… from America’s colleges. It’s a little complicated, because it involves a football team/fraternity synergy… But okay. Let’s go.

A fraternity at Cal Poly has been suspended because the frat is a cover for a drug dealing operation. Nothing new there. More than a few frats have figured out that they’re supremely – UD would even say unbeatably – well-situated as far as the drug trade goes. Recall the federal raid of a bunch of San Diego State fraternities/drug houses. The raid netted guns along with drugs. These boys don’t fool around.

This latest thing, the thing at Cal Poly, also involved guns as well as drugs. Here’s the rather complicated first paragraph of an article about it:

Cal Poly has suspended the fraternity targeted in an attempted armed robbery last summer for violating student conduct policies, after the university determined chapter members knew illegal drugs were sold at the house and failed to take action.

See, what blew the cover of this frat’s operation was the school’s football team. A group of players wanted drugs, and they knew where the campus drug market was, and, well, something went wrong.

The Delta Sigma Phi house at 244 California Blvd. was the target of an attempted robbery on Aug. 10 allegedly committed by a group of Cal Poly football players believed to be looking for drugs.

I guess the football players didn’t want to buy the drugs; they didn’t seem to understand that the frat is a drug market, not a free drug distribution center.

So. To recap: You’ve got university football players committing armed robbery for drugs against a university fraternity.

Cal Poly: Keepin’ it all in-house!

UD likes her way of putting it.

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

San Diego State University also scored a great headline in England’s Independent newspaper:

WORLD’S WORST HUMANS
WAVE DILDOS AT
ANTI-RAPE PROTESTERS

Way to go, SDSU! This is generating even more publicity than your six-fraternity drug cartel.

The local paper goes there.

For a long time, UD went with stupidity as an explanation, because business-model party schools like San Diego State University have to admit a lot of stupid people. Then – for similar party school reasons – UD went with wasted, because being drunk certainly helps make it possible for men to hurl eggs and dildos at women …

(By the way: Remember what UD told you about a similar civil war at the University of Virginia, where frat boys are destroying anti-violence exhibits and, when asked to stop, loudly threatening the people asking them to stop? As with San Diego State, don’t expect the pro-rape forces to surrender without a fight. And those SDSU frats don’t fool around: The last DEA raid on them uncovered a number of guns, plus an impressive cash reserve. )

But it’s occurred to her that the editorial board of U-T San Diego is probably right: Group psychosis looks most plausible.

Let’s put it this way: Drug-running, gang-banging, eat-my-puke pledging fraternities are tailored to appeal to some of America’s most promising sociopaths-in-training. If you want to understand these people, read the chapter in The Story of O when O is brought to a become-a-slave sorority, and instantly goes from a psychopathic masochist to a psychopathic sadist.

UD wouldn’t think of denying that the personal traits honed in some of America’s highest-profile fraternities can be traded up to a career at Goldman Sachs. And, uh, Lehman Brothers…? She understands why predatory capitalism is called predatory capitalism. She sees perfectly well the through-line between secretive all-male sado-masochistic loyalty and this blessed bountiful land.

She just wonders why this form of social interaction dominates so many of our universities.

30,000? In these fans-disappearing-from-university-stadiums days, there’s a lot of numbers massaging going on… Let’s check another source on how many San Diego State people show up to watch their football team play.

… SDSU’s official attendance isn’t what TV audiences see… SDSU counts total tickets issued instead of turnstiles turned. … 61,619 fewer fans attended in 2013, or an average of only 22,954 per game.

So SDSU desperately pours more and more public money into its football program in an effort to … what? It’s already a perfectly respectable team with an okay record of wins.

San Diego State football kicks this month, poised to push its bowl streak to five. USA Today ranks SDSU at No. 58, Lindy’s Sports picks the Aztecs as West Division champs in the Mountain West, and sophomore running back Donnel Pumphrey is a player to watch for the nation’s top running back award.

One popular idea is to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a small on-campus stadium. Small enough so that 15,000 or so in attendance doesn’t make it look empty.

Elliot Hirshman, UD‘s erstwhile, young-man-in-a-hurry, colleague – whose negotiation of a massive raise over his predecessor’s salary at a Cal State campus really pissed people off – is back in the news.

Hirshman left DC for the $400,000 a year presidency of San Diego State (whose condition at the moment UD would characterize as sports-corpse):

It was that $400,000 salary – awarded in July to the new president of San Diego State on the same day the trustees raised tuition by 12 percent – that lit a match under the already heated topic of executive pay.

California has cut about $1 billion from CSU’s budget in recent years, tuition and fees have doubled since 2007, and hundreds of instructors and courses have vanished.

