… rating, its criminally inept bureaucracy, its comically criminally inept bureaucracy, its criminal business school professor, its “financial waste, conflicts of interest, and possible fraud,” has outdone itself this time. A gang rape seems to have taken place on campus.

ASU declined to confirm [a rape] investigation, denying repeated attempts by [a] news station to obtain a copy of the police report and at one point claiming no such record existed.

Wouldn’t want to tell the students either. The handful of people who continue to call the crony compensation center home might consider leaving.

[T]he victim has since left the university… [H]er family said their main concern was that the university did not notify students of the incident.

[Michelle] Crawford was hired [as a business professor] despite the fact she [had been] disbarred as a lawyer and faced criminal prosecution. [Crawford is the sister-in-law of an ASU trustee.]

Crawford was a licensed attorney in North Carolina before she was disbarred in about September 2008 “for misappropriation of entrusted funds and failure to reconcile her trust account,” according to [a] report. She was hired as a business professor at ASU in 2011 and was retained through August or September 2013 (different dates have been reported). She was indicted April 19, 2012, in U.S. District Court in North Carolina… Crawford, also known as Michelle Mallard, pleaded guilty July 10 to “mortgage fraud conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy, and embezzlement in violation of the wire fraud statute.”

She faces a sentence of up to 70 years in prison.

… in which a student, having taken LSD and been violent all night, showed up at campus police headquarters and apparently acted so threateningly that a policeman shot and killed him, San Bernardino city police have shot and killed a Cal State San Bernardino student who also apparently threatened them. Responding to a report of a disturbance, they confronted the student in a dorm hallway.

[T]here was an altercation in which the student became violent toward officers, who shot the student in the torso.

Obviously, there will be an investigation and a review of any security footage.

The parents of the South Alabama student – who was not only unarmed, but apparently naked – are suing.

… shot to death by a campus policeman.

He had taken LSD at a concert that evening and had gone on a rampage, attacking three other people before he got to the police station.

Video taken by a surveillance camera showed Collar nude and covered in sweat as he pursued the retreating officer more than 50 feet outside the building, Cochran said. Collar got within 5 feet of Austin and the officer fired once, striking the student in the chest, Cochran said…. [The Mobile County Sheriff] said he had “serious concerns” about the killing of an unarmed student when he first heard what had happened, but he better understood the officer’s decision to open fire after watching the videotape of the shooting.

“It’s very powerful,” [he] said …

Investigators are trying to determine who provided Collar with LSD and could charge that person with murder…

… wonders why he was lied to.

When the University was considering adding NCAA football in fall 2007, the administration promised this new program would not take any money from the general University budget. But the administration has brushed this pledge aside.

The original football budget, which was proposed to the Board of Trustees in its December 2007 meeting, required no money from the general budget (though it does use $150 per student per semester of student fees).

Further, USA President Gordon Moulton told the Press-Register that football would “break even” and not use University funds.

But football has taken more than half a million dollars from the general budget since its inception.

In fiscal year 2008 (Oct. 1, 2007 to Sept. 30, 2008), the football team received $215,034 under “direct institutional support” — which means money from the general University budget…

The next year, which ended Sept. 30, 2009, football used $320,959 from the University budget…

Michigan State was happily on its way to bankrupting the school, via massive payments (an almost hundred million dollar ten-year contract extension!) to a football coach who racked up some winning games, when (quoting James Bond) “something big came up.”

Given that as recently as 2018 another Michigan school was out 500 mill because a team doctor also had something come up, you kinda wonder

1.) how does one of America’s not at all rich states keep finding all this dough (and more) in its university sports programs? and

2.) will the state ever realize that hugely expensive degenerates tend to populate American university sports programs at the highest levels? (Tuberville not high-profile enough for you?) Because once you get RID of, say, Tucker, he’s gonna turn around and sue you for hundreds of millions more, the way all of them do when you fire them, for cause or not. Right? Has anyone besides UD been following this history?

As daunting as the remaining two months remaining on the schedule appear, there’s also the potential for a lengthy legal fight with Tucker hinting at his intent to sue the university over the roughly $80 million remaining on his contract. Michigan State doesn’t want to pay a dime and will have to decide if it’s worth absorbing hefty legal fees and headlines continuing to link the school with Tucker or reach a settlement to bring the saga to an end.

3.) can anyone at these institutions of higher learning think about cause and effect? As in, when you suddenly give a hundred million dollar contract to a… not too upstanding person, might that money and power go to his head? Make him think he can get away with anything cuz he’s such hot shit?

Yeah. You kinda wonder why so many American universities are ineducable on the most basic patterns, the most basic matters.

