Seriousness and tax exemption – the two essentials of our universities – are closely aligned. If the first (the philosophical foundation) vanishes, the second (the financial foundation) will be imperiled. If any particular enterprise with university in its name loses its seriousness, as expressed in a scholarly atmosphere, a liberal arts curriculum, and the training of students for higher study and for jobs, state legislatures and citizens will begin to question the special forms of financial support (there are many besides tax exemption, of course; tax exemption is shorthand for them all) they are providing. Politicians will appropriate less and less money; alumni will offer fewer and fewer donations. Eventually, for the worst among our universities, students will stop applying, which is already happening at South Carolina State University and elsewhere.

Simply put, if it’s impossible to detect more than a token amount of academic activity on a university campus – if the place is not serious – people are eventually going to withhold the designation university from that campus, and the money benefits that sustain it are also going to be withheld.

Thus when Holden Thorp, sports-battered ex-chancellor of the University of North Carolina, says

“Either we put the ADs back in charge and hold them accountable if things don’t work […] or let’s be honest and tell everyone when we select (presidents) to run institutions that run big-time sports that athletics is the most important part of their job.”

he is warning American universities that they are running out of seriousness. He is signalling to all of our schools that the management of sports events – and the management of their attendant activities (crimes committed by athletes; destruction caused by drunken tailgaters; constant buyout and other lawsuits running into the hundreds of millions of dollars; endemic cheating; deals with distilleries for the sale of alcohol to students; ceaseless scandals costing the school millions in damage control and personnel replacement, etc.) – has become virtually the entire job of the university president. But this group of activities does not describe a university president. It describes an athletic director. The person who manages the dispensing of fifty million dollars – the amount of money the Sandusky scandal has so far cost Penn State – to lawyers and public relations people is not – and, as Thorp makes clear, should not be – a university president.

This person should, of course, be an athletic director. Eventually, many American universities will have athletic director presidents – people who manage sports, and also manage, in their spare time, whatever few academic issues crop up.

Having athletic directors as university presidents makes all kind of sense. The UNC scandal wouldn’t have happened at all if an AD had been president, since academic misconduct from the point of view of an AD is… what? What is that? The AD doesn’t even know what it is, so whatever happened in the Afro-American Studies department at Chapel Hill is … whatever. Price of doing business. Way to stay in the game. Once the AD has real control over what goes on in the school, scandals won’t surface because they won’t be scandals.

Under the President Athletic Director regime everyone will be happy.

But this bliss cannot last. Eventually more and more people will realize you’re not a university, and you’ll have to take that word out of your name and get your funding from ticket sales.

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

Meanwhile more and more schools at the moment have a Gordon Gee situation on their hands. Gee was a puppet intellectual (bow ties, spectacles) trotted out to mouth serious things, to keep the seriousness ball in the air.

Ever wonder why Gordon says such crazy shit? Babe, you don’t need a Freudian to know which way the wind blows. This is an angry puppet, a self-hating hypocrite, a man who used to have intellectual self-respect and now trades it every day for football money. Gordon Gee is a stage in the devolution of the American university president, a halfway point between mind and body, seriousness and play. His extinction will pave the way for President Nick Saban.