– has long assumed, correctly, that its ridiculous trustees will listen to the shit the athletics department tells them year after year about taking care of that pesky deficit. Crazed highly-paid coaches, some still working for the school, others suing the school; games in which no one takes any interest; student athletic fees through the roof; academic quality in the toilet; a deer in the headlights president and an empty-threat legislature – you know the drill. Trustees know the drill…

Cuz everything’s gonna be fine as soon as the athletics department not only kills the deficit, but starts making HUGE money. Hold onto your Stetson!

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But every now and then there’s a kind of … eruption on the part of one of the trustees. One of them suddenly flies over the cuckoo’s nest and lets out his anger at having been lied to and infantilized for years and years and years. It never seems to happen at our most craven sports factories – Auburn, Nebraska, Louisville – but it can certainly happen elsewhere. Because it’s very rare and beautiful and precious and fleeting, like one brief brilliant flash of a peacock’s tail, we take note of it here at University Diaries.

Rob Doughty, president of the UNM Board of Regents – which is responsible for signing off on years of consistently failing budgets from [the] university’s athletics department – says he feels he’s been lied to and won’t rubber stamp any future athletics budgets nor consider forgiving any of the department’s estimated $7.5 million deficit before seeing significant changes.

… “I want to know right now, in front of everybody, why are we [this much] in the hole when I was promised last year that we had a balanced budget?” Doughty intensely questioned.

… “I’m very upset today. I feel like this Board of Regents and the folks that were there, and especially me, were misled and were told things that weren’t true. And [athletics was] making false promises.

“And, I have to say, that in my time at this university in the last four years, as I sit here today, I think I’m as mad as I’ve ever been…. I think the projection line was done just to balance the budget…. [I] want to know what research was done, what analysis was done to really back the projected figures.”

Hey can’t put one over on Doubty Doughty. That projection line was done just to balance the budget!

I’m sorry, kiddies. Either all of these people are idiots, or this is the way they want things to be. It’s a way of life. You don’t get to break in, a century after the cargo cult has established itself, and say Maybe building a landing strip for magical gifts won’t make the magical gifts appear…

One night, in the winter of 2013, crowds of Michigan State University students ripped trees out of the landscape, burned them in the streets, and jumped over the flames. Here’s the Nazi-book-burning-fun image. Close to sixty similar bonfires went up all over East Lansing in response to MSU having beaten Ohio State — another perennially torching and rioting school — in a football game.

You want links? You want links to decades of torching-the-town and scorching-the-earth and torturing-police-horses Penn State, Ohio State, and Michigan State? Sorry. Too fucking depressing. Look them up yourself.

It’s a long tradition: After football games, or after the firing of child-rapist-enabling coaches, or in celebration of holidays, hundreds of drunken shits gather at America’s football factories and attempt to incinerate their neighborhoods.

As if places like East Lansing weren’t bleak enough. Let’s establish a university where we admit hundreds of people who, as one, yank out of the ground all of the saplings planted in an effort to bring some life to our cold terrain.

A university! Maybe East Lansing harbors some gangs we might expect to do something like kill trees and set the town on fire. These are university students. Michigan State University is a university.

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But, as all of America’s media is madly noting today, MSU has a specific culture. (I’ve just linked you to today’s Michigan State University Google News page. Scroll down. Endlessly.) It’s the same culture Penn State and Ohio State and plenty of other NCAA-favorites (the NCAA’s getting excoriated everywhere too – like – hey – turns out it’s corrupt) exhibit, and it’s a deep culture – the work of decades of abjection in the face of athletics.

At this point, schools like these are basically distilleries. Rape and pillage are what you get when you’re a big ol’ distillery packed with twenty year olds.

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So the depraved people at MSU let a depraved doctor systematically rape hundreds of children. Same thing with a coach-rapist at Penn State. The president of MSU and the athletic director just resigned. And now we’re breathlessly told that this is just the beginning of the massive numbers of sports-related crimes about to be exposed at MSU.

Funny thing: It played out almost exactly the same way at Penn State! And Auburn! I could go on!

