Those pesky night games, during which wasted tailgaters turn the campus into a reeking dump, will go on. After all:

Athletics director Damon Evans said Wednesday that he hoped to find a healthy balance between the early kickoffs and the games under the lights …but said television contracts with CBS and ESPN would ultimately outweigh many of the school’s desires.

Professor of Law Peter Appel, of the University of Georgia, “has been invited to train federal wilderness managers at the Arthur Carhart National Wilderness Training Center, a facility in Missoula, Mont., run jointly by all federal agencies responsible for wilderness management.” Appel specializes in environmental law, and knows something about managing wildernesses in particular.

UD thinks Appel should take a hard look at the wilderness right outside his window — the seventy tons of broken glass and human shit in front of the University of Georgia law school — and think about how to manage that. Think globally, act locally. This wilderness stares Appel and his fellow law professors right in the face … right in the nose … after every football game on campus.

The university has no idea what to do about it. It gets worse every year, and this year, with the opening game, it’s so bad that it’s become a very big scandal.

UD‘s been studying the problem, reading lots of news articles, blog entries, and comment threads about it. The University of Georgia Law School Wilderness Area, it turns out, has a number of interesting features.

For instance, the wilderness is created not merely by thousands of drunk tailgaters hurling bottles at each other and shitting in the doorways of Professor Appel’s law school building. The drunks begin the process, to be sure; but after they leave, the derelict of Athens show up to loot the place. Whatever trash has managed to find a bin is now overturned in search of valuables that the drunks may have left behind.

Once we know these sorts of details, once we understand the rhythms of this ecosystem, perhaps we can do something to manage it. Contraceptives in the beer, so tailgaters don’t reproduce? UD‘s not an expert; she doesn’t really know. But there must be professors, in the law school and elsewhere at the University of Georgia, interested in studying the wilderness just outside their doors.

… the worst university in America. Now a new book tells you why. In detail.

All top secret, you understand. I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.

Yes, it’s more shit from incredibly shitty Georgia Tech, whose larcenous profs (and filthy dirty sports programs) continue, even after a long history of other larcenous profs, stealing from their grants and from the school with total abandon. Most recently, a conspiracy of profs who got CIA contracts spent YEARS stealing from everyone, and Georgia Tech just you know missed it. Or knew about it and let it go. The ringleader was a bigshot Head Scientist already found guilty of conflict of interest but fiddle dee dee let’s put him back in charge and see how it goes. COI. Big deal. We’re all boys here, boys will be boys, the dude draws big grants from big federal agencies, let’s go forward with him.

Schools with this many assholes over decades are either corrupt or totally out to lunch. Either way, Georgia Tech needs a new prez and a new board of trustees.

The University of Georgia admissions committee selects for vehicular homicide, drunk driving, drag racing, and beating people up. These guys are highly selected: scholarships, campus heroes. What a school.

And if you’d care to do the entire long Georgia Football Walk of Shame, go here.

Jalen [Kitna] was the 44th ranked QB in the country coming out of high school, choosing [the University of Florida] over offers from Boston College, Georgia Tech, Liberty, and Tennessee.

You just missed – by this much! – having child pornography added to your long list of whacked out campus erotic exploits.

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As for what this means for the Univ. of Florida: On the upside, it’ll give people someone to talk about other than Aaron Hernandez. And the like.

A Potemkin Village is “a pretentiously showy or imposing façade intended to mask or divert attention from an embarrassing or shabby fact or condition.” The three Bloomberg writers who make this comparison – it appears in a long piece summarizing the ongoing national basketball scandal, which they call “the worst since college basketball players were caught shaving points for gamblers in the 1950s” – mean to suggest, I guess, that the glitzy University of Louisville basketball team masked whatever there was of the shabby non-basketball University of Louisville.

It’s quite a statement. Can we have gotten to the point where we’re not a tad astonished by it?

I mean, yes, one remembers the witty president of the University of Oklahoma back in the ‘fifties telling a senator he wanted to “build a university our football team can be proud of.” More recently, the president of Ohio State, “asked whether the school had considered firing embattled coach Jim Tressel, … said: ‘No. Are you kidding? Let me just be very clear. I’m just hopeful the coach doesn’t dismiss me.'” One has no trouble imagining how the puling little president of the University of Alabama feels about his stature vis-à-vis Nick Saban. And of course we know how the leadership of Penn State felt about that… curious couple, Sandusky and Paterno. Going to jail for them was a small price to pay.

