LOL diversity statement counseling but as ever UD stands amazed and impressed by the money-agility of capitalists. Now that even Harvard academics are reduced to pledge-reciting Girl Scouts (I promise to do my best to help other people at all times, especially those at home.), it’s time to cash in on coaching.

But let’s see what else Randall Kennedy, Harvard prof and man of the left, has to say.

Such pressure constitutes an encroachment upon the intellectual freedom that ought to be part of the enjoyment of academic life… By overreaching, by resorting to compulsion, by forcing people to toe a political line, by imposing ideological litmus tests, by incentivizing insincerity, and by creating a circular mode of discourse that is seemingly impervious to self-questioning, the current DEI regime is discrediting itself… I am a scholar on the left committed to struggles for social justice. The realities surrounding mandatory DEI statements, however, make me wince. The practice of demanding them ought to be abandoned, both at Harvard and beyond.

But hey whoa! Not only are arrogant snobs like Kennedy (‘make me wince’) shutting down TWO viable industries (DEI statement generation/enforcement, and DEI statement coaching), they are also impeding the suicide mission of Democrats as the coercive, “easy to parody DEI lingo” makes us look like assholes to the world and thereby makes the world safe for Donald Trump.

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More of the same.

It’s too good a last name for a murder mystery writer to pass up, and one Kennedy Killingsworth stars in a series by Betsy Brannon Green.

Meanwhile UD‘s buddy Mark Killingsworth, an entirely actual econ professor at Rutgers, continues his real world, who-did-in-Rutgers-University, investigation in a series of opinion pieces in the NJ Star-Ledger.

Here, though, the mystery merely lies in the numbers — as in, how does Rutgers lie about the athletics deficits that are doing it in? — not in the reason the numbers have added up over the years to a current $47.4 million.

You can of course list particular things that have happened at the school. A commenter on Mark’s piece nicely describes one part of the deal in this way:

[It’s the old] wash/rinse/repeat cycle. Hire expensive coaches. Give them extensions which are not warranted. Coaches under perform, teams are terrible, fire/buy them out and then repeat.

Or, in Mark’s words:

[A]thletics deficit spending makes bigger deficits and lots of embarrassments, including personnel decisions that led to four athletics directors in nine years, three football coaches in seven years and over $9 million in severance pay.

But as to the larger mystery: No mystery at all. Put a bunch of unsupervised guys together, give them funny money, and WHEEEEEEE…

Once you start paying attention to what schools – high schools and universities – will do to win basketball and football games, you’re in for a treat. School officials will do anything, it turns out, to attract and retain tacklers and dribblers.

There’s the almost thirty year old recently arrived Sudanese gentleman who has been winning games like crazy for Catholic Central High School in Ontario. Everyone – the coach, the recruiters – is shocked right down to the ground that a 6’10” adult male isn’t fifteen, but twice that.

“At 6’10 he was pretty dominant, he was dunking on everybody, it was pretty hard,” said Fazar Yousif, 15, who attends Kennedy Collegiate high school.

Now, for us, for the States, he decided to tell the truth:

When he entered [Canada] his passport and visa application listed his birth date as November 1998. But when he applied for a U.S visitor visa in April, his fingerprints matched an individual who’d already applied for a [US] visa with a birth date in November 1986…

Closer to home, there’s Bellevue High School in Washington, where they just go ahead and break every goddamn rule in the book, baby!

The report focused on excessive payments to coaches from the Wolverines booster club that were never approved by the school board. Investigators say tax records show during a 10-year period, the club paid coaches more than $500,000, with the majority of that money going to the head coach.

Investigators also found players used false addresses, the district and coaches failed to monitor player addresses, and that the head coach directed and encouraged players to attend The Academic Institute — a small private for-profit school in Bellevue.

The report says coaches coordinated tuition payments for some athletes paid by the booster club or its members so they could attend the private school, where investigators claim some players were able to pass classes they failed in public schools.

I think it’s safe to say that for these lads the transition to university football will be a smooth – even unnoticeable – one. Steady as she goes!

… is a benign dictator, in the way of football coaches.  A well-meaning, emotional man of limited worldly understanding, he keeps his kingdom content with athletic spectacles and brooks no dissent.  His players are worshipped by all.

On the fringes of Leipold’s domain lies a university, and though his players may not use the athletic equipment of this university without one of their fitness coaches present, three of the athletes did so anyway, refusing to show their student identification and behaving with the sense of entitlement that you would expect of the king’s pets.

A reporter from the university newspaper was present, took offense, and wrote a column about “spoiled athletes.”

Neither their demeanor, nor their language was respectful, but that’s OK, because they’re athletes. They’re allowed to play the system. Next time I’m in the Williams Center, I’ll keep my ID, wear my headphones on the bottom floor and bench press naked because I feel like it. …

The guilty party usually isn’t the typical student-athlete. It’s really not even the few who misbehave or accept preferential treatment. The villains are the “adults” – the coaches and administrators – who send the message it’s acceptable to behave how you want because you can run fast or jump high.

The writer concluded by noting one common endpoint of athlete-coddling:

[S]ometimes exceptional talent still isn’t enough to bail out someone who thinks he’s above the rules. Ask [Maurice] Clarett. You can reach him at the Toledo Correctional Institution.

When he read this, King Leipold flushed crimson and flew into a rage.

“This is fucking bullshit,” he thundered, and banned the newspaper from access to the football program. “The door is shut. Go cover soccer…. I’m sure that will be fun.”

So certain was Leipold of the right of kings that he wrote an email to the university’s chancellor boasting of having shut down the press: “If this is the type of journalism our paper is going to have. They can cover someone else — we will get along just fine,” Leipold wrote.

Imagine Leipold’s amazement when reprimands and sanctions rained down upon him from the chancellor! When he was made to apologize in public to this student and to the newspaper!

Moral of the story: Just as the concept of assault has now become clearer to Mississippi’s coach, so the concept of a free press is surely beginning to work its way into the brain of King Leipold.

… local news excitement, UD has gotten behind in her coverage of university stories: the on-again, off-again affair between Brandeis and its art collection; drunk coaches, overpaid fund managers, conflicted medical school professors (far too many to link to); and, of course, that perennial embarrassment, Southern Illinois University.

Bear with her as she pulls herself together.