… swaggers through the squalor of capitalism and ends up smelling like a rose.

Il tutor di tutti tutori breaks through the whole pathetic Mary Willingham I’m here to teach them something bit into the light of nasty brutish short. Yes, he helped squads of university athletes cheat, and he couldn’t be happier.

They liked that I swore a lot and didn’t give a fuck. Eventually, I became the go-to tutor for jocks… And helping [them] cheat the system didn’t seem any more unethical than forcing some kid to learn about how great capitalism is… [The] argument that the athletes I helped cheat were taking advantage of public tax dollars is a moot point when you consider how much [their] coaches are paid… Our education system is just one giant hustle — and if you ain’t hustling, you’re getting hustled… I don’t see a problem with student athletes cheating. As far as I can tell, that’s the American way.

There are many possible responses to endemic cheating among our big time university sports programs. There’s indifference, anger, amusement, protest rallies, petitions, withholding of student fees, going to the press with what you know, writing about what you know, etc. Adding to the corruption because The World is Shit is pretty much the worst possible response.

… as she read (and listened to) this visiting law professor at way-past-hopeless West Virginia University complain about the school spending $75 million to upgrade its football stadium. As another WVU professor explains:

[T]he party school is [now] a business, and alcohol is part of the business model. Schools lure students to attend their schools with the promise of sports, other leisure activities and overall fun. Part of this fun, whether schools like it or not, is drinking. Thus, even as university officials want to keep students safe, they also need to keep their consumers happy. This means letting the alcohol industry do what it does best – sell liquor.

The important part of that statement is the beginning: In America today, the party school is a business, and WVU is America’s number one party school.

Anyone trying to introduce changes to that business model is excuse me but kind of a fool.

The only thing that changes this business model is un p’tit peu too much rape and pillage, and then things only change for as long as it takes to clean up the lawsuits and probations and all. Then it starts up again.

So who is this Michael Blumenthal who gets on the local airwaves and says

I have to admit that I hold to the now antiquated belief that universities are for education, not sports; that the most important people on a university campus are the students, not the football players, and that the main purpose of large amounts of spare change is to do things for those who need it most, and have it least.

He can’t be the poet Michael Blumenthal, because he’s a poet and not a law professor…

OTOH, the poet Blumenthal is also notorious — for having written another futile protest, this one against the love me do ethos of many creative writing programs. In a 2001 letter to his students at Santa Clara University (he was there for a visiting gig), he wrote that often their writing instructors simply flattered them in order to get good course evaluations:

You have been neither loved nor nurtured. You have, rather, been lied to and betrayed. Though the mother’s milk that flows from such breasts may temporarily satisfy your ravenous appetites for praise (and its donors’ hunger for tenure), it is not, I assure you, a very nourishing brew. You have been told that the not good is good, that the unworthy is the worthy.

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

… But yes! Turns out the WVU Blumenthal is the Santa Clara Blumenthal. This restless, interdisciplinary man has taught all over the world and has lately landed in one of the weirdest campuses in America, a truly anti-intellectual funhouse.

UD admires Blumenthal’s willingness to open himself to hostility, incomprehension, and indifference; but surely he knows no one’s listening.

… at Chapel Hill.

It’s true that investigations require withholding facts and that federal privacy laws limit what can be said about student records. It’s also true that the university system president and the UNC-CH chancellor can’t respond to every allegation. Folt and Ross are following the advice of university lawyers. But when the university is hit by allegations as strong and high-profile as those coming from McCants, leaders can’t take refuge behind lawyers and investigators.

This is when leaders step forward, address the public and answer questions. That imperative is particularly strong for leaders of a public university who must uphold the public trust with more than constrained silence and appeals for patience.

It makes a lot of noise when accusations of sexual assault come out of the Ivy League, especially when the accused are football players. The Brown University story is rapidly getting national coverage.

