With incredulity? Or because he was so drunk everything made him laugh?

Anyway. Apparently you can do things like this in FSU’s Tallahassee, but it’s harder in Orlando.

Galvin must have known it’d be harder, because he offered not merely a ticket to see amazing Central Florida University play football. He offered season tickets.

UD likes her way of putting it.

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

San Diego State University also scored a great headline in England’s Independent newspaper:

WORLD’S WORST HUMANS
WAVE DILDOS AT
ANTI-RAPE PROTESTERS

Way to go, SDSU! This is generating even more publicity than your six-fraternity drug cartel.

It hasn’t been a great few weeks for [University of Tennessee] athletics. Between NCAA investigations, resignations, suspensions and rape allegations, the news cycle has been overwhelmingly negative. Such an environment has made it easy to forget the many positives surrounding Tennessee athletics. So, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, here are five reasons Vol fans should be thankful.

Unlike George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, all American university campuses know the truth about big-time athletics. They know precisely the difference between truth and illusion.

They have no illusions that big-time athletes are students. Watch the parade of prevaricators at the University of North Carolina who are shocked – shocked! – to find that academic fraud is going on there. We know they’re lying; they know they’re lying. It’s all very strange.

Yet on it goes. As his school goes the way of virtually all big-time sports schools, a University of Michigan regent offers an if/then:

If [academics and big-time athletics] can’t coexist, then intercollegiate athletics is truly an illusion.”

Yes, if and only if… Because… uh… We haven’t settled the question! Not enough data. Votes aren’t yet all counted.

But while you’re counting them, don’t forget that where academic fraud is concerned, Michigan’s tally is below Chapel Hill:

[In 2008,] Prof. John Hagen … was accused of assisting student-athletes in maintaining eligibility by teaching independent study courses that were well below University standards of academic rigor. In Hagen’s courses, the student-athletes had an average GPA of 3.62, whereas their average in other classes was a 2.57. Some students were found to have spent only 15 minutes with Hagen every two weeks, but earned up to four credits for the class. Hagen taught 294 independent studies courses from Fall 2004 to Fall 2007, 251 of which were to student-athletes. After months of investigation, the allegations were dropped…

Dropped! Dropped! Even Chapel Hill couldn’t find a way to drop them.

Truth or illusion. These people feel compelled to carry on as though we’re too stupid to see the difference. They of course see the difference all too clearly. They just don’t give a shit.

In college, he will learn he is still different and be treated as such. He may live in an athlete only dorm and receive special food, tutoring services, and attention. Many colleges will give him credits for classes he never took and go to great lengths to find him instructors who are athlete friendly. In fact, if you are the rare breed of athlete who is academically smart, you will anger your coach when your academics interfere with training, practice, or games.

… tell a high-level Washington DC gathering of university administrators (they were there to talk about the, er, problem of college athletics) that the solution was easy: “Make athletic directors and coaches professors.”

UD, from her seat at the back of the room, silently applauded the man on his genius. “Yes,” she thought. “He has understood that if you wave a wand and declare the athletic staff professors, you destroy any ability the university has to defend itself as anything other than a sports team. There’s no longer an athletic side and an academic side; there’s no longer any protest from professors that too much of the budget goes to athletics; there’s no longer any concept of academic integrity that might be corrupted by athletics. It’s the final triumph of athletics over academics.”

This was years ago – before the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill went this man’s idea one better and somehow allowed an administrator who essentially worked for the athletics department to be a professor (she didn’t teach, but Deborah Crowder acted as a professor in almost every other way), and before Youngstown State University made a tarnished football coach its president. These were positive trends from the genius’s point of view, but then Penn State came along, and a lot of people seem to have decided that a university run in significant ways by its football team was not a good idea. So that was a setback.

You see these power tensions (does athletics run the school? should it?) at a school so academically bad that there shouldn’t be any sports program there at all: Florida A&M. Yet FAMU has so powerful a sports program (and sports ethos – for decades the university looked the other way while its untouchably powerful marching band hazed members to within an inch of their lives — and then last year the university kept looking the other way while the band did succeed in actually killing a member) that the trustees are in the humiliating position of begging the president to fire an athletics director they can’t fire. The AD is brand new; the president is brand new — FAMU has had to turn over a lot of new leaves in the wake of the bad publicity its manslaughtering marching band brought. Continues to bring, as multiple manslaughter trials (one person has already been found guilty) proceed.

And now, while that beleaguered school’s trustees ought to be talking about how to teach the few students who continue to apply to FAMU, they’re spending all their time talking about the sports program. No one goes to the games; the new AD is fucking up left and right; the athletics budget is so huge it’s killing what’s left of the school… and not only that, but…

[Trustee Rufus] Montgomery also was critical of correspondence coming out of the athletics department to the trustees, saying the emails contained numerous spelling and grammar errors.

