CALLING ATTENTION TO THE COLLEGE BUBBLE.

It takes a lot to make the sillier Occupy Whatever protesters look good, but the Penn State students who rallied, en route from the library to the bars on HuMp Day, to object to the dismissal of Joe Paterno, managed the feat.

These Penn State people make the Occupy movement look like a group of vigorous ambition-driven dragons. Embarrassed? They should be. Their precious institution is forever stained. But the outrage from Happy Valley last night was a joke, a riot fueled by football and a fallen icon. Unfortunately, it was a display we should have seen earlier about something far worse than a man not being given the "dignity" to coach one more game on his home sidelines.

Ouch. But they've also induced the mainstream press to question the primacy of beer-'n-circus.

You can chalk up a portion of this behavior to college silliness. But a large swath of students felt wronged by Paterno’s dismissal. If there’s one image that speaks to America’s twisted relationship with college sports, it’s the Penn State pro-Paterno rallies. Football before all. Lives were likely ruined at the hands of a possible predator, thanks in no small part to Paterno. Yet it’s Paterno who must go out with dignity.

If the Pederasty State episode manages to rebut, for once and for all, the presumption that the athletic program is the university's front porch, that's good.  Cato's Neal McCluskey suggests, though, that the follies of Big Time Sports are simply indicators of Waste, Abuse, and Fraud throughout Higher Education.

Taxpayers have to subsidize higher education, we’re told, because doing so promotes the “public good.” Well, as you watch Happy Valley turn decidedly unhappy, contemplate all the rot and waste that runs throughout the ivory tower.  Then tell those people who talk up the public good that, clearly, it would be best served by letting taxpayers keep their higher ed bucks.

Here's me, earlier this year, identifying a possible salutary effect of Penn State's accession to the Big (12) Ten.

Heck, Penn State was motivated to become more like Indiana than like ZooConn upon affiliating with the Big Ten, and perhaps Nebraska's academic administration will do the same thing.

Oops. I know some people in the Penn State faculty, and hope to have some faculty reactions to the events, to contrast with the football program and student reaction.  But it appears a substantial part of the student body is more like that at ZooConn or ZooMass.  What we're seeing isn't likely to convince skeptics that the tax moneys are well spent.

In the course of preparing this post, I came across some related material.  First, by way of a comment at Historiann, let me recommend what is probably the best refutation of "the greatest good for the greatest number."  (Anyone with a working understanding of calculus will grasp that there is one maximand too many in the criterion function.)

I’m a science fiction writer, and one of the great stories of science fiction is “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” which was written by Ursula K. LeGuin. The story posits a fantastic utopian city, where everything is beautiful, with one catch: In order for all this comfort and beauty to exist, one child must be kept in filth and misery. Every citizen of Omelas, when they come of age, is told about that one blameless child being put through hell. And they have a choice: Accept that is the price for their perfect lives in Omelas, or walk away from that paradise, into uncertainty and possibly chaos.

At Pennsylvania State University, a grown man found a blameless child being put through hell. Other grown men learned of it. Each of them had to make their choice, and decide, fundamentally, whether the continuation of their utopia — or at very least the illusion of their utopia — was worth the pain and suffering of that one child. Through their actions, and their inactions, we know the choice they made.

Among the grievances of the protesting students, the loss of the carefree Saturday parties they had come to expect caused them to protest.  Read the accounts of those protests carefully, and understand their laments.  So many of us have lost our illusions.  Should so many of us be deprived so quickly of those illusions?

Then, for those of you looking for a grassy knoll, there is the unexplained disappearance of Centre County district attorney Ray Gricar.

Gricar went missing in April 2005. The murky circumstances surrounding his disappearance — an abandoned car, a laptop recovered months later in a river without a hard drive, his body was never found — have spawned Web sites, television programs and conspiracy theories.

Geraldo Rivera has not yet taken up the case.