September 24th, 2013
Andrew Sullivan…

… features Karol Edward Soltan on moderation.

September 24th, 2013
“[I]f donating your money to absurdly rich universities becomes socially unacceptable…”

He can dream, can’t he?

September 24th, 2013
Well, it’s fall, and the too-exciting, much-anticipated university football season…

… is upon us, which is why, you might notice, UD‘s been covering one story after another about spectacular turnouts at these all-important early games. Georgia State University, for instance, has 32,000 students.

A few minutes before the start of the game, there were less than 70. Overall, I would estimate less than 300 showed up.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Fewer than, not less than.

But that’s but a trifle here.

September 24th, 2013
It sounds like something they’d rig up at Gitmo…

… but it’s just the latest effort on the part of New Mexico State University to get someone to sit through one of their football games.

[U]niversity President Garrey Carruthers and others have raised money to counter the often dismal student attendance at Aggies (0-4) games.

Among the prizes are $2,000, $250 and a VIP parking pass.

The winner of the $2,000 will be selected from all main campus NMSU students who are taking at least one credit at the school. If the student is there during the fourth quarter, he or she will collect the reward. If not, the prize money will be saved for the next game.

The Aggies have lost 15 straight games and have been beaten by a combined 201-62 this season.

Can you collect if you’re just, like, there? Do you have to be conscious?

September 24th, 2013
‘Sweeee-eeeee-eeeet forgiveness!’

Sang Bonnie Raitt – one of my favorite songs back when… Can’t find it on YouTube, but believe me it was sweet…

Okay, so best I can do is Joe Cocker…

Yes, forgiveness of the $19 million worth of loans it not long ago got from the university sure would be sweet, says scandal-ridden University of Colorado’s latest athletic director to its board of regents…

The AD himself is barely getting by at $700,000 a year plus up to $8.5 million in bonuses but has magnanimously kicked in some of that money (won’t say how much) to his program’s endowment… For which oh God thank you Mr Athletic Director! You are our hero! It’s incredibly selfless of you to take a bit of the money Colorado gave you when it gave you the highest administrative salary in the history of the institution and give it back! Lord Bountiful!

Still, that pesky nineteen mill remains to be paid back. And things don’t look good revenue-wise.

I’m sure the regents can figure this one out. Jack up tuition like mad so that the athletics department doesn’t have to pay its debt to the school.

September 23rd, 2013
The Making of a Tea-Partier

You can thank Ted Cruz here, for standing up against the country’s elites.

You can read about his populism here.

As a law student at Harvard, [Senator Ted Cruz] refused to study with anyone who hadn’t been an undergrad at Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. Says Damon Watson, one of Cruz’s law-school roommates: “He said he didn’t want anybody from ‘minor Ivies’ like Penn or Brown.”

September 23rd, 2013
“Florida Atlantic President Mary Jane Saunders is not concerned about lack of attendance when FAU’s new football stadium opens Oct. 15. ‘Everybody is going to come to these games,’ Saunders said last week during the ceremonial first lighting event at the $70 million stadium on the north end of campus. ‘You go to one game and you are going to want to be part of the whole thing.'”

That was August 2011. Saunders, after an error-studded term of just three years, is gone and the new stadium (FAU’s a public university; don’t Florida taxpayers care about anything?) is a morgue.

So Saunders was just off by a few letters: Instead of everybody coming to the games, it’s nobody.

September 23rd, 2013
‘Elsewhere, he spells out the ethos of success on the field: “Decide what you’re going to do and do it violently.”’

Oh no, no. Football’s not about violence. It wouldn’t be on university campuses if it were about violence.

September 23rd, 2013
“The couple traveled the globe together to work on humanitarian causes.”

A beautiful life massacred. In two weeks their first child would have been born.

Elif Yavuz, 33, was born in Turkey, raised in the Netherlands, and educated here in the United States, at Harvard. Her partner was from Tasmania but like her a totally global citizen.

As an HSPH doctoral student [in the Department of Global Health and Population], Elif completed her dissertation research on malaria in eastern Africa,” [Harvard School of Public Health Dean Julio] Frenk wrote. “[She] had lived and worked abroad for many years, both in Africa and in Asia. She was currently working with the Applied Analytics Team at the Clinton Health Access Initiative [a global organization based in Boston] and preparing her thesis for publication.”

September 23rd, 2013
“Games like this will be going away soon.”

Say it ain’t so! Two absolutely filthy university football programs meet on the field! Homicidal Hazers v. Tressel’s Prayer Group! C’mon! Everything about this match-up was exciting and fun. The score says a lot of it: 76 – 0, with Tressel’s disciples edging out FAMU’s merry band…

FAMU’s actual band, the famous one that kills its musicians, wasn’t there, despite everyone having been real excited about a match-up between Ohio State’s musicians and FAMU’s during half-time…

[A] hazing death in the FAMU band around the time the OSU contract was signed meant the band is just getting back on its feet now.

