As both two- and four-year colleges that depend on state funding seek new revenues to close budget gaps and keep their doors open, many have expanded into the realm of online-based distance-learning programs that offer students quick and often easy ways to earn credit hours that will transfer back to bigger schools. And with pressure mounting on college sports coaches to keep players academically eligible under tougher NCAA guidelines that can punish schools, more athletes are turning to such distance-learning programs to earn a quick grade that will keep them on the field.

At Western Oklahoma State College, a small community college two hours from Oklahoma City, online distance-learning programs offer three credit hours for just 10 days of coursework and a cheap price. The quick turnaround has made Western Oklahoma State and schools like it a popular “destination” for athletes needing a quick fix to stay eligible, as the Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

Last year those 10-day classes attracted 5,668 students. Many are adult learners and others looking to finish their degrees faster. But the market for athletes has proven particularly lucrative. Nearly half of the students in those classes play college sports, the college estimates.

The courses are especially popular with junior-college players looking to transfer to the big time. But elite research universities have also accepted their credits. Bobby Bowden, the now-retired Hall of Fame football coach at Florida State University, once put in a personal call to arrange for some of his players to take Western Oklahoma courses. Lately, Western Oklahoma credits have appeared on the transcripts of one of the most highly recruited quarterbacks in the country, basketball players from numerous NCAA tournament teams, and athletes in at least 11 NCAA Division I conferences.

Western Oklahoma State is an accredited school, meaning most four-year colleges and universities will accept credits earned in its programs. And though school officials stand by the rigor of its academic offerings, programs detailed by the Chronicle don’t always pass the smell test. One Humanities course, for instance, covers seven centuries (from the Renaissance to modern day) and the “art, culture, society, religion, politics” that “inform our modern world.” It manages all of that in 10 days of “class.”

An official at the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, which accredits Western Oklahoma State, expressed concern to the Chronicle over the school’s 10-day sessions, but because it isn’t up for accreditation review until at least 2017, it will remain accredited until then. That will allow four-year colleges to continue accepting its credits, even if those hours are handed out in a fashion that makes Western Oklahoma State seem like a diploma mill only interested in the revenues its program generates.

The attraction of such programs to college athletes struggling to remain eligible is clear. Western Oklahoma, according to the Chronicle, mails its transcripts the day after the 10-day session ends, making it easy for an athlete who stumbled in one class to make up for it without much delay:

“You jump online, finish in a week and a half, get your grade posted, and you’re bowl-eligible,” says one Big Ten academic adviser.

Though the NCAA has taken aggressive, if controversial, steps to increase its academic standards in recent years, the Chronicle piece is yet another reminder of the tension that exists between the big business atmosphere of college sports and the academic missions of the institutions that participate in those sports. As long as college sports remain a big business for the NCAA and its schools, those institutions will do what they can (often within the rules and often outside of them) to keep their athletes eligible, even if that means pushing the “student” side of the “student-athlete” equation through shady academic programs like the 10-day classes offered by small schools like Western Oklahoma State.

That tension isn’t going away. In reality, it’s probably only going to get worse. And no matter how tough the NCAA’s restrictions on academic programs get, the situation won’t get better until the organization reconciles the fact that the big business of college sports and the academic missions of its member institutions don’t jibe in a way that makes both sides of the “student-athlete” equation work properly.

Alex Ross has a long and fascinating essay in the New Yorker on gay equality and culture change writ large, and I thought this section of the piece, about how camp culture has become something that everyone wants access to, rather than a refuge for people who were excluded from other aspects of culture and civic life, was particularly important:

In the nineties, there was a vogue for the phrase “post-gay,” signifying life outside the ghetto, and in 2005 Andrew Sullivan announced the “end of gay culture.” Yet, like Sarah Bernhardt, camp always seems to be coming around for one more farewell tour. Chris Colfer, the fearlessly swishy young actor who has become the star of “Glee,” has revived the cult of Judy and Babs for the post-millennial generation. Curiously, Halperin doesn’t mention “Glee,” but he says that his gay students lap up all that antiquated lore, effortlessly unravelling its codes. He also notes that the gay audience tends to lose interest when coded messages give way to explicitly affirmative ones. Lady Gaga tried to write a new gay anthem with “Born This Way,” yet the song failed to ignite the clubs and bars as “Poker Face” had before it. Subtext is sexier.

