… one of the Penn State movers and shakers: Tim Curley. His remarks at a 2009 Knight Commission meeting UD attended so struck her that she transcribed them here.
Looked at in the context of subsequent events, these comments can really… I dunno… make you… a little cynical?
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.
… these are some of the little extrees he has in mind. These fixins are not typically listed on your typical university sports budget menu. Like the second sprig of mint on your crème brûlée or the little side of chutney with your chicken madras, these are the things that add up to make your program the humiliating mess it is.
The state of Iowa will pay $30,500 in legal fees accumulated by a newspaper in a lawsuit over access to records from the University of Iowa.
… The $30,500 payment was formally approved Monday by the State Appeal Board, the panel responsible for reviewing and signing off on the state’s legal settlements.
The open records case centered on documents relating to an alleged sexual assault committed by Iowa football players in a university dorm room. The court found some of the university’s records concerning the case were protected by the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act, while others were available for disclosure.
This writer to Colorado’s Daily Camera points out that football is bankrupting the University of Colorado:
[B]etween 2006 and 2011 the university, students and the state subsidized roughly 25 percent ($15 million) of the Athletic Department’s annual operating costs. The Athletic Department has also taken $18 million in loans from the university system over the past several years. These investments are particularly troublesome considering that Colorado is 48th in the country in funding for its universities.
Who knows how this troublesome state of affairs happened? The point is, I mean, whatever, the point is there’s a solution!
Alcohol sales would help to make the Athletic Department more financially self-sufficient…
I mean, we got into this mess who the fuck knows how but now that we’re in it let’s hit the kids up for booze and solve it dammit. And anyway the students are victims of the current policy!
[P]atrons are forced to get their fill prior to games…
The current policy forces students to get so drunk they become “a danger to themselves and a danger and nuisance to others.”
This state-sponsored coercion must end. Sic semper tyrannis!
Many of America’s most grotesquely twisted football factory schools have a Lewis Margolis, a faculty member who from the start – before Penn State becomes Pederasty Central; before sick jocks become a sick joke – speaks out strongly and eloquently against the corruption of his or her campus by big-time sports.
Margolis has become the go-to person as journalists crowd around the next university to lose much of its reputation because of its sports program – the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Watch for his name as the UNC academic fraud scandal heats up. We know from interviews that he speaks well; this terrific Inside Higher Education piece reveals him also to be an excellent writer.
… to make things look not quite as sordid as they are. Note how this article, about two University of Texas San Antonio players just arrested for drug-related armed robbery, begins:
Two former University of Texas at San Antonio football players have been released from the program after their alleged involvement in an armed robbery Tuesday.
Not a problem! Former! Years ago they were on the team!
… What? … They were on the team when they did the deal? They were dumped minutes ago, shortly after their incarceration?
Well, that makes them former…
Post-Penn State, everyone’s talking about sports culture and how we have to understand it and control it and all. The beginning of my tutorial on the subject (this whole blog can be seen as a tutorial on the subject, but let’s go with our most recent stuff) is here.
Drawing upon the growing University of North Carolina Chapel Hill academic fraud scandal (which this blog is following closely), we take our next step:
Joy Renner, [UNC] athletics committee chairwoman and associate professor and director in the Department of Allied Health Sciences, does not believe the [athletes’ academic] advisors had ill-natured intentions.
“I don’t think there was anything malicious,” Renner said. “I don’t think there was any surreptitious types of activities going on. I think it was truly people trying to help our athletes be able to compete on the field and also in the classroom.”
… The findings [of a university report on the situation] present a continued sense of secrecy coming out of the athletics department and the subcommittee’s report calls for more transparency throughout the university. Renner said that must happen if UNC is going to move forward.
“I’ve not gotten one shred of feeling of someone not being transparent or wanting to get to the bottom of this,” Renner said. “Trust me, is there anyone on this campus that doesn’t want this to go away? Things don’t go away until you get to the bottom of it, until you know what actually happened and didn’t happen.”
