… tell a high-level Washington DC gathering of university administrators (they were there to talk about the, er, problem of college athletics) that the solution was easy: “Make athletic directors and coaches professors.”

UD, from her seat at the back of the room, silently applauded the man on his genius. “Yes,” she thought. “He has understood that if you wave a wand and declare the athletic staff professors, you destroy any ability the university has to defend itself as anything other than a sports team. There’s no longer an athletic side and an academic side; there’s no longer any protest from professors that too much of the budget goes to athletics; there’s no longer any concept of academic integrity that might be corrupted by athletics. It’s the final triumph of athletics over academics.”

This was years ago – before the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill went this man’s idea one better and somehow allowed an administrator who essentially worked for the athletics department to be a professor (she didn’t teach, but Deborah Crowder acted as a professor in almost every other way), and before Youngstown State University made a tarnished football coach its president. These were positive trends from the genius’s point of view, but then Penn State came along, and a lot of people seem to have decided that a university run in significant ways by its football team was not a good idea. So that was a setback.

You see these power tensions (does athletics run the school? should it?) at a school so academically bad that there shouldn’t be any sports program there at all: Florida A&M. Yet FAMU has so powerful a sports program (and sports ethos – for decades the university looked the other way while its untouchably powerful marching band hazed members to within an inch of their lives — and then last year the university kept looking the other way while the band did succeed in actually killing a member) that the trustees are in the humiliating position of begging the president to fire an athletics director they can’t fire. The AD is brand new; the president is brand new — FAMU has had to turn over a lot of new leaves in the wake of the bad publicity its manslaughtering marching band brought. Continues to bring, as multiple manslaughter trials (one person has already been found guilty) proceed.

And now, while that beleaguered school’s trustees ought to be talking about how to teach the few students who continue to apply to FAMU, they’re spending all their time talking about the sports program. No one goes to the games; the new AD is fucking up left and right; the athletics budget is so huge it’s killing what’s left of the school… and not only that, but…

[Trustee Rufus] Montgomery also was critical of correspondence coming out of the athletics department to the trustees, saying the emails contained numerous spelling and grammar errors.

“It’s ridiculous. It’s embarrassing,” Montgomery said. “Please don’t let this happen again with athletics.”

But how are you going to keep it from happening? The only solution will cost the school more money in its athletics budget. They’re going to have to hire someone to rewrite the correspondence.

FAMU is a really interesting case right now. Like a lot of universities, it has for decades acted on the belief that a big noisy sports program is the front porch of the university. What do you do when the sports program at your school turns out to be the university’s front funeral parlor?

There’s no question that a program that beats people to death puts a damper on things. Fewer students apply. Very few students go to games. You’re losing so much sports revenue that you increase tuition big time, which turns off yet more applicants.

FAMU, UD thinks, could go either way. It could go the way of the genius and athleticize the whole school. Make the new AD the provost; keep pouring money into the football program, etc. Or it could suspend all or part of its athletics program and concentrate on academics.

You and I know which one it’ll be.