The trouble at Michigan State appears to go beyond Dr. Nassar, who was a university employee for decades and the physician to two women’s varsity teams. An ESPN investigation Friday described a pattern in which sexual assault complaints involving prominent athletes, including more than a dozen on the football team and a few in the celebrated men’s basketball program, were handled by the athletic department rather than through regular university channels.

Michigan State insufficiently complied with federal officials monitoring the university under Title IX, the gender-equity law, the report found.

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MSU … will not face criminal charges for [its] part in Nassar’s actions, though [it is] facing multiple civil law suits from over 100 victims of his abuse.

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It’s a culture, see? You don’t dump the prez, bring in a deer-in-the-headlights replacement, and create a new culture.

It is, as they say, what it is. The sadistic, greedy, amoral coaches who, once finally fired, dedicate the rest of their lives to suing the school for four hundred million dollars. The deities on the money teams who sack quarterbacks and women. The brain-damaged ex-football-hero trustees. The student body seething with alcoholic bullies. When they tire of watching pledges die from booze forced down their gullets, they head out to the town saplings.

The school’s too busy dealing with five ongoing high-profile athletic and academic and fraternity scandals to notice the creepy little team doctor or the elderly has-been coach off raping children somewhere. And all the decent people on the faculty, in the administration, and in the student body keep their heads down and do their work and pretend their school’s not a saloon.

The funny thing is, it’s often very easy. You don’t really need my instructions on how to detect con men (it’s usually men), because most con men are right out there. Very, very obvious. Let us consider three of them who are currently in the news, starting with … let’s call him the mildest of the cons.

This man’s trickery is in the long and highly rewarded academic tradition of Julius Nyang’oro, Thomas Petee, and Leo Wilton — all of them professors who systematically, over years, provided fake courses and fake grades for athletes. For professors who don’t give a rat’s ass about actually educating anyone, ever, the rewards of this behavior are deep, profound, and monetary. Schools almost entirely devoted to their football and basketball teams – like the schools these men work and worked for – reserve their eagerest gratitude for professors willing to confer upon athletes the trappings of academic respectability. Administrators can’t do it; trustees can’t do it — only professors can put the A-/B+ on the record and keep players eligible.

The system works beautifully, except that occasionally mistakes of judgment are made, and some female pipsqueak hired to help with the grading (in all of the cases I’ve mentioned, except that of Petee, it was a woman) turns out actually to care about educating people. She’s appalled when she realizes she’s part of a con game, and she goes public with the scandal.

In the case of Florida State University’s athlete-positive professor, we’re talking about an online (has to be online – makes it much, much easier to cheat or indeed do absolutely nothing and ace a course) hospitality course called Beverage Management.

I’m not making this up. At FSU, we have entirely entered the world of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, where a local university offers a course called Eating and Drinking: Basic Parameters.

But don’t be too harsh. FSU started out with much more curricular gravitas for its players. For decades, a music theory professor there let hundreds of athletes cheat their way through his intro course. When that scheme was revealed and became a big ol’ national scandal, FSU had to hustle to find another online curricular home for people it didn’t give a rat’s ass about educating. It lowered itself all the way down to a person who heads one section of his 33 page cv Scholary Honors (some of his students have had it up to here with his spelling). (Oh. And there’s this.)

Where does FSU go now? When this latest cheating scandal is over, where can they go that’s even lower than online courses in Beverage Management?

Okay, so the two other con men the media’s paying attention to this week:

Like the FSU guy with his article-length cv trumpeting his amazing accomplishments (come to think of it, Professor Gun-Spree also has the self-presentation of an egomaniac), the children’s book author whose PEN nomination has been withdrawn on PEN discovering what actual Native American writers have been trying to tell the world for years – the writer is a con man – also displays a hilarious sense of his own greatness.

And let’s end with Paolo Macchiarini, shall we? Stem cell research of course is the hard-science con man’s Emerald City … And this guy, like the others, didn’t exactly hide his borderline-psychotic world of lies.

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UD thanks Barney.

Now ah say ah say son you got yourself one helluva problem down at Baylor with some of these here big money boys trying to make all the regents resign just cuz they ground the school all the way down to shit and cost it so far a cool $223 million (and it’s early days!) with all them rapes on their watch.

