Tom Izzo, the $3.4 million a year Michigan State basketball coach, is hurt and angry and confused. Why don’t MSU professors work with him on his players’ academic performance?

— After being in constant contact with professors in his early years at Michigan State as an assistant, Izzo said he now can’t initiate conversations with professors about his players’ academic performance.

“If I see them on the street or at the grocery store, otherwise I’m afraid to,” Izzo said. “That sounds a little ridiculous and a little venom to it, but I’m telling you the truth. I do not like the way we’ve done it, personally.”

The reason for the separation between coaches and professors is that administrators fear coaches will apply pressure to make their players eligible. Izzo said that fear is unfounded.

“I just can’t see myself doing it, strong-arming a prof, number one, or a prof taking my strong-arm number two. I just don’t understand that,” Izzo said.

One of the reasons Izzo is confused is that there’s really no difference between him and any other MSU professor:

“I am an educator, my degree’s in education,” Izzo said. “And so that bothers me that we do not get the opportunity, because I’m a professor in my own right too, I’m a teacher in my own right too.”

Why then when an MSU professor sees Izzo does she skadizzo? Why won’t she, like the Air Force Academy professors we’ve been reading about lately, “hook up” with him?

[T]he Department of Management, which teaches management courses, would “hook-up” athletes – slang for giving athletes advantages in class.

Why won’t professors at MSU play ball?

Well, Tom, let’s consider.

I know it’s petty of her, but Professor I Don’t Brake for Izzo has trouble seeing you as another faculty member. It’s not about snobbery, Tom; it’s about the disparity between your salaries. Talk about income inequality! She can’t help wondering, while you’re bending her ear at the Kroger, why one of the teachers at her school earns fifteen trillion or so more than she does… Than anyone she knows or ever has known or ever will know does… It makes her nervous around him. He must be very important.

And that’s Point Two, Tom. To you, it’s a simple neighborly chat at the grocery; to her, it’s a command performance with the actual president of the university. The actual governor of the state! She knows your salary mops the floor with the titular president’s salary, and with the governor’s salary. She knows that’s because few people on campus – and certainly in the state – give a shit about anything but sports. It’s all there in the numbers. Why should she risk everything in talking to someone of your stature and power? She’d feel compelled to do anything you asked her with a student – pretty much anything at all – because of your state-wide, not just university-wide, influence. (Do you have the highest public salary in the state? She’s sure you’re way up there…)

Okay, and here’s another reason you’re unpopular with faculty, Tom. Every morning professors at your school get up and read about really sickening and endless and humiliating athletics scandals at Penn State and Chapel Hill and the Air Force Academy and all. It’s not so much that your faculty is immediately afraid of the same thing happening at MSU; rather there’s a basic continuous disgust that’s been generated by all of the stories. You are closely associated with the world (university and professional) generating the disgust, and I’m sorry but that makes you kind of gross to be around. It’s not your fault! UD understands. But it’s your world. UD recommends you send a scout out before you enter public spaces – someone to issue trigger warnings so that people liable to experience the disgust/evasion response can exit the area.