Meanwhile, San Diego’s new president, Elliot Hirshman, accepted a salary that was $100,000 higher than the outgoing president, a raise of 34 percent.

Indeed, ever since July Elliot hasn’t been able to preside much over the school, his remarkable dedication to the bottom line having alienated pretty much everyone before he was able to draw one presidential breath. No fewer than three state legislators have introduced bills capping the system’s executive compensation this way and that way.

Elliot and the generous Cal State trustees have tried sitting all of this out, hoping the controversy would go away, but no such luck. The pressure has built, threatening to unseat the chair of the trustees himself, so the trustees have finally folded.

California State University trustees voted today to limit salaries for new campus presidents, and to consider economic realities before making salary offers.

The new plan, approved unanimously by the trustees in Long Beach, caps a president’s base pay at 10 percent of what the prior president earned, but allows it to be supplemented with private money.

You want that private money thing in there so that you can guarantee corporate interests an opportunity to exploit the school.

Elliot must be dreading the next round of negotiations on his salary. Surely the school doesn’t expect him to be satisfied with $400,000 next year.

[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!

Surfism, or the tendency to make fun of surfing degree programs, sounded the death knell for beach and surf studies at Swansea Institute, but that’s not stopping San Diego State University’s Center for Surf Research, which will “teach surfers about the social, cultural and environmental costs of surfing.”

— it’s the only school in America actively trying to transform itself from a university to a jockshop — has been chronicled, step by step on this blog.

And now, rather in the way San Diego State’s last president reduced it to shabby jockery and then retired from the mess he’d made, the president of Rutgers, having presided to his satisfaction over the reduction of his school to a sports whore, will soon take a well-deserved rest.

UD‘s friend Roy sends her the latest article detailing what Richard McCormick has done to a once-proud school.

… was such a young-man-in-a-hurry that when she sat at meetings over which he presided, he was always kind of a blur, racing out of the room to talk on his cell phone, racing through the meeting…

Hirshman has lately raced himself right into a buzz saw; though, on the up side, he might make legislative history.

He’s the new president of San Diego State University, a woeful institution very small on cash and very big on athletics. Last prez of SDSU made $300,000; the school’s board threw in an extra $100,000 for Elliot… Not really a problem; they’re just taking it out of tuition (goes up 12% this year) …

“Appalling… egregious,” say state senators, some of whom are introducing legislation placing limits on what you can make at a public institution when the entire state economy is shit.

Don’t focus on Arne Duncan’s bold ideas for turning sports whorehouses like Syracuse and San Diego State into shining universities on a hill. Focus on the responses of the NCAA.

I’m not going to sully my screen with the actual content of the NCAA’s response to this latest idea. I’m not even going to type the name of the head of the NCAA. There are (to paraphrase Martha’s George) limits. A blog can put up with only so much without it descends a rung or two on the old evolutionary ladder…

But I invite you to go here and read this man’s words for yourself.

… sends her the latest Ivy League drug bust news.

A 26-year-old Cornell senior, a woman, an English major, a witty writer in the campus newspaper, and someone who, if my Googling’s right, used to be a seriously competitive doubles skater, was arrested in a sketchy part of town with enormous amounts of uncut heroin. She’d apparently been selling out of her off-campus apartment for some time. Her mottled, miserable, and frightened mug shot suggests she’s been using for some time too.

Let me free associate in response to this story.

All streets in time are visited, writes Philip Larkin in Ambulances; and so it is with universities. All in time are visited by narcotics units, because everyone knows lots of narcotics are traded and used on and off American campuses. Tips are received, and here come the authorities. Too many students die in drug overdoses, and the school, or someone, decides to call in the police. UD has covered zillions of these, and related, stories.

Most tend to go unreported unless they feature Ivy League, or near-Ivy League schools, or if they involve, as San Diego State did a couple of years ago, the arrest of so many student dealers that extensive, weaponized, often fraternity-based, conspiracies were clearly in play.

The Cornell story will get more than its share of play because it’s part of a trend, because it happened at an Ivy League school, because it involves desperate icky heroin rather than giggly collegiate marijuana, and because it involves a woman.

Most of my free associating, to be frank, has to do with this woman. In her Facebook photos, she plays up her tough girl thing — cig hangs from her mouth, she flips the bird, she features a fuck-all quotation from Hunter Thompson… I dunno. A woman like this becomes addicted to heroin and, feeling it’s impossible to stop being addicted, throws herself down one of the gorges and becomes part of the Cornell suicide story…

I wonder too about her physicality, her having been a serious athlete. I’ve read a lot of stories about college athletes and drug addiction… My friend Courtney sent me this long essay by a climber who has years of serious drug addiction behind him.

