The degradation of being president of hopeless-loser New Mexico State University.
… that Les UDs watched the other night, UD set about looking for ways to visualize American university football. She set about looking for visual equivalents of a situation that everyone realizes is totally, totally nuts.
The BBC thing got her thinking, because it represented a clever solution to an obvious problem: How do you make visually compelling a massive and impossible to grasp abstraction (infinity)? How do you make visually compelling a bunch of unkempt mathematicians and physicists droning about a massive abstraction?
The producers solved the problem by doing things like putting one of the mathematicians on a trampoline and filming him bouncing up and down while his voice-over droned.
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True, bouncing on a trampoline has nothing to do with infinity, but it was something to watch while the mathematician droned.
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Everyone talks about the sickening farce of university football, and there are always new books coming out chock-full of shocking language about the farce… And there are routine visuals of players’ and coaches’ mugshots and their long days in court… routine visuals of the brand-new cost-overrun stadium on game day with 10,000 rather than 60,000 fans in it (two or three thousand at the very end of the shut-out)… routine viral YouTubes of the interview with the coach who earns five million dollars a year by telling the national press to fuck itself. Yes, there are these, and many things like these.
Yet all are small separate clips that don’t capture in a meaningful, artful, way the full reality of university football — neither the way it impoverishes and degrades intellectual institutions, nor the way campus officials from the president on down smilingly and excitedly assure us that things are great, or they will be great in a minute.
So UD looked for an extended, precise, visual evocation of the situation of university football in America.
As she thought about it, she remembered a favorite film of her mother’s – Bread and Chocolate – which featured a scene of Italian guest workers in Switzerland living in a chicken coop.
What my mother loved about the scene was the smiling, proud, and excited way the covered-with-feathers proprietor of this shelter welcomed the film’s hero to it.
You don’t need to understand Italian to understand 1:17:00 to 1:25:00 in this film. These few minutes from this film capture the proud coach welcoming you to his excellent university, where football is, as everyone says, the “front porch” of the institution. Are things less than totally ideal? Less than perfect according to some impossible standard? But of course!
But look at the beautiful campus big-time football has given us! What better proof of the way football unites us all in school pride! How lucky we are to live in this sports paradise.
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The analogy falls short in this way: The guest worker paid for his dwelling by working on the chicken farm. All of us, one way or another, pay real money, through the nose, to maintain America’s system of university football.
… has done it again.
Brainless, amusing, and bizarre, like some beyond-woebegone character in Evelyn Waugh, FSU (follow its tales-of-the-weird history by typing FSU into my search engine) has now generated a healthy trade in t-shirts depicting its quarterback as Jesus Christ.
Look for the crucifixion scene t-shirt once the NCAA gets wind of this.
… about MOOCs.
My MOOC on poetry, by the way, now has 3,764 students. Feel free to give it a whirl.
Oh, by the applicant. The writing sample is supposed to be written by the applicant.…
All four [Vanderbilt University football players] await trial on Oct. 16 and are free on bond. [Jaborian] McKenzie even transferred to Alcorn State University in Mississippi and played in the team’s season opener. However, the university president said he was removed from the team Thursday night and the school had made a mistake allowing him on.
Well excuuuuuuuuse me!
… is the headline of UD‘s latest reporting for the Garrett Park Bugle, her hometown newspaper in Maryland.
… but its students can.
The governor of Louisiana thought he’d figured out how to rid the state of Southern University, a total money-pit bearing no resemblance to a university. He was going to merge it with a better university. But that doesn’t seem to be happening.
In 2001, Southern had a 5% graduation rate. That rate is now 8%.
As the governor tries to do something about this scandal, Southern devolves into farce, the latest act of which involves a fired professor who just kept teaching and being paid because no one noticed he was still there.
He was fired as part of an emergency two years ago, when
enrollment declines and state budget cuts prompted Southern to declare a financial emergency, called exigency — in this case, a 20-month process that allowed the university leeway to cut academic programs and lay off tenured faculty.
Those enrollment declines are going to be the only thing that will eventually be able to shut Southern down. It’s fun to be in the audience for the last acts of a farce, but no one wants to be onstage. When no one goes to your school, you have to stop existing.
Or do you? Maybe Southern can figure out a way to keep going. Maybe administrators can designate one another professors and set up classes for themselves.
