All fraternities and sororities at West Virginia University were suspended Thursday after an 18-year-old freshman was found unconscious and not breathing inside a fraternity house, just a week after a different fraternity was suspended after 19 pledges got into a street brawl, university officials and police said.
And of course there was the matter of that massive, massively destructive student riot last month. Etc. Etc. Do a “West Virginia University” search on this blog if you have a lot of time and a strong stomach. It’s cute to call a university a “party school,” but at perennial top-ten party school WVU what it really means is huge numbers of permanently pissed, violent students (and, in some cases, pissed coaches) who end up torching Morgantown and fucking up freshmen whose bodies haven’t adjusted to prevailing blood alcohol levels.
Still. It’s interesting to see that even WVU has a tipping point.
*********************
But don’t get too excited. A temporary cease-fire has been negotiated between the two primary factions – the university and the fraternities. Left out of negotiations so far are both the government and citizenry of Morgantown, which will have to be included in any future agreement.
Further, there are very likely to be conflicts within Morgantown, for instance between business interests (large numbers of students with near-fatal addictions to alcohol attract large numbers of bars) and public safety advocates. Any attempted crackdown on alcohol will also mean a very unhappy sports program, which understandably fears a falling-off in game attendance if students are no longer allowed to get drunk enough to burn down Morgantown.
On top of all of this, the numbers crunchers at WVA will have to be consulted, since they can provide crucially important estimates not only of riot-preparedness costs, but settlement expenses arising from wrongful death suits filed by parents. It will be the money managers’ job, moreover, to remind the university (see Penn State and Chapel Hill) that public relations firms tasked with the almost-impossible job of making squalid universities smell like roses do not come cheap.
We follow these on University Diaries. Oh my sport I love it so! I’ll never go! All my life is just despair. But I don’t care. When it takes me in its arms the world is bright. All right! What’s the difference if I say I’ll go away when I know I’ll come back on my knees someday. For whatever my sport is, I am his, forever and ever. Evermore!
Though you should probably wonder about any game in which it is customary to have an ambulance in attendance, the violence is not staying on the field where it is channeled and controlled. Much attention has been focused on two incidents at the high school level: the 2012 sexual assault of a 16 year old in Steubenville, Ohio, and the more recent hazing of younger players in Sayreville, New Jersey.
Following the game at the college level is a little bit like reading a crime blotter. And last year’s Heisman watch took the cake with Jameis Winston and his school, Florida State, the subject of extensive reporting by the New York Times regarding allegations of a rape and the school’s casual attitude toward the victim and her rights. Everything seemed to be subordinated to Florida State’s bid for the national championship.
… In all honesty, I doubt that I will ever be able to wean myself from the game.
Finally a University of North Carolina insider willing to trot out the whole 2+2=5, War is Peace, routine! Anyone can condemn the football and basketball scandal at that school as America’s largest instance yet of the way big-time athletics destroys our universities, and indeed in the past couple of weeks everyone has – in a myriad of opinion pieces – done just that. Lawsuits are flying, alumni are pissed, heads are rolling, etc., etc. It’s Penn State all over again.
Only a few people, under these weighty circumstances, will have the guts to go against the grain.
SOS knew that such people would have to come out of UNC’s business school.
So say hello to Michael Jacobs. Mike, c’mon down! We’re gonna do a close scathe of your prose, because you’ve earned it.
Paragraph #1:
For years we have been hearing about the “athletic” or “academic-athletic” scandal at UNC. Maybe I am missing something, but where was the athletic scandal? Were teams shaving points? Were tennis players intentionally making bad line calls? Were soccer players taking performance-enhancing drugs? Were athletes competing on the field who were academically ineligible?
Establish a peeved, above-it-all, know-it-all tone from the outset and come out swinging. No apologies, no concessions. Your first paragraph should contain no use of the word football or basketball. You are going to concentrate instead on the sports that really matter at UNC, the high-profile revenue tennis and soccer teams.
Paragraph #2:
No doubt, there has been a scandal at UNC. But what happened in Chapel Hill was an academic scandal. This is not just about semantics. How you characterize the problem dictates how you devise the solution.
Jacobs has copied the response to the scandal that the entire leadership of the school attempted before it couldn’t anymore: Nothing to see here sportswise! (Penn State tried exactly the same thing: It wasn’t an athletic or an academic scandal there: It was just this one creepy guy, Sandusky, who showed up on campus occasionally… ) The UNC scandal is simply about bad business practices, and I’m a biz school guy, so I should know. I’m all about getting it done, solving problems, and I’m going to let UNC in on how to get out of this mess because – I’m now going to share one of those impressive b-school insights – ‘How you characterize the problem dictates how you devise the solution.’
This crucial sentence should really be rendered as it appears in its natural PowerPoint presentation habitat:
How You Characterize The Problem DICTATES How You Devise The Solution.
Paragraph #3:
Athletes were not the only ones enrolled in bogus AFAM classes. They might have been the intended primary beneficiary, but the scandal appears to have been germinated and incubated by the academic side of the university. Paper classes were the brainchild of “academicians” in the college of arts and sciences.
