Who knows how much of it had to do with efforts to protect the reputation of a storied sports program?

Whatever the motives, Penn State’s athletic director and vice president for finance will turn themselves in to the authorities on Monday. Both are charged with perjury and failure to report in a sex scandal involving the football team’s former defensive coordinator.

For fifteen years, Jerry Sandusky was a “a sexual predator who used his position within the university and community to repeatedly prey on young boys.” The charge is that the other men knew about it but did nothing, and then lied about their knowledge of it to a grand jury. Did they protect Sandusky because he was “closely identified with the school’s reputation as a defensive powerhouse and a program that produced top-quality linebackers”?

*************************
UD thanks David.

*************************

UPDATE: “We all make little mistakes in our lives.”

Title of Sandusky’s autobiography: Touched.

**************************

The legend of Penn State’s Sandusky
Is beginning to smell rather musky.
Their glorious coach
Is a bit of a roach.
Not to mention a bit of a putzsky.

UD‘s seen her share of bizarre defenses of big-time university sports, but this is her first encounter with the pancreatectomy argument.

Of course, you can remove the pancreas, and though the removal creates problems of its own, the procedure – partial or total – is sometimes indicated.

The pancreas argument – the university is a body with vital organs, and you can’t take out vital organs – comes from Steve Reznick, a University of North Carolina psychology professor and major Tar Heels fan.

Another faculty sports rep said – at a meeting with furious UNC faculty – something just as strange:

“There is a collegiate decor created by athletics that bind us all together in a way that doesn’t happen otherwise.”

Drink that one up, me hearties! A … decor … a decor that binds… A pancreas… a pancreas that sustains the life-giving operations of our … decor…

Rather than drawing their inspiration from interior design or internal organs, UD thinks faculty sports zealots would be more persuasive (the professors at the meeting with them left it even more unhappy) if they drew upon religious faith. UD recommends they start with this book:

Game Day and God: Football, Faith, and Politics in the American South

There are beautiful liturgical paragraphs here that may be easily committed to memory when you are challenged to defend the foundational Being of basketball. The professors around you will certainly scoff at your enthusiasm; but this response will allow you to rebuke them as satanic and flounce out of the room.

… I don’t buy the belief at [Louisiana State University] and elsewhere that athletics serve as the front porch of a university, drawing attention to the academic kitchen. It is a hopeful sentiment, but I don’t see any supporting evidence. In fact, the opposite seems to be true.

Football does not appear to provide an open window but rather a closed shade, reinforcing L.S.U.’s athletic standing while secluding its academic reputation, however inadvertently. In my travels, I cannot remember a single person outside of Louisiana knowing or mentioning that L.S.U. aspires to be as competitive in the classroom as on the football field.

… Kurt Branham Barton, founder of Triton Financial in Austin, was convicted on 39 counts after his August trial, including more than a dozen each of wire fraud and money laundering. The charges could carry up to life in prison.

Prosecutors said Barton …used money that investors thought was for real estate deals and short-term business loans to pay for a luxury box at University of Texas football games…

[The University of] Texas [is] guaranteed an average $15 million a year for 20 years for letting ESPN build a channel around its sports.

… “I think we could ultimately end up with two conferences: one called ESPN and one called Fox,” Louisiana State University Chancellor Michael Martin joked at an Oct. 24 meeting of the Knight Commission.

Sports, and college football, matters to broadcasters because it draws a large audience to live programming, where viewers can’t skip advertisements with digital video recorders, according to a report by Barclays Capital analyst Anthony DiCelemente. That helps ESPN generate the highest earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of any Disney unit, at about $3.67 billion.

… Other schools’ anger at Texas is misplaced, said Mike Leach, a former Texas Tech University football coach. “Anyone upset with Texas is mostly rooted in jealousy,” he said. “These guys would walk on glass to make the same deal.”

Mike knows anger.

… $3.5 million annually.”

Iowa’s football coach has the highest salary in the state!

But the nitwits there are pissed off that even with all that money he can’t figure out a way to make a sports team win all its games.

Solution? PAY HIM MORE.

[The people who run the BCS] have allowed their athletic programs to run completely amok. The two people who symbolize what the BCS stands for are, without question, Miami President Donna Shalala, who did everything but rename her school “Shapiro U” while currently jailed booster Nevin Shapiro was lavishing money on her and the one-time “U,” and, of course, Ohio State President Gordon Gee, whose two trademarks are his bow tie and his foot planted firmly inside his mouth.

It was Gee who made himself the Neville Chamberlain of college athletics last spring when he was asked if he would consider firing Jim Tressel as football coach and he replied with a straight face, “Fire him? I just hope he doesn’t fire me.”

The shame of it is that Tressel didn’t stay at Ohio State long enough to get around to firing Gee before Tressel left in disgrace. Of course, the NCAA, led by its top stooge, President Mark Emmert, has been so busy calling meetings and being shocked to learn that cheating is going on that it has yet to take any action against anyone — and will probably come down with a really hard wrist slap when the time finally comes.

John Feinstein, Washington Post

Its rejection rate has soared.

…a Washington Post sports reporter, to make playing football a university major. [Scroll down.] Now a UD reader sends her the latest Jenkins dispatch, in which she provides details of a sports major which would grant students academic credit for their on-field efforts. It would also toss in courses on, like, The Cultural Meaning of Play.