In the straight world, meanwhile, the mortal fear of being mistaken for gay is weakening. Halperin could have added a chapter on the semiotics of “Call Me Maybe,” the pop ditty by Carly Rae Jepsen that became a monster hit this past summer, thanks in part to YouTube videos where everyone from Justin Bieber to Colin Powell was seen singing along. The official video gave the song a queer vibe from the outset: the singer sees a half-naked young man mowing the lawn, requests a possible telephone connection, and then discovers, to her dismay, that he prefers his own kind. (His “Call me” pantomime to another guy is more than a bit camp.) The most popular of the lip-synch videos features members of the Harvard baseball team, in all their macho splendor. Such gayish cavorting would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Likewise, you knew that the days of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell were numbered when soldiers stationed in war zones uploaded videos of themselves prancing suggestively to Ke$ha’s “Blah Blah Blah” and other dance hits. At certain moments, straight people can seem gayer than the gays.

The interesting question here, and the one that other liberation movements could learn from, is how gayness and gay culture were successfully sold to mass audiences as aspirational and compelling, something that everyone wanted admission to, rather than a response to exclusion. Will and Grace may have started Joe Biden on his road to marriage equality, but it’s not as if it was one show, or one song that was the tipping point. And this isn’t a simple story of one half of a binary taking its place as desirable while the other half spent its time in darkness. It’s about how camp and heterosexuality learned to live together, how we learned to decouple cultural signifiers from our identities. That’s a major achievement, and one I’m not sure we’ve totally reckoned with yet.

The media spent a fair amount of Veteran’s Day weekend abuzz with gossip about a small handful of veterans, starting with CIA Director and retired four-star Gen. David Petraeus and his biographer turned paramour Paula Broadwell. Petraeus resigned from his position heading the CIA on Friday, citing an extramarital affair, and setting off a cascade of online digging, speculative reporting and Bond jokes on Twitter. You could see Broadwell on The Daily Show winning a push-up contest for charity and on Book TV, speculate about whether Broadwell’s husband wrote to New York Times Ethicist Chuck Klosterman for advice–turns out, he didn’t–and pun on her name, a laugh-line for every taste.

The tawdriness of the affair, and the contradictions it represented were simply too obvious to be ignored. Broadwell’s glowing review of Petraeus was titled All In: The Education of General Petraeus. She wrote ”General David Petraeus’s Rules for Living,” column posted to the Daily Beast mere days before the scandal broke. And the details of how their affair came to light only reinforced the prevailing sentiment. The relationship was uncovered during an FBI investigation into harassing emails allegedly sent by Broadwell to a Tampa social planner and unpaid military social liaison Jill Kelley, who many suspect Broadwell considered a romantic rival. At the moment there is zero evidence to suggest this other other woman had an inappropriate relationship with Petraeus, but there is evidence she throws excellent pirate theme parties — at least one of which Petraeus attended with his wife. And Petraeus’s successor in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen is under investigation for inappropriate communication with Jill Kelley.

The story is almost unbelievably salacious, so it’s not surprising that this is probably the most a lot of people have read about sex and the military. But as crazy as the the presumably consensual intimate antics of these few military leaders are, they’re nothing compared to truly shocking issues surrounding sexual assault and harassment in military. The Armed Forces have been plagued by reports of a cultural of dismissal towards sexually harassment and assault: The Defense Department reports about one in three women in the military have been sexually assaulted, compared to one in six civilian women, and the Veteran’s Administration confirms about twenty percent of female Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans having experienced some form of sexual assault or related trauma.

That Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has acknowledged sexual assault is vastly under-counted in official records is both a troubling reminder of how bad the situation has become, and a ray of hope that the administration is willing to have an honest discussion about the issue and work towards fixing it. But in the mean time, we are faced with statistics that add up to a bleak portrait of how alleged serial abusers have thrived in military communities. Most prominent is the case of Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair, who has been charged with forcible sodomy, multiple counts of adultery (a violation of military law) and having inappropriate relationships with four female subordinates. The first hearing in his case was last Monday.

Wired says the Pentagon and the Army have gone to “surprising lengths” to keep his case quiet and it shows: It’s hardly a blip on the radar compared to the Petraeus scandal. Certainly, it’s easier to joke about the soap opera plot unfolding among leadership than it is to process the challenges facing women in uniform every day for merely being female. But at the core of the Petraeus scandal are people who  have spent significant portions of their lives deep in a culture with some very troubling norms about gender, and disturbing treatment of sexual violence. The Petraeus-Broadwell connection could even be seen as an extension of those dynamics: On one level, it’s a high powered authority figure who had a sexual relationship with someone who considered him a mentor — Petraeus was on Broadwell’s PhD advisory board,  in addition to being the subject of her dissertation, and would have far outranked her during their overlapping time in the military.

Of course, such a legendarily disciplined leader couldn’t possibly be equally culpable, so we get to read story after story hitting all the familiar schadenfruede and slut-shaming notes like high school style gossip about Broadwell’s tight clothes in Afghanistan and her ”shameless self-promoting prom queen” persona. But the real scandal isn’t that yet another powerful man cheated on his wife. It’s that we have all the time to spend going through their dirty laundry, and almost none to spare to encourage the military to thoroughly clean house when it comes to sexual predators and the practices that protect them.

The bridge is yours.

-The first pro football player.

-Louis C.K. is doing another HBO special.

-The making of Beasts of the Southern Wild.

-Yay, we get to see Michael B. Jordan in a romantic comedy.

-Wes Anderson’s Star Wars:

NBCUniversal has a relationship with Donald Trump, the long-time performance artist and host of its NBC reality competition show The Apprentice, that’s strikingly similar to the one between the Donald and the Romney campaign McKay Coppins described in one of what will be one of many post-mortems of the campaign:

Among the savvy sophisticates who populated the campaign headquarters in Boston, Trump was viewed as a joke and a blowhard — an outrageous figure whose fixation on Obama’s birth certificate was, at once, bizarre and off-putting, according to campaign sources. But he was also popular among the very voters Romney was most concerned about winning over. And the candidate’s aides believed — perhaps naively — that if they could win his endorsement, they might be able to win the hearts of his many conservative fans. “He played very well with blue-collar-type Republicans, and the campaign saw that,” said one source in Trump’s camp. “If you have no education, and you work with your hands, you like him. It’s like, ‘Wow, if I was rich, that’s how I would live!’ The girls, the cars, the fancy suits. His ostentatiousness is appealing to them.”

For NBC, The Apprentice is a product similar to a Trump political endorsement. It’s relatively cheap to buy, in part because it’s heavily supported by product placement. It channels the things that make Trump irritating, his presumptions of expertise, his abrasiveness, and his showman’s flair, towards reasonably amusing targets. And in its Celebrity Apprentice iteration, the show pulls in stars with their own followings. For this, Trump got a $130 million contract from NBC last year. But NBC handed down that deal to Trump at the end of an awful year for the network. And now that the ratings landscape–and the political one–are very different, NBC should seriously consider if they want to stay in business with Trump, or if both he and The Apprentice have reached the end of their usefulness.

