What’s that? What was that you said? Professor? Sandusky a professor?

Ask yourself: What’s the most powerful constituency on a university campus? It’s almost always the professors. When professors get together they are very powerful. Where were Penn State’s professors when… Well, whenever? Why didn’t that totally fucked by football school have at least one Thomas Palaima, one William Dowling, one faculty member who spoke out about how sick the place was? You don’t have to have known anything about Sandusky to know the school was a football whore.

But no. Not only did the Penn State professors – displaying real degeneracy, franchement – just look the other way as their school turned into a cult of personality. Not one of them opened their trap to say… I mean, you don’t even have to write an essay! Just say you’re embarrassed! Just complain to the school paper now and then!

For that matter, where are the professors now? Where’s the formal statement from the faculty about how horrible these events are, etc? Why did it take Louis Freeh to complain about the culture of sport at Penn State? What happened to the headline that should have said

PENN STATE PROFESSOR ATTACKS CULTURE OF SPORT ON CAMPUS

Where did that go? Or – even better:

PENN STATE PROFESSORS ATTACK CULTURE OF SPORT ON CAMPUS

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!

When this story first broke … Paterno said, “This is not a football scandal and should not be treated as one.”

Many agreed. Many still do, including some misguided alumni and football All-Americans and … surely those numbskull students who marched on campus, embraced Paterno’s statue on campus and protested his firing without any regard for the victims.

The problem is concluding that because Sandusky’s reprehensible acts did not lead to a competitive advantage, the football program shouldn’t pay. But the cover-up changes that. What the powers at Penn State did was beyond anything any college athletic program has ever done, beyond free clothes or free rent and academic fraud.

To hell with a free Camaro. We’re talking about sweeping allegations of a child sex offender under the rug in order to protect a school’s image, fundraising and recruiting. There is no more extreme example of a lack of institutional control.

Penn State deserves to be hit hard.

… Paterno and the powers at Penn State were too concerned about the ramifications, off and on the field. That makes it a football scandal, as well.

Jeff Schultz, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

… conclusions about Penn State. Thanks to football, the school has become a pathetic inbred place, hopelessly in thrall in the sort of hero worship that makes the worshiped behave with arrant disregard.

Now the adults on campus will – far too late – move in to remove Paterno’s name from the library and various professorships. It will be harder to convince the true believers to remove his statue from the stadium, but in time that will happen too.

As we all await the Freeh report on Penn State (it will be released today), consider the Joe Paterno statue. Consider universities with a penchant for putting up statues of their living coaches and presidents — like Mountain State University in West Virginia (photo of its statuesque, just-fled, president here, along with details of its loss of accreditation). Ask yourself which sort of political leaders have statues of themselves dotting the landscape. Ask yourself why faculty members at Penn State weren’t so embarrassed by the cult of personality on their campus – a cult that made Paterno and his inner circle untouchable for years — that they opposed that statue.

You say it wouldn’t have done any good to oppose it? Of course it wouldn’t. That doesn’t matter. You’re supposed to go on record as caring about these sorts of things.

Yeah definitely not a good sign when your program director denies being your program director.

And the school president, despite having received letters from students complaining about endemic cheating, says “I don’t know anything about it.”

Definitely not good.

UD‘s already written about the often bogus but – for many schools – financially irresistible executive MBA program. The one at Baruch College begins to look positively criminal.

For damn sure not good.

Hey. But here’s something good. The dean who oversaw all of this and then skipped out just got a job at the University of Connecticut! “Baruch Business Dean John Elliott is set to take over as dean of UConn’s business school in August.” Lucky U Conn! What with its basketball team banned from postseason play because of pathetic classroom performance, and now this guy in its business school, U Conn is covering itself with academic laurels.

The dean of the College of Islamic Studies at Mishkah Islamic University of North America has published a paper, “Circumcision of Girls: Jurisprudence and Medicine,” which “repeatedly point[s] to the idea that female genital mutilation is ‘an honor’ for women.” This guy is particularly excited about the idea of nicking the clitoris, “an incision of the clitoral hood.”

He used to be on the faculty of the Mayo Clinic. They nicked him.

Kevin Broadus brings more than 16 years of coaching and recruiting experience to Georgetown. His duties for the Hoyas include recruiting, game preparation, and player development. Remaining in the District for most of his professional career, he has coached at five universities in the metro area.

A native of the D.C. region, Broadus played high school basketball at Dunbar in the District and Montgomery Blair in Silver Spring, Md. He left the area for one year to play at Grambling State in Louisiana, but returned home to attend Bowie State, where he lettered for three years and earned his bachelor of science in business administration in 1990.

