... here.

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What follows isn’t one of Katherine Stewart’s sexier paragraphs, but since this is a blog about universities, we’ll go with it. To get to the good stuff, you’ll need to read the whole thing.

So, who gets to join the [Claremont Institute’s] secret society of latter-day Greco-Roman authoritarians? A strange fact to remember is that Costin Alamariu, a.k.a. the Bronze Age Pervert, got his Ph.D. from Yale. Curtis Yarvin has degrees from Johns Hopkins, Brown, and the University of California, Berkeley. Anton is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley. Their hero Ron DeSantis has both Harvard and Yale on his C.V. Manly man Josh Hawley is Stanford and Harvard. Yes, Virginia, these very men are themselves the Bugmen. When they talk about sticking it to the administrative state or fantasize about having their dictator-buddy tell all the liberals to suck on it, they seem to be dreaming about revenge on the professors, administrators, and fellow students who were mean to them on their way up.

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Some excerpts from Stewart’s analysis of the Claremont Institute (they’ve changed the name to BEARmont – more masculine) a particularly dramatic and high-profile instance of anti-democracy in America:

In embodying a kind of nihilistic yearning to destroy modernity, [Claremont has] become an indispensable part of right-wing America’s evolution toward authoritarianism… [It has become] openly contemptuous of democracy.

[Its intellectual premise seems to be that] human society is incapable of the kind of rational, deliberative government that liberal democracy requires.

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Therefore, America requires an authoritarian ruler/regime. Cue Trump.

She was a key on-air booster of former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election-fraud lies and, in internal documents made public last month in the Dominion case, she said she was “depressed” by Joe Biden’s election win and texted Trump aides such as Steve Bannon that she simply refused to accept his victory.

“I want to see massive fraud exposed. Will [Trump] be able to turn this around,” she asked Bannon on Nov. 10, three days after Fox projected Biden as the winner. “I told my team we’re not allowed to say pres elect. Not in scripts. Not in banners on air. Until this moves through the courts.”

These seem to be the only two D. Trump honorary degrees that haven’t been revoked; and Trump can rest easy knowing that a school recently run by the Marquis de Jerry Falwell Junior will never do that dastardly deed, even under current circumstances.

Frank Pavone went on to become one of Trump’s highest-ranked advisors on Catholic issues.

Father Pavone’s manifest erotic attraction to bodily gore, and his unique psychotic stagings of handheld human remains atop the holiest of sacred locations, would long ago have attracted the attention of urgent care mental health clinics had he not been ribboned and robed within the church…

Yet even the church, after letting far too much twisted bloodlust go, has recently defrocked him.

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Pavone has a long history of grooming and touching young women who work for him. All seem to have skeddadled before he had a chance to surgically remove their wombs and drink their uterine fluid from chalices in Jesus’ name. But now they’re speaking up.

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Since the church has defrocked him, I’m thinking the Pope will have no comment on this latest Pavone scandal. Pavone? Pavone who? Perhaps Trump wants to say a word.

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Given that Pavone isn’t any longer allowed to wear the priestly garb that gave him a serious leg up in anti-abortion show-stoppers, what to do? His response to being defrocked makes clear that lugging baby guts about from altar to altar and photographing himself panting over them remains his life’s passion. What to do?

Pavone has reportedly been in touch with several drag queens who specialize in clerical outfits, so that they can advise him in the maintenance of his look.

… and that’s saying a lot – has yet another nationally broadcast meltdown. Drink and violence and litigiousness have long been Steve Sarkisian’s (scroll down) game plan, and the resulting embarrassing spectacles in front of trustees, obscene actings-out in the larger community, and, in this latest instance, psychotic attacks on team staff, have totally endeared him to the nation’s premier football programs. He pulls in a huge salary and is massively lionized at one dominant program after another.

He hasn’t yet started pulling out a gun during his special moments (This is How We Do It), but once he does that, he’ll be guaranteed the head coaching spot at the school of his choice.

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The world of university football/basketball coaches is mainly a variant of Trumpworld. Everyone loves the athletic Trumplets’ sick dirty twisted lying ways, and when the sickest and dirtiest die, the, uh, what’s the word, encomia are enmazing! You’d never know from American sports journalism that Bobby Knight or Mike Leach (one of America’s most fanatic Trumpers) was anything other than a fine inspirational example to us all when his sadistic treatment of players comes to a permanent end. And so it is with another manifestly insane person, Steve S.

