Ol’ Justice Buzzard
Had only just uttered
A word to his prisoners two;
But then on a dare
The courtroom was bare!
So Buzzard he tore off and flew.
The study goes on to note that despite a schedule mainly devoted to drinking, hazing, parties, football, basketball, and lacrosse, fraternity guys go on to do pretty well in the world.
***********
And I mean duh.
The idea was to fund a team to study carcinogenesis — how cancer starts. But in reality, [Jim] Allison soon discovered, they pretty much had free reign.
All good writers know never to use exclamation marks! I mean, almost never!
But UD has stumbled over a piece in the U Penn newspaper which demands exclamation marks. She will now quote some of the piece and insert the quotation marks its content demands.
In the wake of the admissions bribery scandal! involving former Penn men’s basketball star and coach Jerome Allen, Penn Dean of Admissions Eric Furda is saying that safeguards need to be put in place in both the athletics and admissions departments.
On Oct. 5, Allen, who is currently an assistant coach for the Boston Celtics, pleaded guilty to bribery in connection to the recruitment of a student athlete – now Wharton senior Morris Esformes – to gain him admission to the University. Allen had been implicated in an indictment of businessman Philip Esformes, who had allegedly defrauded the federal government of $1 billion!!! and had used some of that money to bribe Allen and help Morris get into Penn.
… Furda suggested new professional development and training for staffers in both departments to prevent future incidents of bribery!!!!
[So a guy comes at you with tens of thousands of dollars, private luxury jet trips on his dime, and anything else you want, and says in exchange for this I want my kid who can’t play competitive basketball to get a basketball scholarship and thereby admission to your school. Slowly, now. Think it through. Is this RIGHT or WRONG?]
… [Morris] Esformes was accepted to Penn in 2015 as a member of Allen’s final recruiting class before Allen was replaced by current coach Steve Donahue. Esformes never played or appeared !!!!! on the men’s basketball team’s roster.
We’re all sinners, of course; but when you put “Christian” right there in your school’s name, as Texas Christian University does, you invite more than ordinary sinescopic scrutiny. A quick review of this blog’s TCU entries over the last five or so years definitely reveals more sinners than saints, especially among the football lads, who seem undecided whether they want to drug themselves to the heavenly gates or pummel other people to the heavenly gates.
UD was reminded of this curiously … heterodox school by their latest big national news: One of their most valuable football players has two arrests for domestic violence in the last seven months plus an outstanding bench warrant, since he didn’t show up to court for Dom. Viol. #1.
Since he’s a great player, and since TCU’s quarterback is out with injuries, and since TCU is desperate to win a game, they’ll just suspend him for a game or two.
Two? They’ll probably just suspend him for one. It’s the Texas Christian way.
Here are a couple of live ones: Ira Rennert and Michael Simons.
Both are already endowed with insane riches and honors: Business schools are named after Rennert; he lives in the largest private residence in the world (or close to it). Simons is a much-honored, tenured professor of medicine at Yale.
Yet Rennert’s unbridled greed and bullying and rule-breaking mean he spends his life in courtrooms unsuccessfully defending his nefarious practices. When he loses (and he loses most of the time) he turns around and sues his lawyers for failing to defend the indefensible.
Plus there’s his money for West Bank settlements.
Simons has produced important work in cardiology, and as a named chair at Yale he sits at the absolute pinnacle of the academic world. But after admitting to general sexual harassment of women at Yale, plus a more specific thing —
In addition to the sexual harassment, the university committee found that Dr. Simons had exercised “improper leadership and compromised decision-making” with regard to [a] researcher’s husband, also a cardiologist. Dr. Simons, who is married, began making advances to the researcher, Annarita Di Lorenzo, in February 2010, in a letter, and continued his pursuit despite repeated rebuffs. She left Yale in 2011. Her husband, Dr. Frank Giordano, who remains at Yale, said Dr. Simons froze his professional advancement.
