Gerald Gurney (UD sat on a panel with him at a sports conference a few years ago) and Richard Southall examine the latest NCAA bullshit: Academic Progress Rate scores. Since APR is all about a sports school having the money to play the system by coming up with phony courses, elaborate waivers, etc., etc., the only universities that end up getting to be the dummies eliminated from competition are the non-rich ones.
The writers feature “the recent academic scandal at the University of North Carolina,” a well-heeled school with notorious jock doc Julius Nyang’oro. Rather than suffer any institutional penalty – even a mild verbal put-down – Nyang’oro has been rewarded for years of outrageous academic fraud by a retirement with full honors. For a job well done.
That scene from An Officer and a Gentleman captures what happens when a sports factory loses its assembly line — when all the investments and efficiencies fail and the place begins to shut down.
The University of Kentucky’s football team – the only game in town except for its basketball team, coached by the amazingly corrupt Calipari – is faltering, and customers are fleeing.
Recently, the University of Kentucky Athletics Department announced that season ticket sales for the 2012 UK Football team was down nearly 30% from last year’s totals. And, on top of that, roughly 2,000 unsold tickets were returned to the University of Louisville for the September 2 matchup. Needless to say, the apathy amongst the Big Blue faithful toward this year’s team is high. The question in most fans’ minds: How do we fix UK Football?
The writer is a fan. He proposes spending much more money on the team. The school just bought an incredibly expensive upgraded Adzillatron for the stadium, and there’s no doubt that UK will continue to spend every penny it has on sports. But what if all the money in the world can’t make the football team win? Meanwhile Calipari will probably play fewer and fewer games on the UK campus…
You see where this is going. Soon there will be no reason for the University of Kentucky to exist at all.
… why the NCAA could care less about the rampant academic corruption at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (some background here). Both consider it odd that this year’s most extensive, most comically brazen case of intellectual prostitution at a sports school holds no interest at all for that organization.
[A]s an offshoot of [yet another] NCAA investigation [into corruption at Chapel Hill], a UNC internal probe found that 54 AFAM classes were either “aberrant” or “irregularly” taught from summer 2007 to summer 2011. That included unauthorized grade changes, forged faculty signatures on grade rolls and limited or no class time.
But did the athletics department put pressure on players or the instructor? If not, the NCAA isn’t interested.
[W]hen it comes to the legitimacy of classwork done on a college campus, where technically the NC(as in collegiate)AA has some sway, it lets the individual institutions police themselves… Essentially, the hook in this case is that there is no proof that a coach or athletic department official coerced Nyang’oro [chair of African American Studies] to make lunch meat out of his curriculum for the benefit of the athletes enrolled.
… Pushing athletes to particular majors or even classes — clustering, if you will — while perhaps distasteful, isn’t in and of itself fraudulent. Pushing athletes to classes that were deemed “aberrant” by an internal university probe due to grade changes and forgeries is an entirely different matter.
So I guess this is the NCAA’s philosophy: If you’re simply a cruddy school that doesn’t care about educating your athletes, that’s your business.
… Frontiers of Democracy conference last month at Tufts University. (Scroll down to Opening Plenary.)
The conference concludes this year’s Summer Institute of Civic Studies, a co-creation of Peter Levine and Mr UD.
… one of the Penn State movers and shakers: Tim Curley. His remarks at a 2009 Knight Commission meeting UD attended so struck her that she transcribed them here.
Looked at in the context of subsequent events, these comments can really… I dunno… make you… a little cynical?
College athletics is today the healthiest I’ve ever seen it. Everything’s looking great. Everyone here should be celebrating the positive values of university sports. We’ve learned we can be the great success we are and at the same time we can govern ourselves. We don’t need to be governed by outsiders. We’ve made incredible progress on all fronts. Enthusiasm and excitement and participation and profit is at an all-time high. Yes, escalating salaries stress the system. Yes, we continue to be challenged with our expenses. But these things are out of our control. Every one of these expenditures is necessary. We live in a market society, and we have to respond to market conditions.
… these are some of the little extrees he has in mind. These fixins are not typically listed on your typical university sports budget menu. Like the second sprig of mint on your crème brûlée or the little side of chutney with your chicken madras, these are the things that add up to make your program the humiliating mess it is.
