In a separate case also filed last week, [former Midland University athletic director Jason] Dannelly is accused of giving a 20-year-old student athlete $300 to have sex with him. An affidavit in that case said that Dannelly was empowered to arrange work study jobs for student athletes.

… The Nation. A Summer Institute of Civic Studies participant, Jim Scheibel, sent it to Mr UD. Excerpts:

…We hike the fees and we re-prioritize.
It’s what you do in a race to the bottom.
We lay on handmaidens and academic tutors and personal chefs for our MVPs –
everything ,and the great lunks still pass out at traffic lights…

… We award our sports coaches ius primae noctis (for wins only)
Plus 40,000 square foot pasteboard-and-marble mansions on prime lakeside real estate,
with green lights at the end of their private piers.
Throw in a motorboat and some stables or else we’re uncompetitive…

… will go to trial.

“The biggest suggestion from me, for the 125 Division I football programs, let’s all invest in NCAA infractions and compliance and let’s have an officer on every campus,” [University of Miami coach Al] Golden said. “You’ll find then that there’s a lot of coaches that want to coach life skills, want to teach leadership, want to teach kids what they need to be successful in every facet of their life, that want education, that are teaching it the right way.

“It doesn’t mean we’re less competitive and that’s a part of the fabric of the United States of America, to be competitive. We’re trying to teach life skills and learning in every endeavor. And I think they would see our mission and our value and our goals are commiserate with theirs.”

It was 2009, and UD was so disgusted by what he said that she transcribed the gist of it and put it on her blog. Here it is.

College athletics is today the healthiest I’ve ever seen it. Everything’s looking great. Everyone here should be celebrating the positive values of university sports. We’ve learned we can be the great success we are and at the same time we can govern ourselves. We don’t need to be governed by outsiders. We’ve made incredible progress on all fronts. Enthusiasm and excitement and participation and profit is at an all-time high. Yes, escalating salaries stress the system. Yes, we continue to be challenged with our expenses. But these things are out of our control. Every one of these expenditures is necessary. We live in a market society, and we have to respond to market conditions.

Curley was then athletic director at Penn State. Things were just peachy at Penn State, said Curley. Tomorrow Curley will try telling that to a judge. Peachy! Far as he knew.

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

If you go to my original Knight Commission blog post, you will see that right after Curley spoke, Robert Zemsky gave him hell. This is what Zemsky, an historian, said:

Trying to describe the place of athletics in the larger context of higher education is like trying to describe a burnt-out desert. You see, this discussion today — it isn’t going anywhere. We came here to talk about cost-containment, and it isn’t going anywhere. And that’s because any sense of values is missing.

Since you people don’t have any values, you put the marketplace up as the only thing that matters. That’s why you’re not ever going to reform at all. You’re part of the general loss of aura, loss of particularity, at our universities in America. Football on your campus is just like the NFL, you say, and, see, you’re proud of it. So what makes you a college? Absolutely nothing.

Used to be universities were supposed to be like churches — separate, special places, dedicated to higher things. They’re not special anymore. They’re just like any other business. So why tenure? Why tax exemptions? Look at Harvard and places like that. University endowments aren’t charitable donations; they’re hedge funds. University presidents make million dollar salaries, just like other CEOs.

It all tears at the fabric of the specialness of the university. You’ve all helped make that happen. Since you’ve been in business, things have gotten a whole lot worse. The university athletics engine will certainly stop running. But it will never reform itself. It’ll just run out of gas.

UD knows why he was so scathing. Like UD, like anyone in that room with even a bit of brain activity, a bit of decency, something short of total cynical venality, he was angry, insulted, and, having been given the floor, he was going to use it.

After Zemsky spoke, the president of the worst university in America stood up.

I resent this negativity. Why, at the University of Georgia we’ve got a heck of a program…

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

It was an event UD will never forget. Of course Zemsky was numerically overwhelmed by the jockmeisters. The Knight Commission is where the jockmeisters get jiggy, all team spirit and tommyrot. Those of us in attendance who cared about the rot rolled our eyes and groaned as Curley delivered his pep talk. We had been invited to witness the bright-eyed depravity of American university football and basketball, and here it was, in the aspect of this trim elegantly suited man with his Happy Valley patter.

Of course the crucial figure at this event was not this clown, but University of Georgia president Michael Adams. Here after all was an academic figure, the academic figure, the equivalent of Penn State’s president Graham Spanier — Spanier, who will also be doing a song and dance in front of a judge tomorrow. Adams – chief academic officer, gravitas-man, Big Think defender of the athletic status quo.

