This blog covers Alabama State University because it has to – ASU is a university story of significance.
It is incredible to her that this criminally inept institution is accredited. It should be shut down.
This blog covers Alabama State University because it has to – ASU is a university story of significance.
It is incredible to her that this criminally inept institution is accredited. It should be shut down.
Well, this British university is hosting a talk by Abu Usamah at-Thahabi, a preacher who preaches that all homosexuals should be killed.
Reviewing my University of Tennessee posts in light of the most recent event there – an alcohol enema party that almost killed someone – I find myself pretty overwhelmed by the comprehensive degeneracy of that school. Other universities in America are pretty disgusting (the University of Massachusetts Amherst, for instance, has a large drunken violent student body), but UT has a special combination of corrupt sports teams, corrupt coaches, indifferent leaders, and desperately alcoholic students that makes it truly madly deeply disgusting.
You have to go to Lucky’s speech in Samuel Beckett’s absurdist Waiting for Godot (start at 44:30) even to begin to understand the for-profit college situation in the United States. David Halperin does a nice tidy job of reviewing the mad greed and cynicism and indifference that puts our taxes in the pockets of people who exploit innocents. It won’t change until lobbying changes. And lobbying won’t change.
Mike Leach, Bobby Knight, Billy Gillispie – Texas Tech seems to choose only the most sadistic coaches for its players… Illegally, agonizingly, protracted practices; physical and psychological roughing up; verbal abuse– all of these men have had something on this list alleged against them. (Background here. Oh wait, that’s about TTU coach Tommy Tuberville’s multiple fraud schemes…. Here. Here. That last one explains why the local culture demands sadistic coaches.)
Texas Tech craves pain, whether from Alberto Gonzales or its, er, hit parade of coaches. When the players eventually leave or revolt, or when the newspapers get a whiff of the story, Texas Tech gets to increase the pain for everyone by firing the coach and then getting sued for millions and millions of dollars which will have to come from students and faculty.
This submissive’s latest dominant, Gillispie, came with irresistible credentials:
[Gillispie] faced similar issues following his departure from Kentucky, including from former Wildcat Josh Harrelson, who said Gillispie “once became so angered that he instructed him to sit in a bathroom stall during a halftime talk at Vanderbilt and then ordered him to ride back to Lexington in the Kentucky equipment truck.” Stories like that, and others about Gillispie’s careless attitude toward basketball office admins and staff, have damaged Gillispie’s reputation nearly beyond repair. His post-Kentucky arrest for drunken driving, Gillispie’s third since 1999, certainly doesn’t help.
Or, as TTU likes to put it: “Student-athlete well-being is our top priority.”
The pseuds who pretended to have written it have no shame.
You would think their universities would have a smidgeon.
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.
Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte