… They comfort thee.

Big-time athletics always lifts the tone on campus. Northern Kentucky University students are currently focused on just what Athletic Director Scott Eaton did to make him hightail it out of town. The school will only say he’s been fired for ethics violations — and, I mean, fired immediately, with letters and lawyers and all…

So, as the student editorial I quote in my title suggests, it might be nice to know what’s going on, what manner of man the school hired and paid big bucks to not long ago. It goes without saying that a big part of Eaton’s job has involved lecturing students on morality… Leadership, teamwork, integrity, you know the drill.

So what’s up?

UD has covered stories of coach and AD miscreants for years, and she will share with you her guess on this one.

UD‘s gonna go with sex. She’s willing to throw some alcohol abuse into the mix, but she’s basically going to call this one as messing with the undergrads. The school claims it’s not financial; it also claims NKU won’t get in trouble with NCAA sanctions as a result of whatever Eaton did. That would seem to leave hanky-panky.

The nanny state once again tries to interfere with the free market – the Secretary of Education thinks there’s something wrong with both rogue and non-rogue big-time university sports programs. American public universities shouldn’t use mucho tax money to make Tubby Smith (soon, it’s rumored, to take his winning ways to Texas Tech!) rich as all get-out. Rick Pitino shouldn’t make $20,500 a day. And so forth.

It’s the exact same thing with so-called ‘insider trading,’ not to mention giving for-profit colleges a hard time. Government is the problem.

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UD thanks JND.

I think they really need to update this webpage. It says Stanley Chesley is a member of the Kentucky bar, but he’s not. He’s been disbarred.

The Kentucky Supreme Court upheld the disbarment of famed class action lawyer Stanley Chesley, a partner at Waite Schneider Bayless & Chesley Co. in Cincinnati, for “unreasonable” fees received in the settlement of a class action. Under Ohio Rules of Professional Responsibility, the disbarment may provide grounds for disbarment in Ohio as well.

Eh, unreasonable is a relative thing. You think it’s unreasonable for Stanley to have collected 20.5 million dollars for doing nothing in a class action suit. Others may differ.

Let’s see what he did for his cut of the settlement.

[Chesley] show[ed] up at the mediation and [went] through the motions of announcing the agreement.

Nice work if you can get it; and he doesn’t have to pay back anything, so fine. However, his greed appears to have embarrassed the bar enough for them to dump him.

Ohio’s next.

UD, an English professor, is a big believer in re-reading what you wrote and editing as the need arises. Go to it, Cincinnati.

It was always about the superiority of sport to intellect – American universities were willing to spend millions of tax dollars and tuition dollars on coaches instead of academic programs because nothing sustained school spirit and generated alumni gifts like stadiums packed with excited students. And anyway all that sports money would eventually benefit the academic side of the university. A win-win situation.

Yet even the thickest heads in big-time university sports are beginning to notice that nothing in this model works. Even when schools give tickets away, fewer and fewer students attend games. Away games are often a total joke, with a few hundred tickets sold and even those simulacral — blocks of seats some corporation purchased for some reason, but no actual human being wants to use any of them, so a distinction is now drawn between live gate and… dead gate? Simulacral gate.

A bigger concern is empty seats. Some bowls’ live gates are barely half of their announced attendances.

Officials at lower-tier bowls “don’t even believe the (attendance) numbers they give you,” a BCS bowl executive told the American-Statesman. “They’re counting the tickets schools contractually are forced to buy. If they had to sell tickets, we’d probably have 15 bowl games. But that’s not financial reality. You’ve got TV money and sponsorships propping them up.”

Propping them up is one way to put it. Running them would be a better way, since the schools – beyond springing for the coaches and all – have vanishingly little to do with the whole thing, so that university football in America right now is essentially a bunch of tv programs featuring motion on a field in front of vast numbers of empty seats.

Thick heads are being scratched in athletics offices around the nation as to why no one’s showing up (the numbers are drastically down pretty much everywhere). They’ve kind of gone through their traditional excuses (distance, weather, losing seasons, blahblah) and the numbers keep plummeting, and that’s forcing them to scratch their heads yet more.

Let’s see if we can get somewhere with this.