“Alabama always ranks at the bottom” of every state-based quality of life list, notes a local opinion writer; and if you want to know how they do it, look no further than Auburn University’s Neville Arena, purpose-built for basketball, but – er – converted the other night, by the school’s multimillionaire sports coaches (football and basketball), into a massive Christian revival/pep rally/public baptism. We Ask You Lord/In Jesus’ Name/Make Us Win/ Tomorrow’s Game…

Some have dared point out that Auburn is a public university, and here in the States, uh….

But the Guv herself just shot that right down as in like how dare sicko atheists dare tell us what to do down here …

And meanwhile all the smart people on campus (Jews, Hindus, Muslims) take one look at this sponsored, schoolwide thang and say Wow this is even freakier than Notre Dame… I’m getting the hell out of here…

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And that’s how you do it. That’s how you keep your school – and your state – stupid. In the name of the Father, the Run, and the Goaly Posts, Amen.

Because [huge] network money has to come from somewhere, we can anticipate more and longer commercials in games that already subject fans’ patience, bladders, and backsides to what amounts to a four-hour stress test. Those who head from the stadium to the local motel instead of fighting traffic and fatigue on the long drive home are almost certainly looking at two-night minimums on rooms at grossly inflated rates. Throw in gas, food, and tickets for a family of four, and your credit card tally will scream of a weekend in Paris, not Clemson.

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James Cobb, Spalding Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Georgia, goes on to describe

the sinister contagion of unadulterated commercialism now enveloping college football at every level. Left unchecked, it promises to make exiles of the students, alumni, and loyal fans in general who long saw games, not simply as athletic contests, but the centerpiece of a deeply personal, culturally affirming ritual.

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UD thanks Jim.

There aren’t that many of these, and most of them are religious institutions. Yeshiva University has long been the standout, ruling over its students (especially its women) with an iron morality fist (would you expect any less from a school whose behavioral models have included Bernard Madoff, Ezra Merkin, Ira Rennert, and Zygi Wilf?). In 2011, when a woman student published a sex survey, she immediately lost her housing scholarship. Around the same time, another woman student published a short story with mild sexual content in a campus publication. The paper was shut down. AND sex filters were imposed on all male students’ computers. Not females’ of course! Because females don’t read… or, uh… write about sex.

And there’s the curiously named Liberty University, whose duce has generated lots of news copy lately. UD thinks The Onion captures the situation there best.

The other source of tinpottery is the southern jock school whose Dear Leader knows when you are sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake! U Alabam’s Shahanshah Nick Saban has been in a snit because his subjects don’t go to the blowout football games (they’re always like 70 – 0) he puts on for their entertainment, or if they go they get bored and leave early… and then you know, out in tvland, viewers all over the country see them empty seats and Saban’s embarrassed etc. So the school now tracks its students’ movements:

Alabama is taking an extraordinary, Orwellian step: using location-tracking technology from students’ phones to see who skips out and who stays.

You better not be in the fucking library when you’ve been told to sit on a bleacher in 100 degree heat for hours of grinding nothingness!

But just as in other Orwellian regimes the population rebels, so in ‘Bama, the frat boys have been identified as the avant-garde of the resistance:

[It will] not be long before pledges are conscripted to hold caches of phones until the fourth quarter so their fraternity brothers [can] leave early.

Plenty of precedent for this, mes petites. Remember clickers?

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UD thanks Dave.

Two in two years? Hell, that’s nothin’! It’s Bama, America’s most celebrated university football team. What do you figure the dude makes a year to holler at the boys? 3, 4 hundred thousand? Main strength coach at Bama makes around $600,000…

A Potemkin Village is “a pretentiously showy or imposing façade intended to mask or divert attention from an embarrassing or shabby fact or condition.” The three Bloomberg writers who make this comparison – it appears in a long piece summarizing the ongoing national basketball scandal, which they call “the worst since college basketball players were caught shaving points for gamblers in the 1950s” – mean to suggest, I guess, that the glitzy University of Louisville basketball team masked whatever there was of the shabby non-basketball University of Louisville.

It’s quite a statement. Can we have gotten to the point where we’re not a tad astonished by it?

I mean, yes, one remembers the witty president of the University of Oklahoma back in the ‘fifties telling a senator he wanted to “build a university our football team can be proud of.” More recently, the president of Ohio State, “asked whether the school had considered firing embattled coach Jim Tressel, … said: ‘No. Are you kidding? Let me just be very clear. I’m just hopeful the coach doesn’t dismiss me.'” One has no trouble imagining how the puling little president of the University of Alabama feels about his stature vis-à-vis Nick Saban. And of course we know how the leadership of Penn State felt about that… curious couple, Sandusky and Paterno. Going to jail for them was a small price to pay.

