Rescind her degree; denounce her; make it clear you will have nothing to do with her. The University of Georgia – long designated on this blog The Worst University in America (not all posts at this link are about the University of Georgia; scroll around a bit) – has drawn attention to its worstness again by having spawned this vile nut. Without at least a statement expressing its embarrassment that it allowed itself to be sullied by her, the school will forever be known as the place that awarded a degree to one of the most squalid minds America has ever thrown up.

Allowing laptops, as UD often says, is academic malpractice.

Professors who continue to allow laptop use fall into the following categories.

1. I could give a shit. It’s easier for me to do virtually nothing up there if students are sedated with their fun screens. To make matters perfect, I use old text-heavy PowerPoints and drone and dribble over them. Eventually my teaching will resemble my deep calm when sleeping off benders, and my classroom will be a morgue.

2. I hate and fear humanity, especially students. I look forward to the day when all of them will be hidden from me behind their screens.

That’s about it.

An award-winning B-School Boy, PCP, UGA… these acronyms add up to a naked angry slimy mess inside a trash truck’s hopper …

The spectacle of this student fighting with the cops for his right to die in a mobile dumpster was impressive even on a campus famous for its immensities of trash. Crowds of student onlookers apparently took lots of videos.

It’s all very primal, isn’t it? Curled naked inside the dark wet womb, UGA’s finest sticks his thumb in his mouth, dilates his eyes and cries No! In thunder.

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UD thanks John.

… seems to have drawn more than a few eyes to itself. Its description of universities across America making their financially struggling students pay through the nose for football games they don’t attend is apparently compelling enough to have caught the attention of people.

The Washington Post, for instance, cites the article, and goes on to note that more and more schools are

requiring students who have few discretionary dollars to pay for something that has zero impact on their classroom experience. According to the Chronicle/Huff Post analysis, the 50 institutions with the highest athletic subsidies have many more financially needy students than those universities with the lowest subsidies.

What’s more, nearly all the growth in Division I athletics during the past decade has come at public universities. At the same time these university leaders were obsessed with conference realignments and big television deals, taxpayer support for public universities has fallen to unprecedented levels.

But what’s most devastating in the Post piece is the long memory of its writer. We all know that when it comes to the bullshit promises that university presidents make about football, a good memory – to quote Elizabeth Bennet – is unpardonable. Yet Jeffrey Selingo goes there.

Nearly 20 years ago, I wrote an article about a group of universities that had recently joined the elite of college athletics: the NCAA’s Division I. They included California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, Hampton University, Norfolk State University, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Ok kiddies so before I reveal the fate of those schools, go ahead and guess how well they fulfilled their presidents’ promises of huge revenue and huge increase in applications and huge prestige. Go ahead! Or – you don’t have to guess, do you? Because the names Cal Poly San Whatever, Hampton, Norfolk State and Whatsizface at Greensboro just come racing to your mind when you think of revenue and enrollment and renown and prestige… And all because of Div I football!

What’s more, look at the attention they’ve drawn to their sports programs!

[All] have been relegated to the backwater of college sports, with games on weekday nights on obscure cable channels. The only way many of these universities make it to the big time is to have their name appear on the stream of scores on ESPN’s ticker or as blowout fodder for elite programs.

That’s right. Not only did their elite Div I status do nothing (probably less than nothing) for their academic status, it didn’t even do anything for their athletic status. All at huge cost to their students.

Indeed Selingo is impolitic enough to trace the outcome of Greensboro’s Div I promises even more closely:

[Twenty years ago,] its student fees paid for 80 percent of the subsidy provided to the athletic department. Officials told me they expected the share of student support to fall over time as their teams established winning records and garnered more outside support… Greensboro students today provide 81 percent of the subsidy. In other words, nothing has changed except that the department’s budget has quadrupled since the late 1990s and the student fee for athletics has almost doubled, to about $700 a year per student.

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People wonder why universities keep doing this. I mean, eventually, as Selingo concludes, their students are going to leave in order to attend a school where they’re not “paying for someone else’s [child-like] dreams.” So why?

If you read this blog with any regularity, you know how UD answers that question. Her answer is very simple, and you will probably resist it, but she thinks she might be right.

They do it because they can’t think of anything else to do.

I mean, of course, some presidents – like the hack running notorious Florida State University – are anti-intellectuals whose animus against thought processes as such will always mean a teeny mouselike teaching staff and a titanic athletics program. And some big sports schools, such as the University of Montana, have scared away so many potential students with their rape statistics that they have nothing left but games and a few vocational courses. (Remember: Just as, at the end of life, hearing is the last sense to go, so at the end of a university’s life, football is the last activity to go.)

But most of the universities doing themselves in via football are simply overseen by people – academic leaders, trustees, even faculty (remember the many loyal faculty foot soldiers at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) – for whom football (and sometimes basketball as well) is the very definition of a university. Their job is to worry about naming rights, beer sales, how many classes they can cancel around game days, cleaning up campus after tailgates, preparing for NCAA investigations, covering up crimes committed by athletes, building new stadiums, recruiting faculty who will help athletes cheat their way through their courses, and so many other things. They find these activities totally engrossing, and they will pursue them until vanishing state appropriations and vanishing enrollees force them to call it a day.

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UD thanks Prof. Mondo.

… or the Wynn Resorts board?

… all of our school’s other cheating coaches!

Yawn. Donnan not high profile enough? Try Tommy Tuberville. Rich Rodriguez. Just one of many ways in which big-time sports bring good things to the American university.