Of course a few sissy nay-sayers are calling for him to be fired. They seem worried that the school he rules – Texas, Austin – may suffer reputational damage through having made a gibbering lunatic the highest-profile, highest-compensated person on campus.

To which UD says: Fiddle dee dee! It’s Texas, sweetie!

… all stand steadfastly with their much-admired Rudy Giuliani, a man so fine as to have been given honorary degrees from them.

Three of these schools are Catholic, and Catholics tend to be YUGE Trump supporters, so don’t hold your breath waiting for them to revoke the honor, even after he’s disbarred in total disgrace, imprisoned, etc., etc.

Middlebury College in Vermont, Drexel University in Pennsylvania, and the University of Rhode Island have all revoked honorary degrees that each school, in a moment of madness, conferred upon America’s close-to-highest-profile anti-semitic (Look ye to Soros, oh Blind Ones!) insurrectionist. These are godless public or private schools, lacking the spiritual perspicacity to see the Christlike miracle that is America’s Mayor.

And then there’s godless Syracuse, which is as we speak attempting to work RG out of its system. That school, too, fails to perceive the way in which Rudy acts as a vessel of the lord. The three Catholic schools sure as hell do, though, and when Rudy’s carted off to jail they will speak of his having been burned at the stake just like Saint Joan.

Figure it this way: If, for decades and decades, the most laureled person on your campus was Theodore McCarrick, ol’ Rudy don’t look too bad.

… from whom this blog has long demanded the very highest levels of institutional dementia, and in whom UD has in fact never been disappointed.

Way back in 2006, when UD encountered one of hundreds of Auburn’s fake courses / fake professors / fake departments sports scandals, she embarked upon her Auburn journey, replete with drunks and thugs and sex addicts — and that only describes the upper administration.

Auburn’s new head football coach comes from Liberty U., on whose campus the ambient heavy breathing is either paroxysmal prayer or President Falwell watching his wife fuck the pool boy.

Auburn, like Baylor University, broadcasts its spiritual superiority to us all while behaving in all ways with breathtaking moral degeneracy. It would be too fictional to believe if it weren’t all true. But Coach Hugh Freeze is true, and Auburn is true, and Baylor is true, and Liberty is true.

Because you don’t remain a big fat ethical shit-strip without the full-hearted support of your community, UD was shocked by a recent local jury decision in favor of an Auburn professor who pointed out that the school is a hypocritical cesspool, and who was subsequently systematically destroyed by the administration — everyone, including that week’s president (filthy schools like Auburn can’t keep presidents, cuz their … uh… sins are always in danger of exposure) fucked the guy over in Jesus’ name. The guy sued and won a bunch of money and Auburn got punitive fees imposed etc.

I mean, maybe, as in the case of the tanking Mr Fuckface himself — with his Big Bible Held Aloft + sex/money crimes, treason, and fascist anti-semitism — even the Deep South is tiring of the Shit All Over Jesus Shitshow.

This blog has long argued the importance of rescinding honorary degrees from, er, some of their recipients. Examples:

Bernard Madoff

Theodore McCarrick

Bill Cosby

Lance Armstrong

Sepp Blatter

Donald Trump

Sheldon Silver

James Levine

Almost all of these sex and/or money scumsters eventually lost the honor aura conferred upon them by America’s debauched universities (debauched because, in almost every case, a touch of due diligence would have uncovered enough rumors to stay their hand, but these schools apparently didn’t care).

But what about, say, a law degree? An actual degree you work for and pay for? Is there behavior dishonorable enough to justify rescinding a BA or a JD?

What about an MD? UD has argued that Jumana Nagarwala, who put her Hopkins MD to use allegedly slicing off the genitals of little girls all over the midwest, should have that degree rescinded under… call it the Mengele Rule. It’s pretty easy to argue that people who got BAs under false pretenses (as in the Varsity Blues case, where rejects took the place of qualified applicants because their parents faked their applications and paid various well-connected criminals enormous sums of money to help them) should have their degrees revoked. The principle here is that a legitimate university has a reputation to defend, and when it harbors filthy crooks it should formally, publicly, expel them.

