… as you may know, the winner of Michael Kinsley’s Most Boring Headline contest. Less boring, and just a bit tweaked, is a headline to accompany the recruitment news out of the Canadian Football League:
SOMEWHAT SHORT OF WORTHWHILE CANADIAN INITIATIVE
Yes, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats recruited (briefly) Mr Baylor-Rapes Art Briles; it also seriously considered (before rejecting) Johnny Manziel. Deadspin‘s indispensable Emma Baccellieri reports:
Manziel was charged with domestic violence last year for allegedly hitting his girlfriend and threatening to kill her; charges were dropped several months later after a plea deal. He also has a history of partying and drug use that repeatedly threatened his career. [Briles oversaw] a football program where players were accused of up to 52 rapes in four years …
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UD thanks Jack.
But, as Mike Bianchi points out, it’s only Wednesday. We know this team can do better.
When it comes to university presidents looting their schools, America lags well behind Greece, where the chancellor of Pandio University set the standard by leading (he was only found guilty of failing to note the illegal removal of ten million dollars of university funds, but he seems to have personally benefited from said removal) an extensive conspiracy of robber-administrators. The Greek state gave the school money; the school’s leadership took the money – that seems to have been the straightforward approach – and bought the stuff listed in this post’s headline.
Here in the States, the business of leaders draining millions and billions of university funds is more subtle, more complicated. President Lawrence Summers’ mad insane interest rate speculation cost Harvard one billion dollars but I mean … you know … he meant well. Yeshiva University’s trustees no doubt thought they were enriching the school as much as themselves by their extensive conflicts of interest coupled with avid investments in pieces of work like fellow trustee Bernie Madoff. In the event, they cost the school $1.3 billion.
Not that we don’t boast a few Greek-style university presidents. Karen Pletz, while president of Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences, allegedly paid for her Lexus convertible and a series of amazing foreign trips by the simple expedient of removing what these things cost from the university’s reserves and placing those sums in her private account.
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James Ramsey, now routinely described as the disgraced ex-president of the University of Louisville, stands somewhere between high-minded removalists like Summers and flat-out Ferrari larcenists. UL let him, over the years, grow to a big strapping tyrant with his fingers all over every money source available at this public institution in one of America’s poorest states.
I say let him, but as Pandio and other examples suggest, it takes a village to pillage. Ramsey surrounded himself with what one retired UL professor, reviewing the school’s sordid history, calls fellow pirates – people who took as much pleasure in pillaging as he, and who of course had no cause to expose his piratical deeds.
Dennis Menezes, who spent almost forty years at the U of Smell, takes a sentimental journey through some highlights:
Robert Felner, the former education who ended up doing jail time for misappropriating millions of dollars; Alisha Ward siphoning of hundreds of thousands of dollars from U of L’s Equine Industry Program; “Sweetheart contracts” at the College of Business, where administrators continued to receive their significantly higher salaries even after stepping down from their administrative positions, a practice rarely seen at other universities; the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of dollars stolen by Perry Chadwyck Vaughn at the School of Medicine…
At some point the leadership of a university gets so notoriously filthy that career criminals like Felner make a point of applying to work there, thus amplifying the pirate-load. I mean to say that when Menezes tries to puzzle out what makes a university a criminal enterprise, he fails to land on the obvious: Once your university is known to tolerate – nay, encourage – piracy, pirates from all over the world get on board.
The journey to just awful is smoothed by other campus assets, in particular — natch — sports. Let me suggest how this probably works at places like U of L, where, you recall, an entire sports dorm was transformed into a whorehouse for the use of recruits and their fathers. The pattern at sex-crime-crazed places like Penn State, Baylor, and Louisville is for the president to be invisible while the AD, the actual president of the school, does whatever the fuck he and his massive program like. At criminal enterprises like U of L, a president like Ramsey actively takes advantage, let’s say, of all the big scandalous sports noise in the foreground to quietly do his removalist thing.
