I mean, by prevailing standards.

[Herbert] Gamboa and his fellow returning starting [University of Montana] linebackers, Kendrick Van Ackeren and Jeremiah Kose, were expected to be a strong point in the Griz defense against a vaunted NDSU team that has gone 58-3 in the past four seasons. Both Gamboa and Kose had scrapes with the law last week, though.

Kose, 22, was arrested last Wednesday on a failure to appear charge regarding three moving violations from last November. Kose participated in Tuesday’s practice and is expected to play against the Bison later this month…

Gamboa, 21, was arrested early Friday morning after witnesses saw him challenging other people to fight outside a Maurice Avenue house party at about 12:30 a.m.

He pleaded guilty Monday in Missoula Municipal Court to one disorderly conduct charge, a misdemeanor, and received a six-month deferred sentence.

Better put an armed guard on Van Ackeren.

UD loves to chronicle the intellectual life of her beloved country, as it plays out in our universities.

U President Vows to Push for Stadium Liquor Sales, for instance, is a headline that says so much about the preoccupations of our highest-ranked academic officers; and then there’s the University of Houston’s leader – Coach Herman – whose threatening language to UH students about their unwillingness to attend football games makes us all wonder what he plans to do if they continue to act like students rather than fans.

UD totally understands the coach’s desperate rhetoric: UH just spent $128 million on a new 40,000-seat stadium, and at best it’s half-filled on game day. Of that half, I’m figuring not many are students, and, well, the conceit here is that university football has something to do with university students. Like, the university is giving students this incredible experience – Adzillatrons shrieking ads at them, drunks with guns, I dunno, but IT’S TEXAS for god’s sake where up north a tad from Houston they spent sixty mill on a high school football stadium that has never been used because of structural flaws and no one seems to mind about that! Build another one!

So what’ll coach do? Bring in the Attorney General! But no – the AG’s a Baylor man, and anyways he’s gonna be (cough) a little too busy to deliver a spanking to the many thousands of Oppositional Defiant Disorder sufferers on the UH campus…

UD thinks the best idea is to perform pre-frontal lobotomies on the noncompliant students. Of course they would have to be sedated first because no one is going to want one. They’ve all read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But the lobes are coach’s main enemy here, and the medical school is just sitting there.

UD proposes this tag: A half-empty stadium: Unacceptable. A half-empty brain: Acceptable.

The reality is that UH would only have to perform one, maybe two, for students to get the message.

… jockshops, as this blog routinely does. It’s another thing to see the inner workings, to get an intimate sense from deep within (kind of like that film UD saw when she was a tyke… Raquel Welch was in it… Takes you inside the human body… Ah yes here it is: Fantastic Voyage, 1966… ), of how universities almost entirely about football actually work.

Drawing your president from team players is a popular first move. If you can’t make a jock president, find a political hack who graduated from your school. Make sure the bulk of your trustees are ex-players or peeing their pants with excitement boosters. Direct almost your entire budget to football.

A state-of-the-art football stadium set [the University of Akron] back $62 million and has yet to return a dime. Attendance is literally the worst in the nation in UA’s division. During the six seasons since InfoCision Stadium opened, the team has 16 wins. That’s $3.9 million per win.

For example.

Within these broad parameters there’s room for improvisation, for a nimble ability to as it were catch the toss when new opportunities arise.

Take Florida’s Jacksonville University. The president, who played baseball for the school, is dealing with the aftermath of the school’s recent decision to give virtually all of its campus-wide “leadership” scholarships to football players. Calling them “leadership” was a smart move, since that removed any pesky academic component; directing them almost entirely away from the non-football-playing student body — “football players accounted for nearly 70 percent of all leadership scholarships available, and 90 percent of the award’s total purse” — was pure genius, the sort of thing you need when “low enrollment numbers at the school [made it hard to] bring in enough athletes to fill out both varsity and junior varsity teams.”

I’m not sure what went wrong there, by the way. Everybody agrees that big sports programs guarantee big enrollment boosts.

So well it’s tragic. Punishments have been forthcoming, they have to come up with another way to pay football players to come to their school, and they’re not going to be able to compete in some playoffs. On the bright side, though, Jacksonville University remains a school exclusively committed to the well-being of its football team.

University football players getting arrested happens all the time. UD really doesn’t know how these lads get their schoolwork done! What with practice sessions and game schedules and drugs and alcohol and guns and smashing people’s faces in… Once you get arrested for some of that, you’re looking at yet more study hall interruption.