And a lawyer? A student who attends your school in order to learn the laws of our land in order to use those same laws to destroy it? This is much like the 9/11 pilots who attended flight school here solely in order to crash their planes into buildings. It would seem to be rather at odds with the purpose of a legal education, a serious education in the rule of law in our democracy. If I were Chicago I’d be pretty fucking embarrassed to be the school that taught John Eastman the law solely in order for him to twist it to destroy the country. I mean, is my face red!

It’s not too early for UD‘s beloved U of C to start considering a process by which they can cleanly disassociate themselves from this piece of shit.

The best and strongest denunciation of the cowardly idiocy currently in action at the highest levels of the University of Michigan (background here) comes from – wait for it – the campus chapter of International Youth and Students for Social Equality at the University of Michigan, a Trotskyist group.

[Bright Sheng’s student/destroyer,] who evidently knows nothing about the play, its history, or Olivier’s career and intentions in his 1965 performance, has thus far been fully supported by the university in the baseless claim that Sheng’s showing of the film and the film itself were “racist.”… In a statement to the Michigan Daily, composition Professor Evan Chambers—who is replacing Sheng in the course—wrote, “To show the film now, especially without substantial framing, content advisory and a focus on its inherent racism is in itself a racist act, regardless of the professor’s intentions.” Chambers presents absolutely no evidence to support such an outrageous claim. The public is apparently simply expected to take his word for it… The whole incident is foul and shameful. For all the hand-wringing about students “needing context” and “trigger-warnings” about the play, there is virtually no discussion of the actual work or film adaptation…

Surprised to find the sharpest attack coming from the left? Don’t be. There’s a long history among traditional lefties of disgust with Foucauldian bullshit and its current “identity” emanations. See Richard Rorty’s contrast between the reformist left and the cultural left.

You don’t have to be anywhere in particular on the ideological spectrum to recognize the vicious unpersoning of Bright Sheng as fully reactionary, in the worst traditions of the most perverted forms of Orwellian “revolution.”

Nice work if you can get it.

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Eastman is, somehow, both a lawyer and a senior fellow at a research institute. He’s also a disgrace to the profession. His memo [arguing that Pence should simply declare Trump re-elected] is at once rife with falsehoods, childlike in its reasoning and deadly dangerous in its proposed application. Eastman needs to face consequences. State licensing authorities should review his fitness to practice law. Congress needs to demand answers, issuing a subpoena to compel Eastman to testify if necessary. And the Justice Department must, at a minimum, open a criminal investigation to determine whether Eastman’s proposed actions constituted conspiracy to violate federal election laws. If nobody takes action, then Eastman will fade into memory as just another unhinged conspiracy theorist who proposed dangerous abuses of power to serve Trump’s whims, and then walked away unscathed.

A school that lionizes national conflict of interest icon Charles Nemeroff also thinks nothing of lionizing seedy nursing home mogul Morris Esformes…

Morris’s overwhelming preoccupation for many years has been keeping his son, Philip, out of prison for having run with the whole seedy nursing home thing and turned it into the largest health care fraud in American history.

Philip, when not taking all of the federal government’s money, was himself long preoccupied with bribing the head basketball coach at the University of Pennsylvania to put Philip’s son – named Morris after Family Crook #1 – on the team, and thereby grant his admission to that Ivy League institution.

Head-spinning, ain’t it? Flamboyantly pious religious people, too — all of them. But maintain your focus! I’m trying to update you on all of this.

So Philip got twenty years but because of a ton of flamboyantly pious friends he got DJT to pardon him! Largest health care fraud ever MEH.

But not so fast! For some reason the feds would prefer that its expensive, protracted, extremely difficult fight to put Philip in prison NOT be blithely overturned by rich corrupt people. Athough Philip has indeed been released, the Justice Department “will pursue unresolved charges from Esformes’ healthcare fraud trial in 2019.” And since there were like three million original charges against the guy, the feds have a full plate of leftovers from which to choose. He will soon go to trial again, and because the man of God is guilty as hell, he’ll soon be back in prison, and it’ll be Arrested Development all over again.

The other University of Miami medical school story? Ne quittez pas.

