Big-time athletics always lifts the tone on campus. Northern Kentucky University students are currently focused on just what Athletic Director Scott Eaton did to make him hightail it out of town. The school will only say he’s been fired for ethics violations — and, I mean, fired immediately, with letters and lawyers and all…

So, as the student editorial I quote in my title suggests, it might be nice to know what’s going on, what manner of man the school hired and paid big bucks to not long ago. It goes without saying that a big part of Eaton’s job has involved lecturing students on morality… Leadership, teamwork, integrity, you know the drill.

So what’s up?

UD has covered stories of coach and AD miscreants for years, and she will share with you her guess on this one.

UD‘s gonna go with sex. She’s willing to throw some alcohol abuse into the mix, but she’s basically going to call this one as messing with the undergrads. The school claims it’s not financial; it also claims NKU won’t get in trouble with NCAA sanctions as a result of whatever Eaton did. That would seem to leave hanky-panky.

The nanny state once again tries to interfere with the free market – the Secretary of Education thinks there’s something wrong with both rogue and non-rogue big-time university sports programs. American public universities shouldn’t use mucho tax money to make Tubby Smith (soon, it’s rumored, to take his winning ways to Texas Tech!) rich as all get-out. Rick Pitino shouldn’t make $20,500 a day. And so forth.

It’s the exact same thing with so-called ‘insider trading,’ not to mention giving for-profit colleges a hard time. Government is the problem.

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UD thanks JND.

It takes a lot of tax revenue to bail out the University of Minnesota’s football and basketball programs.

That the Gophers were in better shape than before [just-fired football coach Tubby] Smith arrived left some people wondering whether the [firing] made sense, especially financially. The university has been under scrutiny for its administrative costs, described as out of control by a January Wall Street Journal report.

The university had already paid more than $4 million since 2006 to former coaches Monson (basketball), Glen Mason (football) and Tim Brewster (football).

Smith’s three-year extension signed last July raised his buyout after this season from $1.5 million to $2.5 million.

Sen. Terri Bonoff, DFL-Minnetonka, chair of the Senate Higher Education Committee, said she would not enter a debate on whether the firing was justified.

“But it is my responsibility to provide oversight to financial management,” she said. “And I was concerned that his contract was extended with an increased buyout if there were concerns about his performance.”

Yes, that was strikingly stupid wasn’t it, doubling his buyout months before firing him.

There’s no indication that the citizens of Minnesota care that big stretches of their university are run by stupid people.

… ballistics.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/sports/blogs/chopping-block/os-cb-florida-state-seminoles-fsu-shooting-athletes-20130321,0,7078921.post

…is one popular way of characterizing the NCAA/university athletic program/university athlete ménage à trois; for herself, UD has always found the simpler, less sexy, swinish squalor trope serviceable… You’ve got piggy NCAA head Mark Emmert (“In an interview on a PBS Frontline special, ‘Money and March Madness,’ a visibly agitated Emmert refused to reveal his own seven-figure salary on camera…”); piggish coaches making millions even when, as at beyond-belief-awful Syracuse football, almost no one goes to the games and team members are constantly rotated in and out of local jails; and players, sloshing in a stew of agents, boosters, bogus courses…

Whatever pigskin used to be, it’s mostly pigshit now. Universities like North Carolina Chapel Hill, which actually think they don’t stink, are intriguing to track, in a kind of let’s-watch-the-psychotics way…

We’re winners… we have a glorious proud tradition…

These people are kind of like the three Christs of Ypsilanti. Like the three Christs, they are quick to defend their delusions by accusing other schools of being deluded… Yes, we at U Miami give off some stench, but have you smelled Southern Methodist?

Well, so. What is to be done? How to clean up?

This guy thinks we should abolish the NCAA and put caps on coaches’ salaries.

Not gonna happen. Read Animal Farm. The pigs will not be amused.

… the University of Miami community seems disinclined to attend games. Pay for play, brawls, Nevin Shapiro, sanctions – it’s just decades of major gross-outs. But hark:

Now, while the sanctions may be an answer as to why attendance is so poor, that doesn’t necessarily justify it, Hurricanes fans. The Penn State Nittany Lions were hit with one of the harshest punishments in the history of college football last season, yet they still consistently put 80-90,000 people in Beaver Stadium last season. There’s no light at the end of their tunnel for the next four years, yet the faithful still showed up every home game and cheered their team on. Why couldn’t you do the same?

It’s an interesting argument. You can’t go too low for the fans at Penn State; why should Miami fans be so holier than thou?

In a nearly empty stadium that had the energy of a library, Cuba trounced China 12-0, invoking the mercy rule after the top of the seventh inning to improve to 2-0 in the first round of the World Baseball Classic.

The official attendance of the game was listed at 3,123, but whoever was counting must have included every player, coach, scout, media member and stadium employee who walked through the gate because the stadium was virtually empty. In reality, there appeared to be about 86 fans in the stadium, with neither team proving to be much of a draw for the fans in Fukuoka, creating the feeling of an Arizona Fall League game in a dome.

