The question at Auburn is whether there’s a first university. I guess certain parties at Auburn would like to think so; but when one quarter of your trustees played football for the school, and when until very recently the school was run by the legendary Bobby Lowder… And so many academic scandals UD has lost count… I mean… really?

So now there’s this breaking story about the jock major du jour at Auburn – public administration. How legit poli sci professors at the school tried to shut it down, and how the athletics department kept that from happening, in part by offering to pay for the major. The Wall Street Journal seems the main source for the story – they quote from various emails in which athletics personnel worry themselves sick about the intellectual well-being of their players if the major is punted – but it’s all over the place now…

What UD finds moving about Auburn is its tragic endless search for a home – a warm permanent curricular roof over the team’s head. Not long ago, under their legendary chair of sociology, Thomas Petee, a man who, like North Carolina’s legendary Julius Nyang’oro, was able to chair a program, teach regular classes, and teach AT THE SAME TIME hundreds of independent study classes per semester, Auburn athletes en masse took soc. That scam got blown and they reeled over to public administration, which is now also well on its way to oblivion.

What next?

Athletes at Auburn are like passengers on the listing Titanic, grasping desperately at one side of the ship for survival and, water rising, racing desperately to the other side.

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See, what people don’t realize is that when the athletics department chooses a major for the lads it’s not just a matter of looking for gut courses. You need an entire organization – you need please-mister-quarterback-let-me-touch-you professors, downtrodden and manipulable tutors, mercenary administrators (remember: athletics has huge money to spend on selected departments and majors), etc., etc. You have to set up a whole world for this to work, and you have to watch out for people who (cough) might be inclined to leak incriminating emails about what you’re doing. I’m sure that, even as I write, everyone at Auburn – trustees, deans, students, boosters – is working overtime to create this new world.

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UD thanks Derek and Andrew.

The soaring oratory of Maurice Clarett. As UD readers know, UD has long recommended exactly the same thing for the B-School Boys (see her ever-popular category Beware the B-School Boys) — charismatic ex-cons drawn from the same crowd as their audience. Andy “Enron” Fastow is one example, but America’s prisons are packed with ciceronian swindlers.

Together, these two lad-categories (football hero/captain of industry) make up much of our national mythology, and therefore America’s institutions continue to deal gently with them, which is why remarkable numbers of them keep raping women and financial systems.

UD is a big believer in the power of testifying. She thinks Business Ethics courses are bullshit, but she thinks Madoff on the hustings would be marv.

… acquitted of a misdemeanor battery charge. A jury quickly agreed that he did not punch a woman as he and teammates were leaving a bar.

Of course, this is what big-time football brings to the university, house of reason. It brings the adorable primitivism of humanity’s infancy. Like fraternities, to which it is symbiotically attached, it brings “shirtless kids covered in paint, shivering in the November weather as they cheer their team on,” as one pundit excitedly puts it. The same writer goes on to say:

If you want your students to become loyal, giving alumni, you must turn them into members of a tribe. You must make them fall in love with their school, and believe that they and all the other alums are united in a family. Your temple of reason cannot rise to the heavens unless it is grounded in irrational love.

Tribalism: The core of any great university. I think that’s what we’re all after, isn’t it? Students come to us already members of high school cliques and neighborhood gangs; our purpose is to strengthen those cultic tendencies.

But it’s not just tribal, magical thinking we’re after. Let’s say it straight out – it’s ultimately stupidity we want to convey:

[T]wo schools [Kansas and Notre Dame] [are] now paying Weis nearly $23 million not to coach.

… entire culture here.”‘

… over many years, so how can we be surprised that not long ago “six football players were named as suspects in sexual assault cases”? The number actually charged was only two, and the trial of one of them starts today.

This trial is not to be confused with the Vanderbilt trials, which are ongoing.

