Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s chatter captures an important truth about corruption and hypocrisy as they play out at some of our highest-profile big-time sports universities. Everyone knows that universities like Auburn and Clemson are corrupt; but Auburn and Clemson are consistently corrupt; they wear the daily mask of honest hypocrisy. They have a modest, becoming, forthcoming, hypocrisy.
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Think of it this way.
“[A] state like Illinois with a high corruption rate makes a better investment than a state with a moderate corruption rate… The reason is that the return for your bribe is more certain in a highly corrupt environment.”
It turns out that a very corrupt state offers its own kind of transparency.
That’s the kind of transparency I’m talking about. Almost all big-time sports universities are highly corrupt, but only some are transparent about it.
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Or think of it this way: Who do you prefer to represent international banking, Lloyd Blankfein or the Reverend Prebendary Stephen Green? Recall Blankfein’s reliable mask as he testified in front of Congress; compare this to the reverend’s chilly refusal to lower himself to discuss his own lowness… his refusal to accept his lowness.
What I’m trying to say is that the truly contemptible universities are those, like Duke and Chapel Hill, who keep flouncing around like Blanche Du Bois, denying that they’re just as whorish as Clemson and Auburn. Duke’s Beloved Leader – like Rev Green – refuses to discuss his program’s latest scandal. UNC doesn’t want to talk about the likelihood that it’s as corrupt on the graduate level as it is on the undergraduate. (UD thanks Ken, a reader, for this link.) But they owe it to us – the American taxpayers subsidizing their luxury boxes full of drunken louts and their departments of exercise sciences doing the Beloved Leader’s bidding – to be transparently corrupt.
March 3rd, 2015 at 3:41PM
The problem with the Duke incidents is that at present, there is no “there” there as far as the claimed assaults go. A couple of students in an encounter group claim that a BMOC athlete assaulted them, yet go neither to police, nor the Duke Sexual Assault Star Chamber, nor any other body that could actually do anything. Are we supposed to take this seriously? Students talking shit among themselves is not exactly unknown, as is students clamming up when tall tales are exposed.
If I tell my cronies at the donut shop that our CFO, Mr. Malice, sent a drone filled with Round-Up to spray my front lawn last summer and that claim becomes public, does that mean that the Board of Trustees should fire him, even though I am unwilling to make a real complaint against him?
[For the record: Mr. Malice did not send a drone to dump Round-Up on my lawn. It looks that crappy all the time, actually. There are hundreds of reasons that Mr. Malice’s employment should have been terminated long ago, but sabotaging my lawn is not one of them.]
March 3rd, 2015 at 4:01PM
tp: I take your point. My real complaint is the refusal to address it at all on the part of the coach. It’s real enough to have gotten into respectable newspapers, etc. It needs at least some handling.