On the other hand, it took newspapers ages to notice what was going on at the University of Montana, where things have gotten so bad that “UM officials concede the controversy [over reported incidents and the university’s response to them] contributed to the school’s enrollment drop.” That drop in enrollment – a very big drop – has continued since the story began to break in 2012. It doesn’t help that UM is featured in the opening paragraphs of a Time article about campus rape.

Life of the mind, United States of America, 2014.

Allow UD to speak for university professors in saying how thrilled we are — after Eric Cantor’s loss to a professor, which sets up a congressional contest in Virginia between a professor and another professor — that you like us!

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

Dig: “[T]he House majority leader may have lost his seat because he made a mistake in presuming that Americans hate college professors more than professional politicians.”

!!!!!!!!!

Brat’s syllabus for “The Ends of Economic Justice” lists God as the author of the Bible. (I’ll wager God’s not receiving royalties.) Sales aren’t everything though. Sadly, like Plato and Aristotle, the omnipotent deity is merely suggested reading; the required textbook is by none other than Brat himself. Well, it is an economics class.

… court time is for everybody!

At Chapel Hill, whether you’re a celebrated, veteran professor, or a just-minted freshman, whether you’re in court for criminal fraud or felony larceny, you’re part of the special family of cheaters, liars, and thieves that is the public face of UNC.

Roger Noll, a retired Stanford economist, touches on one of the most notorious aspects of university sports during his testimony at the O’Bannon trial. Noll calls it inefficient substitution.

UD calls it Hail Saban Prince of Darkness.

The coach of a Chicago public high school whose basketball team won and then forfeited the city championship asks, reasonably enough, why his particular school should have to take the fall for the failure of the entire Chicago public school system to keep player eligibility records.

[T]he school district is missing most of the paperwork required to show team and player eligibility, documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request show. The district ignored initial requests for the data and later released it.

UD‘s favorite part of this story is the location chosen for the championship game: Chicago State University (scroll down).

Talk about a cosmic convergence!

[Duet, O’Bannon/Emmert.]

O’Bannon:

“Was I really happy there
With the basketball I played?
Pretending to attend UCLA.

Searching but not finding
Understanding anywhere
I’m lost in a masquerade.”

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

Emmert:

“I’m afraid to say we’re just too far away.
You don’t seem to understand the NCAA.

We tried to talk it over but my Porsche got in the way.
We’re lost inside this legal game we play.

Thoughts of losing $1.67 million
Appear each time I see your eyes.

No matter how hard I try
To understand your reasons why
You know I can’t let
You take my private jet.”

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

O’Bannon, Emmert:

Yeah, we’re lost in a masquerade…
… a masquerade… (fade out)

94% sports subsidy at a school with just about the lowest graduation rate in the country. Only in America.

And, if you can stand it, more posts on Chicago State University (scroll down).

… is a time-honored effect of big-time sports recruiting on the university level, of course… You’re after the most aggressive person you can find, and you don’t much care whether he’s aggressive off the field as well as on…

I mean, University of Oregon, naturally… And naturally an occasional victim will write to the campus newspaper…

I am angry with the culture that appears to exist in our athletic department that prioritizes winning over safety of our students. I cannot fathom how our basketball coach recruited someone who was in the middle of a suspension for another sexual assault to come to Eugene.

But this woman – who was allegedly raped by Oregon basketball players – needs to understand that the occasionally raped or killed university student is pretty much the cost of doing business if you want to win games. With time, she can perhaps be made to see that she has, in her own way, made a huge contribution to her school’s winning efforts…

But it takes a football-crazed state like Texas to bring the recruiting of perilously violent people to high school.

The Dallas Independent School District is run by people who illegally (of course – the local rags mention this part as scandalous, but really…) recruit violent people to their secondary schools… And one of these illegally recruited guys killed another illegally recruited guy.

What’s especially impressive about this story is that it took the murder of a teenager by another teenager to spark the investigation that led to the oh so shocking revelation about not just the illegal recruiting but all sorts of other violations among top ISD people.

UD would call the whole thing depraved beyond belief if it weren’t Texas, where what you call it is business as usual. If a few kids have to lay down their lives for football, big deal.

