Izvestia, Central Florida.

Lively radio interview with a News and Observer reporter about the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill academic fraud (scroll down).

As with Thomas Petee at Auburn and Leo Wilton at SUNY Binghamton, it’s crucial to have either the chair of a department (like Chapel Hill’s Julius Nyang’oro, about whom the reporter is talking up there in my headline) or a very high-ranking faculty member running the independent studies that athletes find so attractive.

The wisdom of commenters. This one even knows how to use a semi-colon. UD bows down.

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Speaking of writing, Scathing Online Schoolmarm is relieved to see wordplay starting up on the last name Peppers. It’s taken far too long. Philadelphia Inquirer:

PEEPING AT PEPPERS’ TRANSCRIPT

Alliteration is the obvious first move, though SOS also looks forward to some pun-seepage.

Pepper is of course part of a famous alliterative Mother Goose thingie:

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers;
A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked;
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
Where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?

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Chapel’s campus posted pickled Peppers’ transcript;
A peek at pickled Peppers’ GPA took place.
It shows how Chapel Hill kept up its pecker
And won the big athletic college race.

… quite gets you there.

The wins get taken away, so where are you? One after another cheater university gets its wins taken away, so what does that make all the effort to play and win the games?

As with the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, which will almost certainly vacate yet more victories once its slow-moving academic scandal picks up steam, it makes the effort either a sick pathetic joke, or it makes it performance art.

UD thinks it’s more healthy to think of it as performance art, à la Dada. Our football program is shit and then we die. Let’s do the rhumba around a Paterno statue and then blow it up. Let’s turn our victory banners into burqas and wrap them around our labrador retrievers.

Far better to adopt the absurd, says UD, than wallow in the bathos all the boys are in at the moment. The boys need to evolve. They need to see the possibilities.

Take this guy, with his anguished questions, his incredulity, his Blanche Dubois Ah see the world ah wanna see thing:

We tend to believe what we want, and since my sister graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill and loved the school so much that she still lives nearby, I didn’t want to believe this school — her school — could be so shameful.

Impeccable reasoning, wouldn’t think of criticizing this way of understanding the world, but it takes him to this grim panicky place:

[This might be] the ugliest academic scandal in NCAA history.

UD would ask him to calm down and recall what the great landscape designer Gertrude Jekyll once said:

There is no spot of ground, however arid, bare or ugly, that cannot be tamed into such a state as may give an impression of beauty and delight.

Go toward the ugliness; bring to it the same pep and pageantry you used to bring to game day, and you will find that laughter and fellowship will not be far behind.

The hope amongst the Carolina blue is that this thing is isolated and no matter what, it doesn’t involve the mens basketball program. My gut tells me the men who have led this program, the great Dean Smith, Bill Guthridge and Roy Williams would never take part in anything like this, that they are men of honor and the basketball program will remain clean forever. It is my personal belief that, that is true and whatever ends up coming out when everything is out in the open, it will remain true.

You see that he says the North Carolina Chapel Hill basketball program, not football. Football is obviously utterly dirty… Yet it being in the nature of fandom to cling to one’s magic blanket even as it tatters before your eyes, the writer professes his faith in the spotlessness of at least basketball. At least that, for God’s sake. You wouldn’t take that away.

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Meanwhile – the infinite bounty of sport! – the professional organization that represents literature professors may soon be headed by someone who teaches at an unaccredited university.

Researchers at UNC are exploring the question of how a football player’s transcript got reverse engineered in such a way as to appear plastered all over the national press.

The details of the transcript, particularly the fact that [Julius] Peppers took three independent study courses in the now scandal-ridden [African and Afro-American Studies] department, raise troubling questions amidst the unraveling of one of the most damaging scandals in the University’s history.

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If the transcript does, in fact, belong to Peppers, it digs the university deeper into an already damaging scandal. An internal review of the African Studies Department found that the majority of the aberrant courses were administered beginning in 2007, but this development would mean that the trouble began much earlier. It would also add to the growing speculation that athletes have been specifically pointed toward African Studies classes by counselors assigned to the athletic department.

And speaking of counselors:

Peppers’s agent, Carl Carey was also his academic adviser while at UNC and helped him get a re-test on a failing grade that would have ruled him academically ineligible.

Impressed? Impressed that Carey has worn two hats – agent and counselor? Well, hold on to your hat, because that number is three: Carey also taught at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill!

[AF/AM department chair Julius] Nyang’oro reportedly hired Carl Carey Jr. to teach a course this summer without telling Karen Gil, dean of the Colleges of Arts and Sciences, that Carey is a sports agent.

