate with a .22?” he begins. “Well, if I hadn’t, he would have been playing at Notre Dame, Texas or Texas A&M. He was the No. 1 defensive back in the state. Started as a freshman. He was a great player. Did a dumb-ass act, probably because he was on drugs …”

On to the raping …

“The first one, two or three she had sex with, that was OK,” Switzer says. “But the fourth or fifth or sixth, she says, ‘No,’ that becomes rape. She should have never been in the dorms. The guys who brought her in there, they went to prison and served their sentence.”

Switzer loses his place.

“Oh, what was the other one?” he asks.

The doping …

“Oh, Charles Thompson was set up – great player, great QB – in an FBI sting. Talked into doing it with a bunch of buddies, thugs that came from high school. Set him up because they were three-time losers and they had a bug on him. Basically, they were trying to get me and my program. He relented after turning them down a dozen times.”

Disgusted with the vileness of Southeastern Conference-type university athletics, and embarrassed for his alma mater, the University of Southern California (current target of one of the NCAA’s random sanctioning fits), a professor proposes a new league:

Stanford and Notre Dame could take the lead in establishing a national conference of first-rate academic institutions that offer athletic scholarships only to true student athletes, as defined, largely, by an iron-clad commitment to graduate with their classmates in four years. An invitation to join this conference could be extended to other private institutions with both high academic standards and proud athletic traditions – such as Northwestern, Duke, Boston College, Pittsburgh and Brigham Young (which could substitute a suitable variation on the four-year graduation policy to accommodate Mormon missions). The three United States service academies might also be asked to join.

… asks readers who Notre Dame’s next football coach should be.

Here’s one of the answers the bloggers got.

Football is starting to harm ND.

… In general, college football at the highest level is now so corrupt that the NCAA cannot control it, and the universities, supposedly bastions of academic integrity and higher learning, exploit the labor of young adults, many with few options, for personal and institutional gain. A majority of teams that went to bowls last year graduated <50% of the players. Meanwhile the nature and frequency of injuries suggest that the kids are not viewed as much more than fodder, necessary casualties to keep the alumni happy and contributing. [T]he continuing effort to field a dominant football team in a fundamentally corrupt environment is eating away at the soul of the institution. ND should get out of football and focus on academics.

The Financial Times reviews a new book.

… The excesses of college football have hit new levels of absurdity since the 1990s, writes Michael Oriard in his new book Bowled Over. Colleges throw money they don’t have into football. “From any reasonably objective perspective,” says Oriard, “the case for reform seems overwhelming. For a football coach to make several times as much as the university president is obviously crazy.” Oriard knows his stuff. He played football for Notre Dame University and in the NFL before becoming an English professor at Oregon State University…

He excels at identifying the sport’s abuses. Some players leave university illiterate, having played football nonstop. They are unpaid, and yet colleges still manage to blow fortunes on tuition centres, airfares around America, and sometimes on “recruiting hostesses” who entice promising youths to the right college. The great majority of colleges lose money on athletics, yet most football teams overshadow their universities. And the craziness worsens each year.

The boosters’ arguments for college football are probably bogus. Football doesn’t seem to persuade alumni to give to a university’s academic work, and doesn’t attract better students. Indeed, donors have recently given “to athletics at the expense of academics”, says Oriard….

Bernard L. Fulton started his teaching career in a two-room schoolhouse in his native Boone County, W.Va.

… Fulton … was still talking schools recently when he ate lunch with [the] Greenhill [School’s]headmaster. He built his reputation in Dallas, where, starting with a vision and a three-room building, he founded the Greenhill School in 1950.

Mr. Fulton, 99, died Sunday … at his Dallas home.

… Greenhill headmaster Scott Griggs said Mr. Fulton’s life mission was to create great educational opportunities for children.

“I had lunch with him two weeks ago, and he spent an hour and a half talking about schools, education, public schools and our challenges we have today,” Mr. Griggs said. “At the age of 99, he was still thinking about what we could do to improve upon education.”

Mr. Fulton was 8 when his father died of blood poisoning, a complication of a compound fracture he received in a railroad accident at his Boone County lumber company. The boy helped his mother raise his three younger siblings.

Mr. Fulton, a high school running back, declined football scholarships to Notre Dame and Princeton to attend Morris Harvey College, now the University of Charleston, in Charleston, W.Va., which was closer to his family…

Potato Heads up close.

“During the last nine seasons, the University of Idaho football team has lost 82 of 105 games. Even with its winning seasons as members of the Big Sky conference, its “all-time ranking” is 118 out of 125 schools.

At a Dec. 16 Faculty Council meeting, the chair said it was not fair to pick on any one specific unit of the university during bad times. But when one program has been favored over others for years, then an appeal to equitable treatment is the only principled position.”

A couple of professors write in the University of Idaho newspaper.