… UD noted the bad behavior of the University of Michigan’s athletics director.

An old friend of hers on the UM faculty writes:

Hey, Bill Martin is a good guy. He runs a clean athletic program, with relatively high and enforced academic standards. (For example, one of the better players on our football team, which sucks this year, got kicked off for a set of transgressions which included missing classes. More importantly, Martin fired the corrupt and awful basketball coach.) He takes as much pride in the successes of women’s sports as men’s (and devotes resources to them) and in non-football/basketball sports as much anything else (not just hockey and soccer, men’s and women’s, but also the even less traditionally popular ones).

He went through amazing hassles to rebuild the stadium where the incidents took place. He behaved badly when some [people] didn’t recognize him when going into a room that he himself had built in order to schmooze the regents, which is a big, big part of his job (and a real pain; all they really care about is the football team).

I agree that football controls too much of out lives here at Big-10 U (though in marked contrast to, for instance, the University of Minnesota, the athletic department is totally self-supporting), and that Martin acted in a petulant anger. But this is not the story you’re making it into–by a long shot.

There’s actually even more to say about Martin, who is a fascinating character, and a subtle, interesting well-read guy–studied with Gunnar Myrdal when fresh out of college, for example. But the point is, if you’re going to have college athletics at all, you want to have them the way they are here–and Bill Martin gets a lot of credit for keeping it that way.

[Having said all that, let me add that] the presence of big-time sports is a subtly corrupting influence on the university–I mean it’s ridiculous that our political support in the state and our (non-athletic department related) alumni contributions go way up when the football team does well. And of course when I say we’re clean I mean relatively clean: Our basketball team of the 1990s was run by a thoroughly corrupt coach in cahoots with a crooked booster who fed our players bucks on the side which came from a gambling ring in auto plants. The point is that Bill Martin cleaned that up…