… forced out. If this happens, UD‘s putting her money on Trent Lott as his successor.

All he ever wanted was what was best for his kids.

Now everyone’s beating up on him.

… (or anyway that’s the famous phrase we all like) characterizes quite a few American universities.

Some of these village idiots aren’t in rural settings at all – echt-provincial Suffolk University (Boston), St. John’s University (New York), Yeshiva University (New York), and St. Louis University (St. Louis) are four urban cow towns whose brainless money grubbing (self-righteous money grubbing at that, if, like Yeshiva, St. John’s, and St. Louis, they align themselves with synagogues and churches) this blog has chronicled.

All American universities have closed, small-town aspects to them; here, we’re talking about truly tribal fortresses with certifiable martinets.

To turn a university (think of the word itself) into a banana republic, you need — call it structural cronyism. The president, the board of trustees, the coaches, the big-time donors — in order to make an intellectual institution deadhead central, all must be in synch.

You see the model at work at Oakland University in Michigan, whose women’s basketball coach was married to the school’s president. (Yes, yes, UD believes people should marry whoever they want.) Power seems to have gone to the coach’s head to the point where she did a sort of Mike Rice on her players, who report – among other cult rituals – bizarre physical and religious tests. Things got so weird that the Ceausescus of Oakland have now been toppled; but you’d think schools would learn, from one story after another of this sort, the difference between cherishing their particular identities and becoming rural idiots.

It’s an old tradition, and an important one, among our highest-profile student athletes: Showing your team colors while in the act of armed robbery.

Back in ’09, several University of Tennessee Vols did it; and now a University of West Virginia Mountaineer has picked up the torch.

West Virginia defensive lineman Korey Harris was arrested Friday for first-degree armed robbery that allegedly occurred in Morgantown on July 12. Harris and two other men broke into a home and held two victims at gunpoint. It presumably didn’t take long to catch Harris, as one of the victims saw the number 96 on Harris’s team-issued sweatpants and figured it out.

“Bitch set me up.”

Er, none; and if you want to understand what’s going on at the University of Medicine and Dentistry New Jersey, at the University of Miami, or the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, you could do worse – as this commenter on a recent article has it – than think in terms of criminal syndicates.

People wonder why Colin McGinn, a philosophy professor accused of sexual harassment, opted to leave UM rather than fight. Well, some reports had it that President Shalala was in a rage and would make sure he was fired.

If this is true, it would make perfect sense in the context of UM’s years of criminal scandals. We are talking, at schools like UMDNJ, Chapel Hill and UM, about scandal-fatigue, about administrations that are saying stop. No more.

Basically McGinn has the misfortune of teaching at a school that can’t afford any more bad publicity. Its president is really pissed off. She didn’t sign on to be the butt of jokes, a permanent petitioner at the NCAA, a symbol of what’s worst in American universities. You come to her with some guy in philosophy who somebody says wrote some smutty remarks to a student and BOOM! That’s it. Donna’s had it. She explodes. All of her problems come from men. Men who beat up other men on the football field. Men who buy whores and cars for her athletes. Men who write smutty emails… Of course the irony is that of all the men beating up on Donna, McGinn is by far the most innocuous; in fact, he’s liable to be innocent of the charges. But McGinn has had the misfortune of being the last in line, the tipping point. Right now, Shalala is like Iran’s Revolutionary Guard: You whip out a cigarette and she’ll fucking blow you away.

[University of New Mexico] Athletic Director Paul Krebs said the business model for the rebuild of The Pit two years ago, which cost about $45 million, was “predicated on a naming gift for The Pit.”

Apparently the Pit, UNM’s basketball arena, actually cost 60 rather than 45 million, but I guess the cost was predicated on being 45 million… Just like the renovation itself was predicated on a rich person offering 10 million dollars so that this person’s family or business name would be on the stadium…

Unlike Florida Atlantic University, which did score a rich namer (a local prison company) for its stadium (whoops – FAU had to turn down the gift because of outrage over the perceived sleaziness of that prison business… FAU’s disgraced president resigned… and since then, no other namer has come forward, so the school is hemorrhaging money…), UNM hasn’t gotten one bite. Even though it spent 60 million dollars on the basis of a promise – a predication – that a naming gift would be forthcoming.

