… Stats!

But hey. It’s Jersey.

Five current Rutgers football players, including the cornerback at the center of a university-led investigation into coach Kyle Flood, were charged Thursday with assaulting a group of individuals, including one student whose jaw was broken during the unprovoked attack.

… [Nadir Barnwell, one of the men charged,] is at the center of the investigation of [Rutgers football coach Kyle] Flood, with the university looking into whether the Rutgers football coach broke school policy by contacting a professor regarding Barnwell’s grades. The junior cornerback was declared academically ineligible in the spring, according to two school officials.

Flood defied academic support staff when he contacted the professor, two sources told NJ Advance Media.

And then there’s the Rutgers basketball program.

Lordy lordy. I have seen me some scuzzy programs, but Rutgers athletics lately takes the cake.

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“Coach Flood exemplifies our university’s standards and values both on and off the field,” Rutgers president Robert Barchi said in a statement.

That wasn’t long ago, right after he gave him a contract extension and a big raise. And, you know, what Barchi said is absolutely true. Putting its students in harm’s way via sadistic coaches and criminal players, and not giving a shit about academic integrity, is the Rutgers standard.

PS: They’re gonna have to pay over a million dollars to buy Flood out of his contract.

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I knew this was going to get funny.

Hands-on research in Criminal Justice majors.

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From a comment thread:

[H]alf our secondary just got arrested.

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Coach Flood Sings to His Favorite Player

I know I stand in line until you think you have the time
To talk some football with me
And if we find someplace to meet, I know that there’s a chance
You’ll end up beating on me

I practice every day to find some clever lines to say
To make the meaning come through
But then I think I’ll wait until the evening gets late and I’m alone with you
The time is right, your perfume fills my head, the stars get red and, oh, the night’s so blue
And then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like “I love you”

Talk about a receiver who gives as well as he gets! Bravo, Rutgers. Your money is well-spent.

One thing you can say for American university football. It’s giving writers an opportunity to have their Martin Luther moment and make a huge deal out of having a conscience.

For here is yet another football (well, Michigan football) boycotter, a person eager to share with us her willingness to, in good conscience, put up with scummy Rick Rodriguez as coach of the team, but not Brady Hoke… Brady Hoke who is about to cost the University of Michigan even more millions to get rid of than Rodriguez, and Rodriguez cost it oodles of millions…

Yes, it’s all been a pretty spectacle – The multimillionaire coach keeping a concussed player in the game is just the latest classy move from a school increasingly indistinguishable from Auburn. Scroll through my University of Michigan posts over the last few years (start here) if you have the stomach for it.

(Oh – and the game the latest Here I Stand fan is boycotting? It’s against Rutgers. Rutgers! Talk about a scum cosmic convergence. Rutgers.)

… that’s doing the place in. So what if their athletic director (who came in to fix what their sadist-on-wheels basketball coach did to the school’s rep – it became, among other things, a notorious Saturday Night Live joke – and then turned out to have her own apparently sadistic past), so what if she told her staff to reach out and touch people in the community, but “not in a Jerry Sandusky-type way.”

In itself, this remark is nothing. But in context, it’s just this week’s shabby Rutgers Thing, part of a narrative involving a school giving all of its money to athletics, run by a ridiculously greedy new president, fronted by hilariously obscene fans, coached by cretins…

So… there’s always a a little bit of hell to pay when the legislature has a chance to chat one on one with the people who run perennial scandal magnets like Rutgers University.

Of course, like most seriously fucked up schools, Rutgers reflects a seriously fucked up state. This is the state that gave us the gone but not forgotten University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. As one local columnist puts it:

[Stephen] Sweeney argues that scandals, including men’s former basketball coach Mike Rice penchant for hurling basketballs and epithets at players, have damaged the school’s reputation and “its ability to purse academic excellence.”

So [putting more political appointees on its board of trustees] would make sense.

Because nothing enhances a university’s academic reputation like a collection of Jersey pols.

You got your basic Scylla and Piscataway dilemma here… Jersey legislators… Jersey trustees…

Here at University Diaries, we never tire of quoting that thing beloved of university football boosters: Give the sport more money because it’s the university’s front porch.

Too true. Every outlet from the New York Times on down today features astoundingly violent (coaches and players) Rutgers University, and you obviously can’t put a price on publicity like this. It’s one thing to become a national laughingstock because of your mad sadistic basketball coach (who can forget the SNL sketch?). You’re moving to a whole other level when you recruit a quarterback who a few nights ago allegedly inflicted permanent brain damage on someone. Someone he seems to have left to die on the streets. Someone currently fighting for his life.

The quarterback, who’s from Minnesota, was named “Minnesota’s Mr Football in 2011.” Too right.

… campus in the country to start doing some marketing. If you read through these posts about Rutgers, you’ll discover that the school subsidizes its athletics program to the tune of millions and millions of dollars, so the place should be receptive to revenue-generating ideas.

