Allegations of academic fraud, natch; but also this extremely embarrassing Athletic Director at the University of Texas. This guy charges alumni twenty five dollars to step onto the football field.
“Steve Patterson appears to be taking the ‘college’ out of college athletics, and he’s doing so under the guise of supporting the Longhorns,” said Rick Cherwitz, a Texas professor in the Moody College of Communication.
Rick’s a little behind the times. Texas athletics hasn’t had ‘college’ in it since the Pánfilo de Narváez shipwreck. Why blame everything on the latest hustler running the program? True, this AD is free to be slightly more totalitarian than the last one, mainly because UT’s got a brand new, deer in the headlights president (“Fenves said he’s still got learning to do about athletics, the part of the university he is least familiar with.”)… Imagine hiring a president for the University of Texas, which is on its way to being entirely about sports, for whom sports is the part of the university he knows least about! One suspects a conspiracy was behind this, and that the AD and the coaches, who have been running the university for years in a somewhat hidden way, will now openly take it over. Faculty and staff who don’t want to live under Auburn conditions will leave. The rest will scrounge together the latest ticket prices (we’re talking thousands of dollars for most people) and grovel before The Great Leader.
June 19th, 2015 at 9:41AM
Hiring an ignorant new chancellor is what UNC did. It might work for them. The verdict’s still out.
June 19th, 2015 at 11:40AM
John: Absolutely. Bringing in a clueless fool post-scandal is often a very good move.
June 24th, 2015 at 11:10AM
There is a new Chancellor in the UT System. Admiral McRavan, and he’s anything but a clueless fool. Nor was Chancellor Cigarroa, a very good man and a world class pediatric surgeon who did his damndest for the system, for the faculty, for the students, for academics on the whole. But when every single regent is a political appointee of the Perry years (and for the foreseeable future, the Abbott years) you’re dealing with the ultimate example of only being able to do so much.
dcat
June 24th, 2015 at 11:30AM
Derek: I take your point.
July 9th, 2015 at 6:44PM
[…] setting out his critique of university sports at places like his school, the notorious University of Texas, Cherwitz offers the classic bad writer’s combination of pretentiousness and – as we […]