You can identify some of this nation’s scummiest universities by their unwavering tolerance of the most psychotically sadistic fraternities imaginable. Readers of this blog already know the University of Central Florida as one of academia’s bottommost dwellers; but did you know that Sigma Chi at UCF has now been credibly accused of running over its pledges?

Fraternity brothers at Sigma Chi allegedly hit pledges with a car as part of a hazing ritual now under investigation by the University of Central Florida, according to an incident report obtained by the Orlando Sentinel late Wednesday.

A sorority member whose house sits next door to Sigma Chi’s told police she heard yelling, saw a car strike a young man and then heard someone shout “help!” and “my bones, my bones, they’re broken,” the report said.

Hoo boy. They are looking at another two-week suspension.

This University of Central Florida student can’t help noticing she attends a really shitty school that spends all of its money on its total-loser football team. Oh, and on its hideous president – he just got a huge bonus for grinding this shabby, overcrowded, scandal-ridden (put University Central Florida in my search engine) wasteland into dust.

You have to wonder, though: If she’s smart enough to see the reality of the University of Central Florida, why doesn’t she attend a different school?

With incredulity? Or because he was so drunk everything made him laugh?

Anyway. Apparently you can do things like this in FSU’s Tallahassee, but it’s harder in Orlando.

Galvin must have known it’d be harder, because he offered not merely a ticket to see amazing Central Florida University play football. He offered season tickets.

The University of Central Florida is full of students like Jackie Fulco, who think academics is more important than athletics. That just isn’t right. It’s “crazy,” it’s pitiful, “it just doesn’t add up,” writes a UCF reporter in the school newspaper. Why is the football stadium half empty?

It must be bad marketing. Word’s not getting out about the games. The student looks forward to a full stadium once word gets out. That will set things right, and UCF will start to look like a real university.

Izvestia, Central Florida.

‘Tis a fine country that makes sure 19-year-old lads have full access to the latest in firearms.

Only 19, Texas Tech student Hollis Daniels stepped up to a campus policeman sitting at a desk typing a report and blew his head right off. OOOOPS! said wee Hollis. “I fucked up.”

Only 19 and U. Central Florida student Max Chambers kept in his car on campus an

AR-15 modified to shoot fully-automatic.

Police said Chambers also had manufactured three drop-in auto sears, which can convert a firearm to shoot multiple bullets with a single trigger pull. Chambers told police he made the devices in December and had tested one earlier this month .

A UCF police spokeswoman declined to say how detectives believe he made the devices, citing an ongoing investigation. He told police he knew the devices were against the law, but said he doesn’t like laws, according to his arrest report.

Most fraternities are repulsive, and most sororities are too. But fraternities hog the limelight cuz they torture and kill people, while sororities lag behind because they don’t have the nerve.

So UD is pleased to see the attention of the world focused, for a change, on the repulsiveness of sororities.

UD had high hopes for the University of Central Florida‘s Alpha Xi something, but that didn’t go anywhere. It was repulsive, but not repulsive enough. GW’s sorority seems to have met the global repulsion standard.

For those who dismiss university fraternity life as simply WASP eighteen-year-olds killing WASP seventeen-year-olds, where have you been? Pi Delta Psi beat one of their pledges to death, and they’re an Asian fraternity.

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And hey – GIRLS — we’re just on the brink! The University of Central Florida’s sadomasochistic sisters, Alpha Xi Delta (‘[s]ome of the pledges said things like they “couldn’t wait to be hazed.”’), have been told to stop trying to kill their pledges through the forced consumption of alcohol.

They’re complaining bitterly about their temporary suspension.

But take heart. Once that’s lifted, it’s only a matter of time before you, just like the boys, will be able to kill someone.

… these are all not merely commendable gestures, but will, in certain American university classroom settings, count as credit-bearing assignments.

Over the course of writing this blog, UD has chronicled the many ways professors accomplish two things: Get multiple people to help the professors in their far-flung personal commitments and endeavors; and avoid reading student papers/exams.

It’s win-win, really. You get a captive audience to do your bidding, whatever it may be, and you give yourself a break in terms of academic labor. For the student it’s win-win too – just cough up the good-cause donation, or knock on a district door or two, or endure that initial little pinch as the Red Cross pokes you… and presto! No need to write your final paper (automatic A) or take the final exam (again, automatic A).

UD herself has wondered if she could interest her students in washing her dog. UD’s dog is water-phobic, and the only way UD has been able to wash her is to capture her in her little fenced-in yard and race after her all over the yard while squirting the garden hose at her. The dog runs madly about, and UD runs madly about. Once the dog’s all wet, UD must attempt to hold her still while applying dog shampoo, and then it’s another runabout for rinsing. If, in exchange for not having to write their final paper or take their final exam, one or two of my students would wash my dog…

But no, no. In all the cases UD has mentioned, professors paid a price for these transactions. The latest instance, at the University of Central Florida, involves a psych prof who just a couple years ago was getting praised for doing shit like hypnotizing his entire class, but who’s now catching hell because he’ll drop all sorts of class requirements for students who give their money to a charity poker game. (Maybe the hypnosis was part of the deal: You put them under and then … When I snap my fingers you will awaken and give all your money to Saint Jude’s Hospital…)

Such a classy idea. On top of taking their money (their parents’ money… our tax money…) in tuition, you take more of their money in exchange for making their university tuition meaningless. At least the University of North Carolina’s athletes were on scholarship when the university arranged for them to have meaningless classes.