The state of Iowa will pay $30,500 in legal fees accumulated by a newspaper in a lawsuit over access to records from the University of Iowa.
… The $30,500 payment was formally approved Monday by the State Appeal Board, the panel responsible for reviewing and signing off on the state’s legal settlements.
The open records case centered on documents relating to an alleged sexual assault committed by Iowa football players in a university dorm room. The court found some of the university’s records concerning the case were protected by the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act, while others were available for disclosure.
This writer to Colorado’s Daily Camera points out that football is bankrupting the University of Colorado:
[B]etween 2006 and 2011 the university, students and the state subsidized roughly 25 percent ($15 million) of the Athletic Department’s annual operating costs. The Athletic Department has also taken $18 million in loans from the university system over the past several years. These investments are particularly troublesome considering that Colorado is 48th in the country in funding for its universities.
Who knows how this troublesome state of affairs happened? The point is, I mean, whatever, the point is there’s a solution!
Alcohol sales would help to make the Athletic Department more financially self-sufficient…
I mean, we got into this mess who the fuck knows how but now that we’re in it let’s hit the kids up for booze and solve it dammit. And anyway the students are victims of the current policy!
[P]atrons are forced to get their fill prior to games…
The current policy forces students to get so drunk they become “a danger to themselves and a danger and nuisance to others.”
This state-sponsored coercion must end. Sic semper tyrannis!
Oh really you little fool. Where do you think you are? A university?
UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior‘s got all sorts of shit going down lately.
There’s Bystritsky, who’s front and center in the Phyllis Harvey lawsuit against that university.
And there’s Strober, a Ghost of Glaxo Past… (see post just under this one)…
On their main page, Semel invites you to PARTICIPATE IN OUR RESEARCH, but I get the feeling it’s not such a good idea.
It’s eerie. Walk the corridors of your medical school and behind the doors marked Keller, Feinberg, Strober, Wagner, flit The Ghosts of Glaxo, professors who, in life, treated disease, and now, in death, ghost.
They ghost for Glaxo, a power so great it just paid the United States government penalties of three billion dollars.
**********************
Glaxo’s ghost-hunters know the haunts; they know which universities are ghost towns where wraiths who put their names on research they don’t conduct and articles they don’t write loom.
In the gloom Glaxo’s Gorgyrae of the underground coax the ghosts out with the sorts of treats ghosts like and the ghosts emerge in a shimmer, scripting their signature with glamorous flicks of the air upon the pages of alchemical antidepressant articles.
These hidden precincts within the American medical school are our university royalty, and what Bagehot said so long ago about the British royalty applies word for word here:
Above all things our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it… Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic…
Some are calling for universities to discipline their ghosts. Let them be! We are their (experimental) subjects, and our reverence for their mystery must remain.
Congress has gone. August is day after day of dead air and wet heat. There’s a tornado warning for a neighboring county until midnight.
All the UDs are vaguely under the weather. A few hours ago we sat in the living room wondering what to eat for dinner and we got nowhere with that. We looked out the sliding glass doors at Lady Gaga the Deer Mother. Lady Gaga the Deer Mother shows up every afternoon with her nursing fawn and while the fawn nurses she STARES into the living room just like this like Fuck you try to stop me. She has the pointless belligerent exhibitionism of Lady Gaga and that’s where she got her name.
She’s in the same bad mood everybody’s in around here. She’s even mean to her kid. When she gets tired of challenging us she storms off, the kid clinging and dragging up the hill.
Jehovah’s Witnesses and guys from West Virginia who want to take down our trees knock at the door. When the phone rings, it’s a recording of the governor saying something about our proud state.
La Kid withdraws to her room and her brand new MacBook Air whose thin silvery je ne sais quoi makes her parents feel resentful, dowdy. Her room is full of gadgets that make us feel dowdy and resentful. Every now and then she looks away from her MacBook to chat, on her iPhone, with her friend Mark, who’s teaching English in Taiwan.
It would be GREAT for limericks. And I (and many UD readers) love to write limericks.
Mitt Romney thinks David Petraeus
Might be his ex machina deus
But his choice of vp
Seems so nutty to me
That I’m sitting here scratching my payos.
… of a professor at the University of Chicago medical school.
