… 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.

—————–

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

… going through your mind as you watch?

The Onion gets hold of the story.

—————–
UD thanks Daniel.

Followed by a series of similar fraught questions. Everybody’s writing this clutch-your-forehead-and-ask-why shit.

Listen, for once in your life, to old UD. Ready? Real deal. Coming from someone who’s followed big-time university football closely for years, read countless interviews with coaches and administrators, attended many NCAA, Knight Commission, and other such gatherings, and even thought about the subject.

It’s about stupidity.

Look at the headline a couple of posts below this one: THERE HAVE LONG BEEN CONCERNS… When football takes over a university, stupid people rule. Shake Your Booty majors from Swamp State rule. Smiling, dazed, dressed for success people rule. Provost Brick Tamland. Academic VP Fredo Corleone.

These are not bad people, inured to evil blahblah.

To understand why they bring down universities, consider the characteristics of the stupid mind.

Basically, these are fear, traditionalism, conformity, lack of curiosity, and optimism.

Because you do not understand what is going on around you, you spend your life afraid of unspecified events. Anything you identify as new, unprecedented, not done before, has you peeing your pants.

You put a good spin on this fear. We’ve had the same coach for eighty years! We really value our traditions around here. Having the same guy in place for eight decades guarantees the integrity of the program. Because you’re stupid, you don’t know that entrenched power is incredibly destructive.

Independent thought is beyond your capacity. On this too you put a great spin. Teamwork! It takes a village! There’s no I in JOIN!

Because you haven’t heard of history, you don’t know that fanatic masses are a bad thing.

A number of current (and past: Palin, Huckabee) candidates for President or Vice-President of the United States know virtually nothing of Europe, economics, things like that. They belittle “Professor” Obama for having studied and taught things. Candidates Cain and Perry do a peacock-strut while listing the things they don’t know and pledging never to know them (roars of approval from the crowd).

Man is born smart but is everywhere in stupidity, wrote Rousseau, reflecting on the latest grossness on the U Geneva gridiron. The sad irony of stupid university people is that they’re on a university campus; they’re at a university. They could actually go to a class, or talk to a professor or something. Remember when John Madden wrote a book? Remember what he titled it? He titled it HEY WAIT A MINUTE I WROTE A BOOK! See how that sort of thing can happen when you least expect it? It’s always possible – there’s always time – – !

After all, look at that list of the attributes of the stupid up there. The last one is OPTIMISM. Take that darned optimism and run with it, baby!

… of them all.

You remember the title of the Neil Postman book about postmodern America: Amusing Ourselves to Death. That’s the deal here. Now that Penn State has imploded, keep an eye on the University of Texas. With its gigantic program on its way to generating billions in profits, UT is bending over and letting football have its way, just the way Auburn did decades ago. It’s as if Texas Governor Rick Perry said I’m gonna shut down three university campuses: UT Austin, uh… UT Austin and … I can’t remember the other two.

… and it has made me come to hate the culture of college football.”

UD finds it interesting that no one is attempting to characterize the Penn State scandal as unique or peculiar or an outlier or anything.

[T]he pep rally outside Paterno’s home Tuesday night was easily the most embarrassing display in the history of modern higher education, and it was fueled by a clueless puppet more focused on [his next game at] Nebraska than the real world around him.

… Paterno doesn’t get to coach his final home game. Boo-hoo. Let’s tip a van.

Penn State’s financial exposure in the sex-abuse case could be in the tens of millions of dollars.

If there’s one image that speaks to America’s twisted relationship to college sports, it’s the Penn State pro-Paterno rallies. Football before all. Lives were likely ruined at the hands of a possible predator, thanks in no small part to Paterno. Yet it’s Paterno who must go out “with dignity.”

All UD‘s English professor life, campus athletes and their fans have characterized themselves as the soul of all-American normalcy, with intellectually-inclined professors and students hopelessly twisted. And it’s strange – because if you’ve ever read even one account of the culture of paranoid teams and their whackaloon camp followers you know just how exactly turned around that appraisal is.

People are obviously very resistant to this truth, because even though they can watch the all-American anti-intellectual macho team parading its deep peculiarities on tv every night during the Republican debates, they continue to insist that Rick Perry and Herman Cain are the normal ones.