Mary Willingham at Chapel Hill. An anonymous professor at Rutgers. An anonymous broken-jawed student at Rutgers.

Let’s call what’s happening at the American university what it is: A peasant revolt.

The once-stable hierarchy we’ve come know –

Coach
Players
Boosters
President
Professors
Students

– is being shaken to its foundations as sporadic uprisings escalate among the people. The Rutgers professor suddenly refuses to give a passing grade to a football player, and, when the coach strong-arms the professor, the professor continues to refuse to back down.

This was a coach who didn’t want to lose arguably the best player in what was an historically bad secondary for Rutgers a year ago, and wasn’t going to let a lowly professor take [Nadir] Barnwell away. He was going to use his rarefied status as the highly paid leader of King Football to make sure that no meager academic policy was going to get in the way of wins and losses.

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The problem is the “bloated sense [of] entitlement among players and coaches who … start to feel as if they can get away with just about anything. Being treated like campus gods can do that, a campus to which they are often only nominally tethered.”

We have all seen the disturbing footage of statues being forcibly taken down, and we rightly worry about the fate of other monuments dotting the homeland.

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It’s pointless to wallow in nostalgia for a time when students gratefully absorbed blows to their faces from good secondaries and professors regarded membership in bogus academic departments as their contribution to the team’s defensive line. The question is What Is To Be Done.

Begin by remembering this. Welcome to my little village! says poor Marie Antoinette. Wake up before it’s too late.

… Stats!

This critique of this argument makes the above point.

It’s a great point, which UD would in fact revise and extend, in this way:

“There are over three thousand four-year colleges and universities in America. That 129 maintain markets in sex slaves has not caused higher education to wither away.”

In other words this is America, dammit, and we’ve got so many colleges and universities doing so many different things, that it doesn’t matter what some small number of them does – the larger national project of higher education is not going to wither away because of it. Only an hysteric would think that twenty or so Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment Redux programs are going to threaten higher education!

… Porn.

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UD thanks C.

But hey. It’s Jersey.

Five current Rutgers football players, including the cornerback at the center of a university-led investigation into coach Kyle Flood, were charged Thursday with assaulting a group of individuals, including one student whose jaw was broken during the unprovoked attack.

… [Nadir Barnwell, one of the men charged,] is at the center of the investigation of [Rutgers football coach Kyle] Flood, with the university looking into whether the Rutgers football coach broke school policy by contacting a professor regarding Barnwell’s grades. The junior cornerback was declared academically ineligible in the spring, according to two school officials.

Flood defied academic support staff when he contacted the professor, two sources told NJ Advance Media.

And then there’s the Rutgers basketball program.

Lordy lordy. I have seen me some scuzzy programs, but Rutgers athletics lately takes the cake.

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“Coach Flood exemplifies our university’s standards and values both on and off the field,” Rutgers president Robert Barchi said in a statement.

That wasn’t long ago, right after he gave him a contract extension and a big raise. And, you know, what Barchi said is absolutely true. Putting its students in harm’s way via sadistic coaches and criminal players, and not giving a shit about academic integrity, is the Rutgers standard.

PS: They’re gonna have to pay over a million dollars to buy Flood out of his contract.

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I knew this was going to get funny.

Hands-on research in Criminal Justice majors.

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From a comment thread:

[H]alf our secondary just got arrested.

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Coach Flood Sings to His Favorite Player

I know I stand in line until you think you have the time
To talk some football with me
And if we find someplace to meet, I know that there’s a chance
You’ll end up beating on me

I practice every day to find some clever lines to say
To make the meaning come through
But then I think I’ll wait until the evening gets late and I’m alone with you
The time is right, your perfume fills my head, the stars get red and, oh, the night’s so blue
And then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like “I love you”

Meanwhile, the school has missed financial targets. A 2015 audit of athletic department finances reported that spending on equipment, uniforms and supplies came in 88 percent over budget in the 2014 fiscal year, while travel expenses were 57 percent over their mark. Meanwhile, revenue from ticket sales came in 21 percent under budget.

Overall, the school had planned to reduce its athletic subsidy by $3.5 million for the 2014 fiscal year, according to the audit. It ended up increasing it by $700,000.

La vie continue at wanna-be sports factory the University of Houston; this article about it even has the dude in charge of turning Houston into Clemson alerting us to the fact that sports are “truly the front porch of the institution.” So true, so true, which is why The Texas Tribune has done a long piece on how the school is spending itself into the gutter subsidizing games no one on campus wants to watch.

The quotation in my headline’s intriguing, isn’t it? Technically isn’t an athletic program. Yes, I see the point. It’s in the stadium and it’s used by the marching band, but it has nothing to do with athletics. It’s academic, see.

Along with all that money transferred from academics to athletics, UH has a new football coach who’s kind of the equivalent of this chick — he issues threatening language to students who might be considering not going to a football game (she issues threatening language to students who might be considering using terms like male and female). Poor students.

To a screen near you.

This writer is talking about the big-time stuff, football, basketball. He thinks paying the players would make matters even more sordid. He sets the scene:

[P]ractically all of the dozens of football players [at the University of Southern California] with whom I interacted [as a tutor] resented their schoolwork, or to be specific, the requirement of it. They viewed it as a particularly onerous element of the raw deal that was playing collegiate-level professional sports for free. Without quite saying it, they viewed amateurism as a farce, a predatory bargain struck long before any of them had nailed their first slow-moving quarterback. They could live with the exploitation, it seemed, but certain things fell beneath their dignity, compulsory study being one of them.