The first sentence is correct, and it means not that the scandal therefore was only academic, but that the scandal was endemic to the university as such. That is, it operated throughout all aspects of the institution, including fraternities (frat boys were the other big beneficiaries of the hoax), athletics, administration, and faculty. The second two sentences are incorrect. The scandal was the brainchild of Deborah Crowder in association with coaches, the hilariously titled Academic Counselors, and Julius Nyang’oro. It seems to have enjoyed tacit acceptance everywhere, all the way up to the woman now chancellor at a sports-above-all sister school, University of Kansas.
Note also Jacobs’ penchant for quotation marks. They designate the can-do biz guy’s contempt for the enemy – intellectuality.
Paragraph #4:
The irony is that now a vocal group of UNC faculty members is questioning whether big-time athletics can co-exist with a prominent academic research institution. The corruption of athletics is tainting the pure quest for knowledge, they contend.
SOS says: This is fine. He’s extending his point about stoopid “academicians.” But she would urge Jacobs, on rewriting, to put the words tainting and pure in quotation marks as well. Like this:
The corruption of athletics is “tainting” the “pure” quest for knowledge, they contend.
SOS knows what you’re saying. Put corruption in quotation marks too! But three q.m.’s in one sentence is too many, she contends.
Paragraph #5
The simple answer is yes they can co-exist, as they do at reputable institutions all across the country, if the academicians will run the academic program with integrity.
Here we see the cut through all the bullshit approach of the b-school boys. Simple, pragmatic, nothing fancy, just square your shoulders and get the job done. All you need is the guts, and unfortunately academicians are gutless. Notice that we’re in the fifth paragraph and the words football and basketball have still not appeared. Certainly reputable institutions across the country have been able to run their tennis and soccer programs with integrity. UNC can too, and this is how:
Paragraph #6:
The breakdown at UNC was due to a lack of appropriate controls and accountability systems within the college of arts and sciences. The primary gestation period for this scandal occurred under the watch of a chancellor who was a musician. While universities need scholars in all areas, including music, music is probably not the optimal background to manage a complex $1.5 billion organization.
Cherchez le musicien! You can get some pansy who fiddles while Rome burns, or you can bring in me and the boys to clean up the mess. It’s your choice! It’s your funeral! It’s your Requiem! Your complex organization (suddenly all that stuff about simple has become complex) needs Men, not Mice.
Okay, we’ll skip a bit, as Brother Maynard says.
Here’s the heart of the thing:
Many in the college of arts and sciences squirmed because [the new post-scandal provost] did not come from among their ranks. The fact that he was an expert in organizational control systems and accountability rather than romance languages made some faculty members uneasy. But Chancellor Folt had defined the problem correctly.
It was all those violinists with French poems dancing in their heads who did this to us, who dragged our fine complex institution into the dust! If you want to clean things up, you obviously have to go to the money guys!
Perhaps the scholars in Chapel Hill who are screaming from the mountaintop that we need to purge our research universities of athletics should pause, take a deep breath and internalize an insight from that great scholar Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and they are us.” The best scholars don’t make the best administrators.
Bravo, says SOS. Jacobs has managed to write an entire opinion piece about football and basketball at UNC without ever mentioning either sport. He has also failed to mention the existence of athletic directors and coaches — the people who, as more and more players now attest, ran the scam from on high for twenty years.
I mean, it’s very odd, isn’t it? The fact is that UNC has been following Jacobs’ advice for ages, and that indeed the athletic program was run brilliantly, generating massive profits and wins. So what happened?
What happened is something that the Jacobs model, to its everlasting peril, overlooks. What happened is that one rogue academician squealed. Mary Willingham is what happened, and no university management system, however complexly and pragmatically run, can control for the rare, bizarre emergence of an honest, non-Orwellian person in its midst.
The only way to control for the enemy within is indeed, to use Jacobs’ appropriately Orwellian word, to purge her. So this is how SOS would suggest revising the piece. Add this.
The screaming scholars of Chapel Hill have it exactly backwards: We don’t need to purge our research universities of athletics. We need to purge our athletics of research universities.
… A Miltonist travels aboard El Al.
Cabin’d about with ultra-Orthodox,
With trembling men made mad by fear of God,
Men rampaging th’aisles in search of seats
Uninfected by the smells of women,
Th’English professor protects the seat
Beside him, which the flight crew had promised
Would remain unoccupied. A frenzied
Searcher after unpolluted places
Is now, alas, upon him, and he must
Assert his right to what has been promised.
“Fleeing the woman seated next to me,”
The searcher says, and gestures to sit down.
“Though short of my making a full-fledged scene,”
The Miltonist later recalls, battle
Did ensue, a most unseemly hubbub
Resolved when the crew found another seat
Equally purified of the She-Stain.
******************************
Justify the ways of God? Milton can.
But who can justify the ways of man?