Backing our football team
Faltering never …

From Missouri’s unacceptable responses to multiple serious sexual-assault allegations in the last decade to Florida State’s head-in-the-sand approach to Jameis Winston, the go-to move has been to do nothing until the law forces your hand.
… If journalists at “Texas Monthly” had no trouble uncovering Ukwuachu’s past transgressions, a school whose president is former Whitewater prosecutor Ken Starr has no excuse.

You’ve got it exactly backwards. He’s the highest paid person because he’s got the balls to risk everyone’s safety. That’s what we call Vision. Commitment. Grit. It’s worth millions.

And after all, the job of the fan base, as it well knows, is to sacrifice itself for the team.

You have to do the hard work of getting inside the culture of schools like Baylor and Louisville (the University of Louisville, a reliable scummy-sports-source on this blog, just recruited a guy — “domestic violence charge involving a gun” — even Texas Christian found too scary).

But it is hard work. Take Baylor. The larger culture of its hometown, Waco, heartland of homicidal Harley honeys, birthplace of branded breastaurant-bred Boss-Hoss boys, is mainly about open carry. That’s the burning social justice issue that fires up so many Baylor/Wacoites — now more than ever:

The day after a deadly confrontation between rival biker gangs in Waco, top Texas lawmakers defended a proposal to loosen the state’s handgun laws [to allow open carry].

What plenty of people in Waco and at Baylor seem to be, uh, shooting for is a campus/town where hotly recruited rapists and criminal biker gangs are placed in an open carry setting…

UD understands that this picture seems unfair to these Texans, whose self-image involves prayer for themselves and for the souls of recruited rapists who shall be redeemed in cleansing local waters. Same as these football programs. And so many others. It’s all about winning football games and redeeming souls.

So you’ve got Baylor’s famous president, Ken Starr, overseeing an internal investigation of his school’s rape-positive policies, and he’s already at a disadvantage, since his experience lies in investigating consensual sex (or, as a commenter at the Chronicle of Higher Education poetically puts it, “President Starr, you went after Bill Clinton for much less. What are you going to do about this ugly mess?”). And you’ve got all the hump-lovin’ folk of this great land, who understand the crucial synergy between sexual and on-field violence, as dramatized so succinctly here.

In this film’s most poignant moment, a father pleads: “Just give it to me straight Doc. Will my boy ever rape again?”

As long as schools like Baylor and Louisville exist, we can answer that question with a resounding Yes.

… is how they seem to sing it at Baylor University, a Christian school apparently, but far more committed to football (and basketball) than to anything spiritual… I mean, if you go by the sorts of things that happen there…

For instance, it’s a very violent place, which seems to UD (she’s no expert) rather at odds with the Christian ethos. One of their basketball players a few years ago “punched Texas Tech forward Jordan Barncastle … breaking Barncastle’s nose and causing both benches to clear.” Although concussed during a recent game, Baylor’s quarterback insisted it was nothing and that despite some fogginess and a headache he’d be back out there again right away because nothing’s more important than winning at football. And

In January, 2014, Tevin Elliott, a defensive end out of Mount Pleasant, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for twice assaulting a former Baylor student in 2012. During that trial, two other women testified that Elliott assaulted them. A fourth alleged victim was not called to testify.

And now everyone’s abuzz with the latest Baylor violence: Under the same coach as Elliott’s, another football player is going to jail for sexual assault on a Baylor student. And this player had already been “kicked off the Boise State football team after punching and choking his girlfriend.” It looks very much as though the Baylor coach knew about this violent past.

But hey. If there’s one thing you’ve learned reading this blog, it’s that plenty of American universities will open their arms to woman beaters if the guys can catch a football. And the schools will do all they can to lie and cover up and victim-blame (Baylor carried out a wretchedly inept internal investigation.) until the bad stuff their football players do goes away. Or maybe it doesn’t go away.

And… uh… this seems to be the Christian way. I mean… One of America’s leading Christian universities keeps doing it.

Baylor’s president is Ken Starr. That Ken Starr. Investigator extraordinaire.

