This is an example of the corrosive skepticism undermining the American university’s greatest asset.

Why sure. You might have noticed that football – and hockey – are extremely violent. Most of the people who play them aren’t violent off-field, but some are.

On-field brawls are common, as at the Super Bowl, when officials had to keep breaking up fights.

Fans and viewers barely notice. It’s structural to the game, college and professional.

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You don’t have to be the University of Miami – America’s best-known Thug U – to have thuggish people on your team, and it shouldn’t be a big deal when this or that commentator notices the thug-factor, especially when it begins to produce a crime-wave in your community.

As it has at the University of Montana, where for years now its football team has really been acting up. The latest thing is a lot of rape cases, and when a member of the board of trustees stated the obvious about them –

“The university has recruited thugs for its football team and this thuggery has got to stop.”

– he got in all kinds of trouble, with the school and fans issuing indignant denials that the team is thuggish.

But – you know – a lot of football teams are thuggish. Some of the best – the winningest – are on the thuggish side.

What do we gain by denying that even well-bred university lacrosse players can be thuggish? A lot of these university sports guys drink and drug too much, are treated like royalty, etc., etc. It’s just not a good situation. It’s a situation that can create mayhem.

Rather than attacking messengers like Pat Williams, communities like Missoula should look a bit more squarely at how they recruit and treat athletes. That they have created an ongoing problem is a (you should excuse the term, given what we’re finding out about long-term health outcomes for football players) no-brainer.

[A University of Notre Dame hockey player] was asked to leave Brothers Bar and Grill Sunday night after patrons accused him of taking beer from their tables. [Police say the player] punched the [restaurant’s] 35-year-old manager in the face and stepped on her head when she fell.

The governor of the state of Tennessee has said it as directly as possible: The university itself is imperiled unless UT’s football team wins games and fills its stadium.

“If you want to be bottom line about it, it shows why UT-Knoxville has to be good in football,” Haslam said. “You have a whole program that’s set up with a 100,000-seat Neyland Stadium, and it’s a program that supports all the other sports other than basketball and provides scholarships back to the university.”

And – he didn’t need to add since everyone knows it – the school, entirely because of sports, currently carries TWO HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS in debt.  Yeah baby you read that right. So there have to be bodies in UT’s big new incredibly expensive stadium; the team has to win…

Only it’s losing, see, so the stadium’s kind of empty and all the coaches that doomed the team and the school have to be paid off in the millions of dollars to go away and WOW! Where can the rest of America sign up? What a great way to run a university!

Nice way of sayin’ it jest don’t get no dumber than the University of Tennessee.

No wonder America’s highest-profile student athletes are such campus heroes. Brain and brawn! Plus, these guys do what they have to do to win. At Donna Shalala’s AMAZING University of Miami, there’s yet another corruption scandal, with the baseball team caught up in the scummy world of steroids.

Uh huh.

Read UD‘s explanation. It is the most-read of her writings.

You’re describing mainstream big-time American university athletics. Nothing to see here.

The place has an astounding consistency. Jockshop di tutti jockshops, it now has its trustees busy looking into two new degree offerings:

How to Make Beer.

How to Keep Turfgrass Looking Good.

Ouch.

This is a line from a letter written to the president of Harvard from an alumnus, a pissed off rich guy. The letter is quoted in the Crimson.

The guy is an Ivy League T. Boone Pickens. An east coast Phil Knight wannabe. He’s in a rage because he’s just seen his investment in the school’s basketball team get shot to hell because of a cheating scandal.

You can understand his anger. A titan of industry takes over a sports team, he expects it to win. T. Boone’s luxury box tantrums when Oklahoma State football fucks up are the stuff of legend.

But wait a minute. This is Harvard University the guy’s talking about. When he says like many the Faculty of Arts and Sciences assigns he’s not talking about some jock shop. He’s talking about Harvard University!

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So. Let us put this matter into perspective. Let us look at the problems that conspired to produce the cheating scandal that broke up the basketball team this guy was bankrolling. Let us then consider solutions.

1. Yes, Harvard’s notorious for short-changing undergraduates. This isn’t going to change. Catering to professors who only want to teach graduate students is a Harvard thing. If you want to teach at a first-rate school that takes undergraduate and graduate instruction equally seriously, leave Harvard and go to Princeton.

