The university is reviewing footage of students throwing trash at people.
All’s fair in love and Holy War.
Throwing trash at the ref doesn’t really make it, though, does it? Look at the footage. Bunch of white streamers. Does nothing.
Wait til the state mandates carrying your gun to sporting events. Now you’re talking.
The world’s most diplomatic police spokesperson turns his attention to the woman at the University of Wisconsin who got wasted and then waited until very late at night to cross a busy street while texting.
Hong Kong magnate Li Ka-shing said he will donate $130 million to Israel’s leading engineering university, the Technion, to help establish a joint academic venture with a university in China’s Guangdong Province.
Last September, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel courageously broke ranks with her predecessors and met with the Dalai Lama. China predictably objected – soon joined by Merkel’s own vice chancellor and foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who accused her of trying to “showcase” human rights.
Now Steinmeier has one-upped himself, refusing to meet with the Dalai Lama while the Tibetan spiritual leader was on a five-day visit to Germany …
Germany’s centre-left parliamentary opposition leader Frank-Walter Steinmeier denied allegations Sunday that he plagiarised parts of his PhD thesis after similar charges have claimed several political scalps in recent years. … [E]conomics professor Uwe Kamenz of Muenster in North Rhine-Westphalia had said he found “extensive” evidence of plagiarism in Steinmeier’s 1991 law thesis.
OSU can see the trend as well as anyone else. When you’ve given everything your university has to football, it’s pretty important that people go to the games.
But people aren’t going to the games.
Which makes you, a university, a school, really, rather than a playing field, look pretty fucking stupid.
What to do?
Current stop-gap measures are incentive-based (see post below): Give students who stay in the stands two thousand dollars. If students promise to stay at least until halftime give them free drinks, free burgers, a stuffed toy, Legos.
But people tend to resent, after awhile, being infantilized. They tend to catch on to what’s happening.
This is where the Ambush vehicle comes in. The moment students start pouring out of a stupid pointless game, just roll that baby to the middle of the field and slowly, slowly, ever so slowly, revolve her turret… Give fans a good view of the big guy (one of the players?) up there on her “roof-mounted shielded traversing gun turret able to fit a 7.62 mm medium or 12.7mm heavy class machine gun.” They’ll get the message without your having to fire one shot!
Wussy little Berkeley ain’t biting yet.
Last year, when University of California-Berkeley campus police tried to buy an 8-ton armored truck, university officials canceled the order, saying such a vehicle was “not the best choice for a university setting.”
But give it time. You know how guys are when it comes to having the best toys.
Students don’t go to football games; or they go and then leave after twenty minutes. Some universities burger and booze students to make them stay put; New Mexico State University pays them.
… ESPN host Keith Olbermann lambasted NMSU President Carruthers as the worst person in the sports world.
“In NCAA college football you can pay the coaches, you can pay the ADs, you can pay the announcers, yet you can’t pay the players, but now you can pay the fans too!” an outraged Olbermann told his ESPN audience. “New Mexico State University’s Garrey ‘We-will-bribe-you-to-sit-through-this-garbage’ Carruthers. Today’s worst person in the sports world.”
What glorious things our universities have turned into.
Readers who have followed my coverage of hapless Central Michigan University will be unsurprised by this headline in the school’s newspaper:
OTHER STATE UNIVERSITIES ARE FLOURISHING; WHAT’S WRONG WITH US?
(My headline is from the article’s comment thread.)
It’s not just those huge athletic deficits – the product of years of all-American asininity about the glories of football… oh, here’s another post about the glories of CMU football… It’s also about a truly pathetic board of trustees… a pass-the-buck president… And a general no-one’s-home aspect to the place. Of course students are beginning to notice.
On the David Gilmour dust-up.
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But there’s an important line missing from the first paragraph: The piece should start with this quotation from a Don DeLillo novel:
“DON’T YOU REALIZE THAT AS LONG AS YOU HAVE TO SIT DOWN TO PEE, YOU’LL NEVER BE A DOMINANT FORCE IN THE WORLD?”
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My IHE post has now been corrected.
From a progressive British blog. We will see more and more European regions vote overwhelmingly against the burqa.
Backed by Arabian petrodollars, the Salafi movement has gained significant influence in [British] mosques, schools, Muslim organisations and communities. This has led to increased pressure on girls and women to cede to regressive patriarchy – from vigilante ”Muslim Patrols” enforcing dress codes on the streets of London, to gender segregated events at our universities, and a school in Tower Hamlets forcing girls young as 11 year old to wear the face veil.
This blog has followed gender segregation at British universities and will continue to do so as long as cowardice on the part of administrators allows it to continue. This blog will not follow the ongoing story of eleven-year-olds put into burqas because it simply hasn’t got the heart. I’ve got my own forms of cowardice, and one of them involves the inability to pay sustained attention to particularly gruesome instances of child abuse.
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UD thanks her sister for the link to the article.
… will appear in a few hours on her other campus, at Inside Higher Education. I’ll link to it as soon as it’s up.
“There’s nothing in there, quite honestly, that’s uniquely mine. I believe what the Bible says: There’s nothing new under the sun.”
… stand.
Type West Virginia University in my search engine for the full record.
This sort of feedback loop of ever-more-extreme political purity tests is a familiar enough phenomenon. First, you identify a demon, and spend a few years whipping up a hysterical frenzy over the threat it poses. You want to tie it to a few key words that you can repeat in a derogatory, contemptuous tone of voice, over and over, until the very signifier evokes such a feeling of loathing in your audience that anyone associated with it is contaminated. Let’s call it Thing X. Now, most people will think your goal here is to drum up a successful campaign against Thing X and against your opponents, who support it, but this is at most part of the mission. Thing X itself may or may not be terribly important, and your opponents are your opponents; there’s not much you can do about them. What is crucial here, though, is that once you’ve firmly established your followers’ revulsion towards Thing X, you can use it to annihilate your “allies”—also known as “rivals”—by accusing them of insufficient vigilance against Thing X.
As have a number of other Greek universities. All claim that they cannot operate under the new government mandate to fire huge chunks of administrative staff.
All say that cuts in administrative staff, including guards and archivists, have made it impossible to keep their doors open… Among the 12,500 civil servants already identified [by the government] for [removal] are administrative staff at universities working in libraries, laboratories, clinics and professorial offices. Announcing suspension of operations on Tuesday, the rector of the University of Athens, the country’s oldest higher education institution, said it was impossible for the university to operate without the 498 employees who have been stripped from its ranks.
UD suspects these places can indeed operate with skeletal staff, but they can’t begin to think of how. After all, things have always been done in a certain way:
[O]nly 295 of the 7,680 administrative staff employed in tertiary education since 1994 [has] been appointed on the basis of a meritocratic process, according to [one source]. “In one historic case a lifeguard was paid for years by Athens University of Economics and Business despite the pool in the student housing complex to which he had once been appointed having closed,” [a] newspaper reported.