And and and and and… You’ve got to string together a lot of ands to describe campus life at Baylor University.

… as the women on Seattle’s city council have discovered. They voted against a proposal to build a new basketball arena in the city, and the reaction to that decision helps you understand why so many once-respectable American universities (Rutgers, Chapel Hill, Penn State, Minnesota, Louisville) have allowed the culture of professional sports to turn them into national jokes.

You need to drill down to the trustees (feast your eyes on this photo), to people like the King of Oklahoma State University, to understand how it’s gotten so bad on so many American campuses that a few people are beginning to notice. You have to focus in on people like Jason Feldman, a Seattle attorney who, along with quite a few other men in Seattle, uncorked his rage against – let’s see – what did he call them – the whoring pieces of trash on the council who blocked his basketball fun.

How did it come to this? I mean how did the American university come to this? How do you get to a university that for more than thirty years harbored and adulated a child rapist? A university that for twenty years implemented an elaborate, completely bogus curriculum? A university that was running a whorehouse? You get there by putting in charge people who share the enthusiasms of Jason Feldman Esq.

A university president who doesn’t know the difference between incredible and incredulous.

$95 million in legal payouts (so far) can put a real crimp in your proofreader budget.

Your father keeps a brothel. Your best buddy lost his job because he drinks too much and tells random women to let him go down on them. The terrible team you coach keeps losing players due to sex crimes. If you’re Minnesota’s Richard Pitino, you’re going to want desperately to get the hell off campus – pronto – at the drop of a hat. And that’s what your fleet of private planes, paid for by the good people of that state, is for. (They also recently paid for the football stadium. They are very very good.) That’s why you’re always flying away.

Gophers men’s basketball coach Richard Pitino has spent twice as much on private jet travel as his contract allows since arriving at Minnesota — doubling his budget in his first season, and tripling it his second season… Pitino spent $116,041 on private jet usage in fiscal year 2014 (spanning June 2013 to June 2014) and $156,440 for fiscal 2015. … [As] of February, Pitino had already spent $53,388 on private jet usage for fiscal year 2016. During [a] three-year period, Pitino also took two private jet flights that were “unallowable” because they were less than 200 miles from campus.

Less than 200 miles? Whatever. Gotta get it up.

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

Best headline so far:

Report: Richard Pitino Overspent Private Jet Allowance With Permission Of Sexually Harassing Ex-AD

Big-time university sports: You stay classy.

[T]he then-president of Florida State University was hired in 2014 to run [post-Sandusky Penn State] — right as The New York Times was faulting his administration for improperly handling rape allegations against FSU’s then-star quarterback Jameis Winston. (Around the same time, Penn State was bringing in a new football coach, James Franklin, whose actions in a rape case against four of his players at Vanderbilt were also raising questions. Neither Barron nor Franklin were formally charged with wrongdoing but … is this really the post-Sandusky look that Penn State is going for?)

It’s not as though a football powerhouse university can pick and choose. When your school is essentially playing professional football, you get to enjoy all the benefits of that culture at its most aggressive. What sort of university presidents and coaches do you think are going to show up at Penn State? Especially now, as it once again goes into deep-indignation mode that anyone would give it a hard time because of its long association with Jerry Sandusky and Joe Paterno.

Made out of words taken from a newspaper article.

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

THREE DAYS INTO MAY

All of this is no more than mere footnote;
Quite good for schadenfreude but little more.
Yet cast your gaze a little farther west…
Oxford! Where finer scandals lie in store.

Carrying on the legacy of the late lamented Norwood Teague, UM’s finest continue leading with their dicks. Sexual assault, sexual harassment, sex videos – the real tragedy is that none of this cockplay seems to be helping the basketball team’s win/loss record. If beating women doesn’t bulk up team confidence, what good is it?

His worshipful masses were sure no
Taint wafted up to Paterno
But then things got real
Jerry lodged an appeal
Happy Valley’s become an inferno

… ’70’s Show.

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

… Sandusky did terrible things to children, and even after hearing that Sandusky was discovered in the shower with a boy of about 10, Paterno didn’t call the police. He didn’t seek to have Sandusky barred from Penn State’s athletic facilities, or apparently even question his assistant about what he had been told, even though the two men had been colleagues for decades.

Coulda knocked me over with a feather.

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

Memory lane.

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

Bad timing.

I mean, it’s strange for any institution to do that, of course. But these are life of the mind type places. Places where they keep some of their students dumb by giving them bogus – even non-existent – courses, and then, just to make sure their cognitive capacities are totally wiped out, they let them play football concussed.

Still goes on. Every day. In high school as well as college.

But now the players are suing. And winning.

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

Do you think this new category of sports costs will change anything?

Ha. If you do, you don’t know anything about Americans and football.

Oh yeah? This commentary in the aftermath of UNC’s two-decade-long massive academic fraud ups the the rhetoric-ante and informs us that universities have souls, UNC has a soul, and it’s looking at its soul being ripped out.