With all of the bad publicity it’s been getting, football is endangered on the American university campus. Though it seems impossible that the sport might, at some schools, be discontinued or cut back, the prudent university president and board of trustees might want to do some thinking about contingencies.
In light of the strong national and international coverage the latest massive NASCAR brawl involving Jeff Gordon, Brad Keselowski, and their crews has been getting, it’s time to consider replacing football at our universities with the largest spectator sport in America. Here are some of NASCAR’s advantages over football.
1. It has much more of the violence that students at big football schools demand, but because the sport is so openly and variously violent (crashes, fights on the track, fights in the pit, fights in the audience, cars crashing into spectators, cars exploding, drivers killed), the violence tends to stay at the venue site rather than spilling out into adjacent neighborhoods. There’s a principle of containment at work at NASCAR events, with the event set up in such a way as to honor and satisfy the demand for violence, so universities can expect a welcome reduction in post-game student rioting.
2. Unlike football, NASCAR is already an academic field at several universities. Auburn not only graduates many NASCAR engineers, but has such close ties to the sport that an Auburn-emblazoned NASCAR vehicle is active on the circuit. The University of North Carolina, much in the news lately for its football program, boasts that its “NC Motorsports and Automotive Research Center … is located in the heart of NASCAR country and is the first stop for employers hiring interns and entry level engineers. We’re within 50 miles of 90% of the NASCAR Sprint Cup teams and 5 miles from Charlotte Motor Speedway, just past the checkered flag.”
3. By sponsoring professional university teams rather than attempting the ill-fated student-athlete route, universities will not only avoid NCAA-entanglement, but will be free to use the entire torso plus limbs of their players for school and corporate advertising. It’s hard to think of a more iconic American image than that of Gordon immediately post-brawl, bleeding from the lip and displaying on his arms and chest ads for Bosch, Siemens, Pepsi, Panasonic, and Champion. Around Gordon’s collar, onto which blood dripped, was an ad for the American Association of Retired Persons.
4. NASCAR is a very human contest, without the anonymous armored-gladiator feel of post-concussion era football. Students can see racers’ faces and watch their flesh bleed freely. In all ways, NASCAR is a closer, more sensory experience than distant sanitized high-tech football. There’s the smell of fuel, the smoking wheels, the splash of water in the pit, the shrieking cries of downed drivers. Student attendance at university football games has been drastically down lately, and there has been much anxious speculation as to why; but if you simply put the game up against NASCAR the answer is obvious.
Compared to NASCAR, football is boring.
… look, as you pick them off,
something like this.
And so it occurs to UD
that she’s got ‘found’ art
up there, something to put in
her outdoor containers as the
cold sets in.
With a fierce
mother deer and her fawns
watching her, UD pulls
twisted bits of wood off of the
still-shiny bark of the cherry.
She examines each gnarled piece,
and if it’s interesting, she trims it
a bit and arranges it with other
pieces in in her deep, black pots.
She wonders if they are grape vines.
She wonders if Martha Stewart
would approve.
Maybe she’ll string lights
along them.
An observer of events coming out of California University of Pennsylvania states the open secret behind a number of university football teams: Recruiters are looking for violent people.
Cal U’s team, which, under a coach who himself has a pending court date for letting his kid drive an unregistered car (You see the theme, right? Risk taking. The coach is so cool because he’s a risk taker.), is on its way toward becoming totally criminalized.
So what’s the deal?
No one on campus is talking.
[The coach] did not return calls for comment… Since the [recent] attack [by six of its players, an attack which left a man close to death], university officials have refused to comment about the football program’s mounting troubles; interim President Geraldine Jones has ordered a “top-to-bottom” review by an outside firm.
Members of the alumni association board and student government officers were told not to speak to the media about the situation.
The situation being a recruitment philosophy that involved admitting hugely notorious bullies to the school and the team… And let’s compound the scandal by ordering everyone to keep their trap shut… No comment, no comment… That’s so the way to go … A real winning strategy…
When carefully brewed football violence hits the fan at obscure schools like this one, it’s a perfect storm. Truly no one on campus knows what to do or say. By definition, you don’t accomplish this amazing outcome in your student body unless absolutely no one is in charge. All the usual suspects – trustees, presidents, faculty – knew some or all of what was going on, but (Italianization again – see post just below this one) they didn’t care. In fact, the last president is majorly pissed because when the six-on-one story broke the school forfeited one game.
When contacted at his Chester County home, [the former president,] who is suing the state system over his firing, declined to comment. In a Facebook posting, he criticized [the] decision to cancel the team’s Nov. 1 game against Gannon University.
The decision, his posting read, “helped bring this tragic story to the attention of the national news media.”
That’s such a yummy comment. Truly a tragic story, like, you know, King Lear or something… And if you’d only kept it quiet and gone on with business as usual, no one would have been the wiser!
Let us call it tragicomic, as Samuel Beckett subtitles Waiting for Godot. A campus landscape of Ubus…
Yes, this one’s got legs. This one we can sit back and watch as the plot staggers about and then explodes onto the national and international stage.