Good ol’ Bert. University of Georgia through and through.

… the worst university in America. Go ahead and type UNIVERSITY GEORGIA in my search engine. You’ll get a few hits for other Georgia universities, but mainly you’ll get one unbelievable UGA scandal after another. The board of trustees tried to take over the student newspaper because they haven’t heard about press freedom. A professor shtupped one of his students in front of other students. Sports teams are endlessly full of gun-toting miscreants. After tailgating, the campus is literally a pile of shit. The school has outrageous rates of student alcoholism.

The school is of course on this year’s top-ten party school list; it always makes the list, and often tops it.

The latest is that Jim Donnan, UGA’s amazingly compensated football coach (he recently left), is under federal indictment as a Ponzi schemer. Most of his victims seem to have been his fellow sports morons.

UGA. As ever, a class act.

Assuming this is true (it appears in an opinion piece about how the University of Georgia newspaper should cover student alcohol arrests) it’s part of an intriguing trend at American party schools. As at the University of Iowa, another booze-soaked extravaganza with full cooperation from the administration, so now at the University of Georgia, you’ve got this rhetorical tweaking – a small line about drinking responsibly at the bottom of screaming ads for Saturday night specials; regular emails to teaching assistants discouraging them from telling students funny alcohol-related stories…

Every semester, as you gaze out your office window at the massive two-day cleanup after the last campus tailgate, every semester a vaguely coercive little note about how Oh by the way lose the When me and the lads got shitfaced bit… And God no Baudelaire wafts your way…

Everyone’s paying attention, today, to the idiots who are trying to take over the student newspaper; but there’s so much more to be proud of when you’re a Bulldog! Like your beloved Hall of Fame Coach Jim Donnan!

Donnan used his influence with former players who looked up to him, federal regulators said. According to the SEC court filing, he told one player, “Your Daddy is going to take care of you,” and, “if you weren’t my son, I wouldn’t be doing this for you,” the SEC complaint said. That former player, who was not named, ended up investing $800,000.

The University of Georgia. Building a legacy every single day.

… this Sunday night, on my other blog, at Inside Higher Education.

“Georgia football still leads all collegiate programs in offseason arrests,” continues an opinion writer in the University of Georgia newspaper. He’s unhappy about it.

University Diaries long ago named it The Worst University in America.

Today it was named Top Party School in America.

The University of Georgia, in Athens, Georgia, beat out Ohio University, in Athens, Ohio, as the top party school — a ranking derived from questions about the use of alcohol and drugs, the amount of studying and the popularity of fraternities and sororities.

Reed College has the best teachers. And Reed was second in the nation for “study the most.” Interesting combination.

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UPDATE: Indeed let’s take a closer look at Reed College. Let’s look at three highly ranked (on Rate My Professors) teachers at the college ranked “best teachers.” Let’s see if we can discover traits they may share.

First, their names: Jerry Shurman, Mike Foat, Jamie Pommersheim. Shurman and Pommersheim teach math. Foat teaches religion.

Shurman’s RMP page.

Foat’s.

Pommersheim’s.

Read them, read them. Then get back to me….

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Okay. What did we discover? In no particular order, we discovered that

1.) Professors are weird. No surprise there. But it may be that really good professors are strikingly weird. Weird in the sense that they bring themselves into the classroom. Not that they talk endlessly about themselves, but that they are themselves. Not emotionally withdrawn. Not fake. Open. Vulnerable to being called weird. Human beings. Individuals. Students may like this in particular because at a young age, when students are tentatively working on becoming who they are, these professors — aside from teaching them — model a certain comfort in one’s own skin, an achieved identity. This can be quite inspirational.

2.) Good teachers assign a lot of work and expect class participation and general engagement. But since the teacher has excited the student’s interest in the subject, the student does not seem to resent the work. Indeed, the student may wish to impress the professor with her work, her enthusiasm, because she admires the professor and wishes the professor to admire her.

3.) The professor is not condescending.

4.) The professor has a sense of humor.

5.) The professor is very smart.

6.) The professor somehow manages to anticipate your confusions, your questions. From Shurman’s reviews: “His ability to know exactly what you are thinking and stumbling over is uncanny.”

(Note to online instructors: Don’t try this at home.)

7.) The professor’s enthusiasm for his subject is contagious, sometimes dangerously so. (“He hypnotized me into taking Attic Greek my freshman year, one of the dumbest mistakes of my academic career…”) It also broadens and deepens his lecture content. (“Says fascinating things about the structure and meaning of math in class.”)

8.) Enfin, it’s a pleasure. “His class was a real pleasure.”

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Is this a scientific sample? No. Does everyone love these guys? No. Are they teaching under optimal, small-seminar, selective college conditions? Yes.

Still. Don’t we all already know that these are the attributes of really good teachers? Doesn’t this result simply confirm what we know?

It’s a distinction UGA works to maintain.

Apparently, head coaches need to worry about their bosses dipping their toes into legal hot water this time of year as well as their players.

According to the FOX affiliate in Atlanta, Georgia athletic director Damon Evans was arrested Wednesday night following a traffic stop and charged with DUI.

The station reports that Evans’ 2009 BMW was pulled over at 11:55 p.m. Wednesday. Evans was given a field sobriety test, and then later refused to take a breathalyzer test.

(It also apparently took police officers quite some time to set the camera up for Evans’ mug shot as the athletic director appears to have nodded off at some point during the process.)