… takes no risks.

Though sometimes this strategy can backfire. As it were.

…is one popular way of characterizing the NCAA/university athletic program/university athlete ménage à trois; for herself, UD has always found the simpler, less sexy, swinish squalor trope serviceable… You’ve got piggy NCAA head Mark Emmert (“In an interview on a PBS Frontline special, ‘Money and March Madness,’ a visibly agitated Emmert refused to reveal his own seven-figure salary on camera…”); piggish coaches making millions even when, as at beyond-belief-awful Syracuse football, almost no one goes to the games and team members are constantly rotated in and out of local jails; and players, sloshing in a stew of agents, boosters, bogus courses…

Whatever pigskin used to be, it’s mostly pigshit now. Universities like North Carolina Chapel Hill, which actually think they don’t stink, are intriguing to track, in a kind of let’s-watch-the-psychotics way…

We’re winners… we have a glorious proud tradition…

These people are kind of like the three Christs of Ypsilanti. Like the three Christs, they are quick to defend their delusions by accusing other schools of being deluded… Yes, we at U Miami give off some stench, but have you smelled Southern Methodist?

Well, so. What is to be done? How to clean up?

This guy thinks we should abolish the NCAA and put caps on coaches’ salaries.

Not gonna happen. Read Animal Farm. The pigs will not be amused.

… context. You look at a school like Syracuse University, which had a bad on-campus brawl early Sunday morning (major fighting; several arrests), and you ask yourself What else? What’s it been like on that campus for the last few months? You scroll through various corruption and violence related posts that pop up on this blog when you type syracuse into UD‘s search engine…

And it’s clear that Syracuse has got what you call a trend.

You’re describing mainstream big-time American university athletics. Nothing to see here.

… got filmed – it’s alleged – by the director of media for that university’s athletic department – coming out of showers after games.

[He] made the recordings by positioning the camera at waist level and placing a piece of tape over the red light to conceal that it was recording. [Authorities] “quickly discounted” the possibility of that having been done accidentally.

He accidentally placed a camera at waist level hundreds of times?

Yes, I think we can quickly discount that.

… is out front on the latest Yeshiva University scandal – a decades-long cover-up of sexual abuse. And the cover-up continues.

[A Yeshiva alumnus] said he was dismayed when [the Yeshiva-appointed investigator] told him that her report might be delivered to the Y.U. board orally rather than in writing. He said he was even more alarmed when [she] said that unlike the [Penn State] Freeh report, which was disseminated publicly the same day it was presented to the board, she “could not say whether… the board would release the report to the public.”

[The alumnus] sent a letter, signed by 18 Y.U. high school alumni [the abuse took place at Yeshiva's high school], to the chairman of the university’s board on January 3, asking that the investigation follow the blueprint laid out by the Freeh report. By January 8, the chairman, Henry Kressel, a managing director at a private equity firm in Manhattan, had not responded.

When a reporter from the Forward called Kressel on January 7 and identified himself, Kressel cut off the call. Kressel’s assistant later directed the Forward to Y.U.’s press office. (Y.U.’s press office did not respond to several questions, including a request to know who on the board is overseeing the investigation and when the board might decide to make the report public.)

Other high-ranking Y.U. officials declined to speak to the Forward. Reached at his New York home, David S. Gottesman, a billionaire investor and a Y.U. chairman emeritus, said: “I don’t talk to reporters. I never have.” Another chairman emeritus, Ronald P. Stanton, who made his fortune in agrochemicals, said, “I have no comment, sorry.”

… Seymour also declined to respond in regard to whether any member of her investigation team has any past or present ties to Y.U….

Yes, Yeshiva, following its long-established M.O. (denydenydenydenydeny), is covering itself in glory once again.

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Brava to this Yeshiva professor who takes advantage of her tenure (keep this in mind when considering the benefits of tenure) to go after Yeshiva. I’m sure Yeshiva will punish her in other ways; but they can’t fire her.

We now can see that there is a paradigm of institutional cover-up, and have named institutions that stand in that line: the Roman Catholic Church, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish organizations, Penn State, Syracuse University, the Citadel, Poly Prep Country Day School, the Horace Mann School, and now my own employer, Yeshiva University, among many others too numerous to name. At the same time, the paradigm is crumbling before our very eyes. No institution can expect to protect its secrets of abuse and assault any longer.

Madeleine Honig and UD met as undergrads at Northwestern University, and have remained friends. One of UD‘s most vivid memories is a particular image of Madeleine – a very young freshman because she’d been admitted a year or two early – marching exuberantly along the campus lakefront on a sunny day. UD was sitting in one of the newish lakefill buildings, watching her, and marveling at her beauty as the wind whipped her black hair. She seemed entirely happy, entirely open to the world.

Madeleine’s father, Arnold Honig, died last year. He was a physicist at Syracuse University, a “physics icon,” “internationally known for his pioneering work in the field of highly polarized nuclear spin systems.”

