Also, there is a drive [at American universities] to be successful in sports, something that perhaps has a huge focus in the US (though anyone who has experienced the Oxford Cambridge Boat Race can attest it is felt elsewhere in the world as well).
Perhaps.
Quite.
Puh-leeze. UD‘s a big Obama fan. But Obama’s a huge sports fan, a jock, and there’s no way this meeting will be anything other than backslapping and stats chat. Members of Congress are worse than Obama.
And… college football leaders? Cynical, greedy NCAA? Even greedier coaches? University presidents whoring after tens of billions in tv rights?
No.
As one commenter notes, “sports revenues and reputation are replacing public support for academics.”
University football and basketball are America’s debraining machines.
… you’ve got to get her the hell out.
Mr. Paterno had given him an ultimatum: Fire her, or Mr. Paterno would stop fund-raising for the school.
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UD thanks Jeff.
Coach tries to recite the alphabet.
Remember: There are university sports apologists who think the coaching staff should be on the faculty.
That was written in 2010. Add the billion-dollar tv deals, much, much more money for the coach, etc.
My point is that the University of Oklahoma football program is rolling in it. The University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma are the “two richest, most powerful programs” in their conference.
And yet like many rich and powerful sports universities, Oklahoma has become visibly microcephalic, bearing on its enormous body a shrinkingly small brain. Oklahoma, with its pathetic academic budget, its hopeless struggle to have anything to do with education, is what you look like when you graft, as George Will says, “a 109,901-seat entertainment venue [onto] an institution of higher education.”
You get a manic depressive university president who spends Monday slobbering over the team’s amazing amazing victories OH MY GAWD I CAN’T BELIEVE IT COACH STOOPS WE’RE NOT WORTHY!!!! and Tuesday sobbing into his beer about no money for, well, the school: “You have to keep the lights on. You have to keep health insurance,” Boren wailed to the student newspaper the other day.
Forget classes and professors. We can barely put food on the fucking table! What kind of a world are we living in when you can have a trillion dollar football team and no lights in the library? If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we run our little school?
“It would be a tragedy if we lost the humanities, the social sciences, the arts and the rest,” Boren stated. “That’s one of the real dangers: universities will think, ‘Ah, quick solution. Do away with all that.’”
Being president of a school like Oklahoma is sort of like being one of the generals who run Myanmar. You preside over a resource-rich campus which should be able to sustain itself at a pretty high level. But because of greed and corruption, your job is essentially to oversee a few people making a lot of money while pacifying a starving population. What a tragedy if we lost the humanities! Message: I care.
Big-time university athletics, in which, writes George Will, “a 109,901-seat entertainment venue [is] attached to an institution of higher education,” has become “impervious to reform.”
This being the case, our only option is to anticipate the myriad ways it’s trying to hurt us, and to defend ourselves against as many of these as we can.
For instance, University Diaries has attempted, over the years, to flag the off-field fraudsters who make football so exciting for schools like University of Miami — guys like Nevin Shapiro with big mouths and big cars and big luxury boxes and big money. Before these guys go to jail, they tend to be BFFs with the university president and the coaches and players etc. … After all, what is a university if not an institution established to honor assholes waving cashwads? Who can blame Donna Shalala for falling hard for Nevin Shapiro?
But UD says that if you’d rather try to see someone like Nevin coming, if you’d rather try to defend yourself against a class of people that accumulates like scum around your 100,000-seat arena, you should do what she does: Stay current on the scammers so that you can perceive patterns. Once you know the patterns, you can establish an early-warning system.
Yes, I have a brand new example for you.
Before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, natural gas broker Paul Lawing lived lavishly in big houses and flew in corporate jets to University of North Carolina basketball games.
Corporate jets to the game… and:
In October 2009, Lawing was placed on probation after pleading guilty to selling UNC and Atlantic Coast Conference basketball tickets for a total of more than $10,000 but not delivering them to the buyers.
That sort of thing.
Oklahoma State University women’s basketball coach Kurt Budke and assistant coach Miranda Serna were killed when the single-engine plane they were riding in during a recruiting trip crashed near a wildlife management area in central Arkansas.