But franchement UD has covered SOOOO many of these stories that she now ignores most of them. I mean, she scans the latest articles, in case there’s a new twist on the old tale…

And she’s not sure why, but the Antonio Allen thing at Indiana University has her laughing her ass off. She’s definitely paying attention to that one.

I guess it’s, first, because this dude seems to be one serious professional criminal. He sells a wide variety of serious drugs on the street. He has a serious gun. Because he’s obviously been at this for some time, Coacha Inconsolata (put the term in my search engine if you’re not familiar with it it) has a big problem. He can’t do the whole shocked shocked he was like a son to me I’m inconsolable this must be an aberration he’s young we all make mistakes thing because the player seems to be a veteran dealer. He’s been taped doing his thing.

So the coach makes two moves. One, he calls it an isolated incident. But

This is the third off-field incident involving an IU football player in the past three months. Defensive tackle Ralph Green III was arrested in April on charges of battery, public intoxication and disorderly conduct. Wide receiver Isaac Griffith was arrested last month on charges of driving while intoxicated.

Two: He uses the thing for a kumbaya moment. He’s gathered the lads together to use the arrest as a teaching and bonding moment. After one of coach’s post-arrest inspirational talks, the team’s quarterback says

I think that’s helped us grow. Just kind of, ‘Hey, we’re in this together. We’ve got to link arms.’

There’s a little of this motivational sludge in the aftermath of all bashing and dealing on all university football teams, but IU is laying it on hilariously thick.

Finally, the player himself is majorly into God. The only thing he said to reporters on leaving the courtroom the other day was “God is good,” which, given what’s just happened to him, seems in his case counterintuitive. And there’s this:

Earlier Tuesday, before his arrest, Allen posted a photo on Instagram of him being featured on the cover of a Big Ten 2015 preview magazine. The accompanying caption reads:

“If you knew (where) I came from and all the trouble I was in when I was younger you can see I did a 360 and I am BLESSED thank you GOD.”

God talk is the default move for all of these guys when the shit hits the fan, but UD has never before encountered one of them who broadcasts thanks to God for turning him totally around when he’s still cuddling his Colt and hawking coke.

All of the elements really came together and got crazy on this one. I had to laugh.

One of America’s most violent universities, with an incredible track record of student rioting, seems to recruit its star players with an eye toward that history and tradition.

A recently recruited BMOC – a potential quarterback for the football team, no less – has already showed his stuff on the streets of Greenwich. He’s accused of being part of a gang that beat up a guy standing on a corner waiting for an Uber ride. (Before you read details, please consider the mean streets from which the player came.)

The victim told police the three men had approached and asked for a cigarette. The victim told police he said no because he had only one left…

The Darien man got up and told the men he didn’t want to fight because he was with his girlfriend, police said. Stafford then pushed the man to the ground, and William Rosato kicked him in the head, police said.

The girlfriend tried to intervene but was pushed away by the men…

The victim was bleeding from his mouth and his right arm and had bruises on his face and legs, police said. The girlfriend also had a bruise on her face, police said.

Yeah. He and his friends kicked the shit out of both of them! And you thought beating up women was just a Florida State kind of thing.

When you’ve got U Mass’s track record, the problem is maintaining it. Every year you risk attracting non-violent people to your team. Every year you’ve got to go out of your way to find the sort of person who will fuck up a man and a woman standing on the street waiting for an Uber. It’s the U Mass Way.

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Over to you, Ed Blaguszewski.

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UD loves the hubba-hubba iconography of this police photo. Kind of like this.

Last week it was Florida State; this week it’s San Jose State. Both universities have dumped two football players in the same week because of violence, though at FSU they’re like totally into beating women up, while at SJSU it’s a combo play: One guy beat a woman up, and the other guy hit a fellow player in the head with a skateboard. So hard that the guy’s in the hospital with broken facial bones. It was “a reaction to some displeasure with how [the player he hit] was encouraging his teammate during the team’s workout earlier Tuesday.”

Today the American universities not only form the best system of higher education in the world, but are morally impressive institutions. They are not incoherent, nor are they in crisis.

Well, I guess this ain’t Allan Bloom.

No, it’s UD‘s hero, Richard Rorty.

She likes Bloom, but she likes Rorty more.

Her other heroes? The two Christophers: Christopher Lasch and Christopher Hitchens.

Albert Camus. George Orwell. Philip Rieff. Tony Judt.