Now that their quarterback-to-be has been arrested for beating a guy possibly to death (the guy is still alive, but in critical condition, having apparently been kicked twice in the head while down, etc.), Rutgers, with its notoriously violent coaches and players, would be a fool not to take advantage of the cachet its name now carries.

What UD is getting at is that the school should market a muscle car, or boxing gloves, or some sort of weapon (not a gun, because the Ruger is a gun, and that sounds too much like Rutger), and call it The Rutger. The name Rutgers is at the moment synonymous in the public mind with brutality; if Rutgers wants to make money, it’s going to have to strike while the iron is hot. There’s always another school (feast your eyes) vying for most sports-related assaults, rapes… And though Rutgers has a little breathing room here, given the sheer volume of violent incidents it has maintained over the last couple of years, you can’t let your guard down.

Get behind the wheel of a Rutger and own the road, baby.

… UD rides into town to save his ass.

Barchi wants to hold on to two corporate money-for-nothing seats. Who wouldn’t? But as the leader of the state senate points out, they are both grotesquely obvious conflicts of interest. The corporations in question even do business with Rutgers.

Barchi would be an idiot to turn down hundreds of thousands of dollars of free money, yes. But his job, and whatever reputation Rutgers has left after its zillions of other scandals, are in peril. What to do? Hm, hm, hm…

So far, Rutgers hasn’t done much of anything. Barchi seems to think he can wait this one out, stonewall until everyone loses interest. UD isn’t sure this is a good move. UD can think of a better move.

Barchi can take for his model here the NCAA’s chief legal counsel, who warns that Ed O’Bannon’s class action lawsuit (details here) “threatens college sports as we know it.”

Take the high road, in other words. Go the dignity route. University presidents on corporate boards, university football and basketball – these are beautiful things, with venerable traditions… things we threaten at our peril… things that are simply the heart and soul of the great American university. When you threaten a president’s ability to double her compensation by attending biannual meetings with a biotech at the Regis Bora Bora, you threaten university life as we know it.

But can he? The problem with – call it the Squeak Assumption – is that, as economists remind us, one’s perception of one’s financial condition has everything to do with what other people in your immediate world earn.

A few years ago, several of Harvard’s money managers resigned in protest because instead of making the industry standard for their job description (with bonuses and all, around thirty million a year at that time), they were stuck (because of alumni protests about over-compensation) at around ten, fifteen million. A few years ago, a University of Chicago law professor with a household income of close to half a million dollars cried poor in the national press.

If Steven Cohen, whose personal worth is between eight and ten billion dollars, sits on your board of trustees, you, as president of Brown University, are going to be challenged to maintain your self-esteem. No one likes to be poor.

If you want to understand why the new president of Rutgers, Robert Barchi, is, like a total idiot, continuing to engage in flagrant, self-serving conflict of interest, and thereby adding one more outrageous scandal to the ten others going on at that university, you have to understand what I’m trying to tell you. You have to try to put yourself in Barchi’s shoes. In his corporate-board world, clearing one million dollars a year is the absolute minimum, the barest acceptable situation. One million dollars is in fact for Barchi squeaking by. If Barchi has to drop his corporate money-for-nothing and suddenly plummet to $800,000 a year, this is what his world will look like to him:

One walks along a very rough path of the river bank, in between clothes posts and washing lines, to reach a chaotic group of little, one-storied, one-roomed cabins. Most of them have earth floors, and working, living and sleeping all take place in the one room. In such a hole, barely six feet long and five wide, I saw two beds—and what beds and bedding!—which filled the room, except for the fireplace and doorstep. Several of these huts, as far as I could see, were completely empty, although the door was open and the inhabitants were leaning against the door posts. In front of the doors filth and garbage abounded. I could not see the pavement, but from time to time I felt it was there because my feet scraped it…

Unless you understand Barchi’s world, from Barchi’s perspective, you cannot possibly understand how he came to assume the presidency of a university barely recovering from years of financial corruption and immediately set about securing his corporate board memberships.

I suppose it’s some sort of compensation, when the story about your young, already totally blighted university presidency jumps to the New York Times, that the quality of prose being produced about the fiasco significantly improves – even to the point of poetry. Rutgers has moved from storm to storm is lovely, lilting, memorable writing; even as the article in the Times rehearses all the stupid stuff Robert Barchi has overseen in the months since he took over at Rutgers, it sweetens things somehow with this poignant formulation…

UD thinks the poetry resides in the word moved… Think of the similar E.E. Cummings line

my father moved through dooms of love

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Perhaps, as John Updike wrote, life’s a shabby subterfuge; certainly the last few years at Rutgers and the UMDNJ have been shabby in the extreme. Under its latest leader, a man who does not even understand the concept of conflict of interest, Rutgers straggles on. And the rain it raineth every day.