The essay ends like this:

If you’re an outdoor athlete and you’re good at it, you’re probably like I once was: a selfish, self-involved son of a bitch. It’s always more, more, more and me, me, me, and I was no different. I wanted to be the best. I wanted to do the hardest sport routes, to be the boldest on high, killer walls.

Why? Why not? I was addicted to climbing, and then to starvation, and when that wasn’t enough, I became addicted to drugs.

Maybe you see some of my method in your own madness. And perhaps your obsessions are “healthy”: wheatgrass, long runs, body sculpting, rock climbing. That’s great. But I tell you now, absent your passions you will feel the sharp scrape of withdrawal — just like any fixless junkie bug-eyed in a January alley. Reality can be reduced, at its sparest, to chemical reactions, our body craving the release of GABA, oxytocins, endorphins, serotonin, dopamine. It doesn’t care about their provenance. It just doesn’t. Cut off the source—any source—and you will pay.

Two (three?) freshmen at Washington’s Jesuit university make meth in their dorm room.

Police discovered a methamphetamine lab inside a freshman residence hall on the Georgetown University campus early Saturday.

Everyone evacuated. (Meth labs have a tendency to explode.) Police are interviewing the meth makers.

You’ll recall that UD featured the same story not long ago, this time at the University of Central Florida.

————————————–

Some cross-town rivalry in the comments section of Vox Populi:

A meth lab? Who’s trashy now?

Love,
GWU

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

God never closes a door without opening a window: Because of this story, UD has discovered the GW Ratchet.

———————————————

This one, back in ’05, was discovered via security camera. He was making meth in the San Diego State chem lab.

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

Some background from Inside Higher Ed.

———————————————

In case you think there might be one in your dorm.

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

Meth meet and greet. (Photo of evacuated Georgetown University students.)

———————————————

If you really can’t get enough of this.

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

Update on the Georgetown University story: The drug lab seems not to have been making meth; instead, it manufactured DMT, a hallucinogen.

If UD‘s experience with these sorts of stories is anything to go by, however, police will find more than one drug being made or sold in the dorm room. The cookers (I learned this word from the Frontline documentary I just watched) usually offer a larger menu.

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

Regaining a sense of perspective: From a Georgetown University comment thread:

At least DMT is a safe highbrow drug suitable for use by educated elites, unlike the crude trailer trash stimulants originally suggested.

They love him at San Diego State; they loved him, for years, at Harvard. And Harvard still seems ambivalent about Piero Anversa; it doesn’t want to comment at all on the decade or so during which it did nothing and during which plenty of people knew Anversa was faking his research. It has nothing to say about why it took Harvard years and years and years to call for the retraction of essentially his entire body of work.

Officials at Harvard declined to comment on why it took so long to take action on Dr. Anversa’s published work. Dr. Anversa could not be reached for comment.

Through arrogance and bluster ol’ Piero has, since 2001, been peddling pretty obvious bullshit about how the heart can regenerate itself. Lots of legitimate scientists said he was a fraud, over and over again, but too much money was at stake. Harvard would do well to apologize for having given this person legitimacy for so long.

**********

And what country’s university system would be so farcically shabby as to welcome Piero and one of his, uh, associates to take up new prestigious positions?

ITALY’s, of course.

***********

Best part of this story: Anversa a few years back sued Harvard cuz pointing out that he was a fraud was hurting business. (He lost the suit.)

What’s the Italian for Da guy’s got balls?

Un uomo ha i coglioni … ?

Sarah and Charles Warren said Puliafito wrote them prescriptions for asthma inhalers to soothe lungs raw from smoking marijuana and methamphetamine.

That’s Dr./Dean Carmen A. Puliafito, until recently the much-lauded head of the Keck School of Medicine, and a man whose compassion for his favorite fellow druggies extended to writing them prescriptions for some of the less attractive symptoms of chemical excess.

Carmen Puliafito’s career tells you all you need to know about why there’s a Black Lives Matter movement. Single-handedly Puliafito proves true everything anyone ever said about the breathtaking immunity white criminals may enjoy over long lucrative prestigious careers. I mean, Puliafito continues to represent the University of Southern California to the public.

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

And why not? I mean, sure, he had to, er, resign his deanship with full honors when one of his mad meth-filled nights turned sour and got anonymously reported to USC’s president (the police knew about it too, but didn’t even write a report); but he remains on the faculty. And the same president who knew all about Puliafito’s criminal mischief a few weeks later enthusiastically hosted his elegant goodbye party:

“Today, we have one of the, not just the area’s, but the nation’s preeminent medical schools and medical enterprises — and, in many ways, thanks to the leadership of Carmen,” [the president] told the crowd.