No one goes to the games. The team teems with miscreants. Tons and tons and tons of them, so that the coach just presses this template each time shit goes down — really, always says pretty much verbatim the same thing: We are aware of the charges against X and Y and Z and A and we’ll you know handle it appropriately don’t worry…

So last night two of the guys got drunk and stood in the street shouting fuck this shit and getting arrested and all…

It’s really odd. I mean, maybe UD isn’t getting something here, but — the coach gets millions of dollars to stage games without spectators and, increasingly, without players.

We’ve got it all – the article written before the stabbing (one of several fights) at our first basketball event of the season (“We have the best fans in college basketball!”), and the article written after the place was evacuated and the stabbed guy was taken to the hospital (“We were saddened to learn…”).

Students and administration at Syracuse seem to be taking a lot of comfort from the fact that the guy who was stabbed, and the guys in all the other fights (“[The police] received multiple reports of fights breaking out in the concourse areas near the concession stands prior to receiving a report of the stabbing…”), weren’t students, but so what? If your university has created perfect conditions for riots (the event is free and open to the public and being shitfaced is de rigueur), you’re not going to be impervious to the weaponry by virtue of having a student i.d.

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The solution won’t be to change the nature of the event. The event recruits fans who will purchase tickets, and the school needs the money. The solution – a familiar one, adding delight to these free-spirited celebrations – will be to turn the arena into a police state.

The Weiss Gallery of Ancient Art will showcase the Museum’s Roman marble portraits and sarcophagi, wall paintings from the vicinity of Pompeii, and floor mosaics from the Roman province of Syria. Here the Museum’s collection of Etruscan and Italic ceramics and bronzes will also be shown, among these a bronze relief fragment depicting warriors on horseback dating to the 6th century BCE, a recent gift of Drs. Arnold-Peter and Yvonne Weiss…

The third gallery, devoted to Materials and Technology, puts on view more Greek and Roman coins from the Museum’s collection than ever before. Among these are a spectacular tetradrachm with a head of the god Dionysos from Naxos in Sicily and a decadrachm with a stunning image of the nymph Arethusa from Syracuse, as well as gold staters from Pergamon dating to the time of Alexander the Great, recent donations from Drs. Peter and Yvonne Weiss.

The Rhode Island School of Design might want to take another look at that spectacular tetradrachm. Might also want to see if there’s anything it can do toward renaming the Weiss Gallery.

As you know if you’re a regular UD reader, this blog takes a keen interest in the details of sandblasting disgraced donors’ names from buildings (Seton Hall specializes in this), and we’ll keep an eye on RISD’s design decisions here, because Weiss of Weiss Gallery has now been found guilty of coin theft. His punishment:

… Weiss must complete 70 hours of community service, give up all 23 coins that were seized from him at the time of arrest and attempt to publish an article on the problem of trading coins with uncertain origins.

One quick piece of advice for Weiss from UD: Contact your colleague, Martin Keller, for names of some organizations that can help with the writing of the article.

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UD thanks Maurice.

Commencement speaker, recipient of an honorary Doctor of Laws degree — Dimon’s the Joe Paterno of Syracuse. Let’s catch up with his latest accomplishment.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) had already lost more than $700 million on synthetic credit bets and Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon was told that number could climb to almost $1 billion when he dismissed press reports about the positions in April as a “tempest in a teapot.”

While JPMorgan booked a $718 million loss on the positions held by its chief investment office in the first quarter, it didn’t publicly specify the loss when releasing the results April 13. When an analyst asked Dimon that day about media coverage of the trades, he dismissed them as a minor issue.

After all, he’s an honorary doctor of laws.

And if during the proceedings he needs a character reference, he can get a fabulous one from Syracuse University, which not only conferred the degree but chose him to deliver the 2010 commencement address.

… the chancellor of Syracuse University had Jamie Dimon give the 2010 commencement address. She defended her decision by saying:

It is rare that a university is able to bring a speaker with a birds-eye view of, and extensive on-the-ground experience with, a major global challenge.

Now that Dimon’s irresponsibility has produced a globally destructive two billion dollar loss at his massive bank, UD thinks it’s time for Chancellor Cantor to invite him back. Thanks to her, Syracuse already has the distinction of having been the only American university to honor this man in this way; and if her criterion for the choice of speaker continues to be someone who has immediate experiences of major global challenges, the choice of Dimon is better than ever. His bank has just created a major global challenge.

Maybe she should have invited Simon Johnson instead. He certainly had useful things to tell her.

Meanwhile, Syracuse can take pride in the fact that it did its small bit to encourage Jamie Dimon to “preen and flash along … until [his] hubris causes the next [financial] disaster.”

[A]thletic success does not seem to imply higher [academic] quality, at least not for the Final Four. Looking at rankings of overall institutional quality as measured by US News & World Report in 2012 , the “Kentucky Arms Race” does not seem to have had an effect. The ranks for the elite eight’s losing teams, Baylor (ranked 75th), Florida (58th), Syracuse (62nd) and UNC (29th) are far better than those for the final four. Of the final four, just one, Ohio State (ranked 55th), is in a comparable academic league. Louisville is ranked 106 spots away from the team it beat last weekend (Florida) and at 124th, Kentucky’s athletic prowess does not seem to be translating into academic accolades.

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