The ongoing scandal has already claimed Baylor’s president, athletic director and head football coach. But the booster group says the purge hasn’t gone far enough and the regents haven’t assigned much blame to themselves. The boosters argue that a small group of board insiders controls the university and occasionally meddles in day-to-day business.

Damn right! Dumbest thing Auburn University ever did was get rid of trustee-for-life (I mean, spozed to be) Bobby Lowder, who for 29 years ran pretty much the entire school, all in the sacred name of football, and didn’t give a flying fuck about so-called ‘scandals’…

So now you get ol’ Bobby on the phone (after the bank thing and finally getting thrown off the BOT I think he’s available) and you have him talk to Baylor’s trustees and tell them how to keep their asses planted firmly on the board for at least 29 years, and how to keep running the show.

… but meanwhile there’s a blog about universities to maintain, and I just happen to have some stuff here that I think you might like…

Close to home, there’s the fun story of one of the fraternities at UD‘s place of business, George Washington University. We’ve had to pay a lot of attention to fraternities on this blog, given the hilarious disconnect between what many of these cults broadcast about themselves and what they actually are/do. The American university frat story is a subset of the American university big-time sports story, in which these closely allied units grab our elbow and direct their alcoholic breath to our face in order to bray about their charity car washes and team work and brotherly love and inspirational school spirit. And we buy it, which is pretty remarkable…

So yet another GW frat has been shut down or suspended or whatever (happens constantly), but this time it’s not about the routine gruesome party or trashed hotel.

The chapter was under investigation after DC Leaks hacked the personal email account of a White House staffer and alumnus, which included messages from Pi Kappa Phi’s Listserv from February 2015 to June 2016. GW’s Greek life official said in a message sent to students that the chapter was shut down after officials found information that showed the group had violated University standards.

No, it’s not Clinton/Weiner-level; but you gotta admit in its own small way it’s kind of impressive. A just-graduated GW person, fraternity prez, moves too quickly to the White House, still “being dead in his sins and the uncircumcision of his flesh,” (Colossians 2:13), and his frat-prez correspondence gets a high-level hack, which if you’re GWU you’re likely to find a mite embarrassing.

Pi Kappa Phi was [already] under disciplinary and social probation until Dec. 31, 2015 for hosting a registered off-campus event with alcohol where several attendees – some of whom were underage – had to be treated at a hospital for overconsumption of alcohol. The chapter had been on social restriction until June 30.

But that’s a trifle here. That’s like… Aren’t all fraternities under social restriction? Let’s get to the good stuff.

The email hack included Listserv messages instructing members to watch out for puking pledges, [and to] contribute to a slush fund; [the messages also included] anti-semitic remarks calling members “Jewish” for not donating to philanthropic events.

“This is such a bad violation of recruitment policies [responded our man] and nationals could royally fuck us if they wanted to… I’m not being a narc but you gotta at least keep a clean paper,” he wrote.

An April 2016 email reprimanded two fraternity members for yelling “fuck you you fucking faggot” at their gay neighbor for 20 minutes during a party, which allegedly led the neighbor to consider pressing criminal charges.

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And here’s something from the big-time sports part of the frat/sports industrial complex.

The University of Memphis. Put university memphis in this blog’s search engine and feast your eyes on one of America’s most lurid locations of any kind, much less a university location. Memphis, like Auburn and Clemson and Baylor, is one of those schools that UD grudgingly admires for their determination to be faithful to what they truly are: totally amoral football-game-makers. Scummy cheating coaches flying high on zillion dollar salaries; broad-shouldered who-gives-a-shit trustees; recruits who spend so much time on the field, or playing video games, or shooting guns, that UD worries they might not have enough time to get their schoolwork done…

University of Memphis football players Jae’Lon Oglesby and Kam Prewitt fought Tuesday night over video games and Prewitt was later taken to a local hospital because of injuries to his mouth, according to a university incident report obtained Thursday morning.

