[T]he fiasco over locker-room bullying between the Miami Dolphins’ Jonathan Martin and Richie Incognito reminded everyone this season how eccentric football now is culturally — not because of a hidden health problem, but just in its explicit, inherent violence. The battle fought in the press between the players’ “sources” unveiled football as a dark, subterranean hive of old-school warrior values and character-building sadism. Taunts and racial imprecations were openly justified, the way military floggings once were: as salutary hide-tougheners.

It’s funny to watch jock schools like Colorado and Chapel Hill hyperventilate about their integrity when football, in all its dark subterranean hiviness, is such an important part of their institutions.

This blog has duly chronicled several sadistic university football coaches (basketball too, of course, but we don’t want this post to get too long) – men who, with each new revelation of their treatment of players, get fired and then passed off to a new school.

Maybe football should be spun out and – in accordance with its actual nature – made just one more non-academic bloodsport:

It is interesting how the increasingly popular spectacle of mixed martial arts (MMA) competition so quickly secured a perimeter of social acceptance for itself. MMA is not only violent; it is violence. But the risks are blatant enough for us not to pity the competitors. (Their locker rooms are probably pretty crude places, too.) Football players, by contrast, are not supposed to be pure, uncivilized instruments of brutality. They are supposed to be technicians, strategists, artists whose work involves only a limited element of cruelty.

Moreover, they are nurtured in a system of universities as “student-athletes,” and a corrupt, increasingly bizarre system at that. The game grew out of educational establishments in the first place. No one is trying to integrate MMA with the curriculum at Notre Dame or Harvard; MMA was invented too late for that.

Think of this observation when you read (as you often read) commentators arguing that the solution to the problem of corrupt university football is to make football an academic major. As the game gets more and more purely violent, its claims to intellectuality, disciplinarity, grow.

Down she swoops, from the emerital ether, to speak the truth to the new management team at this year’s scandal-plagued darling, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Scandal-management-wise Chapel Hill has done the thing, the thing that every jock school does when the shit truly hits the fan – it has dumped its previous management and put in a team of deer-in-the-headlight innocents who can say

Well we weren’t here for the long Nyang’oro Nightmare so we don’t really know what’s going on but we’re pure-hearted people doing our best in a bad situation, etc etc etc.

UD applauds the move, it’s a fine move, it’s an obvious move.

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But, as Orwell wrote:

‘He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.’

You can bring in the deer to try to control the present, but it’s the pesky past …

Madeline Levine swooped in from the past, and (so far at least) the deer have not been able to herd her.

“During the year that I served as interim dean I was made aware of the serious academic deficiencies that some of our newly recruited athletes would have to overcome if they were ever to succeed at UNC,” Levine wrote. “From what I was told … I thought it highly probable that one of these students was functionally illiterate.”

She wrote that she went to the university provost, who was then Bernadette Gray-Little, now chancellor at the University of Kansas.

She said she was “told what I already knew – that the decision had been made to grant special admission to this student and there was nothing to be done about it by then. That was true, but I still feel guilty that I let the matter drop and did not publicly express my dismay.”

One likes Levine’s continued guilt – it sounds right, it sounds real. One believes Levine.

Levine … accused the university of resisting efforts to get to the bottom of a long-running academic fraud scandal that is drawing sustained national attention since it made The New York Times’ front page on New Year’s Day. She said Dean took the wrong tack two weeks ago in publicly lambasting whistle-blower Mary Willingham, a former learning specialist in the athletes’ tutoring program. Willingham said her research found that more than half of 183 athletes specially tested for learning deficiencies over an eight-year period could not read at a high-school level.

“Mary Willingham was courageous in speaking out about her experience as a reading specialist and academic counselor for such students,” Levine wrote. “It is appalling that the highest officials at UNC – before it became clear that attacking a whistle-blower is not a smart PR move – mounted a concerted public attack on the accuracy of Ms. Willingham’s statistical analysis and, by implication, against her personally, while steadfastly refusing to engage with the core issue that concerns her: the exploitation of student-athletes and the concomitant abuse of the academic values by which a great university should live.”

… university near you.

Makes them sound so righteous, doesn’t it? Getting all vigorously defensive in the name of our students…

Of course, when it came to educating them (the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill is a university) we were utterly vigorless… We went out of our way to choose department chairs who took defenseless students and defrauded them…

But that’s because the students were so vigorous! Panting on the track every morning getting ready for that day’s concussion tackle …

A lot of people – and, more to the point, a lot of money – depended on these guys to defend UNC’s honor on the field. Now we’re doing right by the guys in keeping away from the press details of their abuse.

… point out that despite the outrageously bad graduation rate of revenue athletes at Florida State University, many of whom are minority —

Of all the teams that played in the bowl series, Florida State’s has the lowest graduation rate. Sixty-five of the 94 students on the team—69 percent—are black. Based on an analysis of the past four cohorts of black male athletes at Florida State, only 24 of those 65 are predicted to graduate within six years.

— the overall black student graduation rate at Florida State is excellent.

The six year graduation rate is 72.7 and 74.1 for Black and White students, respectively.

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UD thanks her readers.

From a review of a new documentary about one of America’s most bizarre locales.