Still…

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And does the analogy really work? For after all, as is the way with many big-time athletic programs, there was never a clear separation between the shabby embarrassing academic UL and the rich degenerate basketball UL. The squalor of college sports spreads itself all over the campus – literally, as in the way the University of Georgia campus for a long time looked the morning after big games; and figuratively, as in the establishment of a house of prostitution in a UL dorm for players, recruits, and the fathers of recruits.

It’s not really that you’ve got on the one hand the glitzy sports program and on the other the hidden humiliating university. The whole thing tends toward looking like the Calais Jungle.

Oh goody. Here’s an opportunity to see which American university decides to recruit a high school football player who has just been arrested for armed robbery.

Cincinnati, Georgia Southern, Georgia State, Memphis, USF… hm… hm… Who will be the winner?

UD says: MEMPHIS!

Life of the mind, University of Georgia.

These are the first felony arrests for a Georgia football player since Johnathan Taylor in June 2014 on domestic violence charges.

These are the second and third arrests of a Georgia football player this spring. Defensive lineman Jonathan Ledbetter was arrested last month on two misdemeanor alcohol charges.

First felonies since all the way back in… 2014! Things are looking up for University of Georgia football!

UD loves this shit. A hugely influential, venerated, and privileged MIT professor spends years and years stealing more than a hundred million dollars from clients. He did business with Bernard Madoff.

The Bitrans [this was one of those adorable father/son things] paid themselves as much as $16 million in management fees over the life of the businesses and recovered $12 million of their own investments when the funds were doing poorly, the U.S. said in court filings, adding that the two discussed their scheme in e-mail exchanges.

In addition to defrauding investors, the Bitrans lied to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and sought to hide assets by transferring property to a relative without the relative’s permission, prosecutors said.

And a fellow professor gets up during sentencing (three years and nine months) to anguish over his suffering during the long ordeal of running a Ponzi scheme, and to praise his excellent character.

And how does his colleague know firsthand how he’s suffered? Because for all of those “past few years” – in fact, since 2009, long after his Madoff connection and wrongdoing were publicly known – he remained an influential, venerated, and privileged MIT professor. He was even an associate dean. He finally left the school in 2013.

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MIT has said nothing and done nothing in all this time. UD doubts that even now – with Bitran suiting up for prison – MIT will say anything about having for years retained on its faculty a massive fraudster.

Meanwhile, all over MIT websites there are statements like this one:

Deputy Dean Gabriel Bitran discussed [with the Financial Times the importance of] producing leaders with a social conscience.

Like Bernard Madoff’s Yeshiva University, you can direct your IT people to erase all images and mentions of Bitran on the school website. I mean, I’m sure MIT is busy scrubbing scrubbing scrubbing right now.

When you ask yourself why so many people detest professors, think of MIT and the way it protected Gabriel Bitran.

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Oh by the way. How were the thieves caught?

The scheme was uncovered by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission when, while investigating potential victims of the Bernie Madoff fraud, SEC officials asked for documentation to support the Bitrans’ returns claims. The Bitrans then made false statements to the SEC examiners and provided fabricated records.

Here’s a management tip direct from the Sloan School:

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL.

… are the words of wisdom you need to hear as you seek to understand what has been going on in Morgantown. From her you-are-there perch in WVU’s sociology department, Karen Weiss has written Party School, a first-hand account of what Clifford Geertz might have called “deep play” at America’s colleges. These are excerpts from an interview she gave at Inside Higher Education:

Many residential universities, such as the so-called party schools … have become so well-known for their super-charged party environments that it would be very difficult to change the culture without negatively impacting enrollments that are now dependent upon the lure of this party scene. Moreover, many of the disruptive behaviors that I document in the book (e.g., burning couches, riots) have become “traditions” for both current students and alumni. As such, traditions are very difficult to change.

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[People who live in bad neighborhoods] feel terrorized, they change their routines to avoid certain streets, they don’t leave their homes at night. In many college towns, residents are beginning to experience similar problems (albeit less life-threatening) as a result of a minority of extreme partiers who make life uninhabitable [I think Weiss is conflating two phrases here: life unendurable and neighborhoods uninhabitable.] for their neighbors.

