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.

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

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?

… Dominique Strauss-Kahn to help it over its, um, hump. Apparently DSK will advise FSU to move its campus to France, where “internationally acclaimed philosophers will defend your players.”

Their ability to be violent was a vital aspect of what made them who they are as a person and they are celebrated for being that kind of man. It is how they are taught to relate to one another. It is what we, as Americans, want them to be… What really makes us feel sick is the moral contradiction: the men who perform the acts we celebrate under the bright lights of a football stadium are the same men who perform other acts that we would denigrate and punish away from the spotlight. The thought that we are all complicit fuels our revulsion and consequently our denial.

The denial exists on multiple levels. You don’t want to admit that your demand for violence has produced amazing rates of chronic traumatic encephalopathy either, do you?

The hits just keep coming.

… stop punching women.”

It’s outrage-season at Florida State University, with professors tweeting and against a big bad world of people saying mean things about their school and their football team.

For the last ten years FSU has been dominated as an institution by one of the foulest football programs in America, featuring academic cheaters, abusers of women, and a rabid fan base that won’t hear one word against the program. Overseeing the foulness have been cynical coaches, presidents drawn from the football team or the corrupt state legislature, professors who for years have offered cheating-friendly online courses, trustees who are either ex-FSU football players or rich FSU football boosters, and a local law enforcement establishment happy to look the other way. As FSU football racks up more and more player assaults against women, even a sports-loving country has started laughing at the hopeless endless vileness of the enterprise that enables them.

Rather than, say, suspend the program and collectively ask itself where its university went, FSU has deepened the hilarity. Its president, a man who hasn’t exactly been morally punctilious when it comes to the team, has now drawn himself up to his full height and sternly lectured the lads on good and evil. (“FSU coach Jimbo Fisher has suspended both Cook and Johnson from the team – a nice touch after he refused to suspend Winston when he was under investigation – and has pledged to ‘do better.’ University president John Thrasher backed up his coach, saying that he has ‘no tolerance for the type of behavior alleged in these cases.’ Well, except for that one time when an alleged rapist played quarterback and led the ‘Noles to a 26-1 record over the last two years. Then, John Thrasher can find a way to build up tolerance.”) One of his players has entertained the country with his own Before and After: Filmed one day unhesitatingly smashing a woman in the face, he was filmed a few days later clutching his mother’s hand and gazing into the camera on Good Morning America.

And now FSU students and professors join the fun, registering shock and awe in the face of the world’s disgust with their long-running farce.

This is a runaway university. Maybe someone there has the sense to try to stop it before it crashes.

The [Jameis] Winston rape allegation coverage has changed this fan base. That year and half of constant negative publicity forced FSU fans to circle the wagons and become a unified force against those who would seek to discredit Winston, the program, or the University. They saw any attack on Winston as not just an attack to the individual player, but to the legacy of Florida State. With #FSUTwitter leading the way, they took on an “us against the world” mentality and embraced the evil empire role.

The most recent acts of violence against women by two FSU players has emboldened what was an already ill-tempered, constantly on-guard fan base.

… They still want to believe Jameis Winston is innocent and will likely defend Dalvin Cook until he’s either found innocent or some type of video shows up laying all doubt to rest of his guilt.

As easy as it would be for me to do so, I find it hard to blame them for that. Not for the acts of victim shaming or social media attacks by #FSUTwitter, which led me to comment that FSU has the worst fans in all of college football, but for the defense of a football team they hold near and dear to their hearts…

Unfortunately for Tallahassee and its citizens, FSU fans or not, it is our turn to take the brunt of a world that is quick to judge and slow to understand.

How quick we are to judge, how slow we are to understand, the confused minds of people like this writer. On one hand, a unified force of FSU fans together faces a hostile world. On the other hand, an ill-tempered and borderline-paranoid fan base, “the worst fans in all of college football,” lashes out at us. All or some?

And whichever it is, what precisely do we fail to understand?

The writer does not tell us. He simply tell us that FSU fans love their football team. Does he understand that you can love something unworthy of your love? Lots of football (and basketball) fans change allegiance when they’re so disgusted with a team that they can’t enjoy watching it anymore.

What am I failing to understand here? That there’s something virtuous about continuing to defend with angry belligerence a team that for ten years has been a scandal and a laughingstock? That there’s some atavistic FSU football-love that no one will ever truly be able to understand/explain/justify, but the rest of us have to honor it, and sympathize with the humiliation people who experience this love have to undergo?

FSU football is and has long been a contemptible program. If you can continue to love – passionately love – something this contemptible, there’s something wrong with you.

Florida State University has a decade of cheating scandals, sports scandals, sports-related financial scandals, and football player assaults behind it. (For a reasonably full list, scroll down to the “Controversies” list on this page.) Its board of trustees is made up of a guy who used to be captain of the football team plus a bunch of football boosters. Its president is an inarticulate political hack who, like the notorious Gordon Gee, answers to the football coach. Its coach, like FSU coaches before him, seems able to get FSU to admit any person who plays superior football, regardless of criminal record. Many FSU fans consistently defend and demand the reinstatement of players who break the law in outrageous and frightening ways.

The ongoing pathetic hashtag campaign, initiated by an FSU professor who seems not to have been able to get off his ass before this to protest conditions at his school, will probably make matters worse for bottom-of-the-sports-schools-barrel FSU. The campaign notes the obvious and irrelevant fact that you can discover other activities going on at FSU besides football. Et alors?

They don’t call it the front porch of the university for nothing, babe.

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t lecture UD about how you’ll never see ten thousand screaming fans in a John Milton seminar so shut up about our sports program, and then, when you’re cornered, say FSU has John Milton seminars so shut up about our sports program. It’s your fault that the only thing anyone notices about your school is sports, and that your best-known professor is Dale Olsen, who, you recall, served under football player/FSU President Wetherell.

UD doesn’t think you should feel bad about any of this, or seek to distort it via tweets. Become who you are! said Nietzsche. Own it.