When your culture is simulacral – when everybody relates to the world via images (online universities, tv-mediated sports events) – the whole concept of physical presence falls away. Why be anywhere? Desperate universities talk about “enhancing the stadium experience,” but beyond making sure everyone’s sloshed they haven’t been able to come up with much. They spend millions on huge – yes – screens – the notorious Adzillatrons – and don’t consider the possibility that when you screen the event at the event (interspersed with screaming relentless advertisements) you take away any sense of immediacy and encourage people to reason their way to future non-attendance. (“Hm. I’m paying three hundred dollars to watch the game on an Adzillatron screen. I can watch it at home on my own screen.”)

And it’s a problem that just keeps feeding itself. Consider the loyal season ticket holder who thinks he’s really lucky because he gets guaranteed seats to every game. He gets to the game and no one else is there – except for a bunch of yahoos who stay long enough to get drunk and then leave halfway through. Eventually he’s going to stop attending. No one likes to feel like a chump.

The solution will come from advanced robotics. The networks running university football, seeing that viewership is also down, will figure part of it is the empty stadium. The empty stadium says to the viewer at home that maybe he’s a chump too — maybe fewer and fewer actual people share his enthusiasm for the game. To counteract this, the networks will purchase tens of thousands of humanoids programmed to remain in their seats and get excited.

… places like Texas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and of course Montana, where the University of Montana’s football team seems to have a wee rape problem.

The ongoing controversy began in late 2010 when several sexual assault allegations, including two women who said they were drugged and gang raped by members of the football team, spurred a local investigation of the school. Last month, University President Royce Engstrom fired the football team’s head coach and athletic director. One member of the team, Beau Donaldson, was charged with rape and has pleaded not guilty.

It’s so bad, the feds have come in to investigate; and you know how much they appreciate the federal government in those parts. They don’t need some guy from Washington to tell them how to handle the fact that players on their football team – including the quarterback – keep getting accused of rape. But the Justice Department points out that it’s not “the number of allegations,” but precisely “the response” on the part of the university that has drawn its attention. When you’ve got so many people charging rape, perhaps something’s wrong internally. Perhaps your school doesn’t take rape seriously enough.

Anyway, I’m just moseying toward my main point here, about the coverage of another problem at UM – a massive budget deficit.

The University of Montana is facing budget cuts across campus because of a significant drop in enrollment, and most departments are being asked to help shore up a $5.7 million deficit.

726 fewer students than last year have enrolled this year, and plenty of people think it has something to do with all the bad publicity. Parents might not, for instance, want their kids to go to a school which seems to be the main reason Missoula is called the The Rape Capital of America.

That deficit isn’t just about the students who aren’t there to pay tuition. Ask Penn State how much money athletic scandals cost.

So… What’s UM’s athletic department doing to help out with the deficit it almost certainly had a great deal to do with creating?

A local reporter, who breathes not a word of the rape scandal, explains:

Athletic director Kent Haslam told us that his department will curtail some maintenance on facilities to help with the cost-cutting, saving about $150,000.

They’re on the case!

Western Kentucky University basks in the academic splendor of the most important person on campus, Coach Bobby Petrino.

Petrino may well be the least ethically whole man in the, ahem, ethically whole-deprived world of Division I collegiate sports… Western Kentucky, a school with mediocre athletics and apparently, sub-mediocre standards, has turned to a person who lied to his last employer about the nature of an accident involving the mistress he allegedly hired to a university position she was unqualified to hold. Please, if you must, take a second to read that again. And again. And again.

Bobby Petrino, holder of a Ph.D. in the Deceptive Arts (he also ditched the University of Louisville shortly after signing a long-term extension in 2007, and quit as coach of the Atlanta Falcons 13 game into his first season later that year. He informed his players via a note atop their lockers), will be the one charged with teaching the 17- and 18-year-old boys who decide to come to Bowling Green about not merely football, but life. He will be their guide. Their compass. Their role model.

UD’s heart goes out to Robert Dietel. Though here’s hoping that in the years since he tried to stop WKU from turning into a sewer he’s found a respectable place to work.

When it comes to university sports, it doesn’t get any more pathological than the University of Kentucky, a perennially corrupt player constantly featured on this blog.

These details from the Eric Smart scientific misconduct scandal on that campus round out the picture of UK as one of America’s most third-world universities, featuring not only an intensely corrupt athletics division, but a high-profile research lab whose now-disgraced director seems to have been protected by people in the administration.

