A University of North Alabama student reminds us where our priorities truly lie.

The Onion, on the NRA, last May.

Because they (theoretically) serve a charitable educational mission with their respective schools, college athletic departments … are considered nonprofits — a major reason the NCAA clings to the outdated, immoral concept of amateurism, and that big-time football coaches such as Texas’s Mack Brown earn $5 million-plus per season. (When you don’t pay the workforce because you’re technically not a business, all that television money has to go somewhere.) Postseason bowl games enjoy the same hands-off treatment from the IRS, with predictable results: Sugar Bowl CEO Paul Hoolahan earns $645,000 in total yearly compensation; Outback Bowl — Outback Bowl! — CEO Jim McVay eared $808,000 in 2009; former Fiesta Bowl CEO John Junker collected a $592,000 annual salary before the fallout from a scandal involving a $33,188 self-celebrating birthday party, a $95,000 round of golf with Jack Nicklaus and $1,200 strip club visits on the company’s (tax-deductible!) tab led to his firing.

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UD thanks Daniel.

UD’s friend Roy Poses at Health Care Renewal takes a look at Russell Portenoy, a professor at Yeshiva.

In the last few decades, Portenoy has been busy making the world safe for opioids, insisting that millions of Americans can take them with little to no risk of addiction. He has also been enriching himself through consulting and speaking for pain pill manufacturers.

Portenoy isn’t alone. Here’s another advocate:

[In 1998, one doctor] said he understood that a patient would simply ‘go to sleep’ before stopping breathing. While asleep, he said, the patient ‘can’t take a dangerous dose. It sounds scary, but as far as I know, nobody anywhere is getting burned by doing it this way.’

This is the functional equivalent of John Willke on rape.

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Plenty of academic doctors continue to exploit the legitimacy their academic positions give them to shill for pain pill pharma, but what’s intriguing here is that Portenoy now expresses some regrets:

‘I gave innumerable lectures in the late 1980s and ’90s about addiction that weren’t true,’ Dr. Portenoy said in a 2010 videotaped interview with a fellow doctor.

Not just not true. They helped create the stupendous pain pill addiction epidemic in this country.

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It seems obvious that we should, as Roy says, be skeptical of “people paid by narcotics manufacturers advocating increased use of these drugs, no matter how distinguished, scholarly, or influential these people appear to be.” But in the equally destructive matter of anti-psychotics for children, Joseph Biederman, who continues on the Harvard faculty, seems to have met with no skepticism at all – at least none that could stop him as he almost singlehandedly caused a 40-fold increase in the use of these dangerous drugs.

Neither of these activities has anything to do with going to football games.

U Mass drinkers long ago abandoned the middle man, if you will, and went directly at the alcohol poisoning.

It’s logical. Drinking in a stadium is expensive. Your team will probably lose, and alcohol is already a depressant. Stadiums have no cars to tip.

So why did anyone think U Mass students would haul ass across the state and attend their school’s football games?

Many U Mass alumni (who live closer to the stadium) have exactly the same profile as the students they used to be. Why would they go?

Here are two articles rehearsing these well-known facts and wondering why the taxpayers of Massachusetts let the people who run U Mass do such stupid, stupid things.

But what’s wonderful about these articles is that they make the connection between the new U Mass law school and the stadium fiasco.

UMass spending millions on an unprofitable and pricey venture is nothing new. The launch of the UMass law school a couple of years ago harkens [SOS alert: Harkens is awkward. Actually, it’s wrong. Harken is a verb meaning pay attention. Perhaps the writer had the idiom “harks back to” in mind – the law school puts one in mind of the football fiasco. I’d simply say demonstrates.] the same fiscal irresponsibility. With an overabundance of lawyer[s] graduating law school facing a historically anemic job market for attorneys, the idea was a waste of resources.

(The writer doesn’t even mention that the first president of the new law school was fired for credit card misuse.)

It’s important to grasp the synergy here, as these writers do. Taxachusetts indeed.

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UD thanks Andre.

… a patron saint of the armed survivalists.

I had no idea she was one.

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Next up: Brace yourself for the drug story. If this story doesn’t have a drug angle, I’ll be very surprised.

Of course I’m talking about prescription drugs. I’m going to guess that toxicology reports will show both mother and son coked to the gills with mood-altering meds.

She had “at least a dozen” firearms [in her house] — mainly larger rifles,” [a friend of the shooter’s mother] said. He said [he] didn’t know anything about the pistols [also in the shooter’s possession].

… “Nancy was a responsible gun owner,” the friend said.

At least a dozen rifles in your house, all of them accessible to your insane twenty-year-old son. The very model of responsibility.

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Another responsible gun owner, this one harassed by the police.

The lone survivor of her class tricked the gunman by playing dead, the girl’s pastor told ABC News, before running out of the school covered in the blood of her classmates.

“She ran out of the school building covered from head to toe with blood…”

Pretending to be dead in the slaughterhouse of our latest massacre … Lifting yourself from the bloody pile and going home..

