These are the sorts of empty words one expects from the Knight Commission, whose function is to move athletics-related statements around in the air and on the page.

“Otherwise,” Charles Curtis goes on to warn in The American Prospect, “something more drastic will have to be done to change collegiate athletic culture.” Ooh, what?? By whom??

… especially on the part of the faculty. But sometimes faculty pipe up.

Jay Smith, who teaches history at this month’s scandal-plagued darling, Chapel Hill, has piped up.

The Chancellor (who has so mismanaged all the sports scandals that he’s resigning) did his I’m Shocked We’re All Shocked shtick for the faculty, and I guess most of them bought it. Except for Smith.

[O]ne professor, Jay Smith, challenged Thorp on the university’s contention that athletics did not drive the scandal. While he praised the university for the reforms, Smith said the university has not been as forthcoming as it should have been.

He cited the last no-show class [Julius] Nyang’oro taught, AFAM 280, which Nyang’oro created two days before the start of a summer 2011 semester and quickly filled with football players. News & Observer records requests revealed the athletes-only class, which prompted an ongoing criminal investigation.

“The existence of that course alone provides very powerful evidence that the Nyang’oro scandal was all about athletics,” said Smith, a history professor.

He also asked why the university declined to check a test transcript from 2001 that The N&O found on a UNC website that turned out to be that of Julius Peppers, a football and basketball player who is now an All-Pro defensive end for the Chicago Bears. The university had insisted the transcript was fake but did not check records to make sure.

“Instead of confirming the reality of the record and then moving to protect that student’s privacy, the university ignored The N&O’s questions and left that transcript on a publicly accessible website, where it was available for later plundering by N.C. State fans,” Smith said.

Stories like this one always remind UD of the university administrator who, at a conference on university athletics, insisted that the way to overcome the separation between faculty and coaches was to make coaches professors. “Coaches are just like professors,” he said. “Essentially they are professors – people paid at universities to teach students. They should be regular tenured faculty.”

It’s intriguing to think about the Rate My Professors page of Billy Gillispie, Bobby Knight, Mike Leach, Mark Mangino… Instead of the Helpfulness category, you’d have Abusiveness (Physical) and Abusiveness (Mental).

Maybe you’d reserve those categories for certain classroom professors too, but only if, during discussion, they had a tendency to shout You worthless piece of shit and Hey pussy pussy at students; and, when seriously annoyed, concussed them.

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As to lecture content:

Football is violent by design. It became a sensation because of television, yes, but also because it expressed certain truths about American life: the dangers of the mines and mills, dirt, struggle, blood, grime, the division of labor, the all-importance of the clock. But we’ve changed, which is why white middle- and upper-middle-class fans recoil at the cascade of injuries that can make ESPN resemble the surgery channel…

Farewell to the most famed member of our academic community.

[D]angerously myopic … self-aggrandizing … [a Mussolini] in wingtips …
“I’d wake up every day and be afraid,” [one of Billy Gillispie’s players] says… [A] lunatic who has them running the stadium steps, barking like a mad dog at the moonlight… Six months after being fired at Kentucky, he received his third DUI in a 10-year span.

Texas Tech. A community of scholars.

… for as long as I’ve been following it. But now that they’re on a losing streak, the crowds are pissed.

I mean, they’re always pissed. But now they’re also pissed.

University of Kentucky police will increase their presence at the next UK home football game as a result of fights among tailgaters outside Saturday’s game against Western Kentucky.

Police are getting wounded as they try to break things up.

More police will be patrolling at future games. So.

That will be expensive. Great use of money for a university.

And that will be hyper-surveillance. Always fun at a sports event. But if your fan base is made up of jerks …

Of course a lot of these people aren’t students. They aren’t even fans. Why watch a shitty team play? They’re there because violent drunks love a tailgate. Any tailgate.

This year, our team’s opening game against William & Mary drew the smallest crowd for a season opener since 1997. A staff editorial on Sept. 14, “Win or lose, root for the home team,” commented on this disappointing turnout, saying fans need to amp up their school spirit if they want the Terps to play better. I say, why?

One of the many degradations of being a student at a jock school is that people are constantly after you to show enthusiasm for the team.

From the school’s point of view, you’ve got keep the spirit amped because the school has invested zillions of dollars and taken out insane loans to keep the sports thing cranked, and if you fail to be the sort of person who pees his pants at the prospect of paying tens of thousands for luxury boxes and season tickets the school is fucked.

From your fellow students’ point of view, the growth of a party of unamped peers provokes cognitive dissonance, the alienation effect, a crisis of bad faith, acedia, ennui, dark nights of the soul, and nihilistic panic. They are like the people on this tourist bus.

The university has permitted drinking in the football stands, and the results may surprise you.

We had beer spilled on us three times; a fight broke out in the row behind us over the unspeakable sin of wearing a nonmaroon visor, and those of us who spent the better part of the entire game trying to keep the peace received multiple offers to have our faces rearranged.

Whoda thunk it?

The man who – until his recent firing – presided over endless sports, academic fraud, and sports-related misuse of funds cases at the University of North Carolina was a saint. A saint. He did his best. He was powerless.

Big-time college athletics have long been a minefield for university administrators. They often find themselves at the mercy of highly paid coaches under intense pressure to recruit top players – who may struggle academically – and wealthy boosters who want successful teams.

… A 2009 Knight Commission survey of university presidents and chancellors found many of them feel powerless to stop or slow the financial arms race in athletic departments that has often brought scandal.

“(P)residents would like serious change but do not see themselves as the force for the changes needed,” the report said.