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Read this if you can stomach it. Baylor is a sister school to Florida State University, with similar cooperation by local media and law enforcement. Absolutely disgusting.

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UD thanks dmf.

[Buried deep in Chris Borland’s message are ideas]… threatening to the NFL and our embattled national sport. It’s not just that [former pro player] Borland won’t play football anymore. He’s reluctant to even watch it, he now says, so disturbed is he by its inherent violence, the extreme measures that are required to stay on the field at the highest levels and the physical destruction 
he has witnessed to people he loves and admires — especially to their brains… [Football, he says, is] a dehumanizing spectacle that debases both the people who play it and the people who watch it….

[Borland is] the most dangerous man in football.

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Borland’s Wisconsin teammate Mike Taylor describes his pregame regimen before a bowl game against Stanford this way: “I’m just laying on the table before the game, buck naked, just taking shots of s— I don’t even know. Taking pills, putting straps on, putting Icy Hot on. People were coming in and looking at me like I’m a f—ing robot, like I’m dead.”

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[One Florida State University player] said it wasn’t the practices or the physical abuse that bothered him, but how the coaches force-fed him and his teammates. “They watch me clean the plate… ‘You let that settle and then go lift.’” That’s in addition to the supervised supplement-swallowing, the pills and powders of who the hell knows what.

“He looks down at me, this monster man, this beast, and now he’s got kid eyes,” [Derek, an FSU instructor, reports,] “and he says to me: ‘Mister Derek, sometimes I’m not hungry anymore.‘”

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Players’ cafeteria, University of Oregon.

Eight of the fifteen American university football teams that dominate the “most flagrant chaplaincies” list also dominate the “most team arrests” list.

“MOST FLAGRANT CHAPLAINCIES“:

Auburn University
University of Georgia
University of South Carolina
Mississippi State University
University of Alabama
University of Tennessee
Louisiana State University
University of Missouri
University of Washington
Georgia Tech
University of Illinois
Florida State University
University of Mississippi
University of Wisconsin
Clemson University

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MOST ARRESTS:

1) Washington State: 31
2) Florida: 24
T-3) Georgia: 22
T-3) Texas A&M: 22
5) Oklahoma: 21
T-6) Iowa State: 20
T-6) Missouri: 20
T-6) Ole Miss: 20
T-6) West Virginia: 20
T-10) Florida State: 19
T-10) Tennessee: 19
T-12) Alabama: 18
T-12) Iowa: 18
T-12) Kentucky: 18
T-15) LSU: 16
T-15) Marshall: 16
T-15) Oregon State: 16
T-15) Pittsburgh: 16
T-19) Arkansas: 14
T-19) Michigan: 14
T-19) Oklahoma State: 14
T-19) Purdue: 14
T-23) Auburn: 13
T-23) Colorado: 13
T-23) Kansas: 13

Harvard University (endowment $36-plus billion, but it’s got far more money than that if you count other assets) PLUS one of these guys:

In 1999 .. the 10 largest collegiate football programs brought in $229 million in revenue. By 2012, the same schools reported revenue of $762 million. “Profit margins had ballooned to hedge-fund levels.” … Overwhelmingly, the cash is reinvested in athletic programs. As a Texas sports official put it, “We eat what we kill.”

What an amazing school that would be… What an icon of the postmodern university… Unimaginably rich, it would hoard/eat its cash, so that little to no money would be put to academic use…

Imagine this school as a massive nubbed therapy ball stuffed with a trillion dollars. Fund managers and sundry money fetishists would be invited to squat on its nubs and bounce around …

… in a hard-hitting, no holds barred interview about his school.

TRIBUNE: What are your early impressions of what Andersen is doing with the football program?

RAY: He’s terrific, but he’s the first who would tell you, it’s what happens on the field that represents the success or lack of success in terms of wins and losses.

… A recent survey of police records show that Washington State University has the most football players [in the country] who have been arrested within the past five years.”

Background on Washington State’s terrific football program here.