Yawn. Donnan not high profile enough? Try Tommy Tuberville. Rich Rodriguez. Just one of many ways in which big-time sports bring good things to the American university.

… and at the University of Oregon… well… let’s see what it looks like on that ol’ gilded entry at the moment:

The mess in Eugene continues to dogpile …

The mess in Eugene? The mess in Eugene? What shit’s piling up on that shiny front porch?

And I mean shiny. The University of Nike, with a brand new $78 million football palace complete with slogans like EAT YOUR ENEMIES on every wall! It was all looking so good, so front porchy, and now… Has the University of Oregon crapped its pants?

Well, as is the case at most big-time sports factories (what’s that smell behind the fine old lacebark elms of Chapel Hill?), UO recruits student athletes in a rather cavalier fashion. Among the three basketball players who seem to have gang raped a woman the other night is a player thrown out of his last college because of a suspected rape; but the UO basketball coach called that rape investigation “not of a serious nature” and recruited the guy, and now – heck – he’s part of the purported rape threesome… Career rapist? Well, when the world makes it easy for you…

As always, the job of stating the absolutely precise opposite of the truth goes to this distinguished university’s president:

[T]he university takes allegations of misconduct very seriously.

If that were true, you wouldn’t recruit the people you do. You take allegations of physical prowess seriously.

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UD thanks a reader.

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PS: Couldn’t be better timed, too, what with the federal government looking into sexual assaults on university campuses and all…

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Update: That old front porch again. The New York Times, opening paragraph:

The University of Oregon has come under intense scrutiny this week after three men’s basketball players — including one who transferred from Providence after being accused of sexual assault there — were investigated by the Eugene police in connection with rape allegations by an Oregon student.

… than a morally sick school just sitting there getting sicker and sicker.

Each line of this bland account of FAMU’s violent, deficit-ridden sports program should be read carefully. Note first that the reporter fails to mention the murderous FAMU band, a number of whose members will go to jail for hazing manslaughter.

While wondering why

Interim athletic director Michael Smith … detailed a deficit of $4.2 million in 2008 growing to a $7.8 million accumulated loss through this year.

the Tallahassee Democrat reporter doesn’t ask whether people might be so disgusted to be associated with a sick sports program that they won’t go to their games. He simply quotes the budget guy at FAMU saying the deficit must be because they’re losing games or something… Then he quotes some trustees.

Trustees noted that the vast majority of college athletics programs operate in the red…

Lala everybody’s doing it. Of course, at FAMU, the red is literal… Profusely flowing in fact…

It continues. Here’s one of the trustees, touting athletics less than three years after FAMU marching band hazers beat a fellow student to death.

“Athletics do a lot more for your school than just athletics. It creates an environment that energizes the community,” he said.

And here’s the new president:

“Athletics, I agree, is an integral part of an education. Its impact on the economic growth and economic development in this town and in Florida is extremely important,” she said. “We have to understand the level of commitment the institution has to athletics.”

You can’t have an education without sports, you see. And after all our sports program helps local businesses.

Delusional University of North Carolina kicks out the only truth-teller on campus. Big sigh of relief from the president on down. Who cares if the A section of the New York Times notes how

In April 2013, [Mary Willingham] received an integrity award from the Drake Group, which advocates for reform in college athletics. Two months later, she received her first negative performance review and was relocated to a basement office where she was given primarily clerical duties.

Big deal. Liberal media elites. If they understood the money at stake in our sports program, they’d shut their trap. When it becomes too expensive to continue to be a university, you shut down, hire Julius Nyang’oro, and fire Mary Willingham. Simple calculation, apparently over the heads of the folks at the New York Times.

As for Willingham’s desire (see this post’s title) that professors take back their universities… Well, I’ll just refer you – yet again – to this.

The athletic director draws inspiration from the fact that his team played so well after having been arrested.

Half the Eastern New Mexico State University baseball team was arrested (fight, campus parking lot) and then, having been bonded out of jail, they played a winning game that same day.

“A lot of teams in that situation where they saw several of their players get arrested two hours previously could have folded right there at that point,” said [Jeff] Geiser.