“It’s ridiculous. It’s embarrassing,” Montgomery said. “Please don’t let this happen again with athletics.”

But how are you going to keep it from happening? The only solution will cost the school more money in its athletics budget. They’re going to have to hire someone to rewrite the correspondence.

FAMU is a really interesting case right now. Like a lot of universities, it has for decades acted on the belief that a big noisy sports program is the front porch of the university. What do you do when the sports program at your school turns out to be the university’s front funeral parlor?

There’s no question that a program that beats people to death puts a damper on things. Fewer students apply. Very few students go to games. You’re losing so much sports revenue that you increase tuition big time, which turns off yet more applicants.

FAMU, UD thinks, could go either way. It could go the way of the genius and athleticize the whole school. Make the new AD the provost; keep pouring money into the football program, etc. Or it could suspend all or part of its athletics program and concentrate on academics.

You and I know which one it’ll be.

Orin Starn, the sports-anthropology professor, is less sanguine. Duke, he says, has become “this place that’s sort of divided against itself. On the one hand, you have this university that wants to be this first-class liberal-arts university, with a cutting-edge university press, these great programs in literature and history and African-American studies, that’s really done some amazing things over the last twenty years, building itself from a kind of regional school mostly for the Southern élite into a really global university with first-class scholarship. But then you have another university. That’s a university of partying and getting drunk, hiring strippers, frats, big-time college athletics.

… If you were starting from scratch at Duke, no one would have imagined an athletics program where the budget is almost fifty million dollars. This huge outlay of expenses and energy and visibility of sports is just clearly out of proportion with what it should be. Yes, athletics has a place in college education, but not this sort of massive space that it’s taking.”

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

Even before the lacrosse scandal, alarms had been sounded over the coarsening of undergraduate life. Toward the end of Nan Keohane’s tenure as president, the school undertook an extensive study examining the lives of women at Duke. The project’s summation reads like a scholarly anticipation of Tom Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” the 2004 novel (published after Wolfe’s daughter graduated from Duke) portraying college life as a soul-deadening, booze-fueled marathon of sexual predation:

Students rarely go on formal dates but instead attend parties in large groups, followed by “hook-ups”—unplanned sexual encounters typically fueled by alcohol. Men and women agreed the double standard persists: men gain status through sexual activity while women lose status. Fraternities control the mainstream social scene to such an extent that women feel like they play by the men’s rules. Social life is further complicated by a number of embedded hierarchies, from the widely understood ranking of Greek organizations to the opposite trajectories women and men take over four years, with women losing status in the campus environment while men gain status.

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

[T]he University of Virginia has allowed its top seeded men’s team to continue playing into the [lacrosse murder] post-season. … George Huguely V, the indicted midfielder from the men’s Cavalier squad, has, for nearly all intents and purposes, already admitted to the crime, and, in my mind at least, also implicated — albeit on a very different level — the culture and friends that provoked reckless excess and failed to take notice of a young man spiraling out of control.

… [T]he fact that Huguely was at times reckless and violent, particularly when drunk, and was alarmingly obsessive about Love, would have been recognized by fellow players, and perhaps coaches, too, and certainly should have been addressed. The fact that this was not his first violent interaction with Love is the strongest charge against the friends and teammates that failed to recognize the severity of the situation.

In truth, there are many places in the game’s culture where nights like the one Huguely had at Washington and Lee University in November 2008–when he was Tasered after resisting arrest and shouting slurs at a black, female officer who had found him stumbling into oncoming traffic–garner acceptance and credibility. As with other sports teams and fraternities, stories like these are traded like war stories among lacrosse players; they’re the battle ribbons of a culture that enjoys hard-drinking and recklessness. They’re a kind of proof of one’s weekend warrior bona fides.

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

Huguely’s team is … one on which eight players have been charged with alcohol-related offenses. Is anyone paying attention?… If things go terribly wrong, the culture of protection — including parents, coaches and alumni boosters — hire high-priced lawyers who manage to get records expunged and witnesses to forget what they saw.

A Penn State person shares her scandal-wisdom with UVa.

I’m fine with this except for the writer’s suggestion that coaches, of all people, are unequipped to handle criminal investigations.

If university football coaches aren’t equipped to handle criminal investigations, who is?

Doesn’t experience count for anything?

… Two universities’ football programs…

There’s Florida International University, bleeding its students dry for a team no one watches. Here’s a recent lead from a local article about the team’s last game:

A near-empty FIU Stadium for Senior Day. The Panthers sloughing about as Middle Tennessee State built a second-quarter deficit almost as large as FIU’s average points per game…

After which the reporter goes on to … describe the game. Why not. It’s what he’s paid to do.