Governor Vaginal Probe, Penn State — more and more people and institutions are eager to see up the old canal… But aside from the fact that initiatives of this sort prompt equity questions, there’s the matter of privacy. Mandated monthly bouncy-wouncy updates didn’t sit well with women on the Penn State faculty, who felt that whether they wanted their partners’ sperm to squiggle eggward unimpeded was their own business.
In response to complaints, Penn State has opted for the withdrawal method and will not after all impose a financial penalty on canal proprietors. But the university points out that it’s got to find some way to deal with exploding health care costs…
Well but listen. If Penn State had just kept an eye on Jerry Sandusky – a man projected to cost the university almost as much as its health care expenses for one year (both come in at around two hundred million) – it wouldn’t be so desperate.
.. and busy all night celebrating my kid’s
… 23rd birthday.
Am now too tired to post.
See you first thing in the morning.
197
Reported instances of players on BCS teams who were arrested in 2012 — an average of 16 per month. The SEC led all conferences in arrests with 42, followed by the Big 12 with 37. Fewer than a quarter of the 197 arrests resulted in players being kicked off their teams. Only one player was arrested more than once and wasn’t dismissed from his team or suspended for at least a game. Florida State running back James Wilder Jr. Wilder has been arrested three times, and has yet to miss a game. He has played in both Florida State games this season.
Here’s the photo I want you to have in mind as you read the following summary of the Scott Eaton story at Northern Kentucky University. I want you to see how dressed for success the guy is, how he’s doing the Number One thing that Joe Paterno’s statue does (did), how next to him on a presentation board there’s the slogan BUILDING WINNERS FOR LIFE rather than, say, STEALING FROM YOUR SCHOOL AND FUCKING EVERY FEMALE IN SIGHT. I want you to think about how many American universities, as they sport up, fervently embrace and abundantly pay and abundantly esteem douchebags like Scott Eaton.
Smiling sweet-smelling Scott Eaton who came to pathetic NKU knowing he couldn’t do anything for it but that it could do plenty for him, and immediately began his sex and money extravaganza.
He did it for years, too, and that’s onaccounta no one cared, no one understood, some people were being cut in on the deal, some people were too scared to speak up about The Athletic Director, etc.
Dumb, pathetic, desperate schools like Northern Kentucky University are sitting ducks, and their desperate athletic programs are set up to attract people like Scott Eaton, who know losers for life when they see them.
As we speak, a shooter (or shooters) at the Washington Navy Yard has killed or wounded several people, some of whom have been transported to GW Hospital. UD doesn’t teach today, but she can imagine the scene outside the hospital, with police, reporters, families, onlookers, etc. And this is already an extremely busy Washington intersection, with the metro, law offices, and GW medical school buildings immediately adjacent.
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UD hadn’t planned on posting about the firing of GW’s business school dean, but the story has gone from strange to bizarre to bizzzzzaro in the last few days, so here goes.
Handsome young hotshot Douglas Guthrie is hired away from NYU three years back to lead GW’s way-ambitious b-school (it not long ago got an amazing new building, plus a big ol’ budget…). Guthrie overspends his budget rather shockingly and is for this reason (or so the official story goes) fired.
It’s very bad news for the b-school, which has lately seen lots of administrative turnover and disappointing national rankings.
It gradually becomes apparent that Guthrie has a story to tell, and he has really spilled it to The Hatchet, the school newspaper. The suggestion in the story (partly coming from Guthrie, partly from others) is that the overspend was a cover story, the real deal being charges against Guthrie of “making illegal financial deals in China and having sex with colleagues.” These charges apparently came from the chair of the Faculty Senate executive committee, and Guthrie seems to be claiming that it was his lawyer’s letter to the university, discussing the possibility of a slander lawsuit, that really prompted his firing.
As to whether Guthrie might have tried to profit personally from his overseas university work … who knows? There’s plenty of precedent for it, with Harvard’s Andrei Shleifer (his adventures in Russia cost the university $31 million in penalties) the most notorious case. But the explosive charge in the GW newspaper piece is this one: The executive committee chair apparently also charged that
Guthrie had been sharing profits with [university provost Steven] Lerman and other top administrators, according to [another faculty member’s] complaint.
Yikes.