Oglesby told university police that the fight took place between 9 and 9:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Carpenter Complex, a residential building on campus. Oglesby said he then left the complex and returned to his apartment, which is located off campus on Patterson Street. Officers subsequently visited Prewitt’s apartment to check on him and determined that he needed medical attention, according to the university incident report.

Gunshots were fired at a car belonging to Oglesby after 10 p.m. Tuesday, according to a police report. Oglesby told officers that he did not see who fired the shot but that he had been in an altercation with Prewitt earlier in the day.

And that was Tuesday night! Homework night! Imagine what they’re up to on Saturday.

… as the women on Seattle’s city council have discovered. They voted against a proposal to build a new basketball arena in the city, and the reaction to that decision helps you understand why so many once-respectable American universities (Rutgers, Chapel Hill, Penn State, Minnesota, Louisville) have allowed the culture of professional sports to turn them into national jokes.

You need to drill down to the trustees (feast your eyes on this photo), to people like the King of Oklahoma State University, to understand how it’s gotten so bad on so many American campuses that a few people are beginning to notice. You have to focus in on people like Jason Feldman, a Seattle attorney who, along with quite a few other men in Seattle, uncorked his rage against – let’s see – what did he call them – the whoring pieces of trash on the council who blocked his basketball fun.

How did it come to this? I mean how did the American university come to this? How do you get to a university that for more than thirty years harbored and adulated a child rapist? A university that for twenty years implemented an elaborate, completely bogus curriculum? A university that was running a whorehouse? You get there by putting in charge people who share the enthusiasms of Jason Feldman Esq.

A writer for the Auburn Citizen wrote this last year, and ever since then UD‘s been chewing on it. In particular, when UD reads about big-time football schools like the University of Hawaii, Western Michigan U., and Eastern Michigan U. — all of them perennially in the news for bankrupting their students and keeping their schools down in order to subsidize shitty coaches and put on games no one attends — UD ponders that “meaningless” thing.

The pathetic state of EMU in particular has attracted the attention of the national media. Singling out that school, an HBO show called The Arms Race featured the following facts:

At Eastern Michigan, the sports program lost $52 million over the past two years according to Howard Bunsis, an accounting professor at that school. Plus the school football team has not a winning season in nearly a couple of decades and regularly posts the smallest attendance figures in all college football.

(That amount by the way is nothing next to national joke Rutgers, where “in the last 12 years, the school’s athletics department has lost $312 million.”)

The leadership of all of these universities — president, trustees — goes ape-shit whenever anyone suggests that the all-consuming activity that has basically killed their school is meaningless. (Faculty and students, two groups immiserated by athletics, feel differently, but who listens to them?) The ferocity of their unanimous response to suggestions that they lead their university in a more meaningful as well as fiscally responsible direction tells you that for these people taking down a university through the removal of all revenues via football is obviously patently totally on the face of it worth it.

So what is the transcendent meaning they attach to what looks to the rest of us like suicide via sports?

UD thinks a hint can be found here:

It is as though they see a successful sports program as a winning multi-million dollar lottery ticket. Never mind that millions of lottery ticket holders lose.

UD thinks a more vivid and valuable analogy would be to the cargo cult phenomenon. Long ago in our ancestral past, godlike men appeared and won games and there was jubilation among the people. Then the big men went away.

Ever since, we have built gleaming stadiums and training facilities to induce them to reappear.

They will reappear.

We will never give up.

This is the meaning of our life.

It’s pretty much the same process at any university that loses accreditation (both of these universities are distinctly heading that way), loses its financial base (both are Moody’s basket cases), loses alumni donations (SCSU never had much of that, but Yeshiva did, and it’s losing it), and loses students (enrollment is tanking at both schools). If you want to know how to drive your school into the dirt, you can learn the procedure at almost any failing or failed university. A few schools (Sweet Briar) shut down because of market or demographic forces they really can’t control (very few women want to go to single-sex schools), but the overwhelming number of institutional collapses of the sort Yeshiva and SCSU are undergoing display the same mix of factors. Let’s review them, using as our focus this account of the latest developments at Yeshiva.