How many teams can come back right away from mass arrest to play a winning game? Not many, baby. But our guys were totally not fazed.

East Tennessee State football signee Shawn Prevo has been arrested on a charge of aggravated domestic assault.

… Prevo went into his 19-year-old brother’s room Friday and asked for a cigarette. According to police, when Prevo was told to leave, he grabbed his brother by the throat, slammed him on the bed and struck him in the chest and stomach with a closed fist.

Thrilling on and off the field.

And he hasn’t even taken the field yet.

Florida State University. You stay classy.

… to understand!

UD tries to understand. She sees, for instance, that the University of Idaho is being punished because its big-time athletes have failed to meet even the teeny weeny weeny weeny academic standards set by the NCAA.

So far she has no trouble understanding. You recruit a bunch of unpaid playing-field laborers, if you will, and you do your best to make them happy and to overlook their mischief and all… And the last thing you care about, given how much cash is riding on their bodies, is their minds. We all understand this. We don’t need to study the remarkable academic rise and fall of University of North Carolina professor Julius Nyang’oro to understand it. It is structural to the enterprise.

What UD‘s having trouble understanding is the content of UI’s (losing) appeal of the NCAA decision.

The NCAA requires extraordinary mitigating circumstances in order to grant a waiver for penalties assessed for low APR scores.

The University of Idaho’s athletics department included the following extraordinary mitigating circumstances in its appeal:

Upheaval among the intercollegiate athletic conferences
A loss of almost $1 million in revenue – the majority from television and conference revenue
Significant behavioral issues within the football program

“I thought we made a compelling case regarding the extraordinary circumstances that began in June 2010,” said (Athletic Director Rob) Spear. “At the end of the day, we accept the penalties and have used this adversity to make our athletic program stronger.”

So help UD out here. The reason you should waive our penalties is that not only was our football team out of control academically, it was out of control behaviorally. You should show mercy because our very expensive athletics program really, really lacked institutional control. We recruited questionable people who unsurprisingly produced “significant behavioral issues.” Plus we fucked up and lost a lot of money.

Do these seem to you grounds for an appeal? Presumably UI spent a lot of time and money coming up with their case for appeal. Does that seem to you to have been a reasonable use of time and money? UD‘s trying to understand.

I mean. The University of Texas considers itself a very respectable academic institution, ja? So here’s an article, plus comments on the article, in its campus newspaper.

Perhaps the most important line in the opinion piece is this:

Turner will likely turn pro after one year.

Turner is Myles Turner, a hot basketball prospect. UT’s trying to get him. UT, with the U for university.

Now the author of this opinion piece, a UT student, doesn’t even bother pretending that Turner will do anything academic while he’s at UT. He will play basketball for a season and leave. Indeed, pretty much everyone who writes about Turner agrees with this. So UT, like several other universities, is pissing itself blue at the prospect that this guy will visit campus for a few months, dribble the ball, and leave. This is the most important issue, the most riveting thing, on this American university campus at the moment. Will he or won’t he dribble the ball?

The opinion piece writer argues that Turner would actually be wise to go to another school, because despite what you’ve been told about Texas and sports, the school doesn’t really care much about basketball. The school only really cares about football. There are schools that care more about basketball, and Turner should go to one of those.

Again, note that in his arguments (he has others) against Turner coming to Texas, the student doesn’t say This guy, this Myles Turner, he might get a better education, even if only for a few months, at a better school… Because, you know, UT is a school, and … No. This guy will get nothing that UT or any other school has to offer. Too obvious even to put this down in words.

Now read through the comments on the article from other UT students. Most of the commenters are very angry because the author, Evan Berkowitz, has dissented from the piss yourself blue with excitement position that all true UT people must assume on the question of recruiting Turner. Some say Berkowitz is a faggot Jew who should shut the fuck up. Others seem embarrassed by their fellow students’ anti-semitism.

How to explain any aspect of this to anyone with even a vestigial brain?

… that will almost certainly hurt its sports recruiting.

Iowa freshman basketball player Peter Jok was arrested early Saturday for drunken driving, according to police reports.