Jenkins writes strangely, and says strange things. Here’s her first paragraph:

If we would quit being half-ashamed of college sports and assign them some real value, we might just cure some of their corruptions. The NCAA should stop treating athletic departments as ticket offices attached to universities like tumors and instead treat them as legitimate academic branches. In fact, why shouldn’t we let kids major in sports? Aspiring athletes should be able to pursue their real interest, as a business and an art.

Let’s take this step by step.

If we would quit being half-ashamed of college sports and assign them some real value, we might just cure some of their corruptions. [Americans are fully-proud of college sports, and they assign them stupendous value. What is Jenkins talking about?] The NCAA should stop treating athletic departments as ticket offices attached to universities like tumors [Way strange simile, though it fits, I guess, with her use of the word “cure” in the preceding sentence. But does she really think the NCAA, of all places, considers college sports a cancer? For the NCAA, college sports is precisely a cure – a cure for poverty.] and instead treat them as legitimate academic branches. In fact, why shouldn’t we let kids major in sports? Aspiring athletes should be able to pursue their real interest, as a business and an art. [A college education, after all, is a four-year opportunity for students to pursue their real interests, be these dribbling balls, building meth labs, playing video games, or whatever. When it comes to constructing a curriculum, colleges should inquire of students what they would like to do. Then they should build buildings and hire people to help them to do those things.]

UD finds this sentence a bit vague:

Varsity athletes deserve significant academic credits for their incredibly long hours of training and practice, and if they fulfill a core curriculum they deserve degrees, too.

I get the first claim – that purely physical activity warrants intellectual credit. Pant, Run – three credits at an institution of higher learning. Okay.

But the second claim – that if athletes fulfill a core curriculum they deserve degrees – confuses me. Where in this piece does Jenkins say anything about core courses? It’s all about colleges letting athletes do what they want to do – play sports, and major in sports. Jenkins compares a sports major at, say, Auburn, to a theater major at Yale. She says nothing about this — the extensive field of academic requirements you’ve got to get out of the way before Yale lets you be a theater major. She alludes to an academic core, but that’s all. She’ll let other people figure out how to, uh, tackle that one.

… warns Bloomberg.

Pish posh.

The Bloomberg writers rehearse all the familiar outrages –

Rutgers University forgave $100,000 of the football coach’s interest-free home loan last year. The women’s basketball coach got monthly golf and car allowances. Both collected bonuses without winning a championship.

Meanwhile, the history department took away professors’ desk phones to save money and shrank its doctoral program by 25 percent. After funding cuts by the deficit-strapped Legislature, New Jersey’s state university froze professors’ salaries, cut the use of photocopies for exams and jacked up student tuition, housing and other fees.

Rutgers also increased funding for sports. The 245-year-old school spent more money on athletics than any other public institution in the six biggest football conferences during the 2009-2010 fiscal year, based on data compiled by Bloomberg. More than 40 percent of sports revenue came from student fees and the university’s general fund.

— that sort of thing… But no one cares. A few odd professors maybe.

The tension the writers are picking up on has to do with fans worrying about how their teams are going to do this year.

This is from a talk he gave at Berkeley.

Society’s attention to athletics, Nader said, has moved people down what he called the “sensuality ladder,” a theoretical scale of people’s interactions with the world…

“Your education is supposed to push you up the sensuality ladder,” he said.

One problem here is that Nader – known, when he ran for president, as “ascetic-in-chief,” is so far up the anti-sensuality ladder that he can’t really be seen at all. The most commonly used name for him is Saint Ralph.

Another problem is that your university education should feel perfectly free to push you down the sensuality ladder. Educated people – with some exceptions, like Nader – like to explore the senses, and indeed many of your humanities courses (like the one UD‘s teaching right now about beauty, in which we just read Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” with its famous concluding lines: In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art) feature artworks and ideas that celebrate sensuality.

… sends her this article by Allen Sanderson, who proposes a sin tax on

college football games. Yes, I am advocating that we impose steep taxes on all intercollegiate football advertising, television broadcasts, logo merchandise sales, and gate receipts.

… This money could be set aside to provide funding for the ex-players to return to earn a degree, enter a graduate program, and/or start a small business.

Fans and universities benefit enormously from [the] exploitation [of players]. It is no stretch to treat this as in the same category as smoking, drinking, gorging ourselves on hot dogs and nachos, most of which we do in the stands or our family rooms while these exploited workers toil for our entertainment and the coach’s yacht. As citizens we should be above having our entertainment whims sated on the backs of these youngsters. Will it put an end to the cesspools at Ohio State, Oregon, Miami, USC, Auburn, LSU and …? No…

Nice, the way he calls them cesspools. UD‘s been doing that for years, but no one at those schools seems to mind that multiple people call them cesspools. Strange.

Ohio State has had so many players suspended or in trouble that Smith, who spoke and answered questions for 18 minutes, has to differentiate between the tattoo-related violations — “the broader issue” as he calls it — and other suspensions.

No wonder Gee is the country’s highest-paid public university president. Keeping an eye on things.

First they fail to sell out Boone Pickens Stadium. Now some guy from Bethany (I checked. It’s definitely in Oklahoma.) writes a letter to the editor:

The University of Oklahoma Board of Regents voted to give OU football coach Bob Stoops a $4 million to $5 million salary per year. No coach is worth that kind of money …!

What in tarnation’s going on??

… It’s always a beautiful day in the neighborhood for the Bowl Championship Series. Especially when you throw in tens of millions in profit, immense executive salaries, and barely detectable charitable giving.