UD used to think that boards of trustees were pretty pointless – rich businesspeople overseeing, in a vague way, the activities of a university, but, basically, above all, and ever and ever, being called upon to transfer huge chunks of their personal fortune over to the place. Indeed this non-interventionism might be more or less the way things are at high-functioning schools… Maybe you’ll find one or two trustees who actually do understand universities, and who actually have a meaningful relationship with the school’s president… At happy roly-poly little sports factories like Auburn you’ll find one or two trustees (they played for the team back when) actually setting admissions policies and sticking their noses in recruitment, but this form of corruption doesn’t push the school in the direction of collapse. You can’t collapse a school that’s already, like Auburn, an intellectual joke. And it can in fact be perfectly serviceable to have a BOT made up of clueless sheep herded by a brilliant Babe.

Most BOT’s, in other words, don’t amount to much in the smoothly running institutional scheme of things; they’re like US ambassadors to Malta. How badly can they fuck up? You don’t want the person you appoint ambassador to Malta to be ambassador to Afghanistan; for Afghanistan, you need someone who knows how to be an ambassador. For Malta, a rich donor to the current President’s campaign will do. For trustee, a rich donor to the university will do.

But it turns out that a truly depraved board of trustees can bring down a school. Truly stupid, self-serving, self-righteous, risk-taking cronies of the sort Yeshiva and SCSU boast can take an already vulnerable campus and pound it into the dirt.

The key is greed and secrecy.

The key is assembling a group of male buddies (if you want total destruction, the more men the better), many of whom are in each others’ pockets financially, none of whom knows or cares anything about universities as such, and all of whom think they’re doing the lord’s work – for race, for religion, for class. Schools that implode tend to be fantastically parochial. Their trustees are fantastically parochial people, ignorant of much beyond their particular political or spiritual orthodoxy. These trustees routinely bring on board characters like Jonathan Pinson and Bernard Madoff and let them run the show because hey Jonathan! Bernie! My man!

So now your trustees are hard at work stealing the school’s endowment while, one by one, being very publicly carted off to prison or court – a carting off that really does very little for your school’s reputation and its alumni loyalty. For president at this point you have one of two types: The twelfth deer in the headlights you’ve hired in twelve days (the board merrily ignores this person) or just the opposite – a loyal long-serving crony-servant.

The process of destruction is now so bad at Yeshiva and SCSU that the faculty is routinely voting no confidence left and right… But another problem with BOTs of this sort is that they do not know that the faculty exists. What does a faculty do? Students they get – students go to concerts and games and students provide the money the BOT misappropriates. Students, yes. Faculty? So this sort of BOT/university president essentially does not communicate with faculty. Their relationship to faculty is restricted to firing most of it when the BOT’s years of malfeasance destroy the school’s credit rating and they can’t borrow any more money.

“It’s the time of year when we put the schedule together, and we realized we were paralyzed because we didn’t know which faculty would be around,” said [Gillian] Steinberg, an associate professor of English and director of writing at YC. “The administration won’t tell us who will get a contract renewal.”

She can’t take it anymore; she’s leaving Yeshiva.

Then there are the students. You can see Yeshiva cultivating a good longterm relationship with them as well.

According Yadin Teitz, a junior at Yeshiva College who has been leading student efforts to get information from the administration, the “administration operates without consulting the faculty.”

“There’s no connection between what’s going on at the top and at the bottom,” Teitz, an editor at The Commentator student newspaper, told The Jewish Week. Teitz’s March 3 article was the first time students, and many faculty members, found out about cuts being made to the core curriculum.

“There’s no transparency,” said Teitz, who said it was “crazy” that faculty members had to find out about cuts to their own programs through a student newspaper.

Exactly the same at SCSU. You’ve basically got a semi-criminalized sect sequestered in a building somewhere on campus, working feverishly to continue bleeding what money they can out of the institution before it utterly bleeds out.

With all of the bad publicity it’s been getting, football is endangered on the American university campus. Though it seems impossible that the sport might, at some schools, be discontinued or cut back, the prudent university president and board of trustees might want to do some thinking about contingencies.

In light of the strong national and international coverage the latest massive NASCAR brawl involving Jeff Gordon, Brad Keselowski, and their crews has been getting, it’s time to consider replacing football at our universities with the largest spectator sport in America. Here are some of NASCAR’s advantages over football.