Can we derive some coherence from these dead white males? Can we say why the same human being would swoon reading both hyper-righties and hyper-lefties? (And weren’t Lasch and Hitchens sort of both?) Why the same human being would applaud when Rorty says universities aren’t in crisis, and when Bloom says they are?

Do we want simply to say, with Gwendolyn, that ‘In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.’? Because all of these men wrote well (Rieff wrote like a jerk, yes, but not all the time. Not in his earlier days.), and some of them (Orwell) wrote insanely well.

No. Surely we want to grant UD a tad more depth than this. It’s not merely about writing style. Yet writing style is part of it. These men are all impassioned moralists, impassioned social justice warriors, and their prose shows it. Their prose has the sort of kick you get when you actually care about what you’re saying, when you believe that language is politics and that politics is how you decrease human suffering. It’s very much like what George Saunders says in an appreciation of E.L. Doctorow:

What I found particularly inspiring about Doctorow was the way he would tweak form to produce moral-ethical effect — the way that he seemed not to see these two things as separate. Reading his great “Ragtime,” for example, I can feel that all of that technical verve is there necessarily — to serve and escalate meaning and emotion. But as important — the verve serves and escalates the fun, the riveting sense that a particular and wonderful human mind is having a great time riffing on the things of this world, trying to make sense of them. The work exudes fascination with the human, and a wry confidence in it, and inspires these feelings in us as we read. Doctorow, we might say, role-models a hopeful stance toward what can be a terrifying world.

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In the same remarks of his I quote from at the beginning of this post, Rorty says:

If I were writing a history of the American university, I would tell an upbeat story about the gradual replacement of the churches by the universities as the conscience of the nation. One of the most important things that happened in the U.S. in the twentieth century was that the universities became the places where movements for the relief of human suffering found privileged sanctuaries and power bases. The universities came to play a social role that they had not played in the nineteenth century.

An impassioned atheist, Rorty reveres the American university as the place where arts- and sciences-inspired free and democratic discourse about the world and how to improve it, and about humanity and how to know and love it, thrives. The university is where we gather to read and talk about morally charged language, like Doctorow’s.

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Remember what Bartlett Giamatti called the university: a free and ordered space. When Rorty calls the university “not incoherent,” he doesn’t mean it’s coherent, as in fully pulled together, fully ordered and organized around some shared principle or faith. (And as readers of this blog know, once a university decides to organize itself around Joe Paterno, forfuckinggetit.) He means it’s coherent enough – it’s ordered enough to be free enough to generate the sorts of conversations, readings, and experiences that tend to make people (students, professors, readers of the research professors and students generate) more lucid and more compassionate. And more free, rather in the way of, as Saunders puts it, having fun — being part of a classroom where people are experiencing “the riveting sense that a particular and wonderful human mind is having a great time riffing on the things of this world, trying to make sense of them.” That mind, in the university setting, is a collective one, made up of the free and at the same time ordered synergy between a professor and her students.

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All of this is by way of background for a few comments on this intriguing opinion piece in today’s New York Times.

Kevin Carey is clearly on Bloom’s side. This is his opening paragraph:

To understand the failures of the modern American college system — from admissions marketing to graduation rates — you can begin with a notorious university football scandal.

So we’re going to talk about Chapel Hill as emblematic of what has made American universities a failure. Not just a failure – a nothing. An illusion. Carey’s title: The Fundamental Way that Universities are an Illusion. Later in the piece he will talk about them as Easter eggs – beautiful on the outside, dead on the inside.

The Nyang’oro fraud went on as long as it did because

U.N.C. had essentially no system for upholding the academic integrity of courses. “So long as a department was offering a course,” one distinguished professor told the investigators, “it was a legitimate course.” … The illusory university pretends that all professors are guided by a shared sense of educational excellence specific to their institution. In truth, as the former University of California president Clark Kerr observed long ago, professors are “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.”… When college leaders talk about academic standards, they often mean admissions standards, not standards for what happens in classrooms themselves. Or they vaguely appeal to traditions and shared values without any hard evidence of their meaning… The problem for students is that it is all but impossible to know ahead of time which part of the disunified university is which. [And the problem for faculty is that this] kind of profound dissonance can knock askew the moral compasses of people who have ostensibly dedicated their professional lives to education. How else to explain the many people at Chapel Hill — including, incredibly, the director of a center on ethics — who abetted or ignored rampant fraud?