But anyway. Someone called an ethics hotline on the dude and he’s out on his ass and will have to find a whole new universe of suckers.

With open carry, you’ll get FAR better pictures for your Facebook coverage of the next shootout down the street. We’re talking Mad Max Fury Road!

And why, wonders this University of Central Florida administrator, doesn’t our university have the same draw? Why doesn’t anybody come to our football games? Why can’t he swell with UCF pride at the same full attendance he sees at aquariums and amusement parks? “I … cringe when our football team is featured on national TV because the camera might pan up beyond the lower bowl or near the end zone, where seats are often empty.” The university has more than done its bit – it shuts down classes altogether when there’s a big game, for instance…

But here’s the thing about Central Florida University. Empty its football stands might be, but the school itself – qua school, if you know what I mean – is insanely overcrowded, with extensive reliance on massive lecture halls, online courses, PowerPoint automata instead of teachers, etc., etc. In fact, UCF is one of University Diaries’ online makeover schools, universities she believes should simply accept reality and shut down their physical campus.

Given the nature of UCF, would you go to a football game there if you were a student? What do you suppose this high-security (cheating and cameras are rampant) dystopia means to the typical student? A place to pick up a degree, sure. But little more.

Yet why, the UCF administrator asks, do students not understand that

the university’s investment in athletic programs and student-athletes is an important part of UCF’s move to enhance its brand and image, and full support by fans can be a major contributor to that end.

It’s the same deal at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, which is about to build a billion dollar football stadium:

[The university’s president] tied the stadium project to UNLV’s larger aspiration of becoming a top-tier research university.

What is there about spending all our money on sports will make us a great intellectual institution that these people don’t understand??

The most macabre headline is this one, in USA Today:

EXPLOSIVE DEVICES, CORPSE, FOUND ON UCF CAMPUS

A dorm was evacuated, and the campus closed, after – in response to a 911 call – police found a dead person in a dorm room and, near him, an assault weapon and improvised explosive devices.

This is a big story because it’s part of an emerging new normal for certain disturbed Americans. UD guesses that this suicide had in mind going out with a bang, as in Aurora and Sandy Hook. For whatever reason, though, he decided to skip the part where he murders forty people, and instead went straight to killing himself.

Hapless, high-security, high-tech, humongously overcrowded University of Central Florida keeps piling on. Its response to manifold cheating scandals (UD will quote herself here: A zillion students attend UCF – lots of them take online courses, where the cheating (and dropout) rates are sky-high; lots of them take massively over-populated classroom courses, complete with PowerPoint, clickers, laptops, dimmed lights, high absenteeism, security cameras, and total pointlessness. When you experience university as a series of variously degrading, intrusive, and stupid experiences, you don’t respect your school, and you don’t feel inclined to act toward it with much integrity, since it doesn’t seem to be acting all that well in regard to you. ) is to flay students with doubleplusgood PowerPoints. This is so the answer to your problems, UCF!

Mike Bianchi, Orlando Sentinel.

[University of Central Florida] basketball coach Donnie Jones is being accused of using a convicted felon with ties to a sports agent as a conduit to funnel big-name recruits into his program.

Sadly, my first response when I read this story in The New York Times Saturday was this: Doesn’t everybody?

… At this point, it’s impossible to know if Jones is breaking the rules or simply pushing the envelope. And, frankly, when you look at the sad state of the NCAA, does it really matter?

Auburn, the national football champion, had a star player who somehow kept his eligibility and won the Heisman Trophy despite the fact that his father tried to sell his services for $180,000.

UConn, the national basketball champion, has a coach in Jim Calhoun who will be suspended for a grand total of three games next year despite the fact that the NCAA says he runs a cheating program that “fails to promote an atmosphere of compliance.”

John Calipari has been in charge of two different programs that had to vacate their Final Four appearances because of NCAA violations. He now holds the premier job in college basketball at Kentucky…

So sad, when a high-ranking administrator takes to the local paper to try to calm the populace.

In the wake of the University of Central Florida cheating scandal – brought on by the exquisite synergy of a professor who couldn’t be bothered to write his own exam (“Prof. Quinn barely created anything at all. He just pulled questions from a source that the students had access to as well and copied them verbatim. It would seem that, even if you think the students did wrong here, the Professor was equally negligent. Will he have to sit through an ethics class too?”), and students who, sensing he couldn’t be bothered, found the online exam he used and copied it – the school’s provost natters about how much integrity the school has, how this was an isolated incident, and how they’re going to “add to and improve upon our existing safeguards.”

A zillion students attend UCF – lots of them take online courses, where the cheating (and dropout) rates are sky-high; lots of them take massively over-populated classroom courses, complete with PowerPoint, clickers, laptops, dimmed lights, high absenteeism, security cameras, and total pointlessness. When you experience university as a series of variously degrading, intrusive, and stupid experiences, you don’t respect your school, and you don’t feel inclined to act toward it with much integrity, since it doesn’t seem to be acting all that well in regard to you.

UCF must sense how unpleasant its transformation into a Vegas casino, bristling with security cameras, is, since the provost lists all sorts of behavior-improvement initiatives on campus, but doesn’t mention this one. And this is the one that’s gotten the most press.

UCF is a failed enterprise. It has too many students, and professors can’t handle it. Pretty much everything it does reflects badly on the American university. It should shut its physical campus and enter fully into online oblivion.