The Bobby Knight of the University of Utah – a swimming coach with anger issues – reportedly got away with abusing his swimmers for years. It wasn’t until recent allegations of his having sexually abused a fifteen-year-old girl that Utah finally suspended him.

Suspension. I guess the swimmers – and their families – who’ve been filing complaints about his sadistic behavior (outlined here) will just have to sit back and watch him be reinstated once his legal problems are over.

Or not. Another scenario would involve UU facing negligence lawsuits from many people, given the damages the coach was able to continue to inflict on student swimmers over years, despite incessant formal protest.

… with a three-year, half a million dollar salary, contract extension.

Not that they’re going to tell you that.

… comes out in favor of a university-wide laptop in the classroom ban. If you’ve been reading this blog for any time at all, you know that UD has confidently awaited such a day, and that she trusts something similar will happen at other self-respecting campuses (Def. of self-respecting campuses: Places whose football stadium isn’t named after a prison). That is, UD has anticipated that the real energy in favor of serious bans will come not from professors, many of whom do ban them, but from students.

This is for obvious I’m all right, Jack, pull up the ladder reasons: What careth I, Professor X, if Professor Y’s students have a shitty classroom experience? I’ve worked out something good for my group.

But – as UD has told you repeatedly – this is a treacherously short-sighted POV. As the Duke editorial writers ask:

Why convene class if students are half-present, constantly disturbed by text messages, games and Facebook? … What is the point of holding class if people are not paying attention? This is not just about respect; it is also about the necessity of a physical college campus. The more time we spend on computers, the less important the on-campus college experience — which universities tout as a major benefit of an elite education — becomes.

If it helps you to think about this in terms of sports: Note current plummeting attendance at many university and professional stadiums. Why, why, why? Well, lots of traditional reasons (obscene drunks, long runs of losing games, outrageous ticket prices, passels of bad boys on the teams) PLUS a new one: The addition to many stadiums of vast Adzillatrons — screens that show you the game as it’s happening, and add constant massive shrieking advertisements. Fun! You’ve spent hundreds of dollars to be treated to a computer-generated as-it’s-happening rendition of the game while being held captive to wall to wall commercials. Where do I sign up for my $2,000 season tickets?… But it’s so much less fun with every game, ’cause I notice all the other people who used to sit with me and make it exciting to cheer are gone. They’re watching on their big screen in the respectable privacy of their own home…

And see it’s the same thing at universities. Why go there? It’s nicer to lie in bed and stare at your very own screen. And you get to that place, mentally, as a result of staring at screens in classrooms, just the way people get themselves home from the football game by staring at screens in the stadium.

Really dum-dum states, like Nevada, our very dumbest state, are planning more and bigger Adzillatrons at stadiums. A proposed $800 million new facility for UNLV features an Adzillatron that spans the entire stadium. Imagine sitting in your seat and being forced to watch the world’s biggest moving image of a three-tier McDonald’s burger oozing white sauce! Slurp!

… he will now attempt once more to move among us, a man.

… but I will do my damnedest to post – want to write, for instance, about the failing fortunes of that big ol’ University of Nevada Las Vegas stadium the boys have in mind to build once they get hold of hundreds of millions of tax dollars… The current UNLV stadium isn’t empty enough for them — they want one that will be bigger, cost more, and attract even fewer people. But I’ll just post this for the moment, since I’m worried about losing my connection….

When first I saw you
And your shining prison
I felt the sun had
Only just arisen

O CEO!
CEO of GEO!
Pray go away!
Pray GOOOOOOOoooo awayyyyyy!

… deal to name its stadium after a company that runs prisons.

Was a prison company our first choice? No. But let’s face it, for a $6 million donation we probably would have sold the stadium naming rights to Massengill and called the stadium The Douche Dome.

We were desperate. We built a $70 million facility that’s nearly empty year-round, even during home football games, and for two years, nobody was biting on the naming rights.

Most scandal-befouled sports factories – North Carolina, Penn State – are embarrassed by how far they’ve let themselves go. They seem to retain a sense of what they once were, or could have been, before they dissolved.

But UD will give this to Auburn University: It is what it is — the sports and leisure sewer of the American collegiate landscape — and it’s proud of it. No hiding its head in shame for Auburn after its countless athletic scandals; it has a belligerent insistence on total squalor, total contempt for the concept “university,” that one can’t help but admire.

Now it’s building an amusement park for everyone there, featuring

a 50-foot rock climbing wall with an auto-belaying system, four bordering caves for lateral climbing, a a 20-foot wet rock climbing wall in the 20,000 gallon leisure activity pool, a 45-person hot tub in the shape of a tiger paw and a third of a mile indoor track with a corkscrew formation and 10 feet of altitude.

Tiger paw because that’s the mascot, dummy. Here’s a photograph of forty-five people or so (doing something they’d never be caught dead doing at Auburn), in case you want to start picturing the hot tub.

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UD thanks a reader from Auburn.