Harvard’s relative indifference to its undergraduate component will inevitably produce some stupidly designed courses like this one, with its absurd take-home exam (take-home exams are invitations to cheat), inexperienced instructor, etc.

2. Bogus, easy-A, jock courses are the name of the game at big sports universities (for details, see recent events at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill), and no one cares, since winning is more important than educating the people recruited to play on the teams. Harvard is supposed to have a different ethos, but as long as it’s got a sports program that rich guys like the letter writer blow lots of money on, it’s going to have courses like this on offer.

3. Et ainsi, the letter writer can’t have it both ways. Either you put your money on a truly competitive team some of whose players are – inevitably – not scholars, or you settle for a reasonably but not dramatically competitive team made up of scholars. If the guy had put his money on a legitimately scholarly team, he’d be writing pissed off letters to Drew Faust about what losers they are, how she has to take recruiting more seriously, etc. He put his money on a not legitimately scholarly team, and now he’s pissed off because they’re not legitimately scholarly.

Solutions:

There’s only one solution.

1. Harvard should do what Oregon and Oklahoma State have done, and give the team to the titan. Phil Knight and T. Boone run basketball and football at Oregon and Oklahoma State. They basically own the teams. They bought them. Make Thomas Sternberg pony up Knight/T. Boone levels of support and give him the damn basketball team.

A professor of rhetoric gives Armstrong an F.

… administrators are choosing to spend millions on sports programs with only the faintest hope that they’ll one day see a return on their investment other than the dubious intangible benefits of having a few second-rate sports squads around to keep up school spirit. Moreover, they’re spending more on those programs every year.”

Jordan Weissmann does the numbers.

Nevada, our most mentally challenged state, is about to spend eight hundred million dollars on a 60,000-seat stadium for one of the losingest university sports teams around: University of Nevada Las Vegas football.

In an era where it’s been proven time and time again that building new sports and entertainment facilities doesn’t necessarily immediately create a return on investment — in fact, it often does the opposite — there is still no hesitation to go with the bigger is better model of property development.

It will feature a 100-yard long Adzillatron – the entire length of the field. It’s one thing to hurl shrieking sixty-yard long ads at captive audiences; at one hundred yards, there’s really no getting away from them.

The best commentary UD has so far seen on this comes from a reader of SB Nation:

It’s pitiful.

But we’re Vegas and we do stupid shit like this all the time.

And one fewer professor teaching grammar.

… avoid mixed metaphors.

Southern Cal has always struggled to gain a competitive foothold in the world of college basketball while playing second fiddle to its crosstown arch-rival UCLA, coming close on several occasions only to have it torn away by scandal or impatience.

They create confusion. And note the connection between mixed metaphors and cliches (playing second fiddle). They often appear together. Avoid cliches.

Things get worse in a later paragraph:

The institutional decline of Southern Cal, as business consultant and educator Jim Collins would put it, came like a staged disease; an initially unknown cancer that ate away silently at USC fed by its own gluttony for success. At first, it was almost impossible to detect but easily correctable. If the powers that be could have saw the writing on the wall and slowed the bleeding, the program might have been saved. Yet USC sunk deeper and deeper into the quicksand of its own arrogance, until it realized that all it had accomplished had only come about because of broken rules and scorched earth.

Let’s unpack.

The institutional decline of Southern Cal, as business consultant and educator Jim Collins would put it, [Would put what? What in the first words of this sentence does the “it” here refer to?] came like a staged disease; an initially unknown cancer that ate away silently at USC [The reader feels a sense of dread as this overused analogy gets going.] fed by its own gluttony for success. At first, it was almost impossible to detect but easily correctable. If the powers that be could have saw [Wow. Forbes, we have a problem.] the writing on the wall and slowed the bleeding, [Again, note the combination of cliche – writing on the wall, stop the bleeding – and mixed metaphor.] the program might have been saved. Yet USC sunk deeper and deeper into the quicksand of its own arrogance, [The final stage of this staged disease is quicksand.] until it realized that all it had accomplished had only come about because of broken rules and scorched earth. [Can’t resist throwing yet another image – scorched earth – onto his pile of words.]