It’s the free and ordered thing again. Carey believes the freedom Rorty identifies in the American university has dissipated into disorder, so that anything goes in terms of pedagogical content, which makes the world safe for the endemic cheating we know goes on at virtually all big-time sports schools. At such schools – the cutting edge, Carey seems to argue, of the frayed American university – even faculty – even ethics faculty – are cheaters. And why? Because they recognize “no shared values,” no “shared sense of educational excellence,” that would give existential identity, much less academic integrity, to the place where they happen to work.

In response to this, I’d like to cite Rorty once again:

In one sense, [the term “morality”] is used to describe someone relatively decent, trustworthy, and honest – one who gives correct change, keeps promises, doesn’t lie much, can usually be relied upon to take an appropriate share in cooperative efforts, and so on. It seems to me if you’re not that sort of person by the time you’re eighteen, it’s probably too late. I don’t think that sociopaths who enter the university are corrigible by any measures that the academy might adopt. If the family, the community, the church, and the like, haven’t made you a relatively decent member of society, haven’t given you a conscience that stops you from cheating the customers, administering date rape drugs, or doing a lot of things we hope our eighteen year olds won’t do, the university won’t either. The academy can’t take on the job of straightening you out, of creating the conscience that the rest of the culture didn’t manage to produce during your first eighteen years.

This is the same point UD tirelessly makes about the absurdity of ethics courses in business schools – and those are older students. They’ve had four or five years past undergraduate school to acquire a sense of decency.

And how much more hopeless when you’re whatever age professors Jan Boxhill and Julius Nyang’oro were when they dedicated year after year of their lives to robbing students of an education and trashing their school’s integrity…

Carey wants us to believe that the openness of their work setting, the structural trust of faculty and students upon which the maturity and generativity of the American university rests, knocked askew the fragile moral compasses of Boxhill and Nyang’oro. But that trust did nothing to their morality because they lacked morality all by themselves; they were the sort of people who take advantage of the trust others place in them, and the openness of the American university simply made it easier for them to do the sorts of things they do because of the way they are. UD doesn’t think we should press the great free liberal arts schools of America in the direction of moral explicitness and constraint merely because some of the people there are bad actors.

This is from Saul Bellow’s Herzog, describing a hard-nosed friend of Moses who enjoys lecturing him about The Real World. Simkin sees Herzog as a head in the clouds dreamy idealistic type who because he’s not watching out for reality will always crash into it and fuck up his life:

I’m a greedy old money-grubber — I don’t claim I’m a candi­date for sainthood, but . . . Well, that’s just the frenzy of the world. Maybe you don’t always take cognizance, Professor, being absorbed in the true the good and the beautiful like Herr Goethe.

Ever since the multiple woman bashing incidents on the Florida State University football team, we’ve had a rash of Reality-Instructors. Their job is to tell us what’s up, what the deal is, the lay of the land, the facts on the ground, prevailing conditions, the stone cold sober truth. On the subject of big-time university football.

UD‘s favorite Reality Instructor so far is this guy. From his title (Let’s Stop Pretending FSU is Different Than Anyone Else) to his final paragraph, this guy has some cold water to throw on our assumption that universities are universities.

His main point is that all the other jockshops recruit with arrant disregard when it comes to criminal records and things like that. Why should FSU be any different? It’s not as if universities are about moral values or something. (And don’t even ask about intellectual values…) Get with the program, fool!

[This is what bothers me most about criticism of the coach]: The idea that he should be blamed for recruiting these kids at all.

It’s preposterous.

I mean, we’re all adults here, right? We know how the world works.

College football is a billion-dollar business. Virtually every coach in the Power 5 conferences is a multi-millionaire. These universities are making anywhere from 20 to 40 million dollars with these new TV deals.

With big money comes big pressure. And these coaches – all of these coaches – try to get the best players possible to come help them win football games at their respective schools. Many times that means recruiting kids from rough cities with tough backgrounds. It’s just the nature of the sport.

To the rest of the country though it’s Florida State that has become the poster child for what is wrong with college football. Wins trump everything else in Tallahassee. It’s all Fisher cares about. It’s all the community cares about. It’s the only thing that matters.

What I find fascinating — and just a bit ironic — is how [the coach] and FSU are vilified for this culture while not a peep was written or spoken about what happened in Gainesville last year.

The everybody does it argument always has as accompaniment

1.) they’re just as bad; and/or

2.) they’re worse.