Carmen himself, in his farewell remarks, really nailed it: “[T]he primary job of dean of a medical school is to bring leaders that will really set the tone of the organization.” And tone-setting starts at the top!

Who cares if Carmen’s penchant for hanging out with crooks for long nights of drug overdoses – sometimes in his offices on campus – was the reason for the goodbye party? Rich white people using illegal drugs in front of hotel cameras isn’t, it turns out, illegal in Pasadena.

White Lives Matter, in other words; and in fact Puliafito came to USC trailing all kinds of other shit no one bothered acting on:

His time at Miami was not trouble-free. Marc Brockman, an optometrist at the [university], filed a lawsuit against Puliafito in 2006 for assault and battery and accused the university of negligence in hiring him.

Brockman alleged in sworn testimony that Puliafito, in a profane “tantrum” over an inoperable piece of medical equipment, grabbed him by the collar of his lab coat and choked him.

Puliafito denied wrongdoing.

During the case, it emerged that the university had investigated separate complaints of sexual harassment against Puliafito, according to sworn testimony and court filings in the lawsuit. The records do not reveal the outcome of the investigation, and a university spokeswoman said in response to questions about the probe: “We don’t have anything to provide.”

Puliafito and the university reached a confidential settlement with Brockman in June 2007.

Two months later, USC hired Puliafito.

And what a hire!

In a court battle that is still playing out, the University of California filed [a $1.85 million] suit in July 2015 against USC over its poaching of a leading Alzheimer’s disease researcher.

Puliafito was the self-described “quarterback” of efforts to land UC San Diego professor Paul Aisen, a star in the state university system.

… The suit accused USC of civil conspiracy, aiding and abetting breach of fiduciary duty and other misconduct.

And he’s still a highly respected, high-profile faculty member at the University of Southern California!

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

The latest thing is that someone got hold of a series of emails Puliafito wrote to the Los Angeles Times reporters who broke the story about him…

Fuck you.

I’m on you now.

You are fucking with me now.

Watch your back.

You are such a piece of shit.

Call me. Don’t be afraid you piece of shit.

Oh wait. Those are President Trump’s lawyer’s emails. I get mixed up.

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

UD thanks John.

All-male, highly secretive cells, sustained by sadistic initiation rites intended to prove absolute loyalty to the cell – this describes the mafia, Hell’s Angels, and American academia’s extensive system of fraternities.

I’m sure it’s possible to have all of the elements you need to create a criminal conspiracy and not create a criminal conspiracy; but this would mean exhibiting the impulse control one does not associate with bands of young men hidden without supervision behind high walls.

Fraternities have it one better than the mafia and outlaw biker gangs: Everyone thinks they’re cute. No one thinks the mafia is cute, but everyone thinks bonny frat boys with their local good works and character-building by-laws are adorable. I mean, they’re just kids. Plus they’re going to graduate from college and all.

So no one’s looking because these young college men are serious and clean-cut and appealing. They are a tight band of brothers enjoying almost total secrecy inside a nice large private residence, and they can be counted on to keep silent about any and all activities within the house.

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

What UD‘s trying to suggest in all this is that you’d almost have to be dumb, unambitious, unable to grasp life’s opportunities, to be existing under utopian criminal conspiracy conditions and not become a criminal conspiracy of some sort. Imagine a biker gang without a meth distribution business sounds like one of those conceptual challenges your professor poses in Intro Logic. So of course not all but a lot of frats are – on a small scale, of course, most of them – criminal conspiracies …

Too often fraternities function as unlicensed alcohol serving establishments on college campuses: a place where underage people, and those who are already intoxicated, can easily get alcohol. These practices are illegal in most states.

That sort of thing. (Drug distribution can become a seriously big deal at American fraternities.) You tell your stupid or indifferent or afraid university that you’re a dry frat, and your cover is complete: Your organization represents one big ol’ cynical lie, and the choirboy/gangster bit probably looks pretty amusing from inside the frat.

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

And so Greek life grinds on at our universities, dropping the odd rape or overdose or assault (lots of drunken fights break out in and around frats) here and there without attracting too much attention; but then you beat one of your eager-to-please initiates to death, or give drugs and alcohol to a coed who fatally overdoses. Something like that. Something that’s death.

This will finally attract some attention to your cell, especially if, like the guys at Penn State, the circumstances of the death are particularly depraved. And filmed. And if they happen at a campus already deep in blood and sex and gore via the frats and the athletic department. (Frats and sports: Hell of a synergy there: “[T]he secret to long service in a large public land-grant institution [is] ‘never messing with athletics or fraternities.‘”) You’ve now made it impossible to look away, impossible not to think about why so many fraternities are so disgusting, and why they’re part of universities.

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

Reflections on fraternities.