— he lost his named chair. He got to keep most of his other goodies, but he did lose the chair.
Except not really. I mean, he lost one chair, but his cronies at the school found another one sitting around, and so Simons was a named chair again! But then people were outraged that Yale was continuing to confer this very high honor on, uh, this chap, so the cronies removed him from the second chair. (“To lose one chair may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”)
So of course Simons is suing Yale to get this, that, or the other chair – some chair, any chair – back. Because, you know, life without a chair!
**************
America, my beloved. Lawsuit city. UD madly loves her country, but there’s a lot of … wealth … in it.
… The teenage basketball stars are commodities to the hustlers and cons in the hoops underworld — and more disturbingly, sometimes to their own families.
… “So you’ve been pimping out your namesake since he was 14 years old?” [one player’s] lawyer … asked on cross-examination. [The player’s father] did not disagree.
… The N.C.A.A., of course, is not on trial, but it looms as almost a shadow defendant — a multi-billion-dollar enterprise resting on a pool of unpaid, disproportionately African-American labor. The inequities engender cynicism, and N.C.A.A. rules are not followed and not regarded as having any moral authority — not by the players, their families, their youth coaches or by many of the college coaches seeking their services.
Make that literal pimping at the University of Louisville, where teenage basketball stars and their fathers had special campus… housing… just for them.
If I may quote myself. San Diego State gives off the same hopeless pointless stew of corruption vibes that University of Louisville does – and what’s most interesting is that these schools probably always will be like this. Whether it’s Piero Anversa or a fraternity just taken off suspension and just put back on suspension for being irremediably violent, nothing gets done because the people in charge are cynical greedy party-school-modelers.
You know – recall what the West Virginia University professor who studies the phenom up close — really up close — wrote:
Many residential universities, such as the so-called party schools … have become so well-known for their super-charged party environments that it would be very difficult to change the culture without negatively impacting enrollments that are now dependent upon the lure of this party scene. Moreover, many of the disruptive behaviors that I document in the book (e.g., burning couches, riots) have become “traditions” for both current students and alumni. As such, traditions are very difficult to change.
**********************************
[People who live in bad neighborhoods] feel terrorized, they change their routines to avoid certain streets, they don’t leave their homes at night. In many college towns, residents are beginning to experience similar problems (albeit less life-threatening) as a result of a minority of extreme partiers who make life uninhabitable [I think Weiss is conflating two phrases here: life unendurable and neighborhoods uninhabitable.] for their neighbors.
***********************************
While it is easy to see why bar and club owners are reluctant to eliminate drink specials or other promotions – after all, they make their profits from student drinking – it is more difficult to understand why university administrators, police and local town officials have not been more effective in reducing some of the problems caused by the party subculture. In the long run, it really boils down to a rather controversial reality: the party school is itself a business, and alcohol is part of the business model. Schools lure students to attend their schools with the promise of sports, other leisure activities and overall fun. Part of this fun, whether schools like it or not, is drinking. Thus, even as university officials want to keep students safe, they also need to keep their consumers happy. This means letting the alcohol industry do what it does best – sell liquor.
That’s why SDSU keeps suspending and suspending and suspending a criminal enterprise: You’re talking about a big chunk of their yearly enrollment!
Let’s just not have any bullshit about it, okay? Administrators get millions and students get maimed. End of story that will never end.
John Martin. Sarkisian. Puliafito/Varma. Tyndall.
Takes a whole lot of naughtiness merely to kindle
A bit of Oh me!
From ol’ USC.
It’s less of a school than a swindle.
… you can be forgiven for special admissions procedures for the children of big donors.
One of their football players studied.
None of the subsequent unfortunate events would have occurred if he had not, wantonly, crazily, studied.
I trust this will be a lesson to his teammates.
This is the first sentence of an article by Sally Jenkins in the Washington Post. The link simply takes you to the front page of the Post; but you don’t need much more than the first sentence, do you?