UD had read long, long comment threads in which fans compulsively compare their team’s vileness to the slightly greater vileness of this or that other team. In this case, Gainesville – the University of Florida – is trotted out to demonstrate that very bad actors and cynical multimillionaire coaches are equally distributed among America’s institutes of higher learning, so why pick on us?

So jockshop Ball State takes huge amounts of money from students to pay for a pathetic football program whose games they ignore. So what. That describes many American universities.

Yet see if you can make sense of these comments from a member of the board of trustees.

“We lost money last year… We’re going to lose money every year unless we have some unreasonable sponsor come forward and until we have 15,000 people paying for tickets to football games.”

Unreasonable? What does the trustee mean?

“I’m not saying it’s right,” said [the trustee], owner of Sport Graphics Inc., an Indianapolis company that works with clients like the NCAA, several collegiate athletic conferences, the 2012 Super Bowl, the Indianapolis Colts, and the Indiana Pacers. “I’m not saying schools should be seen more in favor for winning football championships or being in tournaments than having Rhodes scholars. But I am saying if you’re going to have athletic programs we’ve got to do our best to support it.”

Oh baby… if loving you is wrong… I don’t wanna be right…

How quaint!

I’m sorry, but in this as in so many things, we are so much farther along.

Plus they’re missing a whole world of guns.

[The University of Tennessee football team] had to hit a 930 score in the APR report that covered a rolling four-year period from 2009-10 through 2012-13. It was going to be difficult. They made a 932…

[The coach] described it as “the greatest win in the history of Tennessee football that nobody knows about.“

Yeah, nobody knows about it because no one cares. It’s only their education.

Hence the article writer’s need to remind us:

The university is, at its core, an educational institution, not a sports franchise.

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The University of Tennessee, one of the most farcical sports stalwarts of this blog (go ahead and type university tennessee in my search engine) is about to have far more to worry about than that silly APR thing.

… marching band, but details like these are pretty newsworthy too.

There have been four athletic directors and three head football coaches in the past 12 months.

For an approximately two-week overlapping period, the university had two entire football coaching staffs; this resulted in an additional $55,000.

I got an email earlier this week from the mother of an Orlando high school senior who is in the process of selecting her college…

“We recently toured FSU and the violence against women by the players was in the forefront of my mind, therefore putting FSU at the bottom of my list,” the mother wrote. “I do not want to send my daughter to a school where her safety is at risk due to other students with a violent past.”

Florida State University: On its way to being Lord of the Flies U.

… I don’t really blame Saban; I blame Alabama’s school president for allowing a football coach carte blanche on what players are admitted into the university. The same goes for presidents at Florida State, Florida, Clemson and the countless other schools that recruited Dalvin Cook, the star FSU running back who was arrested recently and charged with punching a woman outside a Tallahassee bar.

According to records from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Cook was arrested as a juvenile on two separate charges – one involving a robbery and another involving possessing and firing a weapon on school property.

Question: Don’t colleges and college presidents have a responsibility to protect their student bodies by not admitting football players who might be a threat to fellow students?

Mike Bianchi reminds us that jockshops like Clemson, etc., do have presidents. Admittedly these people do little other than attend football games and perform acts of obeisance to their head coach. (And fill out institutional assessment forms.) But just as a cat may look at a king, so a jockshop president may overcome his awareness of his microscopic salary compared to the salary of the coach and beg a few words with Nick or Jimbo about his quest for the biggest, most violent undergrads in America.

[S]everal years ago … Miami recruited Willie Williams, a prep-All-America linebacker from South Florida who was arrested 11 times as a juvenile.

UM President Donna Shalala, in an attempt to justify the signing, wrote in a letter to school boosters: “Mr. Williams is one of us — a son of Miami. We have a special obligation, relationship and commitment to the young people of our South Florida community. We want them to continue to think of us as a place of academic excellence and opportunity.”

Shalala’s letter may be the biggest pile of pabulum in college football history.

That makes me nostalgic. Here at University Diaries we had a hell of a good time following Shalala’s hyper-criminalized University of Miami, and fact is we miss her.

A sports commentator talks about campus life at Florida State University.

[T]here just isn’t a way to keep this kind of stuff from happening.

Not on a football team, a basketball team, on a college campus, or anywhere. If there were, guess what? We’d have stopped all of it by now. If you murder somebody and get caught, you know you’re going to prison for the rest of your life, but that doesn’t stop people from committing murder, does it?