Still…

**************

And does the analogy really work? For after all, as is the way with many big-time athletic programs, there was never a clear separation between the shabby embarrassing academic UL and the rich degenerate basketball UL. The squalor of college sports spreads itself all over the campus – literally, as in the way the University of Georgia campus for a long time looked the morning after big games; and figuratively, as in the establishment of a house of prostitution in a UL dorm for players, recruits, and the fathers of recruits.

It’s not really that you’ve got on the one hand the glitzy sports program and on the other the hidden humiliating university. The whole thing tends toward looking like the Calais Jungle.

How is one of this country’s major jockshops going to shake off its latest thing – the FBI bribery fraud and conspiracy thing? Decades of institutional misconduct have done nothing to blunt their teams’ championship ways; and if Auburn’s long history of corruption has destroyed any vestige of academic integrity, who gives a fuck? It’s a jockshop.

Still, when the DOJ and FBI come calling, it’s definitely a problem, and UD‘s gonna tell you Auburn’s short and long game in dealing with it.

They have a brand new president – hard-landing macho man Steven Leath, who did a bang-up job at major jockshop Iowa State – and Leath’s short game (very short – it’s kind of a placeholder until the other conspirators confess) is to deny that the bribery fraud and conspiracy is the work of anyone other than one singular bad person.

But UD sees a far more interesting long game here, involving Alabama’s next senator, Roy Moore.

UD thinks that if Auburn sits tight and doesn’t do much of anything, Moore will step in and solve its latest problem for it. As a United States senator, he will launch an all-out attack on the FBI and DOJ and their apostate assault on the twin pillars of faith down south: football and basketball. With Roy on their side, the University of Alabama and Auburn University are going to be just fine.

… and the result shows you American higher education and sports culture at its very best.

Keep your eye on DEA/FBI raids of pill mills. One clinic operator currently on trial for everything from “violations of the RICO organized crime statute to illegal drug distribution to kickbacks to wire and mail fraud to money laundering” decided it was too dangerous to pocket the money he got for talking up his corporate drug supplier’s big drug – because a doc now in jail in Michigan for the same shit this guy’s on trial for pocketed his pharma money and look what happened to him.

So here’s what this guy decided to do, in order not to attract attention from the government.

[One] batch of emails [discussed in the trial] concerned [Xiulu] Ruan’s handling of the fees he collected for speaking for Insys. … Ruan … changed his procedure for handling the money after the Michigan case flared up… Rather than receiving the money, he’d begun routing the fees to various educational institutions, directly or through a charitable foundation, with recipients including the Medical College of Wisconsin and the University of South Alabama.

Good man! Good man! And there’s every reason why your university can also be the beneficiary of alleged drug dealers trying to hide their money from government investigators. Just set up a lunch with the most prominent pusher in your town and suggest your campus as a routing location.

… go to the amazing centrality of football in American public universities. As one professor puts it, “intercollegiate football, or basketball, is perceived as the face of the modern public university, large or small.”

The. Face.

So, a couple of comments post-Missouri:

So much of the political and social economy of state universities is tied to football, especially in big-money conferences like Southeastern Conference, where Mizzou plays… [University] administrators created this world where our universities revolve socially, politically and economically around the exploited labor of big time football. Now let them reap what they sow.

***********

[W]hen did sports become more important than academics in American universities…?

… [T]he USA is the only country where college sport venues … consume as much, or more, capital budget than the entire balance of the university.

… [It is] worth great value to a college to recruit a “student” who possibly [can] barely read and write.

… It is doubtful anyone is willing to separate athletics out of America’s universities. But not recognizing the corruption this has done to the original academic purpose of these institutions is turning a blind eye to the obvious. For far too many universities job #1 is about running a sports franchise.

When most of the meaning, and much of the budget, of your state school rests on football, when you are essentially a setting for farm teams, the figures on campus impersonating university presidents and provosts will be toppled again and again with each athletics crisis. Those crises – cheating scandals, rape epidemics, whormitory exposes, the abuse of players by coaching staff, teams that double as criminal gangs, professors who offer hundreds of bogus independent studies per semester, cripplingly cost-overrun stadiums, outrageous student fee hikes, etc., etc. – are built in to the football school system. Only when you drop all university-pretense, in the way Auburn and Clemson and Nebraska have done, will you stop clownishly crashing into one catastrophe after another. Humiliating betrayals of your academic mission only happen if you continue to pretend you have one. If you are smart, you will make the University of Alabama your model, where the long and happy reign of the state monarch – the football coach – guarantees social tranquillity.

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UD thanks Rick.