Most immediately, the soul-threat the writer has in mind is trouble with a couple of accrediting bodies; but you and I know that beyond a brief probation, UNC will be fine. The NCAA has let it off lightly and so will the accreditors. All will be well. Indeed, UD has no doubt that in a few years things will have so supremely settled down that UNC will be inaugurating an improved academic fraud game plan for its athletes and other interested students.

But this matter of a university’s soul… UD has done some scooting about online, and people do make a habit of assigning souls to universities. The soul seems to be a central meaningful place or group: the library, the faculty. It may be a common faith (Notre Dame’s Catholicism.) Or it may be non-profitness rather than commercialization.

Here’s the Soul Man himself, Cardinal Newman:

[The university] is almost prophetic from its knowledge of history; it is almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human nature; it has almost supernatural charity from its freedom from littleness and prejudice; it has almost the repose of faith, because nothing can startle it; it has almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation.

Or in UNC’s terms:

It is almost unbeatable in its knowledge of free throws; it is almost its own search-firm in its knowledge of football recruits; it has an almost supernatural advantage in its freedom from standards and integrity; it has almost the repose of sleep, because nothing can enlighten it; it has the beauty and harmony of hunky competitors.

By which UD means that while most writers, after Newman, consider a university’s soul some central meaningful spiritual/intellectual aspect of the place, after UNC, writers will need to take on board the fact that the only soulfully alive place on some campuses seems to be the athletic department. Surely the soul of Penn State, Auburn, Baylor, Alabama, the University of Oregon, and UNC lies somewhere in the vicinity of the locker room. And that is a soul that no accrediting body can rip out. Only a bad coach can do that.

A writer for the Auburn Citizen wrote this last year, and ever since then UD‘s been chewing on it. In particular, when UD reads about big-time football schools like the University of Hawaii, Western Michigan U., and Eastern Michigan U. — all of them perennially in the news for bankrupting their students and keeping their schools down in order to subsidize shitty coaches and put on games no one attends — UD ponders that “meaningless” thing.

The pathetic state of EMU in particular has attracted the attention of the national media. Singling out that school, an HBO show called The Arms Race featured the following facts:

At Eastern Michigan, the sports program lost $52 million over the past two years according to Howard Bunsis, an accounting professor at that school. Plus the school football team has not a winning season in nearly a couple of decades and regularly posts the smallest attendance figures in all college football.

(That amount by the way is nothing next to national joke Rutgers, where “in the last 12 years, the school’s athletics department has lost $312 million.”)

The leadership of all of these universities — president, trustees — goes ape-shit whenever anyone suggests that the all-consuming activity that has basically killed their school is meaningless. (Faculty and students, two groups immiserated by athletics, feel differently, but who listens to them?) The ferocity of their unanimous response to suggestions that they lead their university in a more meaningful as well as fiscally responsible direction tells you that for these people taking down a university through the removal of all revenues via football is obviously patently totally on the face of it worth it.

So what is the transcendent meaning they attach to what looks to the rest of us like suicide via sports?

UD thinks a hint can be found here:

It is as though they see a successful sports program as a winning multi-million dollar lottery ticket. Never mind that millions of lottery ticket holders lose.

UD thinks a more vivid and valuable analogy would be to the cargo cult phenomenon. Long ago in our ancestral past, godlike men appeared and won games and there was jubilation among the people. Then the big men went away.

Ever since, we have built gleaming stadiums and training facilities to induce them to reappear.

They will reappear.

We will never give up.

This is the meaning of our life.

I mean sure! Sure!

Ole Miss is sure gonna look into this shocking attack on our honor!

Once you start paying attention to what schools – high schools and universities – will do to win basketball and football games, you’re in for a treat. School officials will do anything, it turns out, to attract and retain tacklers and dribblers.

There’s the almost thirty year old recently arrived Sudanese gentleman who has been winning games like crazy for Catholic Central High School in Ontario. Everyone – the coach, the recruiters – is shocked right down to the ground that a 6’10” adult male isn’t fifteen, but twice that.

“At 6’10 he was pretty dominant, he was dunking on everybody, it was pretty hard,” said Fazar Yousif, 15, who attends Kennedy Collegiate high school.

Now, for us, for the States, he decided to tell the truth:

When he entered [Canada] his passport and visa application listed his birth date as November 1998. But when he applied for a U.S visitor visa in April, his fingerprints matched an individual who’d already applied for a [US] visa with a birth date in November 1986…

Closer to home, there’s Bellevue High School in Washington, where they just go ahead and break every goddamn rule in the book, baby!

The report focused on excessive payments to coaches from the Wolverines booster club that were never approved by the school board. Investigators say tax records show during a 10-year period, the club paid coaches more than $500,000, with the majority of that money going to the head coach.

Investigators also found players used false addresses, the district and coaches failed to monitor player addresses, and that the head coach directed and encouraged players to attend The Academic Institute — a small private for-profit school in Bellevue.

The report says coaches coordinated tuition payments for some athletes paid by the booster club or its members so they could attend the private school, where investigators claim some players were able to pass classes they failed in public schools.

I think it’s safe to say that for these lads the transition to university football will be a smooth – even unnoticeable – one. Steady as she goes!