The Apprentice is probably near the end of its natural lifespan as a show anyway. Its celebrity editions are drawing fewer than 9 million viewers per episode, a figure that isn’t bad, but also isn’t strong enough to use to launch other new shows. And it pales in comparison to The Voice, which both has given NBC a platform to boost freshman success stories like Revolution and Go On, and provides an alternate revenue stream to the network in the form of music sales. As NBC solidifies its revitalized brand, and as non-musical competition shows increasingly show their age, the network should consider Trump and The Apprentice both in the context of the larger primetime environment and with an eye towards the special headaches Trump brings in his wake.
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I haven’t read World War Z, though it’s on the list. But this first trailer for it mostly seems like an excuse to show teaming masses of humanity roiling through the streets of world capitals and the prodigious firepower deployed against them:

Honestly it makes me think that Steven Soderbergh should direct a zombie movie. Contagion, his super-flu movie, was one of my favorite films of 2011, in part because it avoided all of the cliches of this genre. The violence and dissolution of society were on a realistic, deeply unsettling scale. Battling the virus was a major bureaucratic undertaking that required the people involved to take serious risks, confront their privilege, and deal with the gap between what they know they’re trying to do and how it seems to the public. The scale of the devastation is overwhelming, but it’s not complete. I’d love to see him address what comes after a disaster of this scale, and remind the moviegoing public that the bureaucrats who control food and vaccines are as important as the ones who control the bullets.

This post discusses plot points from the November 11 episode of Homeland.

The tragic pas de deux between Saul and Aileen is a small masterpiece in this episode, and one of Homeland‘s finest explorations of how the decisions we made in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks have failed us in the years that followed after it. “I want to trust you,” Aileen tells Saul, the man who tracked her down, who drove back from Mexico to the United States with her, who told her about his marital problems, who got her to give up some of what she knew, and who put her in a hole below the ground. “I’m sorry I’ve become this person, but I have.” What she doesn’t say, though she could have, is that she became this person because she’s being held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, conditions that would drive a lot of us to become, as her guard puts it, “a piece of work. A spitter, a hitter, and a shitter.” The warden, as Aileen puts it, may be a sadist. But, as he tells Saul, “We all have our issues. Homeland security funding goes to the big cities, my budget gets cut…And we all have our domains, don’t we? And the United States Penitentiary at Waynesburgh is mine.” And even more to the point, what the warden is doing to Aileen is the same thing we do to many other men who are guilty of her same crimes elsewhere.

Whether this is justice or not, the episode makes an important point: the way Aileen’s been treated has ruined her, both for terrorism, and for any good she might have done to Saul, and to the country that she turned again. “Look at that light. Isn’t it nice?” she asked Saul when she was brought upstairs to the conference room, unshackled, and allowed to look at out at a treeline and sky so mundane that, had the barbed wire been removed, it could have been reproduced and hung in chain hotel rooms across the country. “Time is of the essence, here,” Saul told her. “Not for me,” she reminded him. The country could burn, terrorists could be caught, and Aileen sees only the prospect of a hole in the ground for the rest of her life. And given the promise of a room above ground, even written on a legal document, she couldn’t really believe it, nor in her own potential to do any productive good. Whether she knew who the man in the photograph was or not, she lied to have time to commit suicide, rather than live another day even in a room with a view. “It was the sunset. I’m not going back. I’m never going back to that cage,” she told Saul, dying. “I just spent the day by the window. The whole day. The light. The view.”

That sense of lost opportunity pervades this episode of Homeland. “Tom lost his way. He just went through too many things. And he couldn’t get right again,” Brody tells Jessica regretfully, speaking as much about the ruin of his former friend as himself. And an encounter with Rex, who should have been a kindred spirit, only makes his sense of self-loathing worse. Rex pulls him aside after a repulsive interrogation from a vapid, wealthy woman, who continues Homeland‘s trend of slipping into a satiric tone when it portrays Washington elites, whether at a fundraiser in the country or in Quaker meeting at Sidwell Friends. “How long did they hold you?” the woman asks.”Did you ever just want to kill yourself?” Rex has comfort to offer him, telling Brody “It’s bad enough we went to hell and back. People want to ogle the damage.” But even he wants Brody to be someone he’s not, can’t hear Brody when he tells him “Rex. Honestly? The truth? I’m not that man…No. No. Really. I’m not.”
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