A Duke University economist broaches the subject.

A local person comments on an article welcoming yet another year of on-field nothingness and off-field bankruptcy to Missouri State University (background here).

MSU, with its recent history of sports accounting scandals, is gearing up for another Samuel Beckett season (I can’t go on I’ll go on), degrading itself to the big boys in sure-to-lose games in order to pick up a check; sending its latest interim interim interim president out to say to the press that they’ve got to keep football because it gives the school band something to do… And because a program like MSU’s “helps build student spirit” …

More hilarity from schlock jock school the University of North Carolina, where – with no doubt the same awareness Donna Shalala had of Nevin Shapiro – the university’s president has allowed an entire department to sink into depravity.

The chair of the department – now removed from his position (expect a lawsuit, UNC) – reportedly let a freshman in need of remedial help with his writing take one of the chair’s upper-level courses the summer before the freshman began at the university. Getting a jump on those pesky bogus courses! Bravo!

The chair also earns his close to $200,000 salary by overlooking plagiarism and stuff like that. Read all about it.

Big-time athletics makes a sick joke of academic integrity is an abstraction. It’s important to know the details of systemic sports corruption at some of our once-respectable universities. It almost always involves a group of academic insiders – especially professors – implementing a very conscious policy, in cooperation with the athletics department, of grade and course selling.

Selling? Yes. Think of the money these sports factories have on the line. There are very high rewards for professors willing to play ball.

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Background on the sports agent teaching a UNC course here.

More here.

Some parents of suspended University of Miami players can’t help noticing that their kids are getting hammered while their highly paid coaches remain at large. With Miami in mind, Tom McMillen, in the New York Times, is appalled that “Bloated college sports budgets, with coaches who earn millions of dollars, often more than college presidents, have created a situation where the tail is wagging the dog, with the result that colleges are losing control over their own athletic programs.”

Similarly, recent law graduates – huge swathes of them unemployed and in hock for hundreds of thousands of dollars – are noticing that their law professors continue to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year while failing to produce many employable students.

It is kind of an amazingly sweet deal for these two university employees. You hire a coach at three million dollars a year and he gets that even if his team loses every single game. He’ll get more the next year, even with total losses, because breaking his contract and finding a new coach will cost too much money. Then he’ll get even more the next year with the same win/loss record. I mean, eventually they’ll fire him, but he’ll rake it in for a long time before that happens.

The tenured law professor has it even sweeter. Over the course of five years, only half of her students, say, get jobs. She snuggles into bed at night secure in the thought of a low course load and regular salary raises despite hundreds of idle young people suffering under the weight of immense loan repayments because she and her school were unable to train them well enough to make them attractive to law firms.

You’d think a market correction would come into play in both of these arenas. If coaches are corrupt and hurt their players, or if coaches win too few games, shouldn’t their three million dollar salaries take a hit? If law professors teach at schools half of whose graduates remain unemployed for years, shouldn’t their hundred and fifty thousand dollar take home take a hit? No, you say! Silly UD! Both of these groups are eminently re-employable! Universities need to be scared, onaccounta if that law prof gets huffy enough she can just up and take a job at Cravath! NO university football or basketball coach is too corrupt or inept to fail to get another lucrative position!

Well, first off, this isn’t at all necessarily true. Things can get a little undignified even for high-profile coaches. And a law professor at a substandard school (the ABA will accredit anything) doesn’t have many options.

And second: Why would you want to tempt fate (lawsuits from UM players are going to happen, and lawsuits from unemployed law school grads are already happening) by keeping such people at your school? Wouldn’t you prefer reasonably paid, competent employees?

Dietel can take no pleasure in what has ensued over the last few years, though I’m sure he’s not surprised. He told the idiots at WKU what would happen. They didn’t listen. The school is now a money-hemorrhaging laughingstock.

Here’s our most recent information on WKU:

There will be a lot of empty seats at LP Field in Nashville tonight when the University of Kentucky and Western Kentucky open the 2011 football season at 9:15 p.m.

