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‘What did you expect? Louisville’s basketball program, which was the highest-profile team referred to in the criminal complaint, was ranked as the highest-valued college basketball program in the nation last year with a valuation of $45.4 million. You surely expected some of that money would make its way to the players who actually do the work, whether legally or illegally?’

[If you didn’t expect this outcome, you’re like people who are still] stunned to learn that a game as inherently violent as football would lead to life-altering issues among players from repeated concussions and blows to the head.

Far worse, you’re like Louisville’s superscummy basketball coach, who says he’s “completely shocked” by the shocking corruption in university basketball. As completely shocked as he was by the whorehouse being run in a dorm lived in by basketball players and visited by recruits and their families.

******************

So here’s UD‘s take. American university students are being trained to be Italians. Italians are living the good life and they don’t give a rat’s ass that their entire world is howlingly corrupt. In a New Yorker article about the sordid Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair, Adam Gopnik noted French anxiety about

what many in Paris see as the “Italianization” of French life — the descent into what might become an unseemly round of Berlusconian squalor …

The University of Louisville is the avant-garde: Can you grow a university whose students heartily endorse, and fork all their tuition money over to, Rick Berlusconi Strauss-Kahn Pitino? His sextortion, his whores for sixteen year old recruits and their fathers, his stuffed envelopes for sports agents in Las Vegas hotel rooms? Can you guarantee a university whose students will rush to the bookstore and buy out Pitino’s many books about how to be ethical?

The entire financial foundation of the University of Louisville rests on a bet that there’s no bottom – that students and alumni will be able — FOREVER — to look at a guy who could give Jerry Sandusky a run for his money and say WE LOVE YOU RICK. TELL US HOW MUCH MORE YOU WANT US TO COUGH UP FOR YOUR SALARY.

It’s a solid bet. This is Kentucky, after all.

Margaret Soltan, September 27, 2017 5:24AM
Posted in: sport

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3 Responses to “‘What did you expect? Louisville’s basketball program, which was the highest-profile team referred to in the criminal complaint, was ranked as the highest-valued college basketball program in the nation last year with a valuation of $45.4 million. You surely expected some of that money would make its way to the players who actually do the work, whether legally or illegally?’”

  1. theprofessor Says:
    September 27th, 2017 at 7:53AM

    For vintage sleaze, we might also look at Auburn, where none other than our old friend, Bruce Pearl, is in charge.

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:
    September 27th, 2017 at 8:08AM

    tp: Some observers say he’ll lose his job now.

  3. charlie Says:
    September 27th, 2017 at 10:16AM

    Earlier this year, the U of Oregon announced they were laying off 75 professors. UOwe also stated they had collected a record $695 million in donations, albeit $500 million came from Uncle Phil Knight. It seems that academic quality doesn’t play a role in how people decide to give to a university.

    Keep in mind the bulk of college teaching falls onto the slumped shoulders of poorly paid adjuncts, something they have in common with uni athletes. But it seems most students and alumni could care less. As long as diversions are in place and lectures can be ignored, they’re down right as happy as pigs in bilge…

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UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
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George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
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Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
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