[Jonathan] Turner led the Madison Trojans to the 2013 and 2014 Class 3A state championships and was selected to the all-tournament team this year. But while his classmates were celebrating the last day of the school year on Friday, he was in the Dallas County jail, where he’s being held in lieu of $250,000 bond. He’s accused of killing [Troy] Causey during a fight over a video game.

After the killing, Causey’s mother, Tammy Simpson, said that Burley improperly recruited her son while he was at a residential facility for young offenders on an assault charge. [An IDS administrator] arranged for Causey to attend [a local school] even though he lived in Richardson ISD, she said.

The investigation found that Causey and Turner were not eligible to play for those teams, sources said.

… (its real name is Personal Wellness, but the clever students call it Hellness), is the sort of school that just… you know… does things, and chumps – i.e. students – can take it or leave it. Students will learn personal hygiene in their personal hell class whether they like it or not; and students will keep getting hit with increased athletics fees whether they vote for them or not. YOU VILL PRACTICE PERSONAL WELLNESS. YOU VILL HAVE FUN. VEE HAFF WAYS OF MAKING YOU GO TO GAMES.

If you expect anyone in a position of authority at the university to answer your calls about this, let alone talk to you, forget it.

This last year, UNI President William Ruud approved an additional $25 to the Student Services Fee for athletics without the recommendation of the Student Service Fee Committee. The student body also recommended against the additional fee, according to a survey that University Relations has not released despite multiple requests… Why did Ruud approve the $25 even though students didn’t want it?

… What is the point of having a survey and a committee if the opinions of them are not acted upon and the final decision is not explained?

YOU VILL NOW SHUT UP PLEASE.

… of a sham.

In the wake of the latest details about the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Scathing Online Schoolmarm can’t hold back her excitement. Rampant pointless pretentious bloviating – her favorite kind of writing!

The charges against [Coach Roy] Williams will be difficult to prove conclusively. Despite that, it’s now time for the NCAA to send an investigative team to UNC and find out what happened. Otherwise it’s willful ignorance, a sham of an enforcement process for a sham of a student-athlete dynamic. The entire system may be ridiculous. Some rules may be laughable. But it’s much more difficult to be dismissive or cynical about academic fraud — universities do exist to educate — and this is the sort of corruption that poisons the whole idea. If the NCAA won’t act on that, why bother acting on anything?

WAY big shocker. Maybe I’m reading this wrong. You’re telling me basketball players – not just football players – at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill took bullshit classes? I mean, football, okay. But basketball? What’s next? Badminton?

Who knows why Rashad McCants suddenly felt the need to confess. Maybe he’s spent the last nine years trying to figure out how you can make Dean’s List at Chapel Hill by not attending any classes.

But see this is the thing – in the annals of crime – this is the thing that often trips people up. If his professors had simply passed McCants through with the B grade that’s considered … plausible… for athletes taking bogus courses, all would probably have been fine. But they made a mistake. They got a little cocky. They got pleasantly shitfaced together one night – his professors, his tutors, his coaches – and began giggling about how I mean you know long as it’s all made up why don’t we make him a goddamn Dean’s List student? And ever since then it’s been rankling McCants… he feels a little put-upon… because it’s one thing to pass a guy through, and another to, uh, sport with him like that…

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

You can just hear the conversation in the president’s office this morning at UNC:

Where’s that guy who ruined Mary Willingham’s life? Get him on the phone!

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

UD thanks Ralph for sending her this article, which includes a soon-to-be-famous statement from McCants:

“I thought it was a part of the college experience, just like watching it on a movie from ‘He Got Game’ or ‘Blue Chips… [W]hen you get to college, you don’t go to class, you don’t do nothing, you just show up and play. That’s exactly how it was, you know, and I think that was the tradition of college basketball, or college, period, any sport. You’re not there to get an education, though they tell you that… You’re there to make revenue for the college. You’re there to put fans in the seats. You’re there to bring prestige to the university by winning games.”