A … Los Angeles Times report …. alleged Barrack’s connection to the admission of Sheikh Khalifa bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani into USC, a prince of Qatar. After Al Thani’s denied admission to UCLA and his family’s alleged suggestion that a “substantial donation” would be made to USC if he were admitted, Barrack reportedly set up a meeting between former USC President C.L Max Nikias and Al Thani’s mother. 

Al Thani subsequently began school at USC, and the Qatar Foundation — a state-sponsored organization in Qatar founded by Al Thani’s father — donated to USC’s “marine research center on Catalina Island,” according to the report.

… Barrack was also connected to the presidential pardon of Miami developer Robert Zangrillo, one of the 11 USC parents charged in the Operation Varsity Blues investigation. The White House news release, which included 73 pardons and 70 commuted sentences, stated that Barrack supported Zangrillo’s pardon.

… In a statement to the Daily Trojan Wednesday, the USC Board of Trustees wrote that Barrack stepped down from his position. 

“Tom Barrack has voluntarily resigned from the USC Board of Trustees effective immediately,” the statement read. 

See earlier post here.

Who knows why the University of South Carolina president, addressing a proud contingent of students and parents on an important day, referred to the students as lucky graduates of the University of California? Who knows why he for the third time (reportedly) recycled in this speech a plagiarized paragraph from a speech by a famous Navy Seal? Who knows why (according to some observers) he slurred his words throughout?

I don’t know why. But let me speculate about Bob Caslen, who has now resigned. Let me begin with the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips:

These are parts of ourselves – that don’t want to live, that hate our children, that want ourselves to fail. Freud is saying there is something strange about humans: they are recalcitrant to what is supposed to be their project.

I think anyone reviewing Caslen’s odd behaviors (which, according to some, predate this speech) would want to entertain the possibility that he hates his job (the university bestowed it unwillingly; he has been an unpopular president) and wants out; but rather than grasp that fact forthrightly (a military man, he has always done his duty) he has at it were allowed his unconscious to have its way with his situation. He has allowed his recalcitrance to what is supposed to be his project to emerge, and USC got the message.

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For a wee bit more insight into the whole “unconscious” thing, consider the fact that in Donald Trump the USA experienced its first president with no apparent unconscious. He lost an election and this made him mad; to get the election back he sent a mob to the Capitol to kill his vice president (who made him mad), take out the Congress, destroy democracy, and get back what he wanted. When desperate allies called him from the besieged building, he blew them off and went back to enjoying the riot’s tv footage. Now THAT’S having no unconscious. Recalcitrant to his project? Just like Ubu the King, Trump was happily blowing up the world to achieve his project.

But this is very rare. Outside of select psychopaths, most everyone has an unconscious.

After referring to his institution as the University of California in this year’s commencement speech, the president of the University of South Carolina plagiarized, verbatim, a paragraph about personal ethics.

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How do you achieve this outcome?

Let’s put aside things like a drop of the hard stuff. Without that it seems pretty unaccountable, no?

Here’s what UD figures, FWIW:

Like many busy people, the president of the University of South Carolina has a squad of speechwriters. Here perhaps are the two things that went wrong:

1. He mentioned to one of them that he liked this one quotation a lot, and it seemed real pertinent, so could the ghostwriter work it in. Sure, boss. Only the ghostwriter (who may have been a student) stuck it in without attribution.
2. I’m gonna go with an overly obliging spellcheck on the California thingie. Student’s typing the speech real fast and misses the fact that after she puts down the letters University of Ca the app figures she means California and helpfully fills that in for her. As to why the president went ahead and read California – that’s an easy one, eh? He’s never seen a word of the speech before delivering it, and he’s on automatic pilot, paying very little attention to what he’s saying, thinking mainly about the reception right after the speech… … …

Here is an exact equivalence; here is what Donald Trump has done to us.

In 2012 ISIS men took over a university in Tunisia. Their first act: Replacing the Tunisian flag with the flag of ISIS.

Unlike here in the US, where whatever initial paltry police presence seems to have done virtually nothing, a very brave woman student at the Tunisian university confronted the ISIS thugs and tried to replace the national flag. They almost killed her.

So there we are. Here we are. Violent insurrectionists successfully replaced the American flag with a Trump flag.