Ten minutes later, the American economy imploded, and apparently a decision was made to deal with the enormous shortfall that ensued by, in all sorts of ways, bilking patients and Medicare.

A UM med school executive blew the whistle, and last year UM had to pay the government millions and millions of dollars, and Shalala, of course, fired the naughty whistle blower.

Now the whistle blower has filed a wrongful termination suit for millions of dollars, which he’ll probably get.

When you add the Nevin Shapiro scandal to this one, Donna Shalala certainly has a lot to answer for.

They are Huh? presidents. The things they do are so nutty, so destructive, that you simply have to sit back and wonder.

These are the university presidents with multiple ongoing national scandals to their names, the university presidents always reeling from massive sex scandals to massive money scandals, never quite catching up with anything… You can sort of see the sweat dripping off of their faces as they stonewall on this one, pass the buck on that one…

Shalala – University of Miami – is still buffeted by the rioting football players scandal and the Nevin Shapiro scandal, but now, in addition to those, she’s got the Pascal Goldschmidt scandal. Much of her medical school faculty is up in arms about Dean Goldschmidt and his, er, management techniques… But Shalala says nothing; whether it’s Goldschmidt, or her other proud med school appointment – Charles Nemeroff, she’s just going to keep on keeping on thank you very much…

Joel, of Yeshiva, is a yet stranger case, a man whose tenure has witnessed the deification and then rapid de-deification of trustees Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, the existence of a board of trustees (all male, natch; women would be against Yeshiva’s religion) so rife with conflict of interest it became a laughingstock, and a decades-long sex scandal whose legal costs promise to set YU back even more than the $150 million or so it lost because of Bernie and Ezra.

This sex scandal, this latest thing, involving rabbis abusing boys at Yeshiva’s university-run high school, isn’t raising Joel’s game any.

[One of the abused] also said that he reported the abuse to Y.U.’s current president, Richard Joel, before and after Joel took up the post in 2003. Joel did not launch an investigation into the abuse allegations until they were published in [a newspaper].

At first, through a spokesman, he said that Y.U. had retained the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell to “assist” in the investigation. Later, he said that Sullivan & Cromwell’s investigation would be independent.

Same old same old. Denial, number one. Number two, try to control everything. Number three, pushed to the absolute effing wall, begin – tentatively, shamelessly, angrily, self-righteously – dealing with it.

The most criminalized university in America.

And we haven’t even started talking about the medical school.

The problem with vehement, outraged post-Freeh Report opinion pieces like this one, which breathlessly recounts the excruciating filth of university football in this country, is that these pieces — we’ll see tons of them in the next forty-eight hours — are simply little system flushes, little emetics, little confessionals, for the very sports guys who’ve happily been covering the game for years. I hope they feel better now. But tomorrow they’ll be back at it, back playing the game that they love as much as Paterno’s happy little North Koreans did. All for football! All for the Beloved Leader!

The predictable has happened with eight Miami football players being ruled ineligible for this season.

… Why is Miami president Donna Shalala still eligible for this season?

Under Shalala’s leadership, UM is changing the face not only of American university sports. It’s also contributing to important changes in the way scientific research is conducted in the United States.

It was to Shalala’s UM that Charles Nemeroff repaired after his problems at Emory. As the Chronicle puts it:

… Thomas R. Insel, who was helping to lead the [government’s conflict of interest] review, was also helping a tainted researcher, Charles B. Nemeroff, land a new job at the University of Miami.

Dr. Nemeroff, while chairman of the psychiatry department at Emory University, was one of several high-profile doctors found to have given speeches or written articles in medical journals extolling drugs or products made by companies that had paid them money or stock benefits that they did not report to their universities. Emory agreed to make Dr. Nemeroff ineligible for NIH grant money for two years. But after moving to Miami with the assistance of Dr. Insel, the director of the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Nemeroff was receiving NIH money before the two-year ban expired.

Addressing the NIH’s advisory board after Dr. Insel’s assistance to Dr. Nemeroff was revealed, Dr. Collins said he would delay the process of putting the rules in place to consider additional changes. In particular, he said the rules may need to be changed to ensure that any penalties or sanctions against a researcher remain in effect if the researcher moves to another institution.

Smart move on Nemeroff’s part, by the way, to jump to the University of Miami. They’ll never give him any trouble. You can’t go any lower than UM.

Forbes:

[B]ecause of the tax-exempt designation for college athletics, nearly all of the revenue, including that generated by ticket sales, television deals, bowl games and corporate sponsorships flows tax-free.

It looks like a business. It smells like a business. But we won’t call it a business. We won’t because we’re still buying into the fiction that these programs are somehow an integral part of the academics at these schools. So we call it a charity.

… It’s a game – a game that makes a whole lot of money for a whole lot of people. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I just happen to believe it’s not a tax exempt purpose.

Shalala …was the president of Wisconsin when Barry Alvarez was football coach. She wanted to hire him as Miami’s coach at one point.