Wow.

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(UD thanks Dave.)

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Oh – apparently there’s a bidding war for Julius Nyang’oro going on between Auburn and Clemson.

It’s always a little upsetting for sports schools when they fail – as they so often do – in their effort to twist privacy laws. The bigger the athletics program, the more it has to hide (recall the legal hysteria about Happy Valley emails), so they scream FERPA whenever newspapers ask for substantive information.

A judge just ruled that this season’s scandal-plagued darling, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, cannot use the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act to keep those of us outside the coaches’ circle from knowing every choice detail about their disgraced football program. Urp!

… this two million dollars a year?

Because they’re worth every penny. A university can’t put a price tag on this sort of international publicity.

… is Southern Methodist University, which, despite its beyond-notorious sports past (people keep talking about its death penalty in relation to Penn State), seems determined to get right back up on that particular horse and ride itself into oblivion again. Their athletic deficit is over a hundred million dollars, and they just fired – in an act of obvious desperation – the swaggering bigmouth athletic director in charge of making that deficit much, much bigger.

Read the background here, if you can stomach it.

Like the University of Georgia (which UD has long designated the Worst University in America), SMU has a president who seems a wholly owned subsidiary of the NCAA, a jocko di tutti jocki who will do absolutely anything to get SMU back on track toward another death penalty, either via the NCAA or via institutional bankruptcy.

Gerald Gurney (UD sat on a panel with him at a sports conference a few years ago) and Richard Southall examine the latest NCAA bullshit: Academic Progress Rate scores. Since APR is all about a sports school having the money to play the system by coming up with phony courses, elaborate waivers, etc., etc., the only universities that end up getting to be the dummies eliminated from competition are the non-rich ones.

The writers feature “the recent academic scandal at the University of North Carolina,” a well-heeled school with notorious jock doc Julius Nyang’oro. Rather than suffer any institutional penalty – even a mild verbal put-down – Nyang’oro has been rewarded for years of outrageous academic fraud by a retirement with full honors. For a job well done.

That scene from An Officer and a Gentleman captures what happens when a sports factory loses its assembly line — when all the investments and efficiencies fail and the place begins to shut down.

The University of Kentucky’s football team – the only game in town except for its basketball team, coached by the amazingly corrupt Calipari – is faltering, and customers are fleeing.

Recently, the University of Kentucky Athletics Department announced that season ticket sales for the 2012 UK Football team was down nearly 30% from last year’s totals. And, on top of that, roughly 2,000 unsold tickets were returned to the University of Louisville for the September 2 matchup. Needless to say, the apathy amongst the Big Blue faithful toward this year’s team is high. The question in most fans’ minds: How do we fix UK Football?

The writer is a fan. He proposes spending much more money on the team. The school just bought an incredibly expensive upgraded Adzillatron for the stadium, and there’s no doubt that UK will continue to spend every penny it has on sports. But what if all the money in the world can’t make the football team win? Meanwhile Calipari will probably play fewer and fewer games on the UK campus…

You see where this is going. Soon there will be no reason for the University of Kentucky to exist at all.

A coach talks about why Americans go to college.

… why the NCAA could care less about the rampant academic corruption at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (some background here). Both consider it odd that this year’s most extensive, most comically brazen case of intellectual prostitution at a sports school holds no interest at all for that organization.

[A]s an offshoot of [yet another] NCAA investigation [into corruption at Chapel Hill], a UNC internal probe found that 54 AFAM classes were either “aberrant” or “irregularly” taught from summer 2007 to summer 2011. That included unauthorized grade changes, forged faculty signatures on grade rolls and limited or no class time.

But did the athletics department put pressure on players or the instructor? If not, the NCAA isn’t interested.

[W]hen it comes to the legitimacy of classwork done on a college campus, where technically the NC(as in collegiate)AA has some sway, it lets the individual institutions police themselves… Essentially, the hook in this case is that there is no proof that a coach or athletic department official coerced Nyang’oro [chair of African American Studies] to make lunch meat out of his curriculum for the benefit of the athletes enrolled.

… Pushing athletes to particular majors or even classes — clustering, if you will — while perhaps distasteful, isn’t in and of itself fraudulent. Pushing athletes to classes that were deemed “aberrant” by an internal university probe due to grade changes and forgeries is an entirely different matter.

So I guess this is the NCAA’s philosophy: If you’re simply a cruddy school that doesn’t care about educating your athletes, that’s your business.

… 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.