… complete with wishful thinking …

[T]here is nothing wrong that can’t be fixed by 18 strong college presidents — that’s how many seats there are on the NCAA executive committee — acting in concert to curb their own worst excesses, and impose stiffer penalties.

… and the apparent belief that all university basketball and football players graduate from their universities:

They get a four-year ride free of the mountainous student loans that burden so many of their peers — a collective $900 billion worth. Ask any parent who is paying tuition what a scholarship is worth. Pay players? Please. We’re already paying them as much as a half-million dollars apiece over four years, maybe more.

And, pound for pound, there’s the insanest defense of playing football and basketball as an exercise in college-level intellectuality you’re ever going to see:

I don’t know that revenue-sports, basketball and football, are more valuable than any other performance-based learning experience, in which stakes are damn high and the audience brutally demanding. But they’re certainly not less valuable. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once praised sports as “high and dangerous action,” because, “in this snug, over-safe corner of the world we need it, that we may realize that our comfortable routine is no eternal necessity of things . . .”

Yeah. Take the game they’ve been playing since they were ten, put it on a big field with tv cameras, and watch it morph into a university subject. Jenkins wants football and basketball players to be able to major in I ran up and down a field today.

Much better, UD thinks, that they major in ethics, taking advantage of field work opportunities in cults of corruption at American universities.

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

SOS loves the way Jenkins ends with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Reader: Make a note of it. To lend parting gravitas to your argument that football and basketball are university subjects, wheel out Holmes or Churchill or Lincoln saying they are high, and dangerous.

Dangerous, to be sure. They are full of danger.

What they bring to the university, however, is – so very often – unutterably low.

… about the university as a setting for organized crime.

The Junker story (details here) invites general commentary on the filthy Bowl Championship Series.

Until he was fired, Junker “was paid $592,000 to stage either two or three football games a year.” In 2008, Sugar Bowl CEO Paul Hoolahan earned $645,386 “for staging one football game.”

This man, Bobby Lowder, remains on the board of trustees at Auburn University. Read all about him here.

The latest sex and money for Auburn players scandal is coming soon to a tv screen near you. Bobby Lowder has instructed Auburn to have no comment in response to the players’ allegations.

Auburn: The shame of the nation.

Just-fired Fiesta Bowl CEO John Junker explained to a group of investigators that the $1,241 he charged the bowl for “a visit to a high-end Phoenix strip club” was a legitimate business expense:

We are in the business where big strong athletes are known to attend these types of establishments… It was important for us to visit and we certainly conducted business.

Sports Illustrated lists Junker’s activities as CEO:

[F]unneling money to politicians through bowl employees; coaching witnesses, and altering documents during [an earlier] investigation … taking junkets to college football games with politicians and their families — all on the bowl’s dime. On page 210 is a charge that the bowl footed the $33,188 bill for Junker’s 50th birthday party, a four-day bacchanal in Pebble Beach that had, according to one attendee, “absolutely no business purpose.”

But they’re all like that: “The Sugar and Orange Bowls have also recently come under withering criticism for the excessive compensation of executives and extravagant expenditures.”

You gotta get up pretty early in the morning to follow all the sleaze in big-time university sports. Here at University Diaries, we do our best…

Fun with the NCAA.

Thanks, Dirk, for the link.

… Thug U, but the University of Miami – the original Thug U – still shows you how it’s done.

University of Miami linebacker Ramon Buchanan, who was arrested early Friday morning in Coconut Grove, allegedly told a Miami police officer, “I’m a UM football player and I don’t give a [expletive] what you do. I’ll get out of it. [Expletive] the police.’’

Details.

And after all, writes a fan, putting it in perspective, “Very different from a confirmed AK 47 shooting.”

Who must answer this call and begin the reform? That’s easy – college and university presidents. They must take a stand and expect severe, unjustified criticism. They must summon courage to defend the best part of the academy and return athletics to a wholesome place in American higher education. And those of us who love college competition and want to restore it to health must encourage them, support them and take on their critics. While they do the right thing, we must cover their backs!

There’s a sweet, dreamy, retro feel to the prose of John A. Roush, president of Centre College. When the subject is big-time university sports, “metaphors of illness are apt,” he writes; and the only cure is presidential courage. He ends with this defensive play where we all huddle around the presidents and keep them safe while they expose their rears to severe criticism…

Shouldn’t that be the job of the stupendously rich NCAA? Don’t they have the money and the power to protect university presidents as they defend what’s left of their schools against the plague?

Well, of course the NCAA has that power.

UD proposes that we all write opinion pieces in which we dream aloud about their using it.

… is the spectator sport.

Here’s a tax-exempt organization that does little other than make the world safe for big-time university athletics corruption (note its president’s hard-hitting response to the Education Secretary’s latest proposal about the droves of basketball players who don’t graduate).

Ralph Nader’s proposal to eliminate athletic scholarships and replace them with need-based money was a great opportunity for the NCAA to, say, reject the idea as overbroad, but express understanding of the motivation behind it, given the corrupt and destructive nature of much big-time university football and basketball.

Instead, the NCAA did another cynicism number. If the response to government officials wanting to reform a university-based system that fails to graduate huge numbers of high-profile athletes is to say jackshit about it and move on, the response to someone like Nader is to pull out all them nice girls on the swim team who graduate one hundred percent and you better believe it baby! Why is that mean man going after them nice girls?