At 3 p.m. Wednesday, 40,262 tickets were available at Ticketmaster.com, including nearly 10,000 in the lower level. The stadium, where the NFL’s Tennessee Titans play their home games, holds 68,798 fans.

They’re desperately handing out free tickets so the stadium won’t look like a funeral home.

… about the University of Miami scandal. Here’s a typical one:

I grew up on two major items on the vast American sports smorgasbord – major league baseball and college sports. In my case, the direct spectating involvement was more college basketball than football, although I was exposed to some very interesting football events when my father was an assistant athletic director at Villanova in the early ’50s…

Ah yes I remember it well… It was stinkin’ crooked then and it’s stinkin’ crooked now and I love it… Because I’m an American! Aren’t you an American?

We are Americans. We want this in our lives.

What?… Say again? Louder?… You don’t want it in your life? Or at least in your university?… What are you Canadian or something? Sit down shut up and listen … Ah… Let’s see… It was ’52 I think… No, maybe ’53…

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Here’s another old fart:

The scandal “only strengthens my support,” said attorney George Lott, a Miami alumni whose family is another major donor. “I think UM alumni, students and faculty will come together as a family and we will get through this together.”

If only we could have a scandal of this magnitude every five years or so! Alumni support would be through the roof.

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Let’s leave Pops and Old Fart on their rockers and go with the youth vote. Here’s a lecture from a dynamic hypercapitalist on why all of life is a market and corruption is a who-gives-a-shit byproduct of markets.

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It’d be interesting to hear these guys on, say, the drug war in Mexico.

Pops: Cocaine? We’re Americans. We want this in our lives. Why, I remember a lovely trip the wife and me took to Oaxaca one summer…

Old Fart: The drug wars bring us together as a family.

Hyper: Hey baby it’s a great big dirty world get real all markets produce corollary damage…

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Essentially all of these guys are signalling that if anyone tries to do anything about their game they’re going to go weewee in their pants.

Fay Vincent gets it said.

… the University of Louisville (background on this university here, here, here, here, here) are shocked to hear that UL’s current recruiting coordinator might have been deeply involved in the Nevin Shapiro University of Miami scandal (his last job was at Miami).

The reporter who broke the story about the University of Miami and Nevin Shapiro says to NPR:

But the reality is the NCAA is comprised of – it’s the universities. It’s the institution. It’s the presidents. It’s the power conferences and the conference commissioners, and in some way, shape or form, it’s – there’s no getting around the fact that they are all in bed together. You’re asking a governing body to look over universities that essentially help to establish that governing body’s power in the first place.

So it’s a little bit of an awkward marriage between the people who are expected to enforce are also made up by individuals who at – you know, at some point in their lives typically had worked within university structures, and I think that’s sort of what creates a lot of the gray area that people tend to attack when they go after the NCAA.

That’s the important thing. That’s what makes all of the university sports scandals so particularly, so intensely, disgusting. The NCAA isn’t a bunch of jocks acting like jerks with whom academic leaders are in constant conflict… because, you know, jock/intellectual… they’re naturally at odds, etc. … No. The NCAA is American university presidents. They run the fucker.

Here’s the NCAA logo.

Here’s what it should be.

Everyone’s upset because Peevy – a UK athletics public relations guy – went and got all peeved with a UK student reporter who had the gall to interview a couple of basketball players without getting Peevy’s permission.

Yeah, just a couple of amateur college athletes, but there’s a big, big big old public relations machine right behind them, and you don’t, like, just, you know, call them… I mean, are you crazy?

When he found out that the reporter had committed journalism, Peevy punished him and his newspaper by withholding various other forms of access to the team.

The Associated Press Managing Editors group sent a letter to Kentucky’s Director of Athletics:

This is a level of abuse of free speech not tolerated at universities in other states and is particularly abhorrent at a taxpayer-owned institution…

Peevy does this sort of thing all the time – whenever anyone dares to do some independent reporting.