Tim Bricker, the former chair of pediatrics, wrote [Smart] a recommendation letter to the state’s teacher certification agency, calling him “an outstanding teacher.” Bricker is thought to have also removed a letter of reprimand from Smart’s personnel file that detailed his yearlong probation for sexual harassment and creating a hostile work environment in his lab.

… I’ve wanted the University of Southern Mississippi (you owe it to yourself to read the entire article, plus the letter at the end) to be stupider than the University of Massachusetts. I’ve assumed that that deep south school would obviously be dumber than a school in my enlightened part of the country.

Yet they’re actually neck and neck. They’re actually destroying themselves at the same rate, for the same reason. They’re both sports fuck-ups.

6,385 people showed up for U Mass’s most recent football game — played far from campus in Gillette Stadium (where the big boys play!), which offers 68,756 seats.

So let’s see. UD stinks at math, but… 6,385 / 68,756… That’s, uh (pause for phone call to Mr UD) … 9.3%!!!

OR (pause for visit to Percentage Calculator) … that’s 9.2864622723835%!!!!

Of course, “students and taxpayers [are] picking up the tab.”

General Subbaswamy has announced from his bunker that “we haven’t completely mobilized the alumni yet.” His last job was at the University of Kentucky, so he knows university sports.

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UD thanks Andre.

When does a university start tipping over into Auburn territory? When does it accumulate so many scandals of so many kinds – athletic, research, financial – that it begins to get that University of Kentucky smell?

When you add the current insider trading scandal in the University of Michigan’s medical school to the psychology department scandal … when you throw in long-established questions about the university president’s extensive, lucrative, and possibly conflictual corporate board activity… and when you add years of high-profile athletic scandals, including the president’s recent very own Rich Rodriguez debacle… Well, UM’s heading into the red zone.

The University of Kentucky distinguishes itself not merely in football and basketball. The federal Office of Research Integrity has singled out one of its highest-profile professors for a decade of research fraud.

Eric J. Smart, a former UK professor of pediatrics and physiology, pediatrics vice chair of research and the Barnstable-Brown chair in diabetes research … falsified data that was included in at least 10 published papers and numerous reports and applications.

… Among the falsified data … were five grant applications and three progress reports about nonexistent “knockout” mice, which have been genetically engineered to have at least one gene turned off, or “knocked out,” through a targeted mutation.

The ORI found many of Smart’s published findings to be falsified also. In more than 33 instances the office found Smart to be guilty of manipulating “western blots” — an analytic technique that allows scientists to find a specific protein in a sample of tissue — to falsify data in publications and reports in order to complete his research.

Vice chair of research! As with their coaches, UK really knows how to pick ‘em.

Smart’s now teaching high school at the wonderfully named Bourbon High; but the county superintendent says Smart has assured her “there is no evidence to base their (the ORI’s) allegations on.” Whew! You wouldn’t want someone who’s been systematically lying about the results of medical research for over ten years teaching your kids.

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By the way, Scathing Online Schoolmarm will point out that the article about Smart in UK’s paper says his research has now been “censored.” I think they mean “censured.”

… that the New Yorker magazine used to have an amusing feature (maybe it still does?) called Block that Metaphor!, in which the editors printed excerpts from writing that featured mixed or excessive metaphors.

SOS considers the problem of excessive and awkward metaphors in a recent piece of writing by a North Carolina state senator denouncing the athletic/academic scandal at Chapel Hill. As always, her comments are set off from the main text. The senator’s writing is bolded.

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The UNC academic fraud scandal is like a pesky staph infection that just won’t go away for university officials — nor should it. As reporters at the Raleigh News and Observer continue to dig, they uncover more and more dirty little secrets. The latest problems swirl around a pus pocket called the Academic Support Program.

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Okay, so first things first: Figurative language is basically a good thing; it’s there to pep up your writing, make it more vivid. But the figures you choose should have some pertinence to the situation about which you’re writing; they should help us envision it, or think about it, more clearly, as in this famous opening paragraph from Orwell’s essay, “Down the Mine”:

Our civilization, pace Chesterton, is founded on coal, more completely than one realizes until one stops to think about it. The machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal. In the metabolism of the Western world the coal-miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the soil. He is a sort of caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is supported.