1. It has much more of the violence that students at big football schools demand, but because the sport is so openly and variously violent (crashes, fights on the track, fights in the pit, fights in the audience, cars crashing into spectators, cars exploding, drivers killed), the violence tends to stay at the venue site rather than spilling out into adjacent neighborhoods. There’s a principle of containment at work at NASCAR events, with the event set up in such a way as to honor and satisfy the demand for violence, so universities can expect a welcome reduction in post-game student rioting.

2. Unlike football, NASCAR is already an academic field at several universities. Auburn not only graduates many NASCAR engineers, but has such close ties to the sport that an Auburn-emblazoned NASCAR vehicle is active on the circuit. The University of North Carolina, much in the news lately for its football program, boasts that its “NC Motorsports and Automotive Research Center … is located in the heart of NASCAR country and is the first stop for employers hiring interns and entry level engineers. We’re within 50 miles of 90% of the NASCAR Sprint Cup teams and 5 miles from Charlotte Motor Speedway, just past the checkered flag.”

3. By sponsoring professional university teams rather than attempting the ill-fated student-athlete route, universities will not only avoid NCAA-entanglement, but will be free to use the entire torso plus limbs of their players for school and corporate advertising. It’s hard to think of a more iconic American image than that of Gordon immediately post-brawl, bleeding from the lip and displaying on his arms and chest ads for Bosch, Siemens, Pepsi, Panasonic, and Champion. Around Gordon’s collar, onto which blood dripped, was an ad for the American Association of Retired Persons.

4. NASCAR is a very human contest, without the anonymous armored-gladiator feel of post-concussion era football. Students can see racers’ faces and watch their flesh bleed freely. In all ways, NASCAR is a closer, more sensory experience than distant sanitized high-tech football. There’s the smell of fuel, the smoking wheels, the splash of water in the pit, the shrieking cries of downed drivers. Student attendance at university football games has been drastically down lately, and there has been much anxious speculation as to why; but if you simply put the game up against NASCAR the answer is obvious.

Compared to NASCAR, football is boring.

This of course is the deepest nightmare of every jock-school trustee and president. It’s much deeper than current worries about tanking ticket sales. You can still maybe bell-and-whistle tanking ticket sales; you can imagine ways of turning a stadium into, I don’t know, something that in significant ways resembles a really plush, high-tech, Las Vegas gambling hall/hotel/restaurant. But you can’t change the system of recruitment and cheating; you can’t stop the fact that Florida State University’s revenue-athlete graduation rate is a sick joke, or that the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, qua academic institution, is a sick joke. Lying and cheating your way around this problem is starting not to work. That’s the nightmare. Because the guy making the comment in my headline is saying that he can’t identify with the people playing on the gridiron anymore; that he feels like a jerk trying to pretend they are part of the college world.

Eventually the remnant true believers will trickle down, as it were, to the south, where the few locations that have always been honest about being football stadiums and nothing else (Auburn, Clemson, Alabama) will continue to stage games. Eventually most of the audience for the games will be like the tourists who go to “Old West” towns to watch pretend shoot-outs.

What’s nice about this rather typical appraisal of America’s many football schools is that the writer names names. I mean, he doesn’t say this school and that school are no longer schools. He simply provides the data and lets you arrive at the obvious conclusion.

So the standouts, the almost-entirely-without-discernable-academic-missions, are:

University of Arkansas
University of Nebraska
University of Oklahoma
Auburn University

These are the Big Four, the prime nullities, that this particular author highlights – schools that spend huge sums on games and stadiums and all, and vanishingly little on education. So little that their academic mission is pretty much gone. There are plenty of other such places, including almost every school in West Virginia.