More than that, enormous sports programs tend to bring quite a few truly scummy and twisted people to a campus and reward those people with enormous salaries and enormous respect (if they win games). Over time the powerful and often scummy sports contingent defines the ethos of the whole university, as in: Jerry Sandusky was EMERITUS PROFESSOR Sandusky at Penn State, I’ll have you know. UD attended a Knight Commission meeting in DC where a coach at a local university stood up and insisted that athletic staff at American universities should have professor status. “They’re educators as much as anyone else. It’s elitist to think otherwise.” So athletics, at many universities including Louisville, certainly does its bit to vulgarize and corrupt everyone, making it much easier for already sketchy people like Ramsey to assume they’re living in a sleaze-friendly world.
UD ain’t saying you must have a big sports program for endemic corruption, but it sure doesn’t hurt.
Anyway. This post is long enough. We’ll be following U of L as they try to decide whether it’s worth suing Ramsey and his pirate crew to get back some of the many millions they removed. We’ll also follow U of L’s difficult effort to find a new president. Would you want to preside over a school suing your predecessor for millions of dollars? Hell, the thing could even end up in criminal court.
COLLEGE FINDS COMPROMISE TO KEEP
RAPIST ON FOOTBALL TEAM
… expect the very best!
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The player’s father just tried to kill a judge (thanks for the tip, dmf).
Though not the judge who convicted his son of rape. Maybe that judge had better personal security. The targeted judge is a hunter who always carries a weapon, and he shot back. He apparently will survive. The father was killed.
Look, football and school don’t go together. They just don’t. Trying to do both is like trying to do two full-time jobs. There are guys who have no business being in school, but they’re here because this is the path to the NFL. There’s no other way. Then there’s the other side that says raise the SAT eligibility requirements. OK, raise the SAT requirement at Alabama and see what kind of team they have. You lose athletes and then the product on the field suffers.
… If I wanted to graduate in three years, I’d just get a sociology degree.
Ok. It’s late August. Soon we’re back to a daily consideration of the current state of the American university. Look sharp.
… at the University of Florida.
[Several University of Florida football] players were alleged to have to taken part in a scheme that saw them purchase electronic products with school-issued [student aid] debit cards before selling them for cash. While this practice is not uncommon in college football, the Gators’ players then went to university officials to report their cards stolen, triggering a school investigation into possible credit card fraud. After investigation officials deemed the cards were not stolen and looked into the purchases, they found the players at fault for misusing funds given to them.
Here’s more on one of the guys, the team’s “top play-maker,” Antonio Calloway.
This is not the first time Callaway has faced suspension during his time at Florida. He was suspended last spring amid sexual assault allegations. Callaway was accused of sexual assault in December of 2015 but testified that he was “high on marijuana” during the incident and was “so stoned I had no interest in having sex with anyone.”
Your education tax dollars at work.
(See post below this one for details.)
You have made the mastiffs bleed out
You have made the pit bulls die
Our honored Michael Vick
Makes these innocent creatures cry.
Worthy football hero!
We honor you today
May our sons and daughters
Imitate your ways.
[Interlude]
OH, YECH!
OH, BLECH!
Y!O!U!D!I!S!G!U!S!T!M!E!
YOU DISGUST ME
I noted in this recent post our country’s almost total amorality when it comes to football heroes. This is what I mean:
Virginia Tech is so impressed with animal torturer Michael Vick it’s putting him in its hall of fame.
To the shock of seemingly everyone involved in this decision, numerous anti-Vick petitions are gaining tens of thousands of signatures. After all, Vick graduated from Virginia Tech!
Haha I mean he failed to graduate – another point of honor I guess… Executes non-performing dogs, college dropout… convicted felon… If that’s not a man of honor, what is?
The honor will go through despite the petitions, believe me. We’re talking virtually total amorality when it comes to football.
But it doesn’t hurt to sign them.
UD could care less about sports of any kind (exception: competitive Scrabble), but she’ll say this: Her need to read about athletics for this blog at least led her to Deadspin. Who knew some of the best writing in America would come out of this funny, subversive, knowledgeable, source? Deadspin has taught UD much of what she’s learned about the lingo and lunacy of the jock shop, and along the way it has delighted her not only with its literacy, but also its amused embrace of the ultra-loucheness of this thing that has taken over – of all places – our universities.
