… advertises his wares from Canada.

[Luis-Andres Guimont-Mota, an award-winning football player for McGill University,] was arrested Wednesday afternoon and will be arraigned Thursday on charges of assaulting his girlfriend, theft and uttering threats… He pleaded guilty last February to an assault charge after he and two accomplices beat up a young man outside a Quebec City bar in May 2010.

A career assaulter! Expect a bidding war here soon.

The University of Michigan: Cheesy.

… that’s doing the place in. So what if their athletic director (who came in to fix what their sadist-on-wheels basketball coach did to the school’s rep – it became, among other things, a notorious Saturday Night Live joke – and then turned out to have her own apparently sadistic past), so what if she told her staff to reach out and touch people in the community, but “not in a Jerry Sandusky-type way.”

In itself, this remark is nothing. But in context, it’s just this week’s shabby Rutgers Thing, part of a narrative involving a school giving all of its money to athletics, run by a ridiculously greedy new president, fronted by hilariously obscene fans, coached by cretins…

“[Heisman voters] gave him the benefit of the doubt last season when he was accused of — but not charged with — rape. It’s unlikely that they will give him the same leeway after first being caught stealing and, now, after shouting obscenities into a microphone.”

FSU: It’s all good. Only way to make it better is to dispense with what’s left of the pretense of academics altogether.

And dammit! Let them have their chiropractic school! Somebody’s gotta bind up all them wounds.

…but many of our universities.

We idolize players of a game that champions aggression and violence. Their [way of life is] dependent on their ability to run fast, throw far and hit very hard. They are so dependent on this lifestyle that [several of them] no longer have the ability to control the aggression for which they are revered.

Lots of professional sports are scummy and are dominated by front and back office scumsters (Lance Armstrong dominated cycling for decades, Zygi Wilf continues to own the Vikings, etc.) and UD finds this unsurprising.

Yet everyone is unsettled by the particular case of football.

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Almost all cultures enjoy violent spectacles; America’s a notably violent culture; America has immense wealth to use toward refining and enlarging the spectacles.

It does seem, however, that even Americans have some breadth and scope of violence limits. Football’s unapologetic violence – highly financially rewarded violence – is getting so out of hand that people are beginning to boycott games, broadcasts, and sponsors.

None of this should surprise. People have a gag reflex, and football is making more and more people gag.

What should surprise people – and UD has no idea why it doesn’t – is the fact that this same culture of make-me-puke violence has come to dominate quite a number of our most high-profile universities.

Universities! Think of what they are! And think about what – to use one example – the University of Nebraska actually is! This is one of many universities that fought hard to recruit (although his story broke not at all long ago, you’ve already probably forgotten about this guy – he’s been overwhelmed by subsequent football violence stories) Richie Incognito, a notorious head case long before he applied to college. UN not only didn’t care – it debased itself in every imaginable way to get him.

A touch of collateral damage on campus and in town? Who gives a shit about our students’ welfare?

And UN professors? Where were the professors?

One of them, recently hired, describes the academic culture:

“Would you like seasons tickets for the faculty cheering section in the football stadium?” [the department secretary] asked.

“No thank you,” I said, effectively ending my social life at the University of Nebraska. I didn’t realize it wasn’t a question but an imperative. Faculty members were expected to wear sweaters with the school colors and hold up colored pieces of cardboard to spell out, in giant letters, eternal verities like: “Hold That Line!”

Universities wonder why on game day their student sections are emptying out… Why students either don’t show up at all, or trail in drunk after awhile, try to focus their eyes on the game a bit, and then trail out well before the game is over. Expensive experts have been called in to reverse the situation, and they’ve told universities to sell liquor in the stadium, to provide wifi, to offer money bribes, etc. But universities should look at professional football. Professional football is making a lot of people sick, and it ain’t got nothin’ to do with wifi. And then universities should look at universities. Even the deadest dead head who attends university has a rough sense of the difference between a university and the mass culture outside of the university. It’s time universities themselves got a sense of this too.

… often exhibit spectacular sleaze synergy.