Just getting back on its feet… Sweet way to put it… The band’s long-ignored violent rituals finally ended up killing someone… But it’s getting back on its feet again, struggling up like little Colin in A Secret Garden! It’s not that FAMU’s embarrassed that when its bloody band takes the field Ohio fans will add insult to shutout by chanting things, as fans are wont to do…

*****************************

Oh, and the whole thing is even prettier than that.

The Florida A&M athletic department is digging out of a $6 million deficit. [And it] is looking for its 10th athletic director in the past 11 years.

******************************

If it’s true that spectacles of this quality are going away, UD is afraid she might not be renewing her decades-long season tickets to such riveting autumnal all-American delights, these front porches of our universities, where what’s best about our academic institutions is broadcast all over the country and to the world.

But you know what? UD‘s been covering American university football for years, and she is absolutely – absolutely – certain that the guy in her headline, the guy trying to scare her, is wrong.

September 22nd, 2013
Another massive majority of European voters…

… supports a burqa ban. This time it’s the Swiss, in the canton of Ticino.

Opposition to the burqa has been massive over several European countries. Defenders of this full-body shroud specifically designed for little girls and women are in the embarrassing position of having to declare huge swathes of the population of Europe bigots.

Indeed confusion at the ways of democracy reigns among burqa defenders. One defender is baffled by what she calls an “unlikely alliance of rightwing politicians and feminists.”

It’s unlikelier than that. Not just feminists and rightwing politicians but anti-feminists and leftwing politicians seem united in their rejection of outrageous gender oppression in their midst.

September 22nd, 2013
“After his book was withdrawn he contacted me at the university and tried to justify his plagiarism. He claimed to hold my work ‘in high regard’ and said his use of use of my poems had been ‘as a framework against which to build my own poem’. I don’t see any point in speculating as to why he should think it was okay to take six of my poems, make minor alterations, and then try to pass them off as his own work. His attitude to writing is very different from that of any of the writers I know, published or not.”

People don’t seem very happy to find out they’ve been plagiarized. They don’t seem very flattered. They don’t seem very receptive to their plagiarists telling them it was all an act of love.

Matthew Welton, for instance – a British poet who teaches at the University of Nottingham – seems to have found it downright sneaky that serial plagiarist C.J. Allen altered Welton’s poems just enough to avoid easy detection. Indeed only Welton himself, on buying a collection of Allen’s poems after one of Allen’s poetry readings, recognized the extensive lifting.

This long article parses the difference between an homage to/being inspired by/doing a free translation of a cited work/etc. and being a lazy motherfucker who takes someone else’s artwork and publishes it as one’s own. The author quotes a friend:

‘There’s a world of difference between Prokofiev formally basing the 2nd movement of his 2nd symphony on the 2nd movement of Beethoven’s Op.111, and Graham Nunn flattening out his notebook alongside a book by Helen Dunmore’.

Yes – it’s not really subtle, is it?

And speaking of subtle: UD has zero interest in the psychological excuses offered by plagiarists when they’ve been found out and when their first line of defense (homage, pastiche, that shit) fails. They’ve always been insecure; when their mother died it really did a number on them…

When the psycho line also fails to generate sympathy, plagiarists move to Position Three, drug and alcohol abuse. I did it because I’m a desperate mess. How did I manage to conduct a grueling book tour, run university seminars, give poetry readings, and produce a new plagiarized book while so debilitated by drugs? I don’t know, but…

(Position Four)…

… I’m happy I’ve been found out! I plagiarized so blatantly in order to be found out! I craved being brought low enough, being hollowed out thoroughly enough, to find my way back to my lost faith. I have recently joined a Catholic parish, spent hours in a confessional box, and experienced forgiveness. I will share my rebirth in my next book.

September 22nd, 2013
A Wintry Shade of Hazing

Cornell, you’re as cold as ice. Simply because your lacrosse players force alcohol down freshmen, you shutter the team! Lacrosse, hazing, and alcohol have always gone together – ask George Huguely – and any university that expects a winning team without bonding rituals rooted in proud histories has another thing coming.

September 22nd, 2013
Poet, Professor, Activist…

Kofi Awoonor was killed in the terrorist attack in Kenya.

September 22nd, 2013
“As part of the push to make its 3-year-old [football] stadium a little more fan friendly, FAU is turning the southeast portion into an area called The Cove, complete with inflatable swimming pools and beach chairs.”

Florida Atlantic University’s desperation to get people to come to its new stadium grows. As a local columnist pointed out during the prison-naming fiasco, “[FAU] built a $70 million facility that’s nearly empty year-round, even during home football games.”

Specifics? You’re looking at four thousand people scattered around 30,000 seats. And remember how it goes: Four thousand show up… Game doesn’t look promising after a half hour or so… Two thousand begin leaving… The two thousand left stay because they’re too drunk to walk…

Better keep the stadium swimming pools shallow, or you’ll drown your students… Remember Chico State!

It all adds up to a massive police state – nanny state – presence at the games. Two hundred armed police glare at two thousand drunk and despondent (team lost; alcohol’s a depressant) students furiously slashing at the water in their baby pools…

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