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While it is easy to see why bar and club owners are reluctant to eliminate drink specials or other promotions – after all, they make their profits from student drinking – it is more difficult to understand why university administrators, police and local town officials have not been more effective in reducing some of the problems caused by the party subculture. In the long run, it really boils down to a rather controversial reality: the party school is itself a business, and alcohol is part of the business model. Schools lure students to attend their schools with the promise of sports, other leisure activities and overall fun. Part of this fun, whether schools like it or not, is drinking. Thus, even as university officials want to keep students safe, they also need to keep their consumers happy. This means letting the alcohol industry do what it does best – sell liquor.

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That last bit is way important. All prospective university students interested in drinking know where to go – Cal State Chico, UWV, University of Georgia, University of Texas, almost anywhere in Wisconsin – to fit in. It’s like – who doesn’t know that Key West is a better place to drink yourself silly than Salt Lake City? And just as Key West’s business model – the thing it does to attract tourist dollars – involves the provision of alcohol every five steps or so down Duval Street, so central to UWV’s business model – the thing it does to attract applicants – is the provision of alcohol five steps off campus in every direction. Many of its most high-profile traditions (Weiss cites couch burning and rioting) are about alcohol.

You expect eighteen year olds who may have chosen WVU because the joint is gin-soaked not to drink gin once they get there?

You expect UWV to change its business model?

As Weiss points out, it’s not just a business model. It’s a way of life.

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Update: DRC, a reader, updates UD on the student. He has died.

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Don’t forget: The president of West Virginia University is Gordon Gee.

Yes, yes, you’re right – as UD readers constantly point out, one day it’s the University of Georgia, another day Penn State, another day Southern Methodist, and yet another day Alabama State… So many of this country’s universities are in various high-profile aspects disgusting that no one university wears the crown for long.

But. But – If UD were asked which university, not only in its sports but in its academic component most consistently struck her as disgusting, I think she’d have to say, on balance, and on reflection, and on reading today’s story about Miami’s deeply loved and curiously successful baseball coach Lazaro Collazo (You can still find Miami heavily breathing upon its beloved here. Why take down the page? Taking down pages of disgraced UM people would threaten the sports budget.), that it’s Charles Nemeroff’s and Nevin Shapiro’s University of Miami.

“When you’re talking about PEDs in the black market, we’re talking about some clown in his basement, with a bucket and a burner, and a very dangerously limited knowledge of chemistry… And these chemicals were going in our children’s bodies.”

Yes, the University of Miami’s finest was for years allegedly peddling and administering performance enhancing drugs to the kiddies. Drugs made, as the DEA agent I just quoted notes, according to the highest standards.

See, that’s why UM gets scuzziest. It’s not just about money. It’s about hiring and sanctifying people like Collazo.

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Ugh. You want the underbelly? You really want the underbelly? Okay. You asked for it. Welcome to the University of Miami.

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Update: Ooh. They took down the page!

And, you know, if sports factories can’t “connect with students when they’re on campus — when they’re a walk away from going to one of the best football games in the country every Saturday, for free — how are they going to be able to do that when these kids are in their 30s and 40s and 50s and they become the next generation of donors and boosters …?”

Yeah, bummer, and it keeps the AD and the coach up at night so you’re going to have to increase their salaries by a million dollars a year because this is like a whole new thing they didn’t sign up for. Who knew that teams mainly composed of fake students and thugs playing in an enormous half empty stadium whose shrieking Adzillatron cannot be escaped might fail to attract fans? Don’t university students enjoy sitting around endlessly while waiting for the ads on the television stations airing the game to finish? Oh, but while they wait they can watch their very own endless ads on the inescapable Adzillatron, featuring some local fuckhead selling mattresses! Where do I sign up?

Why don’t students enjoy being associated with prisons? Doesn’t that add to the wonderful energy of game day? What is wrong with these people?

Here’s a good formulation of the problem:

This is a typical problem around the country. College demographics are changing and nowhere is that more clear that at the University of Georgia. The student body is approaching 65% women and 35% men. Higher admission standards coupled with more prestigious academic programs result in fewer legacy students. The typical Georgia student doesn’t show up for a basketball game.

The question, then, is how to reverse these trends.