Confused? The report describes “a sense of secrecy” and “calls for more transparency throughout the university.”
But Renner says nothing “surreptitious” was going on.
But Renner says more transparency “must happen.”
But Renner says the advisors and professors were “truly people trying to help our athletes be able to compete on the field and also in the classroom.”
But Renner says we need to “get to the bottom of it.”
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Joy Renners abound at all sports factories; they are the joy of sports factories. Without people on the faculty, and on important committees, willing to say the shit you just read, the culture couldn’t thrive.
Joy chairs the athletics committee and so there’s a lot of press attention coming her way. UD recommends that Joy get her story straight or do the no comment thing.
Meanwhile, as we build our knowledge of university sports culture, we keep front and center the pivotal value of the useful idiot.
As the University of North Carolina sport scandal begins to take off, pay attention to the details. People use phrases like sports culture all the time (Penn State, we are told, has to confront its sports culture) but until you look at things like the background of the trustees at Auburn or the background of the people who run the academic support program for athletes at North Carolina, you don’t grasp the reality.
UD attended a university sports conference a couple of years ago, here in Washington, where a high-ranking administrator at a local university demanded to know why coaches and coaching staff were not professors. They are teaching, after all; and erasing the line between coaches and professors will heal the rift between athletics and academics, making the university one big happy family.
If it seems a grotesque idea, it shouldn’t. It’s already being implemented, in a way, at a lot of universities, where the president is little more than a sports nut with impressive corporate or political ties, several of the trustees played football or basketball for the school, and plenty of professors sit on sports-oversight committees and don’t do anything other than enjoy the free tickets and other perks they get to make sure they don’t do anything.
“The athletic enterprise has grown so large and so remunerative that it may not be appropriate at universities anymore,” said Lew Margolis, a [University of North Carolina] public health professor.
Yes, it has grown into the university, to the point where we’re supposed to shed tears because Penn State and its surrounding towns and villages will go bankrupt because of football sanctions. Penn State created and sustained a happy seamless valley where children got fucked in its showers by one of its coaches and now just because of that you’re going to remove the very basis of our economy and indeed of our valley life itself?
Take it out of universities. It’s of course fully appropriate for the larger culture, which laps up the much viler world of professional football. But it is really rather inappropriate at universities.
Nice summary of the situation in the comments section of yet another article anticipating the next big gross college sports story – academic fraud at the once-respectable University of North Carolina.
If not for Penn State, you would be sick of hearing about North Carolina by now.
As the details emerge, you’ll get sick of hearing about it right quick.
We’re conditioned by misguided loyalty to rationalize the same routine corruption in our programs we relentlessly condemn in our rivals. Now rot has been exposed in a supposedly “elite” football program that can’t be glossed over.
Following the massive academic fraud scandal at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill is essentially following the entire leadership of a school – president, deans, high-ranking faculty – attempting to convince people that this leadership saw no difference between a department flagrantly run for the convenience of its athletics program and all other departments.
These people are attempting to convince us that despite well-established fraudulent procedures along these lines at many big-time sports schools – clustering of players into certain majors, department chairs who are nothing more than tools of the athletic program, tutors who cheat on behalf of players, the use of the designation “independent study” to create rafts of bogus courses – all signs of sports-sponsored academic fraudulence on their campus “escaped attention,” in the words of a dean.
No wonder they are having difficulties persuading us to believe that – despite SUNY Binghamton, Auburn, and all the other recent national academic fraud stories with exactly these elements – no one at Chapel Hill had enough distrust in the integrity of its catering-to-athletes department to investigate even a little. We’re supposed to believe that, until the unfolding of a series of events entirely outside the hands of the school’s leadership, everyone trusted in the integrity of this department and its chair.
It’s tawdry and pathetic. It’s insulting to all of us watching as UNC simply and repeatedly lies. It’s particularly insulting to the taxpayers of North Carolina who pay the salaries of corrupt department chairs and cynical administrators.