… relentlessly unmasks that university’s sports lies (background here). Like Reed Olsen at Missouri State University, Killingsworth is part of a special breed of university professor: A smart economist able to detect all of the bs universities put out about how lucrative big-time sports on campus are (or will be; it’s almost always got to be will be). So for instance, in a recent opinion piece, Killingsworth writes:

Its report to the NCAA shows that the subsidy to [Rutgers] athletics is $28 million: $18.5 million from discretionary university funds and another $9.5 million from student fees. None of these funds are earmarked for athletics — the university is free to spend those dollars on anything it wants, or even hand them back to students and their families as tuition reductions. All told, the subsidy amounts to almost $1,000 for each undergraduate. The student fees alone work out to almost $330 per undergraduate.

Nevertheless, Rutgers officials from [President] Barchi on down repeatedly refer only to the $18.5 million in discretionary funds as a subsidy. They never mention student fees. Sayonara! $9.5 million in subsidies conveniently disappear.

Killingsworth barely touches on the reputational costs to Rutgers of its absolutely endless athletics scandal. He doesn’t need to.

… violent and prevaricating coach , direct your attention away from Rutgers for a moment and take a look at the University of Alaska.

The larger picture for Alaska involves spectacular statewide corruption. Our two far-flung states – Alaska and Hawaii – are among America’s most filthy, and their substandard universities, and corrupt university sports programs, reflect that. Of course one of the reasons these programs can be so corrupt is that no one outside Hawaii and Alaska pays any attention. We look at big urban states like New Jersey.

But UA has its own sports scandal going, and it precisely echoes the Rutgers story. College Hockey News reports:

Former Alaska-Anchorage forward Mickey Spencer alleges that former coach Dave Shyiak hit a player with his stick during a practice in 2011, then told players to keep quiet about it. Spencer made his allegations in a letter written to the school president and Board of Regents, it was reported in the Anchorage Daily News.

According to the letter, Shyiak violently struck forward Nick Haddad during a drill because the coach got angry that Haddad didn’t stop in front of the net as instructed.

The Daily News obtained the letter. In it, Spencer said, “He tomahawked, lumber-jacked — whatever you want to call it — him across the thigh on his (hockey) pants. We knew this wasn’t a small deal, it’s kind of a big deal. I’ve seen a coach break a stick over a goalpost or the glass because he’s pissed about something, but I’ve never seen one take out his anger on a player.”

You can understand why Shyiak was frustrated; he had eight losing seasons in a row at UAA. Anyone would have attacked a player.

As at Rutgers, after the violent coach went, the UAA athletic director who oversaw the coach was also forced out. There’s a suggestion that the university didn’t take the players’ report of the coach’s violence seriously; there’s also the fact that the university announced nothing of all of this to the media. And now, for unknown reasons, the search for a new hockey coach has been called off.

UAA athletics is also, by the way, under NCAA investigation for an undisclosed something or other.

The Sarah Palin appointees making up this university’s regents have called a special meeting to discuss all of this. That should help.

…. which seems to be going down a stupid-violent-corrupt-university To-Do List.

Of the thousands of articles that have appeared in the last two days about Mike Rice, Rutgers, and the imperiled president of Rutgers, this, UD reckons, is the best so far, since it stresses not so much the fate of one or two miscreants, but the fate of Rutgers University.

Repeatedly, expert observers are quoted comparing Rutgers to Penn State (“This is a minor league version of Penn State.” “Rice should’ve been gone right away, and especially in the context of [Joe] Paterno and Penn State, neglecting to act is stunning.”), and they are right to do so, because it will probably take around a decade for most Americans to stop thinking Paterno/Sandusky when they think of Penn State. Rutgers is in the same place now.

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It’s quite possible that instead of thinking those two names, they’ll think instead of the names associated with new scandals at Penn State that have overtaken the Paterno/Sandusky scandal. Look at Miami U and Auburn (“Lies, I tell you! It’s all been lies!”) and the University of Tennessee and Ohio State and all. There’s a reason UD has always called big-time university sports the gift that keeps on giving. You’re given a toy with many moving parts when you’re given a big multi million dollar sports enterprise on a small university campus. Your marching band can haze a band member to death. Criminals on your team can rape people. Fans can riot, or constantly trash your campus beyond recognition. Your sadistic coach can appear on film being sadistic. You can’t, like Penn State, replace an academic culture with a corrupt sports culture for decades and then turn around when that absurdity implodes – as it always will – and say no, no, no, we’re a university, we’re doing all these great things. You are doing great things. But it doesn’t matter.

Like Graham Spanier and the rest of the pathetic crew, Rutgers’ Robert Barchi will probably be forced out of a job soon. He has already been outed as an enabler of depravity — which is virtually the job description of a Division I university president.