Take assistant-coach-assaulting Tommy Tuberville, late of pain slut Texas Tech, now bringing his expensive brand of physical violence (plus Ponzi schemes!) to University of Cincinnati football. When this person has to deal with violent players on the Cincinnati team… Well, who’s gonna make the … Shall we call it the Roger Goodell sermon? About how violence is bad bad bad and we have really high standards of personal conduct here…

There’s nobody to make the sermon but the coach, and at Cincinnati the coach is a dumbfuck who smacks his staff on camera… So when gunplay breaks out among team members and some of them try to run away from the police, etc., etc., there’s stinky ol’ Tuberville instructing America on moral purity…

“This kind of behavior is not acceptable and not indicative of the UC football program,” Tuberville said. “Moving forward, we will continue to educate our players on making good decisions and being great representatives of the University.”

Amen Brother Tommy. Tell us how we can be more like you.

… has some great comments about university football in this News Hour interview:

… [I]f people begin to say that football is the new cigarettes, and you’re starting to hear that, if people begin to think that football isn’t just tax subsidies — the governor of Minnesota says he’s embarrassed by the Vikings’ treatment of Adrian Peterson…

What you should really be embarrassed about [is the] half-a-billion dollars of taxpayers’ money that the governor of Minnesota gave to the Wilf brothers to build the stadium in which they will keep all of the profits. If people become more aware of those issues, if football becomes perceived as a woman’s issue — nobody saw that coming — and especially if football — people turn their attention to the fact that the vast majority of football is played at the youth and high school level by people who legally are children, that’s where the health harm of football is done.

If public high schools begin to drop out of playing football — and there is some indication they will — that over a period of years could change the NFL’s economics very radically.

… I call [football] the king of sports because it expresses what we are as a nation. It’s too loud, it’s too crazy, it’s too violent…

But when you add the sociological impact, the distorting effect that it has on high school education, mainly for boys, for a few girls, but mainly for boys, the distorting effect that it has, … that NCAA football has at big public universities, and then add in that the public subsidizes the production of NFL profit — roughly a billion dollars a year goes to subsidize the construction and operation of NFL stadiums — where almost all the revenue generated is kept by the super rich, you have these sociological impacts…

America’s public universities: Violence, sleaze, and greed, or non-violence, class, and restraint?

No contest.

… as the great old hymn has it; and when it comes to tracing the glorious careers of America’s highest-profile university students – like the University of Oklahoma’s Adrian Peterson – the toting can get complicated.

Because once these lionized grads (well, not grads; almost all of them, like Peterson, leave school before graduating) hit the professional leagues, they run into people like Yeshiva University trustee and Vikings owner Zygi Wilf, and that’s where the subtle and complex synergy that is the NFL gets going:

“[Wilf himself, who allowed Peterson to stay on the team until public pressure forced him to cut him,] was just found] guilty of fraud, breach of fiduciary duty, breach of contract, rackeetering[,] and this is the man who made the decision with all of this [domestic violence] on Adrian Peterson’s record to bring back his running back.”

So Yeshiva University’s finest meets Oklahoma’s finest and sparks fly for the Vikings! Racketeer plus accused serial child beater equals the best Monday Night Football money can buy!

There. That math wasn’t so hard after all.

This article, about impoverished University of New Mexico having just upped its coach’s already amazing compensation by $200,000, frets about a university well on its way to being about nothing but basketball.

But why fret? Honesty is the best policy. Like Nevada, New Mexico is one of our most brainless states, and UD has never picked up the slightest tremor of anyone there feeling anything but content about this.

And listen to the timid representative of UNM’s faculty senate:

“Our faculty also – and one might suggest, preeminently – contribute to the value of a UNM degree.”

UD appreciates her suggestion, but it’s obvious that the basketball team preeminently contributes to the value (such as it is) of a UNM degree.

I have spoken with and apologized to the Penn State athletic director Sandy Barbour and I would like to apologize equally to the Penn State University fans, as well as Rutgers fans that were subjected to this classless display that does not represent the ethos of our university, athletic department or fan base.