No problem, however. Tuition and fees will rise, and faculty salaries will remain flat, so that this unpredicated outcome can be handled.

Luckily, UNM students and faculty are accustomed to the peculiarly expensive nothingness of la vie UNM. They’re already paying for an empty baseball stadium. There are all sorts of ongoing monetary and other costs related to the latest batch of unpleasant coaching departures (Alford, Locksley). Everyone at UNM seems willing to remain eternally poor and stupid — predicated on sports.

… overlooked.  Brain injury, drunk driving, gun-play — the sorts of activities significant numbers of high-profile-sports student athletes engage in — these things get less attention than bogus courses and friends with impermissible benefits, etc.

UD isn’t sure why, given the obviously greater drama of that first list… Maybe it’s because some of that stuff hasn’t happened yet, as it were (eventually some players will probably die of football-inflicted brain injuries…), and while the other stuff (drunk driving, gun-play) does happen here and now  it usually  doesn’t end up actually killing anyone.   Plus millions of Americans play with their guns and get drunk and get into fights and all.  Big deal.

The other stuff, the academic stuff, can have all sorts of NCAA implications, which can hurt team performance, etc.  It can hurt eligibility.

Thus Luke DeCock, a Kansas City  Star writer, notes how bizarre it is that the latest fuckup on a University of North Carolina sports team is in trouble for hanging out with a professional agent and possibly taking gifts from him and all, but no one seems to care that a gun was found just outside the car he was driving when he was recently arrested.

Drive around with a 9 mm handgun and nine rounds of ammunition … and you’re asking for real trouble. That was also found outside Hairston’s car, and while the police said Wednesday they don’t anticipate any additional charges against Hairston, there’s still no explanation for the gun. That’s the really worrying thing about this entire episode.

NCAA violations very rarely put lives at risk. Guns kill.

There have been 14 homicides in Durham in 2013 already. It’s an unchecked epidemic of violence, too much of it taking place in the same neighborhood where Hairston and his friends were arrested.

As DeCock writes:

Not to be deliberately obtuse, but while rental cars and parking tickets have added a whiff of conspiracy to P.J. Hairston’s troubles, isn’t the bigger issue that a gun was found outside the car the North Carolina basketball star was driving when he was arrested?

 

Apparently it’s being obtuse to believe that the weaponry student athletes are carting around is more disturbing than the mysterious Yukon SUVs they’re driving. I mean, unavoidable bottom line here seems to be that we don’t much care whether they kill themselves or even us; we care that their team remains eligible.

I think this is how you get to Aaron Hernandez.

… a West Virginia newspaper.

It begins with a July 6 letter from good ol’ Wade Gilley, president of Marshall University (background on Marshall here) in the ‘nineties. Wade went on to head the University of Tennessee but had to leave onaccounta he did a few things that seem like they didn’t sit well with other people there. Yeah, ol’ Wade had to scoot.

Now Wade’s letter is a model of its type. What you got here is the good ol’ boy reminiscing bout the good ol’ days when men was men and Marshall was a beautiful paradise of football, football, and football.

I … remember being invited to a national meeting of 20 university presidents and 20 Fortune 500 corporate CEOS in the late 1990s and hearing many positive remarks about Marshall. In fact, Father Malloy, the president of Notre Dame at that time, approached me at a reception and said, “Wade, some of us were just talking about the success of your football program and we were wondering just how it happened.”

And that’s just one story about rich important people flocking around me wanting to know my secret of success!

After sharing more stories about how fantastic football is for universities, Wade concludes:

And there is no doubt that football, which is largely self-supporting, has been and will be a positive factor in promoting Marshall’s national image.

A little nay-saying (“Self-supporting? Hardly.”) does pop up among the commenters, but a July 13 opinion piece from a Marshall finance professor really puts the kibosh on the thing. Dallas Brozik is a hard-nosed guy and he ain’t having any of it.

Despite the fact that one of his students, on Rate My Professors, says Dallas doesn’t like English majors, Dallas writes really well. Let’s see how he does it, step by step. Scathing Online Schoolmarm will interrupt his piece with comments in parenthesis.

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

Wade Gilley’s recent letter concerning the ongoing discussion about the Marshall University budget was quite interesting. [Now usually SOS complains about the profoundly uninteresting word interesting. But Dallas here’s going to use it slyly, in the manner of Oscar Wilde…] Just as a magician uses sleight of hand to mislead the audience, those who wish to keep the university budget a black hole keep spreading misinformation.

