Sally Dear, an adjunct professor at Binghamton, recently received an email from an administrator there. SUNY was firing her because of a “strategic reprioritization of resources across the university.”

Now they’ve hired her back.

Binghamton … reversed the firing of Sally Dear, the adjunct lecturer who taught human development for 11 years before being dismissed earlier this week. Dear believed she was dismissed because she spoke out against the basketball program. The university had cited fiscal reasons. But Dear received a letter Friday saying she would remain an adjunct, although in a different department, during the audit.

“How come they’re firing me due to budget cuts and a reconfiguring of the department and all of a sudden I’m being hired by another department?” Dear said.

Easy answer to that question if you understand the inner workings of university administrations.

SUNY’s engaging in what’s known as “Reverse Rereprioritization,” in which formerly reprioritized priorities are reversed, resulting in rereprioritization.

Taking a page from SUNY Binghamton, the University of Massachusetts has dumped a bunch of football players for drug stuff.

The University of Massachusetts has one of the highest levels of on-campus violence of any university UD‘s covered on this blog. It admits amazing numbers of assholes — quite a few of them, recently, on the lacrosse team — and when the school loses a big game, everybody gets together and puts on a big riot.

It’s not pretty at U Mass, and it just got not prettier.

Lois DeFleur, SUNY Binghamton’s president, has fired her athletic director, ordered an external audit of the sports program, and ordered disgraced basketball coach Kevin Broadus to draw up a “recruitment and supervision plan for the program’s future.”

UD thinks Binghamton will also try to get rid of Broadus, despite the fact that – just before the shit hit the fan – they renewed his contract to 2010. Getting rid of him will therefore be very messy and very expensive, since Broadus will certainly sue if they don’t give him all the money they’ve promised.

Of course, at any given time five or ten university coaches are suing their employers over contractual matters, so this won’t be any novelty. It’ll just be ugly and expensive for the taxpayers of New York.

A lawyer writes an opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor. Excerpt:

… Congress should prevent federal research grants or subsidies from being awarded to any educational institution that pays greater compensation on average to its football or basketball coaches than it does on average to its tenured faculty members.

Any school that pays more to those who coach big time sports than to those who teach students academic subjects shows its true colors. No taxpayer should pay money to such a school…

Every now and then UD stumbles on pieces like these. They’re the product of a disbelief that turns to rage when people serious about universities start to examine what’s going on.

Some people decide the thing to do is go after the university’s tax exempt status. Others say spin already-professional university sports programs off and make them an independent affiliate of the university, with the players paid athletes rather than unpaid pretend students. This writer would make schools that pay their coaches six million dollars a year while their classrooms sink into ruin ineligible for federal research funds.

It’s unlikely any of these ideas will go anywhere. For one thing, contemporary America is much more about entertainment than seriousness, and our universities, many of them, reflect that priority. In going up against crass campus sports programs, you’re going up against an entire culture.

And you’re going up against deep-lying needs. The people of Alabama don’t see Nick Saban as a coach. He’s a savior. A god. He will make their sad lives happy, their shame pride. Variants of this fervency prevail at all big sports schools, where no amount of criminality, greed, and contempt for the values of universities on the part of teams and coaches diminishes their on-field aura.

A third problem is that people never really look directly at universities. We sentimentalize the places. You’d think, for instance, that people would be able to look directly at the University of Georgia Law School Wilderness Area and conclude the obvious: The University of Georgia isn’t a university; it’s a tailgaters’ trash dump. And indeed until it finds a way to stop being a dump and start being a university, it probably shouldn’t get federal funds.

But it’s like the most photographed barn in America in White Noise. No one, says a character in the novel, sees the barn.

No one sees the dump.

Boyce Watkins on the latest Michigan scandal.

… One can hardly blame Michigan Coach Rodriguez for pushing the players too hard, since universities make it clear that winning percentages matter far more than graduation rates. The University of Kentucky’s decision to pay nearly $30 million dollars to John Calipari, a coach known for both corruption and a lack of academic integrity, sends a message about the importance of winning games over educating athletes.

We know that corruption rolls down hills and at the bottom of this pile are the players, their families and the entire African-American community. NCAA athletes in revenue- generating sports are typically kept in special dormitories, forced to live on rigorous athletic schedules, and pushed to place football ahead of everything else. All the while, the administrators on central campus, as educated as they are, turn themselves into unenlightened blind mice when confronted with the reality of athletic exploitation.

… Massive reform is needed not only within the Michigan football program, but also within all of college sports. Congress must step in and challenge the NCAA for anti-trust violations, as well as its tax-exempt status. NCAA revenues during March madness rival that of the NFL and NBA, so it’s time to note the NCAA for what it truly is: a professional sports league that artificially restricts the wages of its employees…

The University of Montana student newspaper, the Montana Kaimin, on Friday reported that two football players were involved in an assault on another student last March, and that Coach Bobby Hauck swept the incident under the rug. The alleged assault is the latest in a long series of incidents involving violent off-the-field behavior by members of the UM football team.