Didn’t Marx predict that the first classless society would occur at Rutgers University?

But hey. We all knew that.

And it would be the University of Miami, a comprehensively filthy athletics program. (Put University and Miami in my search engine if you dare.) Of course the dude in question is just your average majorly fucked up nineteen year old male (the article I link to doesn’t even specify the UM drug test he failed), but the entire media apparatus of the United States of America is currently trained on the University of Miami because… Well, they don’t call football the front porch of the university for nothing.

Meanwhile, feast your eyes on the latest I love it but I can’t watch it anymore football fan confession. (Here’s another. UD thanks Dirk for sending the link to it.)

Despite the pull football exerted on [Steven] Almond, a lifelong Oakland Raiders fan, he decided that he couldn’t watch it anymore because of its seamier side: its violence, misogyny and the corrupting influence of big money.

“It’s complicated,” Almond said. “But for me, the darkness was enough to realize that I didn’t want to be a sponsor anymore.”

Darkness? Them front porch lights are shining brighter and brighter.

So UD‘s nodding off to yet another article about the beyond-belief-lucrative degeneracy of American football, when she lit on the sentence in this post’s headline. Which reminded her of one of her blog’s most consistent themes: The professionalization of revenue sports at our universities has put more and more of our students at risk from the dangerously violent players universities routinely recruit. Nebraska got to deal with Richie Incognito, about whom it still boasts; and of course the lovely University of Florida program got Hernandez:

Since Hernandez’s arrest for first-degree murder, [then Florida coach Urban] Meyer has been under heavy scrutiny for allegedly allowing Hernandez to engage in inappropriate acts while a member of the Gators football program. Gainesville Police reports indicate Hernandez was questioned in a shooting investigation in 2007 where a witness described a suspect meeting his general description. Hernandez was also reportedly involved in a 2007 bar brawl where he broke a bouncer’s eardrum, and allegedly failed multiple drug tests. A Sporting News report indicated that Meyer shielded the press from learning of one drug-related suspension by having Hernandez wear a walking boot and fake an injury.

Here’s UD‘s take on the highly compensated monsters of professional American football: Americans love the monsters’ violence, on and off the field. The world’s most violent sport is by far this country’s most popular. And we’re making our players more violent by the day. Okay.

But college. You know? College? Colleges are importing pumped up nutbags on their way to the NFL.

The American university president makes $400,000 a year intoning about the sacred duty to keep our students safe; his football coach makes four million dollars a year doing everything but going down on Richie and Aaron to get them to come to campus.

[T]here are no grounds for the sweeping pronouncements about the virtues of non-Ivy students (“more interesting, more curious, more open, and far less entitled and competitive”) that [William] Deresiewicz prestidigitates out of thin air. It’s these schools, after all, that are famous for their jocks, stoners, Bluto Blutarskys, gut-course-hunters, term-paper-downloaders, and majors in such intellectually challenging fields as communications, marketing, and sports management.

Of course, he’s talking about professional football players. You don’t see this in our colleges.

You have to understand how much that shut-out cost EMU. To do that, you have to revisit the following University Diaries posts:

1. The post pointing out that “virtually no one shows up to watch” games which cost EMU millions to put on.

2. The post pointing out that

NCAA rules stipulate a school must average 15,000 fans per home football game to remain in Division I. Eastern Michigan, which averaged 6,401 fans per home game in 2010, uses $150,000 from a distribution contract with Pepsi to purchase tickets from itself at a rate of $3 apiece to remain NCAA compliant.

3. The post quoting an EMU finance professor saying

“We’re down to 57 percent regular faculty, and the other 43 percent are lecturers and part time. Searches are being held back, and I’m unhappy that they spend so much money on athletics and not academics. It’s important that we have full time faculty…Over the last few years, the budget for academics was cut by four million dollars. They need new programming. They redid the football stadium before they redid the academic buildings. … The football coach makes more than the president.”

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UD calls football the freak show that ate the American university.

At EMU, you can actually watch the process of digestion.