I have no doubt [Brozik will repeat the formulation I have no doubt throughout his piece.]   that Dr. Gilley met with folks at all levels who commented on our football team, which at the time had a winning record. Sports always makes good small talk. I have no doubt that we had the best athletes and coaches despite the legal and criminal records of some of these individuals.  [Note how slyly Brozik has already gotten two points across:  Gilley’s a maundering fool; and the teams he’s teary-eyed about were pretty smelly.]

I have no doubt that Dr. Gilley met a person whose daughter had chosen to go to law school at a certain university, supposedly because of the school’s athletic program. I also have no doubt that I would not want this person to represent me in a court of law unless it is about sports law.  [Brozik’s calm, reiterated I have no doubt is wonderful.  It signals a kind of elaborate emotional self-control, a determination to be gentlemanly and long-suffering about Gilley.]

Dr. Gilley has no doubt that the football program has been an important factor in the increase in enrollment at Marshall. Dr. Stephen Kopp became president on July 1, 2005. For the academic year 2005-2006, the official enrollment of the university was 13,920. The official enrollment for 2012-2013 was 13,708. This implies that the football program, or whatever, created negative enrollment growth.  [Oh, don’t confuse me with numbers!  And that or whatever is wonderful too  – another sly polite little suggestion that Wade is somewhat whacked out.]

Dr. Gilley has no doubt that the football program has been a very positive economic growth factor for Huntington. Since Dr. Gilley’s time, the population of Huntington has decreased and many businesses have closed. The 2012 State of Well-Being Report from Gallup-Healthways ranks Huntington as 188 out of 189. Check the want ads section of today’s paper to see how many job openings exist and at what levels. There has been no economic miracle in Huntington over the last several decades, football or not. [You can see ol’ Wade putting a hand over each ear at this point and saying LALALALALA I can’t hear you I can’t hear you…]

Wade Gilley left Marshall under his own cloud [We won’t even go into his University of Tennessee cloud.]; why he wants to get involved in this discussion is strange. He has no dog in this fight. He is old news. He admits he has little insight into the current budget situation, but he has no doubt that a football program which is not self-supporting promotes Marshall’s national image. Dr. Gilley is entitled to his opinion, but opinions are like bellybuttons; everybody has one but very few should be aired in public.  [SOS would drop the way down-home belly button thing.  Brozik doesn’t need it; and it breaks his terrific tone of restrained contempt.]

Dr. Kopp promised “transparency” in April.  [Only in his last paragraph does Brozik turn to Marshall’s current football-concussed president.  Nice move.  It puts MU’s latest loser squarely in the company of Gilley.]  He still has not opened the books for review, even though state law requires him to do so. The current problem is one of accountability for state funds and the tuition and fees paid by students. Those who try to frame this as an anti-sports question are either misled or trying to be misleading. The budget for Marshall University is important to the entire community, and that budget should be examined. The time for opinions is over. It is time for action. It is time for Dr. Kopp to live up to his promise of transparency and open the books.

Ah, Penn State. Took our eye off that ball for a bit.

Yeshiva University has been hogging the sex abuse limelight lately… But now that PSU’s most recent president, Graham Spanier, has sued Louis Freeh for libel, we must all pop our favorite antiemetic and swivel our attention back there.

UD doubts there’s an antiemetic strong enough for us to look at both campuses at once.

Weird bizarre shameless odd sad and insane are some of the adjectives the Bloomberg Business Week writer I quote in my headline uses in his piece as he tries to figure out why a once reasonably respectable man – a man now under criminal indictment for endangering the welfare of a child – launches an unwinnable lawsuit that can only bring greater disgrace to himself and the university that continues to employ him as a professor.

What can I say… It’s damnably difficult for people who’ve been university presidents, who have flown in (taxpayer-provided) private jets, and who have run massive sports empires, to think ill of themselves. Year after year they get spectacular evaluations from the trustees, who (at places like Penn State and Gordon Gee’s Ohio State) want caretakers who leave the coaches alone. Now suddenly just because some old fart coach got caught in the shower Spanier’s being attacked!

We’ve spent the last year watching several university presidents be destroyed by the sports programs on their campuses. Other presidents (Donna Shalala most notably) have been reduced to little more than NCAA petitioners. Yet UD doubts there’s one university president in America who thinks it can happen to him or her. Spanier’s nutty libel suit emerges out of the toxic, only-in-America combination of presidential grandeur and sports pimping.