As I’ve said before, this is Babi Yar. “[Lanza] moved to a classroom where he systematically shot all those inside – 14 children whom the Courant reported were huddled and clutching each other in terror …” This is piles of bleeding bodies among which has now emerged our own Dina Pronicheva, the woman who survived Babi Yar in the same way — by playing dead.

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But America, with its massive, easily gotten arsenal of top of the line people-killers, has made Babi Yars much easier. One skinny little kid can butcher a village in seconds.

Adam Lanza had hundreds of rounds and used multiple high capacity magazines when he went on a rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School, killing 20 first graders and six adults, Connecticut State Police said today.

After shooting at victims in two classrooms and a hallway with a high-powered semi-automatic rifle, he put a bullet into his own head with a handgun.

Quick and easy. I trust our technicians are working on yet quicker, more powerful models.

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… tweeting.

A shared fascination.

After fatally shooting his mother in the face, investigators say [Adam Lanza] took three of his mother’s legally-owned weapons that he used in the assault, including a Glock, a SIG Sauer, and a .223-caliber Bushmaster rifle. In addition to those three weapons, cops also recovered a .45-caliber Henry repeating rifle, a .22-caliber Marlin rifle, and a .30-caliber Enfield rifle…

… According to the Post, Nancy Lanza was a gun enthusiast who often took her son shooting with her. “She’d take them to the range a lot … Nancy was an enthusiast — so much so that she wanted to pass it on to her kids,” said her former landscaper and “occasional drinking buddy” Dan Holmes. “She took her two sons to the gun ranges quite a bit to practice their aim. She was a really great shot from what she told me. Whenever I finished work and went inside to chit chat, she spoke often about her fascination with firearms. Nancy had an extensive gun collection and she was really quite proud of it.”

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Why would she have three powerful guns in the house when she knew her son was so deeply disturbed?

It sounds as though she had quite a lot more than three.

And “powerful” doesn’t say it. You use these guns when you’re pinned down in Helmand Province.

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It defies logic … that an average citizen with a gun is going to disarm a crazed killer.

All those guns all over the house, and herself a very good shot. Yet when it came to it, Nancy Lanza was unable to defend herself from one of the most notorious mass murderers in American history stepping up to shoot her face off.

But then, she’d devoted herself to training and arming him.

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“She prepared for the worst,” [a relative of Lanza’s] told [a] newspaper. “I didn’t know that they [the guns] would be used on her.”

Yes. She was prepared for a firefight in Kunar Province.

As for this woman not knowing the guns would be used on her relative – try reading some statistics.

Did it occur to you – or anyone in the family – that a paranoid family member living alone in a hidden-from-the-road, closed-off house, with an insane twenty-year-old and a military arsenal in it, might be something to keep your eye on?

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Prepare for Nancy Lanza to become a patron saint of the armed survivalists.

While he appeared a grandfatherly academic, Dr. [Sidney] Gilman, 80, was living a parallel life, one in which he regularly advised a wide network of Wall Street traders through a professional matchmaking system. Those relationships afforded him payments of $100,000 or more a year — on top of his $258,000 pay from the University of Michigan — and travels with limousines, luxury hotels and private jets. … Dr. Gilman made a sharp shift in his late 60s, from a life dedicated to academic research to one in which he accumulated a growing list of financial firms willing to pay him $1,000 an hour for his medical expertise, while he was overseeing drug trials for various pharmaceutical makers. … Colleagues now say Dr. Gilman’s story is a reminder of the corrupting influence of money. The University of Michigan, where he was a professor for decades, has erased any trace of him on its Web sites, and is now reviewing its consulting policy for employees, a spokesman said.

[Gilman] has been ostracized by the university, and the consequences are broader still as a debate over the propriety of professors’ receiving payments from financial firms has been rekindled.

“What is the argument for sanctioning your full-time faculty, using your brand name, to advise the financial sector?” said Dr. Garret A. FitzGerald, a cardiovascular researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, who has been outspoken about conflicts of interest. “What’s the public good there?”

Oh pish posh. What’s the public good of Michigan’s president, Mary Sue Coleman, collecting huge sums from corporate boards for doing little other than attending meetings that cut into the time she can devote to the university? Was she distracted by her corporate boarding when she insisted on the catastrophic hiring of Rich Rodriguez?

Colleagues can nod their heads sagely about the corrupting influence of money, but really. When the president of Gilman’s university is as subject to greed as Goldman Sachs executive compensation rubber-stamper Ruth Simmons was, why should Gilman have felt uneasy about his own acquisitiveness?

LOL. Even their public relations firm has had it with the new Texas cancer research agency! It’s like You paid us to handle  this much shit, but your agency has already produced THIS much shit, so we’re outta here.

Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, its billions in dollars funded by taxpayers, has only been around a couple of years, and already its corruption stinks to high heaven. The latest: A criminal probe of the organization.