Following graduation Broadus served as assistant coach at Bowie State until 1993, when he returned to D.C. as an assistant at the University of the District of Columbia, where he stayed until 1997. While coaching at UDC, he earned his master’s degree in counseling in 1995. From 1998 to 2001, he was on the staff at American University. In the summer of 2001, Broadus moved again, this time to George Washington University, where he was an assistant coach until he came to Georgetown in 2004.

And where was Broadus from 2007 to 2009? Oh right. He was front and center at the SUNY Binghamton scandal; the New York Times calls his tenure at Binghamton the “scandal-ridden Kevin Broadus era.” He even gets an era!

But Georgetown has allowed him to airbrush that right out of his webpage.

Way 1984.

How impressive that a university committed to the truth — a Jesuit university, kids! — not only hires this notorious recruiter of diploma mill graduates and criminals, a man who sued for immense sums the last university for which he worked (Binghamton “paid Broadus $1.2 million to leave”), but allows him to fudge his work history on its official site.

Even by the standards of big-time university sports, this is really sickening.

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UD thanks Polish Peter.

I’ve talked a lot on this blog about the corrupting effect of big pharma money in the American university, especially in the hard to define and hard to diagnose area of depression. I’ve talked about the mindless defensiveness on the part of some academics to growing evidence of the largely placebo effect of anti-depressant pills for millions of people who take them.

But I’ve never seen anything like what some Israeli academics are doing with these pills when a rabbi brings to their office a haredi Jew who does not conform to haredi culture.

[Professor Omer Bonne sanctions] prescribing antidepressant pills from the SSRI family (most commonly used for the treatment of depression, anxiety disorders and some personality disorders ) for yeshiva students who masturbate excessively, or have sexual relations with other men, yet do not suffer from depression.

Bonne justified the use of these pills by pointing out that their side effects reduce sexual urges; he argued that such medication preempts possible destructive conflicts between the men and their surroundings, and the pills might also preempt conditions of depression.

A prominent psychiatrist cited in the report justified the use of lithium – medication ordinarily used for bipolar disorders – in certain cases where a man or woman suddenly decides to stop observing religious commandments, or to break up the family unit. The psychiatrist said that in some cases, such behavior derives from conditions such as mania.

Bonne and other psychiatrists confirmed that some of the patients come to clinics accompanied by rabbis or various “supervisors” associated with yeshivas. Sometimes, the religious pupils’ families are not notified of these visits. The psychiatrists confirmed that the rabbis or supervisors are on hand when patients are examined.

This article, in Haaretz, is difficult to read. It evokes the world of 1984, and Brave New World, in which closed and repressive cultures enforce conformity with chemicals. A senior psychiatrist interviewed for the article says: “I am stunned that people do that.”

.. slavishly imitates the Ivy League.

Harvard University professor Bill George boasts of his seat on the board of directors of Goldman Sachs, and lectures the world on “character-based leadership.” What has he done at GS?

One wonders how much louder the alarm must ring before the drowsy Goldman board stirs. Last week, a judge’s description of Blankfein’s apparent role in persuading its client El Paso Corporation to work with Goldman in a conflicted situation was top news. The week before, Goldman reported that the SEC is looking into client disclosure issues, an alleged continuing problem at the firm…

Others much further from Goldman’s epicenter have heard the alarm, so where is the bank’s board in all of this? …

Is the SEC at all relevant to Blankfein and Goldman’s board? Blankfein and Cohn did not mention the recent headlines or scrapes with the SEC in the memo to employees. Last month, SEC Chair Mary Schapiro described the need to continuously police these kinds of firms — and yesterday, Propublica traced Goldman’s troubled regulatory history over the last 12 years. With all of these troubling instances, the current board has had several opportunities to awaken and act.

The board failed to seize a big opportunity last year when it oversaw the bank’s Business Practice Review amid the fallout surrounding the company’s role in the financial crisis. That inadequate 67-page document was big on platitudes but small on substance in addressing the ethical conundrums employees face. Goldman told the Times yesterday that client success mattered to the firm. But in the instance in which you are selling what you call junk, does only the seller’s success matter and not the buyer’s?

… The board missed another opportunity yesterday. Instead of brushing off Smith’s comments, the board should have ensured that the CEO took the allegations seriously. It should have used this opportunity to communicate to employees and others that it would move to understand what actions would make all employees and stakeholders comfortable that Goldman’s deeds match their words.