However:

[T]he tragedy at the heart of college sports is college sports. Paying the players would only ensure the continuation of athletic programs as currently constructed. Everything would remain as it is, with the freakishly lucrative enterprises that are Division I college football and basketball nestled awkwardly within our higher education system. Payment would, in fact, give the system needed space to grow, protect it with a thin veneer of legitimacy, and free everyone from the constraints that have lately burdened the good time of college athletics.

Constraints here means the need for universities to find ways to pretend that these guys are in some sense students.

The pretense works fine as long as the university is itself, tout court, a pretense – the University of Alabama, Clemson, Baylor.

The pretense is always falling apart at Blanche DuBois schools, schools that continue to flatter themselves that they’re universities (Penn State, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill). At UNC they have spot checks to make sure professors are meeting their classes – – along, of course, with spot checks to make sure athletes are attending them. It’s one big pre-school program.

The best-known so far is Jim (“In the morning he would read the Bible with another coach. Then, in the afternoon, he would go out and cheat kids.”) Tressel, but in today’s New York Times Joe Nocera identifies a rival for top seed.

[Baylor University president] Ken Starr was as complicit in the two-year-long silence [about a football player/rapist)] as anybody in the Baylor athletic department, which makes his current “anguish” seem like little more than P.R. posturing…

But it’s at moments of crises like this one when people discover how a university, and its president, prioritizes athletics. Baylor, a Baptist school that professes to adhere to Christian principles, appears to have “sheltered” a “perpetrator,” to use Starr’s own words, because this particular perp might be able to help the team win a few games.

But at least there’s a humongous new movie all about what our college football players experience in school, and then experience again when they graduate to the pros.

As you watch the trailer, think of all the university (hell, high school) coaches we’ve covered on this blog who let their players continue playing while they’re still reeling from a hit.

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“[I]t will sure be fun to watch the NFL attempt to bury or explain this film away come December.”

As for the NCAA, UD is sure they’ll maintain an – er – studious silence.

A Texas sports journalist puts the rape scandal at Baylor in perspective for us. (UD‘s comments appear in brackets.)

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So am I calling Art [Briles, Baylor football coach,] a liar?

On that leave ’em laughing note, we know heads will roll over all this. And we know Art will be watching from a Waco safe place, high above it all. [Hilarious to think that the official head of a football factory has any power. The God who stands above it all directing and watching is the coach. UD read somewhere – can’t find the link – that a sacrificial woman from somewhere in the administration has been selected to suffer for her Art.] [Good one, UD.]

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Remember: This guy is writing about a place that was founded as a university.

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Oh. And here’s a great blast from the past. In a recent tussle with his league over their team ranking system (it placed Texas Christian, the place Briles found Baylor’s most famous rapist, over Baylor), Briles said

[The league is] obligated to us because we’re helping the Big 12’s image in the nation.

Totally, Art, and keep up the good work.

The arrest is the first for an Arkansas player since defensive end Tevin Beanum was arrested in late February for DWI.

Yeah, this here’s a real shocker. Why, I can barely ‘member last time someone on that team got himself arrested… Was it… way back in April? Nah. Even farther back than that… I know! No wonder I had such trouble ‘membering. It was February!…

… and their incoming students need. Before the University of Montana administration took them down, the following signs greeted this fall’s students:

Montana Hunting Season OPEN. Female Students The Prey.

Get Drunk. Get Raped. The Players Are Ready.

Baylor University… will [eventually] deliver a big check to a woman raped by one of its scholarship football players.

And along with a check, you get a book!

… at the University of Illinois, where one after another, in the space of a few days, the chancellor, the provost, and now the football coach have all been fired or resigned. People are calling for the school to fire the athletic director.

Predictably, the coach thingie is about how twisted big-time American university football is. UD can’t get enough of the fact that the high-profile normal people on campus (football players, frat boys, coaches) almost always, when the shit hits the fan, turn out to be absolute pervs next to whom the weirdo humanities types are the actual mainstream. It’s the players who are often enduring a sick masochistic family relationship with their sadistic coach daddy.

Before the Illinois athletic director could no longer deny the sadism going on in his program, he dismissed player complaints about the coach by saying this:

“The feedback I get from players and our players’ families is that our coaches genuinely care for them and treat them like their own children,” Thomas said May 11.

How to unpack all the ugly in this statement? Since when do you treat adult males like children? But of course dominating and infantilizing and then intimidating players is the name of the game in much college football coaching. Like the sickest father ever, you embrace them and then scare the shit out of them if they disobey you. Daddy Dearest. Coach would make his own son play injured; he’d terrify his kid by telling him he’s gonna lose his scholarship if he doesn’t do what he tells him to do. He’s verbally abusive.

I mean, sure. There are fathers like this. It’s called child abuse.

This coach had already been accused of abuse.

Beckman was the subject of a lawsuit, later dismissed on a technicality, alleging the same kind of disregard for player injuries that would get him run out of Champaign.

But no. Oh no. We’re being pussies, aren’t we? Have you noticed how long the pussy list is getting? How many names the bruisers who love bigtime university and professional football now have to keep track of in order to dismiss them with contempt? Most recently there’s the name Chris Borland; and, at Illinois, there’s Simon Cvijanovic, who didn’t appreciate the unrelenting viciousness of the coach. There are many others; and the university officials whose job it is to keep their massively indebted football programs alive will no doubt want to encourage the frat boys and others as they cry pussy.

UD has covered so many of these coaches – highest public salary in the state, private jets, country clubs, worshipped by all, and physically and psychologically beating the shit out of their players.

And do you think a guy like this is going to let the university deprive him of a penny?

He will not receive the $3.1 million remaining on the last two years of his original five-year contract or the $743,000 called for if his contract had been bought out, the university said.

If he doesn’t sue, UD will be astonished.

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Update: Here we go.

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UD thanks Wendy.