Because of course you need to control the news very closely when your franchise is filthy top to bottom (scroll down). You don’t want a free press reporting on what’s going on. Peevy is seeing to that.

… is totally worth a read. Garvin summarizes the pay college athletes argument:

The sky’s the limit [on salary]. And they shouldn’t be distracted by having to go to class, either, or even having to read or write.

He crunches the numbers colleges will need to anticipate:

The average NFL player’s salary, Bloomberg Businessweek magazine reported earlier this year, is about $1.9 million. If colleges wind up paying even a tenth of that — a lowball guess — that means that the University of Miami football team would need a payroll of $16 million just to cover the 85 scholarship players the NCAA allows. (Though, if we’re doing away with the requirement that players be able to write their own names, I don’t know why we’d be nit-picky about silly things like roster limits.)

UD‘s laughing out loud here.

And don’t forget taxes!

Right now college athletes don’t pay taxes on their scholarships because their schools sports programs are tax-exempt. But once you start paying the players (and especially if all pretense that they’re getting an education is dropped), the IRS will certainly want its cut. And that will include the value of the scholarship in addition to whatever salary they’re getting paid. A year at UM costs about $55,000 these days; at current tax rates, that means a UM football player would be around $12,000 in hock to the IRS before accepting another cent.

“The NCAA is starting to crumble internally. It is losing legitimacy in the eyes of its constituents, especially the athletes.”

The problem with this comment, from the head of the Drake Group, is that is misdescribes things in a pretty basic way.

The NCAA is stronger and richer than ever. With the new billion dollar tv deals, and with its retention of its absurd non-profit status, the NCAA is thriving beyond belief, and will continue to do so.

Why will it continue to do so? Because almost no one in this country – and certainly no one with any power – cares about what’s going on in big time university athletics. People want their games. They want them bad. They couldn’t care less what else the games bring.

University presidents know this. Tom McMillen, in the same article, says “You have coaches making salaries that are often 25 times more than what the college president at his school makes” as if he thinks this will get a rise out of someone. It hasn’t. It won’t.

What UD means is… If it were going to, it would’ve. Know what I mean? If I said There are dozens of universities in America which barely exist except as lucrative athletic programs, would that upset you? Galvanize you to action?

Or look at it this way: UD loves Barack Obama. Can’t wait to vote for him again. But Obama is a jock who loves big time university sports and – far as I know – has done nothing but heap praise on it.

And Congress? LOL.

This doesn’t mean you stop protesting the situation. It means you need to be honest about how deeply bad it is.

Another mission statement for the University of Miami (and many other campuses), courtesy of the coach of the Orlando Magic.

Colleges shouldn’t be farm systems. It doesn’t make any logical sense. But the schools don’t want to be blatantly in the situation of being professional sports even though they already are professional sports. They just want to disguise it, so they hide behind education. But, really, all you want is enough of your athletes to graduate so it looks like that’s what you care about. Anyone around sports knows it is all a bunch of bull[expletive]… The alumni want the illusion, and so does the school… But the kids know it is all bull[expletive]. Everyone does.

To judge by the particulars of an eight-year spree of lawlessness by one of your boosters, your football program has no regard for the rules, and your administration has no ability to enforce them.

… [Y]ou must shut the program down…

(Say what you will about the Miami Madoff, but Shapiro may be right: Cheating is even worse in the SEC, where, he says, “the money is an endless river.”) …

Truth, good writing, and all the right ideas.

All wasted.

Look. If you can’t make that campus attractive to people (UD has seen its palm-lined splendor), you’re not much of a president. Shalala did accomplish this.

Her problem is that she did it indiscriminately. She just looked at anything that might tart up the place and went there: football, Nemeroff:

The former secretary of health and human services raised some eyebrows when Miami hired Charles Nemeroff, a star researcher who left a previous job at Emory during a conflict-of-interest scandal, to lead the medical school’s psychiatry program.

Shalala swung wild and wide. And struck out.