Nobody notices or cares when professional soccer, football, and basketball are disgusting. We only pay attention at the very grossest margins, as when an NFL player tortures his dog to death. Moral monstrosity on the level of mere money registers not at all, as in the failure of the FIFA story, or the related story about the apparently universal tax evasion of international soccer players, to get anywhere at all. Who cares. Put a bunch of guys together with a lot of money and surprise.
But the university. Ah the university. Little streamers of seriousness continue to flutter ‘pon it. Wilted garlands of gravitas shake aloft their dying buds. The Sacred Groves of Academe! When a university reveals its true rot, as in the moral desert of (in effect) all-male Baylor, the extremity of response – A new woman president! Who, asked why she took the job, says “I love Jesus.” – tells you all you need to know about the effort required to keep stray wisps of legitimacy flying.
But I don’t want to overstate the matter…
So people do indeed tend to notice the truly debauched campus. Whorehouse-for-teens-and-their-parents proprietor University of Louisville is the higher ed scuzz-meme of the moment, cited in a kind of shorthand in many articles about other athletic scandals; indeed, it’s mentioned in a wonderful Deadspin piece about Hugh Freeze, a guy who has a lot in common with the miscreants at Baylor, being both a superduper Christian and a (reportedly) twisted piece of shit.
Ole Miss, ex-haunt of football coach Freeze [background here], has many advantages when it comes to ultra-louche supremacy on a university campus, the most important of which is its location in the most corrupt, most benighted, state in America. Nobody much cares what goes on down there, and this includes the people who run the state. So the tired business of boosters giving impermissible benefits to players, and similar venerable forms of corruption, continue to thrive at Ole Miss, which means the NCAA’s always sniffing around. The general air of loucheness in a steamy south that time forgot, plus William Faulkner having lived in Oxford, means that people often reach in the direction of his novels (with special attention to the Snopes family) to, er, contextualize some of the goings on, as Deadspin notes in a wonderful summarizing paragraph:
The revelation of Freeze’s possible sex-having brought its fair share of confused hilarity [to observers], but did little to outline the future of either of Ole Miss’s ongoing, convoluted [legal] cases with [former former Ole Miss coach suing Freeze for defamation Houston] Nutt and the NCAA. There were (are) still a number of questions to be answered — namely, how Nutt and [his lawyer Thomas] Mars knew exactly where to look [for dirt on Freeze]; whether anybody comparing this case to a William Faulkner novel actually read a William Faulkner novel; how long Freeze was possibly using school technology and school funds to maybe fuck; how far back into his career Freeze’s general misbehavior extends; whether Freeze was even the one doing the fucking; whether Ole Miss know about Freeze’s extracurriculars beforehand; and how Nutt’s legal team will use this information moving forward.
That one about whether Freeze was actually doing the fucking: There’s a theory that the calls on his phone to an escort service might have been on behalf of a recruit…
UD does think the Faulkner comparison works, since he wrote convoluted stories like this one, about vague imperishable grudges among unsavory people, like these people.
The phrase about how far back Freeze’s misbehavior extends: The Deadspin piece includes some way-twisted testimony about the way Freeze behaved when he coached a women’s high school basketball team.
One woman [says that] Freeze forced her to change shirts in his office, claiming her Grateful Dead shirt violated the school dress code because it “represented drugs.” At the time, [she] was in eighth grade; according to her, Freeze did not leave the room while she changed.
“Coach Freeze pulled me in his office and told me that my shirt represented drugs. … I said, ‘I’ll go change in the bathroom,’ and when I said that he said, ‘No, you’re going to change in here so I get the (Grateful Dead) shirt and you can’t have it back.’
He didn’t do anything sexual. But I stood in the corner and faced the wall when I did it and I changed out of my shirt. No privacy.”
Another student, remaining anonymous, claimed Freeze was “hyper attentive” when it came to making sure the girls’s skirts adhered to school policy. She also claimed that on one occasion, when she was late getting back to class from her lunch period, Freeze obliged her request to be paddled rather than sit in detention; instead of fetching a female administrator to complete or at least proctor the punishment, Freeze paddled her himself.
“(Freeze) did some bizarre warm-up taunt before actually making contact,” said the woman, who spoke to USA TODAY Sports on the condition of anonymity because she said she fears reprisal. “I was humiliated that he didn’t have a female in the room. I don’t know if the acts were intentionally sexual or if he was really that oblivious to the inherently sexual nature of his approach to discipline.”