The Kaimin also reported that when a reporter asked for comment about the incident, Hauck said: “You’re done for the day, and you’ll be done for the season if you keep bugging me about this thing that I’ve answered four fucking times.” The two players allegedly knocked a student unconscious and kicked him in the face following an altercation at a party; they were held out of one game this season, but otherwise apparently faced no sanctions.

In a furious editorial, Kaimin sports editor Roman Stubbs called the allegations involving the two players “disturbing, sickening, alarming,” and denounced Hauck for building a “wall of silence” around the incident and refusing to take responsibility or hold anyone accountable. “A college football coach should never be blamed for isolated incidents,” Stubbs wrote. “But when accusations form a pattern, then not only do the upstanding Griz players become stigmatized, but so does this school, this city and this state. It becomes embarassing. And it falls on the commander in chief.”

UM football spokesman Dave Guffey said in an email to NewWest.Net: “We have no comment on this matter.”

A letter to the editor of the University of Minnesota newspaper.

Your recent story on [football coach] Tim Brewster’s helicopter rides was a shocking read. In the midst of a recession and a University hiring freeze, Tim Brewster’s waste of money on an entirely unnecessary helicopter ride to Irondale in New Brighton, a 15 minute drive from campus, should be a scandal. Yet we have come to accept that even when institutions from our state government down to the corner store are tightening their belts, the University athletics department will never be questioned for its ridiculous spending choices. Dan Berezowitz’s comment that Brewster was not “showboating” is an obvious lie.

He knows it, Brewster knows it, we all know it. Worse was the insulting comment from Joel Maturi suggesting that those opposing Brewster’s spending habits “think we shouldn’t spend one dollar [recruiting].” Maturi knows those opposed to expenses like this helicopter jaunt don’t believe in a $0 recruiting budget. His defensiveness and desire to aggressively delegitimize any opposition to the wasteful spending habits of the athletics department are very telling.

Patrick Timmons

[Florida State University President T.K. Wetherell] should tell the whole world what an absolute shame it would be if [Coach] Bobby [Bowden’s]’s iconic career is tainted because of the malfeasance of others. He should point out how unfair it would be for Bobby’s reputation to be disgraced because some nameless, faceless tutors helped FSU football players cheat in an online music course.

This kind of statement, from Mike Bianchi in the Boston Herald, upsets UD.

There’s an elemental unfairness in dismissing FSU’s tutors as nameless and faceless. They have names; they have faces. They’re human beings, and they deserve to be recognized for their part in the nation’s largest cheating scandal.

But what Bianchi also overlooks is that they were only little cogs in the big cheating machine that is Florida State University.

Why make it appear they acted alone? No one group of people can create an entire university devoted to academic violations on behalf of sport. There’s the music course’s professor, a notoriously negligent instructor whose course had served FSU athletes well for decades until something went tragically awry. There’s the university’s board of trustees, willing to do their part to keep everyone stupid and unethical. There’s the university’s coaching staff who recruited the players. And of course there’s Wetherell himself, who continues to preside over a massive joke at the expense of Florida’s taxpayers.

Give credit where it’s due, says University Diaries.

… a passage that captures my thoughts about The Blount Punch perfectly.

… I’m not thinking about the taunting that set him off, Blount’s own actions or the season-long suspension. What bugs me is our whole disingenuous reaction. Here’s what we say to athletes from a very young age: Here’s a scholarship for excelling at a violent game, here’s fame for excelling at a violent game, here’s a chance at millions for excelling at a violent game. We reward young, immature people for excelling at a violent game and then, when that violence crosses over the constantly moving line of what’s socially accepted, we all jump back and gasp in faux horror like total phonies and call for drastic action.

The writer is David Fleming, for ESPN.

Athletics director overrules code of conduct, clears Mbakwe for practice.

Star basketball transfer accused of felony assault received permission to practice in the preseason.

These are headlines in today’s University of Minnesota newspaper (UD thanks Bill).

This is the article’s first paragraph:

Months after junior basketball transfer Trevor Mbakwe was charged with felony assault of a woman in Miami, University of Minnesota Athletics Director Joel Maturi gave him permission to practice with the team.

The decision announced Tuesday lifts the automatic suspension enforced by the University’s student-athlete code of conduct.

FAMU football fans shouldn’t be afraid to come to home games in the wake of a campus shooting that injured three people after Saturday night’s game, said FAMU Police Chief Calvin Ross.

“People should be alert but certainly not fearful to the point that they avoid games,” Ross said Sunday in an interview with the Tallahassee Democrat. “This is at best isolated. The involved parties had no affiliation with FAMU except for the victims.”