Instead, the board allowed Blankfein and Cohn to take the tact most likely to shut down future whistleblowers: reject Smith’s comments as out of hand. If they are willing to do this in public, what goes on behind closed doors?

The board itself should be taking action. It’s serious when your CEO has been publicly called out by both a judge and an employee in a two-week timeframe.

And shouldn’t it be a wake-up call when stakeholders mock the employee whistleblower for being naïve, implying that everyone should know that Goldman is as bad as Smith made it sound?

… Blankfein has been on the Goldman board for nine years and some Goldman directors have served terms ranging from seven to 13 years. Are some too embedded? Where have their hearts and minds been? Hello, Goldman board. Are you awake?

To be fair, Bill has done some things on behalf of Goldman Sachs. Here he is defending tens of millions in personal compensation for GS executives:

Goldman Sachs board member and Harvard professor Bill George defended the firm’s massive bonuses and compared employees’ compensation to that of professional athletes and movie stars during a recent interview.

In an interview posted Dec. 23, 2009, George told the ideas web site Big Think “I think that one feels like the shareholder value is made up in people and you need the people there to do the job and if you don’t pay them for their performance you’ll lose them and it’s much like professional athletes and movie stars I think.”

Well, they’re sure movie stars now. Spotlight couldn’t be any more intense right now.

… sits on the Board of Directors of Goldman Sachs. Bill’s job at Goldman: Doing nothing. He has recently been joined by Barnard president Debora Spar on the Goldman board. Her job: Doing nothing. Ruth Simmons, president of Brown University, has just left the Goldman Board of Directors. Her job: Doing nothing.

[S]ix of …seven [former GS managing directors and partners] said they agreed with [Greg] Smith’s [NYT op/ed] criticism of how the firm has treated clients under Blankfein and Cohn’s management and that current members of the management committee would, too. Even so, they said they don’t expect the board of directors to take action or that anything will change because the firm has made money and outperformed most rivals.

Harvard, Barnard, Brown: Some of our best universities are Goldman-infested. In exchange for hundreds of thousands of GS dollars, some of our highest profile academics sit on their asses there, rousing themselves to approve – as Simmons did – a $68 million dollar bonus for Lloyd Blankfein. “There’s no indication … that Simmons takes her fiduciary responsibilities to Goldman’s shareholders particularly seriously,” wrote Felix Salmon of Simmon’s time at Goldman. He noted she knows virtually nothing about finance, making it absurdly easy for her to be “snowed” by Blankfein.

[GS] should get to work on the board, appointing people who will look hard at managerial business decisions, and won’t allow themselves to be snowed by Lloyd.

Or, as Salmon put it yesterday:

The real muppets, in this story, are Goldman’s board members, who have never had any real control over how the company is run. And, frankly, never will. The most remunerative skill, at Goldman, is the ability to flatter someone into believing that they’re incredibly important and clever and sophisticated, even as you’re getting that person to do exactly what’s in your own best interest. No one rises to lead Goldman Sachs who doesn’t have that skill. And you can be sure that Lloyd Blankfein uses it on the board every time he meets with them.

Everyone commenting on Muppetgate agrees that the board remains useless at best and an enabler of sick personal greed and toxic corporate culture at worst. (You’d think Harvard would be embarrassed that Incurious George promotes Me Heap Big Leader shit like this under Harvard’s name.) How disgusting that the names of some of our best universities are dragged into this mud.

Presiding over thug-ridden sports teams.

Picking up other universities’ conflict of interest discards.

Sucking up to people currently in prison.

Taking big bucks to be on boards of trustees that compromise your position and your university.

Put it all together, it spells Donna Shalala’s University of Miami. After the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, America’s most corrupt university.

… Florida A&M has in the last two weeks. After a hazing death, a hazing injury, attendant lawsuits, and now employee fraud, you’d think the university could do better than reprimand its hapless president.

Ah, now we’re getting to it. Now we’re getting to the bottom of the scum bucket.

The head of an organization representing the online for-profit schools, pissed that a congressman is opening hearings on their executives’ compensation, asks why the government isn’t going after six million dollar a year coaches.

Why should the feds harass zillionaires who pocket government money while destroying the lives of poor people, when the feds don’t harass zillionaires who pocket the same public money (through non-profit tax breaks, etc.) while destroying the country’s universities?

After all, both zillionaires take the noble cause of higher education and grind it down, down, down, down until it’s so dirty decent people avert their eyes. Why single out our whores and not theirs?

Yet the reason is simple. University football coaches give their students money and sex and great cars. For-profit school presidents give their students nothing.