Yeah, yeah, it makes your brain mush... But it also pays for four years of a fine college education!
UD‘s having trouble making sense of this story. Give her a moment.
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And here’s the obligatory I AM STUNNED TO DISCOVER THAT A (choose one from Column A)
FOOTBALL COACH
BASKETBALL COACH
ATHLETIC DIRECTOR
is a super-sanctimonious-Christian fraud! You never see that combination at our universities! You never see a noisy pious moral scold who turns out to be a greedy horny cheating little shit!
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Hearken, ye sinners! O list, ye lost ones!
The Hugh Freeze saga at Ole Miss haveth everything. It haveth the alleged recruiting violations, the former player on the holy draft night of 2016 who telleth of the cash payments, the aggrieved former coach (Houston Nutt), the disciples from the NCAA Committee on Infractions, the lawyers, the escort service, the “misdial” to the escort service, the suggestion from the athletic director that perhaps the “misdial” was part of a “pattern.”
It haveth the mingling of the gods on the fields and the gods in the sky.
“I don’t stand over them, make them do it,” coach Freeze sayeth of his players and his religion to Kent Babb of The Washington Post in 2014. “Certainly they hopefully see that it’s important to me and maybe the way I live and the way these other coaches live. Maybe it attracts them to it.”
The Twitter feed of the man from Independence, Miss., doth lineth with his Bible.
Here we seeeth the juxtaposition that will never stop astounding, the one that has breathed through the whole story of this most American of games since Rutgers playeth Princeton in 1869 and the legend goes that a witnessing professor hollereth: “You men will come to no Christian end!”
Here, a grubby game (and deliciously so) intersects with a peacocky purity.
Big-time athletics, we’re told again and again by its boosters, is the front porch of the university — that’s their favorite cliche. It means sports are by far the most visible part of the institution, and they should be financially supported big-time because they’re the first point of contact for potential students. A winning football team makes the number of applicants rise dramatically – or so people claim. This might not really be true. Or it might be true, but the additional applicants might turn out to be jocks who wouldn’t be accepted anyway.
But anyway. That’s not our focus here. Our focus is the pesky little problem of rapists and other varieties of sex offenders among the recruiting classes for big-time university sports. (Of course, it’s not just the players; there’s plenty of rape to go around when you’re a major football school.). It’s a pesky problem because after all especially if you’re talking football you want a big big bruiser of a guy who’s incredibly aggressive on the field – and while most such types will confine their aggression to the game, some number of them reliably will not. Hence all the football-player rape trials always going on.
But if you’re a coach you’re totally incentivized to – er – overlook said bruiser’s history of sexual misbehavior, and to exploit all that testosterone-rage on the gridiron. If the coach is lucky enough to be on a conceal carry campus he can try redirecting his player’s sex-rage to pistol-rage and let him shoot his gun off all over town rather than his dick.
And yes, yes, I know there are problems connected to the gun solution; of course there are problems … But, for instance, a group of students at Washington State University has asked that school to deal with the sexual rage problem, never mind the gun problem…
The leaders of three student groups at Washington State University recently sent a letter to president Kirk Schulz and athletic director Bill Moos asking the school to implement a policy regarding the recruitment of athletes.
The letter, sent June 28, urges the university to have a policy that prevents “the recruitment of any athlete with a history of sexual violence.”
It refers to “those who have pled guilty to or been convicted of dating violence, domestic violence, stalking, sexual harassment, rape, sexual assault, or sexual violence.”
A quick review of this blog’s posts on WSU indicates that its primary problem among athletes is their propensity to beat the living shit out of random fellow students and townies. It didn’t help matters that for a time WSU even boasted twisted, violent Mike Leach as coach. But no doubt these students – the ones requesting that WSU not recruit sex criminals – are responding to the fact that there may be sexual problems as well.
So… UD will predict that after extended dithering WSU will very self-righteously announce that it’s compelled to admit plausible applicants who have paid their debt to society and we’re really sorry but we’re not going to do anything. Being at a jock school, after all, means willingly assuming certain risks, like getting beaten up or raped by an athlete. Small price to pay for a winning season.
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UD thanks Seelye.