As poor little David Boren of Oklahoma University says of the coaches’ salaries there, “We can’t control the marketplace.”

These guys can’t do anything! They’re only the president.

He writes an opinion piece in the school newspaper protesting the destruction of the university by athletics.

You’d think newspapers at Auburn and Clemson and Georgia and Montana and all of the other American universities degraded by big-time sports would feature similar professors – committed, responsible people capable of tracking and analyzing the deterioration and writing about it. Hell, many of these people have tenure, a level of job security unimaginable to most people. But – as UD discussed in what seems to have become her most famous column – for a variety of reasons, they don’t say anything.

Rutgers is an exception. William C. Dowling – a Rutgers English professor – wrote a 2007 book about how sports has long undone, and continues to undo, Rutgers. And now, with things far, far worse than when Dowling’s book came out, an economics professor there – Mark Killingworth – has described the ongoing (and, old UD will guess, ultimately failed) effort to “clean up” after its athletics mess.

A New York Times article about Dowling was written in 2007, when things looked way cool at Rutgers athletics. The author writes that “the number of undergraduate applications has risen along with Rutgers’s sporting fortunes, as have annual donations to the university.”

Really? Here’s Killingworth, 2012:

[B]ig-time University athletics hasn’t attracted more first-year students with high SAT scores, and hasn’t raised our “yield” (percentage of accepted applicants who actually attend), relative to peer institutions. Our academic rankings are sliding steadily downwards, and for two years running, our enormous athletic subsidies have landed us in the Wall Street Journal’s “football grid of shame.” This isn’t “building the brand” — it’s making us a punchline.

What happened to all them big donations and big smart students?

See, this is something sports factories don’t want to parse for you, but getting more jerks to apply to your school because they want to get pissed and join the fun is not a good trend. The state of Massachusetts has set up the University of Massachusetts Amherst to take those students.

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Killingworth touches on the Rutgers board of trustees. He is far too kind, merely asking them to “rethink their priorities.” No. They are the people who killed Rutgers. Like Penn State’s trustees (UD predicts all or most of them will resign in the coming months) they should be booted. Instead of holding the university in their trust and working toward its benefit, they shat on it and created the absolute failure Killingworth describes. Out they go.

Central Michigan University (go here – scroll down – if you have the stomach) is a Division I unibrewery with a losing team. The only fiscal solution to this problem is full-throttle student bacchanalia in the parking lots of games no one attends. The presidents of div I unibreweries spend most their time tweaking alcohol policies with an eye to two things:

1. maximum consumption; and

2. the mobilization of personal responsibility rhetoric.

It’s an unavoidable task of a blog like University Diaries to go to where the big-time university sports fans are, and to listen to them with care.

I read this sort of thing on a regular basis.

I re-read it. I circle around it. I pore over it.

It’s always the same: A halting recital of the current top rung of university sports scandals. A few forced laughs along the way. A final pledge to do all one can to deny that they happened.

It’s a guy thing.

UD‘s not a guy.

UD likes guys.

She knows that guys power the billion dollar tv contracts that have killed any number of universities as serious institutions. But she still likes guys. She likes this guy.

Like all guys, he’s basically Blanche Dubois: Ah see the world ah wanna see. Like her, he deserves our effort to understand, and our pity.

… is that any particular revelation of corruption threatens to set off a chain reaction.

Take your typical southern university system — a crony dumping-ground, a favor-repayment franchise, a post-tailgate barrens of the blitzed and bilious. As with the 2009 Mary Easley scandal at North Carolina State (scroll down for several posts), one fallen crony begats another which begats another yea to everlasting. More recently, the unpleasantness in the University of North Carolina’s Afro-American Studies department has touched off a spate of panic-auditing which has begat more fallen cronies, among them a sporty, well-compensated couple that travels about hither and yon on the taxpayer’s dime.

… that I ignore most of them and only feature the very worst. The Florida A&M hazing death definitely rates inclusion. The family of the student beaten to death on the marching band’s bus has sued, and FAMU has argued that the kid brought it on himself.

This ignores the fact that FAMU has spent decades ignoring a hazing culture that anyone could see was spinning out of control. UD thinks the school should take the fall – might knock some sense into all the other sports factories that do the same sort of thing.

The full weight of the tragedy is finally felt.

A writer at Jezebel uses really hurtful language to describe Boston University’s fun-loving hockey players. In the tradition of George Huguely, they call their sexual conquests “kills.” As at the University of Montana, a campus so rape-positive that students must now watch don’t rape, don’t get raped films and then pass a test about them before they can register, it’s all about the athletes.

I mean, it’s also about the bars, boosters, and coaches.

There is a widespread belief that behavior by the [Montana] football team has been tolerated by the program’s infrastructure. Three of the lawyers representing players, for example, are on the National Advisory Board for Grizzly Athletics…

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[O]ne [Boston] team member said [the hockey coach] “cares too much about hurting the important players’ feelings… He’ll criticize, then apologize.”

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[A] shady student-athlete-friendly sports bar … T’s Pub [has been cited as] “part of the problem,” since hockey players could (until recently) drink there for free without showing IDs. [Athletes bring in business.]

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Yes, it takes a village. And why is the village the way it is?

Mayor John Engen of Missoula said the city was cooperating and would make any needed changes. He said he believed the scandal would pass if the public and the students felt the issues had been addressed, but in the meantime, with the football team under a cloud, “it’s hard to know what people are going to pin their hopes and dreams on.”

What else are people going to pin their hopes and dreams on?

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UD proposes that big-time sports universities set aside some part of their enormous athletic budgets to establish Comfort Women dormitories, safe and supervised havens for the teams.