After [Penn State’s Jerry] Sandusky was convicted on 45 counts of child abuse, Penn State was treated as a national pariah, hit with a $60 million fine and forced to forfeit 13 years of football victories, based on the premise that it had put athletic accomplishment above ethical conduct. As if that were somehow unique among American universities! Here’s the parallel: People in Happy Valley tried to blame Penn State’s problem on Jerry Sandusky, and people in America tried to blame college football’s problems on Penn State…

… I’m not claiming there’s some obvious solution to the hive-mind, groupthink, blame-the-media mentality we see in “Happy Valley,” which seems like a constitutive element of human psychology that’s not limited to Penn State or college football or America.

… [N]obody in Happy Valley wanted to hear anything bad about the demigods who ran their beloved football program, until it became necessary to pull down their idols and cast them out of the temple.

All for T. Boone!

So if it’s not for the money, or to spur applications, or to attract better students [studies show university sports accomplishes none of these things], what is the point of building big college sports programs, primarily football and basketball?

Here’s my unsurprising theory:

There are groups of alumni who are very passionate about their teams. I’m talking very passionate. They go to all the games or watch them on TV; they populate the online fans sites; they obsess over recruiting. They are very vocal when things aren’t going well for State U., and some of them sit on university boards, or in state legislatures, or belong to powerful alumni organizations. While their numbers as a percentage of all alums may not be large, they can make a lot of noise.

If they are UNC fans, they do not like losing to Duke. If they are N.C. State fans, they do not like losing to UNC.

Conformist Without a Cause.

I mean, beyond calling university researchers liars.

Nicely put.

There they sit together, the state of Montana’s two university systems, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, both ranked #201 on the higher ed hit parade at US News.

201! You really have to give it the old college try to do that poorly. There really isn’t much lower you can go.

And, as is always the case, talking to the people in charge – particularly the trustees – grants insight into the grit, determination, and developmental delay that make Montana what it is.

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So this here reporter points out that Montana State and the University of Montana bleed students and taxpayers dry via immense subsidies for sports, and that of course all the money that goes to sports is money that doesn’t go to, you know, educating people. A thunderingly obvious point.

A guy who used to be a UM economics professor and is now a state senator has really “irked” one of the regents by making this point.

[Dick] Barrett … was reacting to news reports that inaccurately characterized the Montana University System’s college athletics as showing a $571,331 “profit.”

The word profit suggests the programs are self-supporting, Barrett said, and they are not.

“People shouldn’t operate under the misperception they support themselves,” Barrett said. When people attend games they should realize, he said, “Taxpayers are giving them a hand.

“My point is simple — that we should understand what it is, particularly at a time when resources are limited.”

At a time when UM faculty are arguing about budget priorities – when some professors assert the university has disproportionately cut the humanities while funding top-heavy administration — “it struck me as odd,” Barrett said, “that funding for athletics has not become part of the discussion.”

Barrett called “bogus” the regents’ argument that millions of dollars in tuition waivers for athletes shouldn’t be counted as subsidies because no cash changes hands.

Tuition waivers for athletics totaled $8 million last year for all campuses, including $2.8 million at MSU, according to Frieda Houser, University System director of accounting and budget.

The university could have decided to “sacrifice revenue” in other ways, Barrett said. “It could decide not to charge other students as high a tuition.

“Students are subsidizing athletics, not just in their (athletics) fee, but they have to pay higher tuition so athletes can pay lower tuition,” he said.

That’s not the only bogus regents’ argument.

The regents … argued that the dollar amount listed on Montana’s NCAA reports as “direct state or other government support” for athletics programs is zero.

It’s zero, one administrator explained later, because under the Montana Constitution, the Legislature doesn’t approve money for specific university programs like athletics, but instead sends a lump sum to the Board of Regents.

Oh. Alright then.

PLUS, the whole other defense of athletics is, hell, you know, it just generates one heck of a great atmosphere …

… Rapture.

The fish rots from the top.

What can a new chancellor do (the last one was booted out after his university’s self-righteousness about its academic integrity ran hard up against its decades of bogus courses) but mouth comforting cliches about past wrongs and glorious futures?

That very unhealthy atmosphere of mistrust thing is interesting. It refers to the fact that now all professors at Chapel Hill are, like marine recruits, subject to spot checks to make sure that they’re actually meeting their classes. Apparently they’re no longer trusted to be doing that…

Yet the reality of recent history at Chapel Hill is that everyone from the trustees and the chancellor on down trusted that no real classes were being offered across a number of departments; they trusted that in this way their revenue athletes would be kept on the field and undistracted by mere academics.

It’s so totally part of the tradition of big-time athletics that now somehow it’s the legitimate faculty at Chapel Hill who have to be folded in to the shit stew cooked up by the athletics department and the university’s administration. Now, because of the money cynicism of provosts and trustees, actual professors are treated like sneaks and fakes. There’s no better demonstration of the way big-time sports destroys the very heart of universities.

But no worries! The new chancellor assures us that she’s nailed 95 theses to the library door, all about how icky and corrupt academics at the university used to be, but now that they’ve done the 95 thingies it’s all great.

A Virginia Tech student does the math.

And what’s it add up to?

She’s going to a school that spits on education and worships football.

… it seems a little odd that Colorado State University is apparently about to impose extreme budget cuts.

A professor at CSU Pueblo sent out an email complaining about the cuts in colorful language (he called the chancellor a “hitman”) and promptly had his university email closed down (it has recently been restored). He probably faces other forms of punishment.

Go here for all the familiar stupid obscene reasons a school in CSU Pueblo’s position is part of a system building a new stadium (scroll down).

And when you’ve finished reading, wonder not at the rage that produced the “hitman” email.