… Alvarez and his son lost $1 million in [Nevin] Shapiro’s Ponzi scheme. Here’s a couple of questions Shalala will get hit with whenever she surfaces:

1) Did your know your good friend, Alvarez, lost $1 million to Shapiro?

2) Why didn’t you inform [Miami’s new coach] of this issue when he took the job?

People like [University of Miami president Donna] Shalala ... are the system. They have cross-contaminated school standing with NCAA hypocrisy. They are one and the same. Shalala maintains a watchdog role in the NCAA.

… Was this decades-long culture of institutional malfeasance [at the University of Miami] so rooted it ignored [warnings about Nevin Shapiro]? Was the lack of institutional control at the very heart of the institution?

How did things come to this, Donna Shalala? What have you done to deserve this? Maybe it’s that $1.2 million salary.

This Dead Spin blogger is only the first of many writers who in the next few days will turn their attention to the woman who has presided over all of the amazing events at the University of Miami – hiring Charles Nemeroff, fielding the most violent university football team ever, enabling Nevin Shapiro for years… Miami, in UD‘s opinion, is just a scummy school, and Shalala has let it get that way. She should go.

A school that lionizes national conflict of interest icon Charles Nemeroff also thinks nothing of lionizing seedy nursing home mogul Morris Esformes…

Morris’s overwhelming preoccupation for many years has been keeping his son, Philip, out of prison for having run with the whole seedy nursing home thing and turned it into the largest health care fraud in American history.

Philip, when not taking all of the federal government’s money, was himself long preoccupied with bribing the head basketball coach at the University of Pennsylvania to put Philip’s son – named Morris after Family Crook #1 – on the team, and thereby grant his admission to that Ivy League institution.

Head-spinning, ain’t it? Flamboyantly pious religious people, too — all of them. But maintain your focus! I’m trying to update you on all of this.

So Philip got twenty years but because of a ton of flamboyantly pious friends he got DJT to pardon him! Largest health care fraud ever MEH.

But not so fast! For some reason the feds would prefer that its expensive, protracted, extremely difficult fight to put Philip in prison NOT be blithely overturned by rich corrupt people. Athough Philip has indeed been released, the Justice Department “will pursue unresolved charges from Esformes’ healthcare fraud trial in 2019.” And since there were like three million original charges against the guy, the feds have a full plate of leftovers from which to choose. He will soon go to trial again, and because the man of God is guilty as hell, he’ll soon be back in prison, and it’ll be Arrested Development all over again.

The other University of Miami medical school story? Ne quittez pas.

With its latest accomplishment – caught by the feds stealing gobs of money in a wide range of inventive and patient-anguishing/bankrupting ways – UM Med maintains its national position as America’s most corrupt medical school ever. With a rogues’ gallery of leaders and doctors, the school has, over decades, enriched itself in ways so deeply and consistently depraved that at some point you have to grant it grudging credit for having utterly transformed a place of healing into an abattoir. The state of Florida is to be sure already the USA’s epicenter of elderly people and medical fraud; it took decades of clever planning and moral squalor for UM to make itself the epicenter of the epicenter.

“Tens of billions of dollars are lost annually to fraud, waste and abuse, and Miami is the Medicare fraud capital of the United States,” [the whistleblower’s attorney] said. “Today’s announced settlement and the schemes described in the DOJ press release are ironic considering they were committed by an iconic South Florida institution under the leadership of the former Secretary of Health and Human Services [the appalling Donna Shalala], the very agency that promulgated the Medicare rules that were violated.”

Wanna know exactly what they did? Details here.

How to approach the delicate topic of football culture and the gifts it has given the American university? It’s not merely the obvious stuff – the pointless stupid scary violence that scads of sports heroes like Richie Incognito bring to campus (idle Google Newsing turns up the latest helmet-bashing-in-the-campus-locker-room, this one at the University of Delaware, where last February another player “was charged with assaulting three other students at a party.”).

This violence has turned professors into police:

Days after the incident, [an Oregon State student who got beaten by team members] said that one of his professors noticed several football players milling outside the door of a classroom and the professor told him to exit through a different door because she was afraid they were going to harass him.

The violence is hard-wired, of course, into the coaching of both university football and basketball, so that on a routine basis latter-day Bobby Knights are filmed and parodied (start at 1:15). The coaches are quickly replaced, sometimes by women, who are symbolically part of the clean-up routine cuz you know women just want to mother the team and would never be violent…

In fact, let’s pause there and think about the incredibly important role of women in big-time university sports. I don’t mean merely as tools of recruitment (several schools attract players via, er, dates with carefully selected female students), and objects of rape, assault, and harassment (see, most recently, the Norwood Teague unpleasantness at the University of Minnesota). And I don’t mean merely the importance of trotting out mom, post-assault, on Good Morning America. (Or, as Matt Hayes puts it, “GMA’s utterly repulsive decision to allow De’Andre Johnson on television to apologize for punching a woman in the face.”)