You remember Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous statement about some burning issue in the Senate: “Everything that has to be said has been said, but not everyone has said it.” So everybody’s saying it about Penn State. Everyone.
UD thought it might be timely for her to reprint, as it were, something she wrote back in 2006 for Inside Higher Education: THE FACULTY BENCH.
… but here’s yet another fraudster who spent stolen funds on a university sports team.
Through the Mattera Foundation, the accused paid for Florida Atlantic University’s weekly football fan breakfast with legendary coach Howard Schnellenberger in 2010, although the athletic department refused his support this past year when word of his legal troubles first emerged.
Efforts to reach FAU athletic director Craig Angelos for comment Thursday were unsuccessful…
Nevin Shapiro’s the big name here, of course; but the business of parking your Ponzi profits in university athletic programs is broadly popular.
New to teaching, I was proudly gazing at a sign on my office door proclaiming “Assistant Professor Grossman,” when the department secretary knocked.
“Would you like seasons tickets for the faculty cheering section in the football stadium?” she asked.
“No thank you,” I said, effectively ending my social life at the University of Nebraska. I didn’t realize it wasn’t a question but an imperative. Faculty members were expected to wear sweaters with the school colors and hold up colored pieces of cardboard to spell out, in giant letters, eternal verities like: “Hold That Line!”
Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune
UD has already noted the cynicism of Penn State appointing the CEO of Merck – a particularly repellent pharma outfit – to head their scandal review committee.
Snigdha Prakash – in a Slate article titled Why is Kenneth Frazier Leading the Investigation at Penn State? – goes into greater detail as to why Penn State, facing significant vulnerability to lawsuits, finds Frazier attractive:
A Penn State alum and Harvard-trained lawyer, Frazier is best known for his phenomenal success in defending a sordid chapter in Merck’s recent past—its years-long silence about the safety problems of the popular painkiller Vioxx.
… Tens of thousands of former Vioxx users sued Merck after it withdrew the drug, alleging Vioxx had caused them to suffer heart attacks and strokes. Frazier, then the company’s general counsel, declared Merck had done nothing wrong and refused to settle. “We’ll fight every case,” he declared, and hired top-flight law firms in several East Coast cities, in the South, in Chicago, and Los Angeles, as well as a prominent New York firm to coordinate the overall strategy. It took three years and $2 billion in legal expenses for Frazier’s hard-nosed tactics to pay off. Merck settled in late 2007 for a relative pittance, resolving some 50,000 Vioxx cases for just under $5 billion. It was a far cry from the $25 billion to $50 billion in liability that analysts had predicted when Merck withdrew the drug.
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UD thanks Carl.
[T]he mountain Krzyzewski just climbed is a pile of dirt that has been heaped for many years on the top of a sinkhole. And that sinkhole is giving way… [I]t happens amid frantic N.C.A.A. reform efforts attempting to stave off the demise of the whole system.
… the core values of a university.”
As the nation slips into post-Happy Valley tristesse, people like the ex-president of the University of Michigan begin to tell the truth about big-time university football. Turns out football isn’t the university’s front porch. It’s the shower stalls out back. Plus, as this guy notes, big-time football is in fact an aggressor against the university, a predatory embodiment of anti-university attitudes and behaviors: Groupthink, authoritarianism, fanaticism, secrecy, brawn over brain.
As we slip, too, back into business as usual at university sports programs – the coach arrested for his third DUI and afterwards put right back to work coaching; a player only dismissed from a team after his fourth arrest – it’s good to recall that this campus activity is structurally corrupt, subject at all times to sex scandals, money scandals, crime scandals. When you consider all the elements in play in football – recruitment, staff salaries, tailgating, alcohol, the absurdity of the NCAA, academic cheating, a culture of secrecy, etc. – you know that Shalala’s Miami and Spanier’s Penn St. are chapters in a never-ending story.
Most big-time college football programs are operated by state-funded institutions of higher learning with a few notable exceptions, such as Stanford and Notre Dame. One would think that those who rail against big government would cry out for dismantling these publicly-funded entertainments.
… [Penn State] is a great university that, like many others, had been led away from its essential mission decades ago and now finally may have been shaken into taking action.
Roger Abrams