This Thanksgiving Day, the Florida State University Community Gathers Around its Tables to Thank God for its New President, John Thrasher.

America’s rapeabilliest campus prayed for a president able to deflect relentless incoming sexual assault claims, and God gave it the perfectly named Thrasher — a man willing to spend his twilight years (he’s in his seventies) thrashing back and forth like Bonnie and Clyde in their 1934 Ford Model 730 Deluxe Sedan as one sex-bullet after another smacks him pow right in the kisser.

As they pass the turkey, students, faculty, administration and alumni can reflect with gratitude on the way Thrasher’s long career as a Florida pol and lobbyist, er, seasoned him for the curious job of chief academic officer at a school with virtually no academics and virtually non-stop rape claims.

FSU is the star of a new film; it’s featured in big splashy New York Times articles; and just this morning, as FSU football fans begin to dig in to the bird, news outlets all the country are headlining the just-released content of court papers that detail special treatment for football players accused of rape, the fear of retaliation on the part of victims, and… you know … just the whole stinky stewpot of a school that wants everyone to shut the fuck up so it can watch men bash each others’ heads in.

And sure – things are closing in on FSU. Even the DOE is after them for mishandling the assault claims. But did Bonnie and Clyde give up? Did they run and hide and try to live respectable lives? No! They were what they were unto the breach! Sic Semper FSU and amen!

“Florida State University president John Thrasher on Monday actually addressed the football program to tell all of them to …

… stop punching women.”

More Thrashing for Thrasher

FSU’s president John Thrasher looks forward to his, uh, troubled school getting far more publicity than it already has: A film about it – The Hunting Ground – has made the shortlist for the best documentary feature Oscar.

Egghead sissy out at Maryland, which has learned its lesson…

… and will certainly appoint, as next president, a go along to get along good ol’ boy. Paging John Thrasher!

College Park is happier than a trash can full of vomit.

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

“[S]everal [football] players, including starters, walked out of [a] meeting with” the reinstated coach.

Bad, scary coach stays and university president goes. Datz the way it is, kids.

Final Nail in Bush’s Coffin.

The notorious John Thrasher, head of one of America’s most corrupt universities, has endorsed him.

— I WILL DO SUCH THINGS — !!

It’s outrage-season at Florida State University, with professors tweeting and students petitioning against a big bad world of people saying mean things about their school and their football team.

For the last ten years FSU has been dominated as an institution by one of the foulest football programs in America, featuring academic cheaters, abusers of women, and a rabid fan base that won’t hear one word against the program. Overseeing the foulness have been cynical coaches, presidents drawn from the football team or the corrupt state legislature, professors who for years have offered cheating-friendly online courses, trustees who are either ex-FSU football players or rich FSU football boosters, and a local law enforcement establishment happy to look the other way. As FSU football racks up more and more player assaults against women, even a sports-loving country has started laughing at the hopeless endless vileness of the enterprise that enables them.

Rather than, say, suspend the program and collectively ask itself where its university went, FSU has deepened the hilarity. Its president, a man who hasn’t exactly been morally punctilious when it comes to the team, has now drawn himself up to his full height and sternly lectured the lads on good and evil. (“FSU coach Jimbo Fisher has suspended both Cook and Johnson from the team – a nice touch after he refused to suspend Winston when he was under investigation – and has pledged to ‘do better.’ University president John Thrasher backed up his coach, saying that he has ‘no tolerance for the type of behavior alleged in these cases.’ Well, except for that one time when an alleged rapist played quarterback and led the ‘Noles to a 26-1 record over the last two years. Then, John Thrasher can find a way to build up tolerance.”) One of his players has entertained the country with his own Before and After: Filmed one day unhesitatingly smashing a woman in the face, he was filmed a few days later clutching his mother’s hand and gazing into the camera on Good Morning America.

And now FSU students and professors join the fun, registering shock and awe in the face of the world’s disgust with their long-running farce.

This is a runaway university. Maybe someone there has the sense to try to stop it before it crashes.

Life of the Mind, United States of America.

[Florida State University president] John Thrasher — a career politician who is now the chief decision-maker at the nation’s most disliked football-playing university — [grabbed] his coach in a very giddy, very public embrace.

Earlier, Thrasher had released a statement blasting The New York Times for a report Friday describing how two starters on the Florida State defense ran from the scene of a late-night car accident in October and were given what seemed to be preferential treatment by Tallahassee police officers.