Hill and Knowlton should have seen it coming. This is Texas! You don’t mess with Texans making money!

CPRIT: Where our profit margin, and your metastasis, meet.

… places like Texas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and of course Montana, where the University of Montana’s football team seems to have a wee rape problem.

The ongoing controversy began in late 2010 when several sexual assault allegations, including two women who said they were drugged and gang raped by members of the football team, spurred a local investigation of the school. Last month, University President Royce Engstrom fired the football team’s head coach and athletic director. One member of the team, Beau Donaldson, was charged with rape and has pleaded not guilty.

It’s so bad, the feds have come in to investigate; and you know how much they appreciate the federal government in those parts. They don’t need some guy from Washington to tell them how to handle the fact that players on their football team – including the quarterback – keep getting accused of rape. But the Justice Department points out that it’s not “the number of allegations,” but precisely “the response” on the part of the university that has drawn its attention. When you’ve got so many people charging rape, perhaps something’s wrong internally. Perhaps your school doesn’t take rape seriously enough.

Anyway, I’m just moseying toward my main point here, about the coverage of another problem at UM – a massive budget deficit.

The University of Montana is facing budget cuts across campus because of a significant drop in enrollment, and most departments are being asked to help shore up a $5.7 million deficit.

726 fewer students than last year have enrolled this year, and plenty of people think it has something to do with all the bad publicity. Parents might not, for instance, want their kids to go to a school which seems to be the main reason Missoula is called the The Rape Capital of America.

That deficit isn’t just about the students who aren’t there to pay tuition. Ask Penn State how much money athletic scandals cost.

So… What’s UM’s athletic department doing to help out with the deficit it almost certainly had a great deal to do with creating?

A local reporter, who breathes not a word of the rape scandal, explains:

Athletic director Kent Haslam told us that his department will curtail some maintenance on facilities to help with the cost-cutting, saving about $150,000.

They’re on the case!

Pushed by primal instincts. Such a strange way of being for a university. You’d think even a wretched university would at the very least understand its identity in terms of the civilizing of primal instincts. NASCAR – that’s primal instincts. But a university? A university allows itself to be “overshadowed” by the “unassailable fortress” of football?

What are those instincts? Can we be precise about the nature of the basic instinctual energies that Americans think belong on college campuses? That they think are the center of campuses, so that coaches get statues and millions of dollars and pretty much unsupervised power?

Here’s one paean to big-time university sports. And here’s an excerpt from it.

If you want your alumni to give, you first have to make them fall in love with your school. This is not about having better chemistry programs or more faculty with higher name recognition than the school up the road. It is not about scoring higher on world indices of university quality. It is about competition, drama, intensity, about hope and fear, collective celebrations or collective disasters, seared into young and impressionable hearts where they will never be forgotten — and where they will be annually renewed as each sport in its season produces new highs and lows, new hopes and fears.

Note the Wide World of Sports script: competition, drama, intensity, hope, fear… But these aren’t really primal, are they? Fear – maybe fear’s primal. But hope? Drama?

What is the primal instinct that doesn’t appear on this list?

Here’s what we say to athletes from a very young age: Here’s a scholarship for excelling at a violent game, here’s fame for excelling at a violent game, here’s a chance at millions for excelling at a violent game. We reward young, immature people for excelling at a violent game and then, when that violence crosses over the constantly moving line of what’s socially accepted, we all jump back and gasp in faux horror like total phonies and call for drastic action.

Oh right! This guy forgot… violence! He overlooked all the ancillary sports stuff on campus – hazing that kills, players killing each other with guns, coaches beating up players… He overlooked the fact that people like football because it’s incredibly violent.

Rich Cohen, in the New Republic, talks about “the cascade of injuries that can make ESPN resemble the surgery channel.” Now that’s primal, baby! Watching men get all torn up and concussed on the field!

Just the thing for the university.

Western Kentucky University basks in the academic splendor of the most important person on campus, Coach Bobby Petrino.

Petrino may well be the least ethically whole man in the, ahem, ethically whole-deprived world of Division I collegiate sports… Western Kentucky, a school with mediocre athletics and apparently, sub-mediocre standards, has turned to a person who lied to his last employer about the nature of an accident involving the mistress he allegedly hired to a university position she was unqualified to hold. Please, if you must, take a second to read that again. And again. And again.

Bobby Petrino, holder of a Ph.D. in the Deceptive Arts (he also ditched the University of Louisville shortly after signing a long-term extension in 2007, and quit as coach of the Atlanta Falcons 13 game into his first season later that year. He informed his players via a note atop their lockers), will be the one charged with teaching the 17- and 18-year-old boys who decide to come to Bowling Green about not merely football, but life. He will be their guide. Their compass. Their role model.

UD’s heart goes out to Robert Dietel. Though here’s hoping that in the years since he tried to stop WKU from turning into a sewer he’s found a respectable place to work.