The 145,000 student-athletes who receive athletics related financial aid each year are in fact students first — as evidenced by the fact that in almost every demographic they graduate at higher percentages than their counterparts in the general student body. …[T]hey are students, just like any other student on campus who receives a merit-based scholarship.

Don’t talk to me about football and basketball! Let’s just put all the athletes together into one big 145,000-person pile and note that most of them graduate! How unfair to pull out of that pile the few who play … What did you say? Which sports? … Oh yeah. Football and basketball. Why the obsessive focus on those sports? They’re just like any other…

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Why is the NCAA so cynical?

Because it works. No one, Mencken wrote, ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

Let’s take a few comments from a recent Inside Higher Ed interview with Charles T. Clotfelter, author of a new book about big-time university sports.

[T]he ingredient that gives big-time sports its remarkable staying power is quite simply support from the top – the university’s trustees or regents – who want to have competitive teams. Period.

Doug Lederer, who interviews Clotfelter, notes what happened when Clotfelter asked universities “who sat in their presidents’ boxes and received complimentary tickets to games.”

Fully half the public institutions with which you filed open-records requests turned you down or gave you useless information. My favorite, from Berkeley: “The public interest served here by protecting the identity of major or potential donors, and thereby increasing the likelihood of acquiring financial support for the university, outweighs any incidental interest served by disclosing who those individuals are.”

Clotfelter, Lederer points out, calls for “ending the tax exemption for donations to commercially driven college athletics programs.” Why? Clotfelter responds:

The income tax deduction we have for charitable donations is usually justified on the basis that these gifts go for socially virtuous purposes like education or community service. In contrast, much of the work of contemporary college athletic departments is purely commercial. Were they not attached to a university, these departments would probably be classified by government statisticians in the entertainment industry, alongside amusement parks and minor league professional teams. So, based on the traditional justification of the charitable deduction, gifts to enhance the commercial enterprise simply don’t qualify.

Trustees, regents, donors, anonymous presidential box sitters, anonymous complimentary ticket holders — what’s missing here?

Oh yeah. Students, parents, faculty, and taxpayers.

Disgusting enough that absurdities like Auburn get tax breaks for being amusement parks; even more disgusting that these schools are run for the amusement of the people at the top.

… must dive below.”

And UD does, she does dive below – way, way below, as must all writers who follow University of Tennessee basketball.

In finding Bruce Pearl, their latest coach, UD has had to dip substantially below what she thought was the bottom of the barrel, UT-sportswise, but it turns out there is no bottom of the barrel.

Having fired Pearl, UT will now reward him with one million dollars. From a comment thread:

[C]ommit minor violations but lie to investigators and cause them to become major violations; subject the school to be the butt of jokes; lose signees, commit additional violations while under investigation; put UT basketball in a terrible position regarding recruiting, scholarships, attendance, etc., for years to come, and get paid a million dollars.

… emptiness.

Looks like the University of Tennessee may be firing Bruce Pearl. Not because of his (cough) ethics problems, but because he’s not winning games.

Voice of the people:

Perhaps the Administration well knows the college’s reputation cannot have them turning any more blind eyes to the magnitude of corruption in the UT Athletics Department. The national attention on the issue will certainly pull anyone down into the whirlpool to flush the UT Athletics system’s corruption.

NO ONE IS worth a crap is going to take the program over with all the trouble it is facing…

These two local commenters point out that the problem is not confined to games lost. That Pearl plays dirty is of course well-established; but this in itself doesn’t distinguish him from most big time university basketball coaches. As the first commenter notices, there’s a … call it a context problem at Tennessee. If them boys hold onto Pearl, they run the risk of attracting so much attention to the university that folks will start gettin’ a whiff of the whole damn UT athletics septic tank.

The second commenter makes the better the cheats we know point. Eventually a school’s reputation goes so far down the tubes that no even vaguely ethical coach wants to touch it. The commenter cautions that UT might want to hold on to Bruce if it doesn’t want to be forced to hire someone who makes him look like Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

I know. Duh. But what’s really strange at sports factories like the University of Kentucky is that obfuscation has hardened into cult of personality authoritarianism, complete with pretend oversight committees and pretend boards of trustees. Athletic directors tell the president what to do and the president does it.

UK is one of America’s Potemkin Village universities.

A local paper reviews the accomplishments of the departing president of the University of Kentucky.

UD comments in parenthesis.

Take Todd. Since his hiring, UK has had one of its longest stretches without an NCAA investigation. [What an achievement! What’s it been – more than a year?] But with UK sports, calm is a relative term. In just the past four years, Todd has had to manage uproars over basketball coach Tubby Smith’s departure, the hiring, firing and $3 million settlement for the next basketball coach, Billy Gillispie, and the hiring of John Calipari, which was shortly followed by news that his most recent Final Four appearance had to be vacated. Calipari was not sanctioned in the Memphis matter. [So we’re between NCAA investigations PLUS Calipari wasn’t sanctioned! Was Todd a great president, or what?]

Then there was the controversy over coal magnate Joe Craft’s organized donation of $7 million for the new Wildcat “Coal” Lodge, which led one of Kentucky’s most famous authors, Wendell Berry, to withdraw his papers from UK. [Ah hell who gives a shit about that.]

Most recently, Todd gave [the UK athletics director] a $125,000 raise on his annual base pay and extended his contract until 2019, which put Todd at odds with his own Board of Trustees in the last few months of his tenure.

More legacy at the link.