The caryatid image takes our mind to that paradigmatic location, the Acropolis. Orwell thus has us, from the outset, exactly where he wants us, equating the miners with the foundations of civilization. Thom Goolsby’s pus pocket does have a connection to his subject in that we often talk about corruption in the language of spreading sickness. The “cancer of corruption,” for instance, has become a cliche. But his elaborately evoked, way icky, somehow comical image is simply over the top, especially for an opening paragraph. It suggests an out of control anger about his topic that immediately diverts the reader’s attention from the subject at hand to the mentality of the writer.

Here’s a really extreme example of a bad comparison, from Morrissey:

“We all live in a murderous world, as the events in Norway have shown, with 97 dead. Though that is nothing compared to what happens in McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried [Chicken] every day.”

Of course Goolsby’s isn’t that grotesque, but it has that same feel of absurd incommensurability, an unfitness to the topic under discussion.

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For many years some football and basketball players, known to the University as “Special Admits,” were assisted by the Academic Support Program and allowed to take no-show classes in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies. Billed as lecture classes, the courses were offered by none other than the chairman of the department. The classes never met — leading one to wonder why the courses were scheduled at all.

Mary Willingham, a reading specialist at UNC, worked in the Academic Support Program. She told reporters she met numerous athletes who had never even read a book, nor did they know what a paragraph was. Willingham reported numerous instances of academic fraud, but no administrator wanted to hear from her. Why would they?

These student-athletes (the term “student” is used lightly here) played in the all-important category of revenue-producing sports. Such individuals are precious commodities at any major university because college sports programs bring in billions of dollars every year to the schools that maintain them. The money comes from many different places, including trademarks, endorsements, media revenues, postseason games and big money from alumni donors.

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This is okay, though the final sentence in the first paragraph would have more impact if Goolsby dropped the last part of it (“which leads one to wonder…”). Just end with “met.” It makes the point, and the finality on the monosyllabic word “met,” combined with the white space before the next paragraph, nails the idea of the nothingness of the courses. In the same way, drop Why would they? at the end of the next paragraph. When expressing rage and disgust, you want to be cool, collected — even cold. Hot rhetorical questions dissolve the sharp substantive language you want.

Wordiness in general – saying much more than you need to – is a problem in this essay. Drop the parenthetic the term ‘student’ is used lightly here. It’s much better simply to use the term – without quotation marks – and proceed. Trust the reader to understand the irony you’re bringing to it. And think of the other words better dropped to make this attack lean and mean: The writer uses the ugly, clunky word numerous (just says lots, or tons, or plenty, or many, — trim your syllables when possible) twice. The final paragraph here would be better if you dropped all-important (precious makes the point). Individuals, like numerous, is a multisyllabic, vague, and rather pretentious word. If the writer had combined his first two sentences, he wouldn’t have needed to come up with another word for players. His second sentence should have ended at billions (same principle as in the first sentence of this excerpt). Or, once having dropped that verbiage, the writer could have attached his final sentence to this one:

These student-athletes played revenue-producing sports, making them precious commodities able to bring in billions from trademarks, endorsements, media revenues, postseason games and big alumni donors.

Okay, back to metaphors.

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It’s the gladiators who bring crowds to the arena and it should surprise no one that schools will do whatever it takes to field the best possible team. What is shameful is the continued smokescreen produced by the UNC administration around this scandal. Academic fraud has prompted no less than four investigations at UNC. One is currently being led by former Governor Jim Martin. So far the governing body of college sports, the NCAA, has not sullied its hands in the most recent fraud revelations.

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Should be no fewer than.

You see what I mean by an excess of metaphor and simile? In this short paragraph, gladiators wrestle with smokescreens and dirty hands. It’s not that any particular image is bad; but jamming them together, one after another, has the reader’s mind dashing off in distracting directions.

In the next few paragraphs, SOS will highlight in red language that if dropped would make this a more powerful argument.

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Governor Martin’s investigation should provide clear answers and solutions for dealing with the scandal. So far, administrators are using the former Republican governor’s inquiry as a dodge to avoid any comments. When asked about the problem, Chancellor Holden Thorp refused [say refuses] to talk, stating that everyone was focused on the Governor’s investigation and that’s all he had to say.