These four schools naturally take up a lot of air time on University Diaries, each of them a massive military industrial academic fraud violence against women drunk driving plus all them other naughty big boy thangs complex. Nebraska loved to death two of America’s current high-profile bad boys – Richie Incognito and Dominic Raiola – so that place (along with the University of Florida ’cause of loved-up Aaron Hernandez) is at the top of Google News lately. But Auburn, with its long tradition of massive cheating, and its board of trustees packed with former Auburn athletes, is perennially in the news, as are vastly corrupt Arkansas and Oklahoma…

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Speaking of tradition — that whole tradition thing, so important to all of these schools, can really backfire. Just like Penn State, all four schools on this guy’s list seem to think they have these glorious traditions…

When things go wrong in nullity schools, when the essential scumminess of what they’re about becomes too public, they often try to play this tradition card, as if the act of reminding people of the essential glory of what they’ve always been about will make people’s backs straighten… Yet these places forget that although they might have won many games over a long period of time, the scumminess was always there and everyone knows it…

So – here’s an example of the problem.

Louisiana State University is trying to get its students to stop commanding their game day opponents, in unison, on national television, to suck their dicks. How to go about this?

LSU decided to initiate something called Tradition Matters, which is essentially a series of notices all over campus, signed by the president of the school, asking students to stop saying suck my dick in unison on national television.

An LSU student journalist writes:

I didn’t realize how sleazy [the cheer] made my university look until I sat in a press box last season and watched my professional colleagues shake their heads in disgust.

Yet in what way will an appeal to LSU’s traditions help the matter? LSU qua football school has always been pretty sleazy… Indeed sleaziness is kind of a point of pride for the entire state of Louisiana... traditionally… It seems fully in keeping with Louisiana’s traditions that the president of an academic institution there would devote his time and the institution’s money to plastering campus with a plea that its scholars not get drunk and invite a national television audience to suck their dicks…

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So you see the problem. Nullity schools cannot make an appeal to their academic traditions, to the ethos of reason and moral reflection at the heart of non-null universities; they are forced to make an appeal to their athletic traditions. But athletic traditions at schools like these are as much about decades of publicly pleading for people to fellate you as they are about clean-limbed sportsmanship.

Ed Keller, baseball player for Oklahoma State University back in the day, chairs the board of trustees there… The Board of Trustees! Where have they been during OSU’s long years of academic fraud, pimping of coeds to football recruits, money gifts to players, etc. etc.? What is a board of trustees? What does it do?

Okay, so the best answer to those questions is (see Penn State) nothing and nothing. We know this. Does it bother Yeshiva University that a man just found guilty of massive racketeering is on its board of trustees? Does Brown give a shit that Steve Cohen is on its board of trustees?

The best answer to these questions is no and no. Au contraire, if you’re a sports slut like OSU, you positively want a board of trustees made up of mindless jocks and boosters. In order to get to Number One, your coaches are going to be breaking a lot of rules, and the last thing they need is even one trustee with a conscience.

How do you keep all the trustees in line? If you’ve read this blog for any time at all, you know how the thing is done. All BOTs have one really well-connected bully (see Auburn’s Bobby Lowder) who controls everyone else on the board by withholding information, threatening to drop them from the board, whatever. This person takes advantage of the fact that for most university trustees the position is little more than something to boast about rather than a series of meetings one really means to attend, etc. Note that some universities have boards made up of thirty, forty, fifty people. You don’t have to be an expert in organizations to know that these groups are pointless, bootless, bogus.

Sports Illustrated is going after low-hanging fruit like this Okie joke first; expect more such multi-part investigations. And expect, in each case, that at some point someone’s going to say Hey doesn’t this school have a board of trustees? What does the board do?

Answers: Yes. Nothing.

… sings Cinderella; and this year’s Cinderella university story has got to be Rutgers, whose dream to be the Auburn University of the east is coming true, one day at a time. Rutgers has done it all, with amazing focus and commitment:

*** It has moved decisively toward shutting down the academic component of the university for the sake of athletics. The school’s athletic budget is massive; its academic more and more paltry. Eventually Rutgers as “teaching” and “research” “university” will be exclusively online.

*** It has hired and fired presidents with an eye toward greater and greater haplessness and indifference. Its trustees may be close to firing its latest leader, his function of taking the fall for the most recent string of athletic scandals having been fulfilled. Watch for Rutgers’ next presidential offer to go out to Nick Saban.

