… to reveal all the petty inept mini-scandalous acts that may accompany anything bureaucracies do.
This is the real reason big scandals tend to grow, tend to be so difficult to tamp down. Bureaucracies are hydra-headed.
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Just as plagiarism scandals break out with one instance of copying, but almost always, on examination, yield tons of other instances of copying (they also, typically, yield related forms of bad behavior on the part of the plagiarist), so any given big-time athletics scandal on an American university campus will almost certainly – having drawn public and press scrutiny – bring to light routine subsidiary idiocies.
When the shit hits the fan in this big way, you can count on some big name on campus blaming journalists for it all — but of course this move (especially if made by someone in part responsible for the debacle) — simply becomes another hydra-head.
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And so it is in rattled rutted Rutgers, stuck in the deepening slough of its own despond. It started with an outrageously abusive coach, moved briskly to negligent administrators, and now has positively zoomed onward to useless, expensive search firms (the national scandal of often useless, always expensive search firms is what I mean by hydra-heads that lurk in almost all bureaucracies); an also-scandalous replacement appointment; a hectoring professor on a university committee.
UD‘s point is that all of these microbursts are routine aspects of any university. All universities have fanatic ideologues. All have presidents who don’t wanna know from sicko athletics. Almost all are robbed blind by search firms.
It’s only when the big scandal hits that all of these routine scandals come bursting out.
Alors, if you want to avoid the hydra-head deal, avoid the big scandal, right?
Should have thought of that before you spent all of your students’ money on that big ol’ dirty ol’ sports program.
June 12th, 2013 at 6:39AM
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