FIU students, however, pay a fortune not to attend football games.

And then there’s the University of Wisconsin, whose students also seem a bit miffed about the football program. The editors of the UW Madison newspaper complain about a thank you to our supporters video of athletes that ran on the Adzillatron during the last game and which “left the audience with an uncomfortable and annoyed feeling.” Apparently it featured the lads larking about, while a voiceover kept repeating that the university’s facilities were “world-class.”

A simpler, “Thank you for all the support,” without explicitly mentioning more than once the world-class, bordering exorbitant facilities would not cross fans in the same fashion.

Another cause for the discomfort stems from the funding in general.

While student-athletes have access to their world-class facilities, many students would be right to ask “What about me?” Between the crumbling infrastructure of the Natatorium, the SERF and the Shell, our options pale in comparison.

… [S]tudents will be footing 57 percent of the bill for the [most recent] facilities [upgrade] while the Athletic Department will contribute 3 percent. After seeing what the athletes have and seeing videos boasting their new, nearly $125 million facilities coupled with their newly approved $133 million budget, as students, it’s difficult to accept the lack of participation by the Athletic Department.

Chancellor Rebecca Blank, in an open email to Madison students, likened the Athletic Department increasing their financial contribution to “asking the physics department to pay for improvements in chemistry, just because they both study science.”

This oversimplification does a disservice to the students. What if the physics department uses the chemistry facilities on a regular basis and does not allow chemistry students to use them at that time?

Or, what if the chemistry students bailed the physics department out of a projected $1.5 million deficit like in 1989, when the Athletic Department was under financial duress and student segregated fees covered the deficits?

Oh pish-posh. A little bitter, aren’t we? If y’all weren’t losers who can’t throw a football, you’d be singing a different tune.

Did the same team that worked the magic at Chapel Hill work their magic at Kansas? And look who our chancellor is!

Aw, shaddap. Blood under the bridge. Leave it alone.

“Over the years, the Board of Trustees rejected multiple opportunities for the [University Alabama Birmingham] football program to become more competitive. In 2006, it rejected the hire of Jimbo Fisher for $600,000 a year because they said it was too much money, even though boosters would pay most of it. Now Fisher is coaching the undefeated FSU and is on a 26-game win streak.”

Jimbo! Jimbo, whose recruiting philosophy has made Florida State University the toast of the New York Times! The toast of the nation! Jimbo, Jimbo, Jimbo, we could’ve had you and because of our evil trustees you fell from our embrace!

There we stood with arms akimbo
Ready to embrace our Jimbo
Then the powers that be
Acted scandalously
And cast us inside Loser’s Limbo

… she didn’t know exactly what big ol’ scandal they were up to now… But their recent hiring of the University of North Carolina’s finest stonewaller, Leslie Strohm, turns out to have something to do with their attempting to keep the results of an audit of the “KFC YUM!” arena (UD is not making this stuff up) out of the hands of the state attorney general.

He has explained to the university that it’s in violation of open records laws, but the university (which no doubt has excellent reasons to stonewall on this) continues to withhold the document. And who better to help them do this than the pride of Chapel Hill, Stonewall Strohm herself?

A sample of local press coverage.

That’s called earning the “U of Smell” nickname. This hiring stinks.

And so now here, with the University under fire for not turning over documents related to an internal audit of potential misdoing (on a number of issues, including The Yum Center), the school has hired someone who is alleged to be adept at covering up wrongdoing.

…. (background on the party school business model here) pushes West Virginia University out of the headlines with its own student drinker in critical condition this morning.

SUNY Albany! Who can be surprised? One of our most notorious sicko campuses, with a French Revolution-worthy history of riot and carnage.

… programs.

As UD explained here, one of America’s most ghastly jockshops, the University of Louisville, has scored quite the td in recruiting one of the architects of Chapel Hill’s undoing.

Here is one of her valedictories as she leaves UNC. It appears in UNC’s newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel:

TO THE EDITOR:

It is good news that Leslie Strohm is leaving her position as UNC Vice Chancellor and General Counsel.

I had strongly recommended to the administrative review committee that her contract not be renewed, following [ex-chancellor] Holden Thorp’s unfortunate resignation. I stated that “she is incompetent, dishonest and unethical.”

Her stonewalling on releasing records about the athletics scandal has only made things worse; with better advice, Holden Thorp might still be here.

Elliot M. Cramer

Professor Emeritus of Psychology

Do keep in mind, in case UD has not said it explicitly enough, that UL’s motive in hiring her is almost certainly her protect-the-dirty-sports-program-at-all-costs M.O.

Can’t keep in mind the details of each and every dirty sports program? Type UNIVERSITY LOUISVILLE into my search engine.

But just to whet your appetite: Here’s a sample.