*** It has decided to retain its latest in a line of allegedly abusive and/or mendacious athletic officials. She and her rhetoric of integrity and triumph will stay; the letter protesting her cruelty as coach – signed by the entire volleyball team she once led – will be ignored.

These, and too many other strategies and initiatives to mention, are the outward manifestations of an American university determined to root out any scholarly residue, and just as determined to compete with Auburn, Texas Tech, Southern Methodist, Kentucky, and LSU for sports supremacy. A bold move, indeed, to go up against the southern powerhouses. But so far, Rutgers is doing everything right.

Have faith in your dream and someday
Your rainbow will come smiling through.

He writes an opinion piece in the school newspaper protesting the destruction of the university by athletics.

You’d think newspapers at Auburn and Clemson and Georgia and Montana and all of the other American universities degraded by big-time sports would feature similar professors – committed, responsible people capable of tracking and analyzing the deterioration and writing about it. Hell, many of these people have tenure, a level of job security unimaginable to most people. But – as UD discussed in what seems to have become her most famous column – for a variety of reasons, they don’t say anything.

Rutgers is an exception. William C. Dowling – a Rutgers English professor – wrote a 2007 book about how sports has long undone, and continues to undo, Rutgers. And now, with things far, far worse than when Dowling’s book came out, an economics professor there – Mark Killingworth – has described the ongoing (and, old UD will guess, ultimately failed) effort to “clean up” after its athletics mess.

A New York Times article about Dowling was written in 2007, when things looked way cool at Rutgers athletics. The author writes that “the number of undergraduate applications has risen along with Rutgers’s sporting fortunes, as have annual donations to the university.”

Really? Here’s Killingworth, 2012:

[B]ig-time University athletics hasn’t attracted more first-year students with high SAT scores, and hasn’t raised our “yield” (percentage of accepted applicants who actually attend), relative to peer institutions. Our academic rankings are sliding steadily downwards, and for two years running, our enormous athletic subsidies have landed us in the Wall Street Journal’s “football grid of shame.” This isn’t “building the brand” — it’s making us a punchline.

What happened to all them big donations and big smart students?

See, this is something sports factories don’t want to parse for you, but getting more jerks to apply to your school because they want to get pissed and join the fun is not a good trend. The state of Massachusetts has set up the University of Massachusetts Amherst to take those students.

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

Killingworth touches on the Rutgers board of trustees. He is far too kind, merely asking them to “rethink their priorities.” No. They are the people who killed Rutgers. Like Penn State’s trustees (UD predicts all or most of them will resign in the coming months) they should be booted. Instead of holding the university in their trust and working toward its benefit, they shat on it and created the absolute failure Killingworth describes. Out they go.

As the University of North Carolina sport scandal begins to take off, pay attention to the details. People use phrases like sports culture all the time (Penn State, we are told, has to confront its sports culture) but until you look at things like the background of the trustees at Auburn or the background of the people who run the academic support program for athletes at North Carolina, you don’t grasp the reality.

UD attended a university sports conference a couple of years ago, here in Washington, where a high-ranking administrator at a local university demanded to know why coaches and coaching staff were not professors. They are teaching, after all; and erasing the line between coaches and professors will heal the rift between athletics and academics, making the university one big happy family.

If it seems a grotesque idea, it shouldn’t. It’s already being implemented, in a way, at a lot of universities, where the president is little more than a sports nut with impressive corporate or political ties, several of the trustees played football or basketball for the school, and plenty of professors sit on sports-oversight committees and don’t do anything other than enjoy the free tickets and other perks they get to make sure they don’t do anything.

“The athletic enterprise has grown so large and so remunerative that it may not be appropriate at universities anymore,” said Lew Margolis, a [University of North Carolina] public health professor.

Yes, it has grown into the university, to the point where we’re supposed to shed tears because Penn State and its surrounding towns and villages will go bankrupt because of football sanctions. Penn State created and sustained a happy seamless valley where children got fucked in its showers by one of its coaches and now just because of that you’re going to remove the very basis of our economy and indeed of our valley life itself?

Take it out of universities. It’s of course fully appropriate for the larger culture, which laps up the much viler world of professional football. But it is really rather inappropriate at universities.