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.

The American University Hymn

All for Football, all for Football!
All our students’ ransomed dollars:
All our thoughts and words and doings,
All our days and all our hours.

Oh, what wonder! How amazing!
Football, glorious King of kings,
Deigns to call me His beloved,
Lets me rest beneath His wings.

FSU’s appeal has failed.

… The NCAA Infractions Appeals Committee said Tuesday the cooperative efforts of the university in the academic cheating scandal involving 61 Florida State athletes failed to outweigh the aggravating factors in the case.

“The case also included impermissible benefits, unethical conduct by three former academic support services staff members and a failure to monitor by the university,” the NCAA statement said.

Twenty-five football players were among the athletes who cheated on an online test in a music history course from the fall of 2006 through summer 2007 or received improper help from staffers who provided them with answers to the exam and typed papers for them…

[Florida State University President T.K. Wetherell] should tell the whole world what an absolute shame it would be if [Coach] Bobby [Bowden’s]’s iconic career is tainted because of the malfeasance of others. He should point out how unfair it would be for Bobby’s reputation to be disgraced because some nameless, faceless tutors helped FSU football players cheat in an online music course.

This kind of statement, from Mike Bianchi in the Boston Herald, upsets UD.

There’s an elemental unfairness in dismissing FSU’s tutors as nameless and faceless. They have names; they have faces. They’re human beings, and they deserve to be recognized for their part in the nation’s largest cheating scandal.

But what Bianchi also overlooks is that they were only little cogs in the big cheating machine that is Florida State University.

Why make it appear they acted alone? No one group of people can create an entire university devoted to academic violations on behalf of sport. There’s the music course’s professor, a notoriously negligent instructor whose course had served FSU athletes well for decades until something went tragically awry. There’s the university’s board of trustees, willing to do their part to keep everyone stupid and unethical. There’s the university’s coaching staff who recruited the players. And of course there’s Wetherell himself, who continues to preside over a massive joke at the expense of Florida’s taxpayers.

Give credit where it’s due, says University Diaries.

Do we really want to read the three hundred page transcript from “an October 2008 hearing in Indianapolis, attended by [Florida State University] President T.K. Wetherell, at which FSU and NCAA officials discussed the case involving 61 student-athletes who cheated, many in an online music class.“?

Some judge just ruled that the NCAA’s decision to hide the transcript from us is “clearly contrary to the broad interpretation given to the definition of public records in Florida courts and legislative language.”

So now UD will have to read – at least skim — at least read other writers’ excerpts from — a conversation about an instance of academic fraud so enormous that FSU has had to “vacate … 14 football victories from the 2006 and 2007 seasons and two national championships in men’s track and field.” Wetherell’s a clueless, sports-mad fool; the NCAA … well, you know.

It seems to UD that Florida has grotesquely overbroad notions of what’s in the public record. It’s in no one’s interest to have to read these men. I say keep it sealed.