Further, university officials repeatedly claim that FERPA does not allow them to discuss developments in the academic fraud case or release records to the public. FERPA is an acronym for the federal “Family Education Rights and Privacy Act.” [Put this information in a parenthesis after your first use of FERPA.] The University claims this law does not allow them [Find a way to avoid repeating these words.] to release records or face the loss of federal funding. A few documents were disclosed, providing strong evidence as to the extent of the scandal.

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Weak or odd metaphor, redundancy, and unnecessary words will now appear again.

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It is past time for a criminal investigation into these fraudulent activities. For far too long, academic scandals have been treated with the soft glove approach. The local district attorney’s office should begin an immediate criminal probe. If the DA does not wish to handle this matter, he should request that the Attorney General appoint a Special Prosecutor to handle this case.

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The word “criminal” appears twice; you can drop into these fraudulent activities and for far too long. Adding the word “approach” to “soft glove” weighs it down. Just write with a soft glove. End on your strongest word – and that’s glove, not approach.

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The reputation of the state’s flagship university is at stake and someone must take this matter seriously. [This is just blahblah at this point in the essay. Drop the whole thing, or risk looking like a blowhard politician.] Any prosecutor worth his salt would turn detectives loose on staff and administrators involved in the fraud and subsequent cover-up. If necessary, the General Assembly could consider legislation to make prosecuting this type of academic fraud easier.

Additionally, the UNC Board of Governors should seriously consider [Drop seriously consider; makes you look weaselly. If you think they should resign, say it forthrightly.] asking for the resignations of current UNC Trustees who failed to safeguard academic integrity. They have shown little willingness to get to the truth of this scandal and cure the infection. When UNC comes to the General Assembly for more funding, university officials should expect that legislators charged with representing the taxpayers will demand answers.

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He does circle back nicely at the end to infection, which gives the piece some coherence.

Farewell to the most famed member of our academic community.

[D]angerously myopic … self-aggrandizing … [a Mussolini] in wingtips …
“I’d wake up every day and be afraid,” [one of Billy Gillispie's players] says… [A] lunatic who has them running the stadium steps, barking like a mad dog at the moonlight… Six months after being fired at Kentucky, he received his third DUI in a 10-year span.

Texas Tech. A community of scholars.

… for as long as I’ve been following it. But now that they’re on a losing streak, the crowds are pissed.

I mean, they’re always pissed. But now they’re also pissed.

University of Kentucky police will increase their presence at the next UK home football game as a result of fights among tailgaters outside Saturday’s game against Western Kentucky.

Police are getting wounded as they try to break things up.

More police will be patrolling at future games. So.

That will be expensive. Great use of money for a university.

And that will be hyper-surveillance. Always fun at a sports event. But if your fan base is made up of jerks …

Of course a lot of these people aren’t students. They aren’t even fans. Why watch a shitty team play? They’re there because violent drunks love a tailgate. Any tailgate.

Mike Leach, Bobby Knight, Billy Gillispie – Texas Tech seems to choose only the most sadistic coaches for its players… Illegally, agonizingly, protracted practices; physical and psychological roughing up; verbal abuse– all of these men have had something on this list alleged against them. (Background here. Oh wait, that’s about TTU coach Tommy Tuberville’s multiple fraud schemes…. Here. Here. That last one explains why the local culture demands sadistic coaches.)

Texas Tech craves pain, whether from Alberto Gonzales or its, er, hit parade of coaches. When the players eventually leave or revolt, or when the newspapers get a whiff of the story, Texas Tech gets to increase the pain for everyone by firing the coach and then getting sued for millions and millions of dollars which will have to come from students and faculty.

This submissive’s latest dominant, Gillispie, came with irresistible credentials:

[Gillispie] faced similar issues following his departure from Kentucky, including from former Wildcat Josh Harrelson, who said Gillispie “once became so angered that he instructed him to sit in a bathroom stall during a halftime talk at Vanderbilt and then ordered him to ride back to Lexington in the Kentucky equipment truck.” Stories like that, and others about Gillispie’s careless attitude toward basketball office admins and staff, have damaged Gillispie’s reputation nearly beyond repair. His post-Kentucky arrest for drunken driving, Gillispie’s third since 1999, certainly doesn’t help.

Or, as TTU likes to put it: “Student-athlete well-being is our top priority.”