I mean, think about Donna Shalala’s tenure as president of Miami University. Her main role was as cover for a team that got in big on-field brawls and whose best buddy was Nevin Shapiro. She was like the Good Morning America mom times a hundred. They kept wheeling Shalala out to apply the back of her hand to her naughty charges, and this routine actually worked for a while.

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A local commentator asks incredulously where the University of Minnesota found the likes of Teague (the answer is that they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a search firm). “Were the other finalists Bill Cosby and Donald Sterling?”

Donald Sterling, Zygi (“bad faith and evil motive”) Wilf, these are the guys who give professional basketball and football such a great name… And, as the commentator suggests, there’s not a lot of discernible difference between professional and big-time university football. Even in the matter of violence, there’s the NFL…

In the N.F.L., … fits of violence hardly blacklist players chasing roster spots. The day after punching [Geno] Smith, [Ikemefuna] Enemkpali latched on with the Buffalo Bills, whose new coach, Rex Ryan, has created a haven for wayward players…

(What a sweet, Victorian, girly way of putting it! A haven for wayward players! Like Ikemefuna’s teammate, the aforementioned Richie Incognito! The way Jane Addams created a haven for wayward girls! SWEET.)

… and there’s college ball, where getting kicked out for violence means the same thing it meant for Ikemefuna – you just find another team.

All of which is why, as UD has often recommended, universities with big-time football need football coaches, not academics, as presidents. (See Jim Tressel.) In a pinch, a politician will do. You could also go with a figurehead, a Queen Elizabeth to Nick Saban’s prime minister. But you’ll keep getting stories like the one coming out of the University of Minnesota as long as you take some guy – some random polite reflective well-meaning university denizen – and hand him the management of what is essentially a professional football team.

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The petri dish for university football culture is the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Their new field design is all about Vegas. A sample headline:

UNLV REBELS WILL BE PLAYING FOOTBALL ON ONE BIG CRAPS TABLE IN 2015

“The team’s field and uniforms now reek of the Strip — it’s glitz, gold, gambling and most importantly, its promise of future fortunes.”

This is a team with one of the worst records in university football. An appalling record. Very few people show up to their games. Season tickets sold last year: 3,890. In response, the university decided to build a $900 million, 55,000 seat stadium with an Adzillatron spanning the length of the field. Although they’ve cut back on that original plan, they’ll surely come up with something like it. And they’ve got yet another miracle coach who’s going to shock everybody with the greatest comeback story this side of Elvis.

… I don’t really blame Saban; I blame Alabama’s school president for allowing a football coach carte blanche on what players are admitted into the university. The same goes for presidents at Florida State, Florida, Clemson and the countless other schools that recruited Dalvin Cook, the star FSU running back who was arrested recently and charged with punching a woman outside a Tallahassee bar.

According to records from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Cook was arrested as a juvenile on two separate charges – one involving a robbery and another involving possessing and firing a weapon on school property.

Question: Don’t colleges and college presidents have a responsibility to protect their student bodies by not admitting football players who might be a threat to fellow students?

Mike Bianchi reminds us that jockshops like Clemson, etc., do have presidents. Admittedly these people do little other than attend football games and perform acts of obeisance to their head coach. (And fill out institutional assessment forms.) But just as a cat may look at a king, so a jockshop president may overcome his awareness of his microscopic salary compared to the salary of the coach and beg a few words with Nick or Jimbo about his quest for the biggest, most violent undergrads in America.

[S]everal years ago … Miami recruited Willie Williams, a prep-All-America linebacker from South Florida who was arrested 11 times as a juvenile.

UM President Donna Shalala, in an attempt to justify the signing, wrote in a letter to school boosters: “Mr. Williams is one of us — a son of Miami. We have a special obligation, relationship and commitment to the young people of our South Florida community. We want them to continue to think of us as a place of academic excellence and opportunity.”

Shalala’s letter may be the biggest pile of pabulum in college football history.

That makes me nostalgic. Here at University Diaries we had a hell of a good time following Shalala’s hyper-criminalized University of Miami, and fact is we miss her.

… note that when the New York Times went in search of a sage, gravitas-rich voice on the absolutely shocking academic fraud at Notre Dame, they could only find Dave Schmidly.

Schmidly! Dave! Dave – comic-book ex-president of the unbelievably corrupt University of New Mexico; a man who tried hiring his son for a high-level university position [scroll down for some Schmidly posts]; a man drummed out of office by faculty… Yes, get Schmidly on the the phone! He’ll have something sage to say!

And he does. He obligingly knits his brow for the New York Times about how, you know, competition to recruit the best football players “increases the likelihood of people cutting corners.”

Dave would know about that! Why interview lots of people for a $90,000 a year UNM job when your kid’s sitting right here?

… Eh. It’s not as though the NYT could find a clean president of a big-time sports university to interview. It’s more a kind of how far down the list do we want to go thing… Donna Shalala? Yikes. No. Hey, there’s Tressel! He even used to be a coach! … Oh yeah. Scratch that…. Next…?