Jok, 20, was arrested on a black 2013 moped …

Something’s terribly wrong at Iowa. Jok was supposed to have been arrested driving a 2014 Chevy Tahoe. If word gets around that local dealers aren’t feeding SUVs to recruits, look out.

In Athens, the Olympic Ideal is not just for the Olympics. Scenes from the Greek Cup final:

[The game was] halted when a firecracker was thrown onto the pitch.

Before the match Panathinaikos supporters threw broken plastic seats at riot police on the pitch and flares, firecrackers and other objects were thrown between supporters.

Police used tear gas to bring order and the presidents of both clubs, Giannis Alafouzos of Panathinaikos and Ivan Savvidis of PAOK, pleaded to fans from the stadium’s loudspeakers for calm.

Outside the stadium a police car was destroyed by a firebomb thrown by a motorbike rider.

One coach carrying PAOK supporters was attacked with rocks by Panathinaikos fans causing minor damage to the vehicle.

A large section of Athens Olympic Stadium was left empty to separate the two groups of supporters while a police helicopter kept a watch from above.

… Police … arrested the two owners of a PAOK supporters’ clubhouse in the centre of Athens after confiscating fireworks, iron bars, bottles filled with petrol, knives and baseball bats.

Some 4,000 police officers were deployed to keep the peace in the Greek capital for the match.

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And as for the Platonic Academy:

Photini Tomai, a Wilson Center favorite, and Director of the Service of Diplomatic and Historical Archives of the Hellenic Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is running for the European Parliament. Her background:

Foreign Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos appointed her as the country’s special envoy for Holocaust issues, a decision that withdrawn that June after 40 historians and other figures petitioned the minister over their concerns at the “unethical way” Tomai has run the ministry’s archives.

They said access to the archives involved “a very complicated and lengthy process in which the head of the archive takes part herself, and sometimes intrusively”. They also claimed that the “30-year rule” is not applied in many cases, meaning files from the 1950s remain inaccessible. Nevertheless, Tomai publishes extracts from files otherwise out of bounds to researchers in her Sunday newspaper articles.

“In a time when dozens of civil servants are suspended without judicial or disciplinary convictions, we, the undersigned, believe that if Ms Tomai remains the head of the Diplomatic and Historical Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, especially after her conviction, it will raise major issues in academic ethics and in equal treatment. For the same reason we believe that Ms Tomai could not represent Greece in international organisations, conferences and meetings, jeopardising the prestige of our country.”

But that’s not all, folks!

In an October 2013 appeal court decision that has only recently been published, Photini Tomai, director of the foreign ministry’s archive, was told again that she must pay €20,000 in compensation to two authors after she published a children’s book that they wrote under her own name.

The decision confirmed an earlier ruling by Athens first instance court that Tomai was guilty of copyright infringement. That court ruled that a book entitled 1,2,3 … 11 True Olympian Stories, … was the work of screenwriter Eleni Kefalopoulou and her husband, film director Aris Fotiadis.

The couple told the court that, ahead of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, they came up with an idea to make an animated series on ancient Greek Olympians and sent a script to the national broadcaster ERT and a number of private companies. On the recommendation of friends, they also sent a copy to Tomai, in her position as head of the foreign ministry’s archives.

The authors received no offers and animation was never made. But in 2008, they noticed 1,2,3 … 11 True Olympian Stories in a bookstore and immediately recognised the characters in it as ones they had created. In many instances, they saw that text had been copied verbatim and the court agreed.

Oho no you don’t. If you think the president of the University of New Mexico – one of the scummiest sports schools in the nation (put the last name of its last president – Schmidly – in my search engine) – is going to let you vote on the athletics fee, you’re nuts. He knows you’ll vote against it, and that is not the outcome he and the trustees want. So shut your traps and let the president and his buddies have their money-losing fun. It’s your money, after all; not theirs.

Yes, sports is the university’s front porch, as we’re constantly told by the rascals who run football and basketball on campus; but … well, you know the rhyme:

When she was good,
She was very very good;
But when she was bad
She was horrid.

Looked at with any objectivity at all, of course, big-time university sports is horrid (intellectually and financially corrupting; crime- and riot-generating, university-bankrupting) even when it’s very very good — indeed, big-time university sports generally only gets to be very good (winning championships and tv deals) when it’s very very busy with recruiting scandals, buying out coaches at huge expense, hushing up team crimes, blahblahblah, you know the list. But the actual squalid vileness of the enterprise is usually managed. A dustup here, a dustup there, but the basic look of campus football and basketball is tidy, most of the malfeasance hidden.

The NCAA and the Knight Commission have big yearly meetings during which in a corporate pointless way they natter about the challenges and the issues facing the student-athlete as he aces calculus and kicks field goals during the same afternoon. These two entities – the NCAA and the Knight Commission – play a crucial role in keeping the actual nature of the university athletics endeavor hidden. They both look respectable; both bring knitted brows to the challenges and issues and prospects and promises of the grand endeavor. I think most people realize that these people are entirely empty suits – empty excellent suits – but no one cares. People care about the games, not the brow knitters whose job it is to make the system behind the games look legitimate.

So that’s when it’s good. When it’s good, it’s very very good, with tailgating and car tipping and bonfires and all; but when things go badly, they go really really really badly. Big-time sports is the front porch that keeps on giving, the big ol’ central spotlighted star of your campus, the only thing most people know or will know about your campus. So when one of your coaches fucks little kids in on-campus showers, the whole world gets to see that front porch; and when one of your professors – the highly compensated chair of a department – is running a fake courses racket for the teams, the whole world gets to see that front porch too.

That’s when we get to watch the sport of denialism. We get to watch Penn State trustees say it’s all a government conspiracy. We get to watch the University of North Carolina say it’s only that bitch Willingham plus that bastard Kane.

Children don’t like it when you take away their toys. It makes them very angry and vindictive. They like it even less when you punish them for their misdeeds. When they are bad, they are horrid.

… Give it some money… And watch its president ignore the overwhelming sentiment of its student body and give that money to athletics.

Eastern Kentucky University is in this neighborhood (the article I’m linking to is absolutely terrific, by the way). Its schools need to spend scarce funds on training and education, but the president of EKU wants to spend them on football. EKU students know the president is full of shit.

While the fee has yet to be approved by the Regents the student body continues to debate the hike, most recently represented by a survey. In this survey distributed by the Student Government Association, students overwhelmingly did not support fees for athletics. In fact, more students participated in said survey than voted in the most recent SGA election, showing just how much students care about this issue.

But no! says the president (who, with the board of trustees, will ram this down the students’ throats anyway). Our students can easily spend an extra four hundred dollars tuition on football! I mean look at Western Kentucky! They charge more than that!

Ah, Western Kentucky. One of our favorite subjects here at University Diaries. Feast your eyes.

Yeah – we want what Western Kentucky’s got! If our students are so stupid as to think we should spend that money on their education, they’ll just have to suck it up. After all, says the prez, consider the arguments for soaking our poor students for football:

“I don’t think we can afford to stand still — that’s my concern,” Benson said. “This may be our window of opportunity, and if it closes on us we may have forgone an opportunity that may not come around again.”

Touchdown!

… Funds to begin to make sense of a scandal like Sul Ross University. A terrible school with a graduation rate approaching zero, a school only lately on probation, Sul Ross naturally is all about athletics.

Back in November the entire football coaching staff was fired. Then the president of the university resigned days later.

There’s no there there, at Sul Ross, which opens the door to local bullies and boosters and hangers-on. No one’s saying exactly what happened (maybe everyone on campus is too addled to know), but the local press suggests the latest Sul Ross administration ran away because

There were claims that coaches were physically and verbally abusing players, that athletes were being bribed to incriminate coaches, and that coeds were being pushed to have sex with recruits.

Yadda yadda. Bottom line: When there’s nothing to do and nowhere to go, boys will get up to trouble. And Sul Ross is all about boys.

It’s odd to UD that Sul Ross is about anything. I mean, anything you and I have to pay for.