It was merely the latest in a long string of headlines that has brought endless cynicism about the kind of operation Florida State has been running off the field while beating everybody on it for now 26 straight games.

But here at Sun Life Stadium, moments after No. 2 Florida State finished off yet another comeback to beat Miami 30-26, you could at least envision why people like Thrasher and Fisher may be able to rationalize all the enabling and justifying of behavior other schools at least pretend to care about.

The harder the nation roots for Florida State to fall, the more self-fulfilling life becomes in the Tallahassee bubble. The Seminoles aren’t running from their identity as escape artists; in fact, they’re practically scripting it before it ever happens.

“No matter what the football rankings show, FSU is far from No. 1 in Florida.”

Shocking. Wins on the field, we’re always told, translate into wins at the admissions office… Yet in one of our most educationally pathetic states, Florida State University is the worst of the lot…

So what they need as president is a man who, as FSU board chair, pushed for a chiropractic school there (he was shouted down by legitimate scientists), and who has been a pretty routine pretty corrupt politician for America’s most corrupt state.

John Thrasher has now been elected president of Florida State University. When he was one of the finalists, he met with students.

Asked about evolution, Sen. Thrasher talked about his religious beliefs, saying: “I have a great faith in my life that has guided me in my life in a lot of things I believe in.” The implication is that science and faith cannot co-exist.

Sen. Thrasher also declined to give a specific answer when asked about the science behind climate change, and then threatened to walk out of the room when two students giggled at his answers…

You and I know that the most important problem with Thrasher’s answer isn’t that, at a university, he refuses to discuss (is incapable of discussing?) evolution and climate change. It’s that any institution that thinks someone who can barely speak English should be its president needs to have its head examined.

Infinite Rascal Regression…

… is another term for political history in America’s most corrupt state, Florida. A kind University Diaries reader (UD thanks you) sends an update on the distress of faculty and students at Florida State University over having a political hack shoved down their throat for president (that would be the perfectly named John Thrasher, who as chair of FSU’s trustees presided over the school almost having a chiropractic school shoved down its throat).

So UD does a search on Thrasher and Infinite Rascal Regression begins… Thrasher’s predecessor as head of the Florida Republican Party done went to state prison, while Thrasher himself seems to have thrashed out, before that happened, a real interesting severance agreement for his buddy… Among the signatures on that agreement was that of Mike Haridopolos, featured on this blog years ago for his own impressive academic career … Yes, infinite rascality… wheels within rascally wheels…

It’s an old Southern tradition. If universities aren’t dumping grounds for used up politicians, what are they?

From the Seminoles to the team everyone now calls the Criminoles: How do you get there?

Whether it’s national disgrace University of Oklahoma or national disgrace Florida State, the crucial step in creating a totally shitty university is appointing as president a used-up political hack. Once you’ve given David “We can’t control the marketplace” Boren and John “I want FSU to have a chiropractic school” Thrasher their pointless sinecures, the sky’s the limit. Coaches and boosters and – er – fraternities – are free to run the school right into the ground.

FSU faculty begged the trustees not to appoint Thrasher; one professor called him, with remarkably accurate foresight, the “scary” rather than the “safe” choice. It’s scary to appoint passive stupid people to run things; active, clever, bad people step in and run them instead. It’s scary to attend a school where everyone has to hide from the football team. It’s scary to realize how quickly a campus can become a criminal syndicate.

Good ol’ Florida State U…. They just got them a good ol’ boy for prez; they got “Jesus” Jameis Winston for local hero…

… They got so many good things! Got Gonul Colak.

(Well, his name don’t show up on their finance page, so I guess they ain’t got him anymore.)

Almost got a chiropractic school – the same good ol’ boy who now runs the place backed it big time (he was then a trustee) – but outraged actual scientists on the faculty managed to shut down the idea. Bet it gets a second life, now that the good ol’ boy who backed it runs the whole joint.

On top of all that good stuff, they got the wonderfully named Sanford Lovingood (see his sun-kissed, kinda-ashamed mug shot here), FSU booster club comptroller who has been stealing hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars from fan donations.

Oh, but don’t call it stealing. Lovingood had in mind to pay every penny back:

He told investigators [he] planned to repay the money by willing property that he owned back to the Boosters.

See now once he died and all he was gonna give FSU his, like, his houses and all..

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