… to pathetic whining in the face of failure. The voice of the university athletics director.

The University of Minnesota is still hawking some of the priciest seats in its new, $300 million TCF Bank Stadium, long after it hoped to have sold out the first season.

… “If the economy was better and we had alcohol, I have no doubt we would have it all sold out,” said David Crum, an associate athletics director overseeing ticket sales for the stadium.

Oh, if, if, if, IF! Fiddle-dee-dee!

Two UW-Madison men’s basketball players were jailed Sunday on tentative charges of burglary and underage drinking in the thefts of portable music players, a cell phone and $400 cash from “numerous” dormitory rooms, university police said in a news release.

Diamond Taylor and Jeremy Glover, both 18-year-old students, were confronted by police as they left Sellery Hall, according to a news release. Police had been called to the dormitory to investigate a reported burglary.

University police said in the release that the men admitted to entering the unlocked dorm rooms without permission and officers relieved the pair of “numerous items, including iPods, a cell phone and over $400 in cash.”

Police said the students may be suspects in several other burglaries …

One home game… one shooting…

Live, from Tallahassee, it’s Saturday Night.  Let the fireworks begin!

[I’m an alumnus.]  I have no qualms with the UNIVERSITY, it’s the senseless youth and thuggish behavior at the games [and] campus … parties, and frankly [I] quit going to games because of fear for mine and my children’s safety and exposure to vulgar language and violence. You are right by thinking that it’s not fair to judge others for the actions of the few, but the few are becoming the many and frankly I don’t like the way the campus acts most of the time.

Campus gunplay after FAMU’s first football game of the season injures one of their running backs.

The quotations are comments from local readers on an article about the shooting in the Tallahassee Democrat.

… Robert Zemsky, a very intelligent critic of universities who has a post up on how not to reform schools at Inside Higher Ed.   She heard him talk at the last meeting of the Knight Commission.  Here’s her post about his remarks there.   If you don’t want to go to the trouble of clicking on that link, here’s some of what he said:

Trying to describe the place of athletics in the larger context of higher education is like trying to describe a burnt-out desert. You see, this discussion today — it isn’t going anywhere. We came here to talk about cost-containment, and it isn’t going anywhere. And that’s because any sense of values is missing.

Since you people don’t have any values, you put the marketplace up as the only thing that matters. That’s why you’re not ever going to reform at all. You’re part of the general loss of aura, loss of particularity, at our universities in America. Football on your campus is just like the NFL, you say, and, see, you’re proud of it. So what makes you a college? Absolutely nothing.

Used to be universities were supposed to be like churches — separate, special places, dedicated to higher things. They’re not special anymore. They’re just like any other business. So why tenure? Why tax exemptions? Look at Harvard and places like that. University endowments aren’t charitable donations; they’re hedge funds. University presidents make million dollar salaries, just like other CEOs.

It all tears at the fabric of the specialness of the university. You’ve all helped make that happen. Since you’ve been in business, things have gotten a whole lot worse. The university athletics engine will certainly stop running. But it will never reform itself. It’ll just run out of gas.

UD of course loved all of this, though she was puzzled by the run out of gas thing.  The university athletics engine is a massive SUV  with guns and fists and phalluses sticking out of it.  It’s barrelling down the road at high speeds and is equipped with no moral or financial brakes.  Everyone adores it.  Everyone’s mesmerized.  ESPN has run the tape of the Blount punches pretty much non-stop since he landed them, and everyone adores it.  Everyone eats it up.  Violence!

As long as human beings enjoy enormous stadiums housing violent spectacles, big time university athletics will be fine.

Zemsky seems in fact to agree with this in his IHE piece:

It’s already too late to reverse the tide of athletic commercialism. The sums are too large, the constituencies too powerful, the absence of agreed-upon purposes all too readily apparent.  Is reform necessary? — yes. Is it possible? — no…

[There’s been a] cascade of scandalous acts that, against a backdrop of institutional complicity and capitulation, threaten the health of American higher education.

… The best higher education can hope for is that eventually universities will cut loose their programs in football and basketball, making the university a sponsor rather than an owner of the enterprise.

I think Zemsky’s making one explicit, and one implicit, argument here.  His explicit argument has it that it’s not worth universities’ time to try to clean up their football and basketball programs.   Too much money and power is concentrated in those programs.

His implicit argument seems to be that if we just let the SUV keep barrelling down the road, eventually it will crash and burn.  Let the programs get worse and worse, in other words, as they certainly will — Let coaches make twenty million dollars a year.  Let players rape burn and pillage.  Let university presidents become total castrati.  Let students get so drunk they destroy downtown after every game, not just championships.  In this way, university sports won’t run out of gas so much as implode under the force of its own vileness.