… on the Nevin Era at the University of Miami:

I’m starting to wonder if college football will someday start losing the benefit of its fans, too. Is it just me or are you, too, starting to feel guilty and dirty rooting for a sport where seemingly everybody is cheating in some form or fashion? Isn’t it hard to clap your hands for your favorite team when you have to hold your nose at the same time?

Sometimes, you wonder if you are as hypocritical as the sport itself. I mean, we like to act like we care about what is just and right, but do we really? If we did, would we still be packing the stadiums to watch the 100-yard lie?

Mr UD and I are driving home from our recent hiking trip in the Virginia mountains.

We’re maybe forty miles from home when we come to a massive roadworks project which blocks all car traffic. Large signs instruct you to get out of your car, walk to a nearby field of 747s, and fly one home.

Mr UD and I begin walking. I’m thinking I do remember reading somewhere that anyone can fly a 747.

The two of us get to the massive plane, and Mr UD’s game, he’s being a guy, he’s walking up the steps to the cockpit (Do 747s have cockpit steps?)… But I can tell he’s reluctant.

Suddenly I say: “Stop. That’s enough. There’s NO way you’re flying this plane. It’s not good for your health. It’s not safe. No.”

Somewhat sheepishly, Mr UD descends the steps.

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When I woke up, I told Mr UD the dream. I expected him to laugh. He didn’t laugh.

“It’s true,” he said, his voice a bit slurred by sleepiness. “All you have to do to fly a 747 is press a button. I mean, it has to be programmed and all.”

“Oh yeah?” I countered. “A field of 747s. Tons of people are taking off at the same time. How do you avoid hitting them?”

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(For new readers: UD is recovering from surgery and taking Percocet.)

The Heisman winner and quarterback of the national championship team had a father who apparently had offered his son’s services to Mississippi State for $180,000. The national championship basketball team was on probation. One of the game’s premier programs (USC) already is on probation, with another (Ohio State) ready to follow. The Ohio State case already resulted in the earlier-than-expected departures of Buckeyes coach Jim Tressel and potential Heisman contender Terrelle Pryor. Over the past 12 months or so, the 2004 BCS championship, the 2005 Heisman presentation and the 2009 ACC football championship have been vacated. And now we have one division – the ACC Coastal – that has half its membership (Georgia Tech, Miami and North Carolina) in hot water with the NCAA.

But that only scratches the surface.

Here’s a big one; and one of her favorites: All her life she’s heard and read pragmatic reality-based broad-shouldered boots on the ground straight-talking university sports enthusiast types ridicule humanities types as pie in the sky dreamers, limp-wristed do-nothing childish emotional deluded obscurantists jabbering pointlessly away in empty jargon.

Yet from the moment, ten years ago, she began attending NCAA and NCAA-related conferences, and heard one speaker after another intone words like integrity and principle to complacent audiences, UD has recognized that these NCAA words have exactly the same value as words like (counter-) hegemonic, imbrication, and modalities among certain groupings of English professors.

Hollow abstractions prop up both groups as they struggle to maintain a sense not only that they are united, but that they are not marginal, not incorrect in their beliefs, and – in the case of the NCAA crowd – not corrupt.

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Of the two groups, which is the more pitiable? The more deluded? Foucauldian academics occasionally score a meaningful cultural intervention; their efforts to radicalize the academy have had an impact. The NCAA crowd is caught in the eternal recurrence of win/loss, with winning as meaningless as losing.

“[S]o many colleges have bent the rules in the great academic act of winning meaningless football and basketball games,” writes Buzz Bissinger of his initial reaction to the University of Miami story, “that it was hard for me to muster much excitement.”

It is not only the ultimate meaninglessness of their endeavor – a meaninglessness made more acute by its location within that most ardently meaning-generating institution, the university – that the NCAA crowd must shield itself from; it is its filth. Few people, beyond sociopaths like Bernard Madoff and Nevin Shapiro, want to think of themselves as corrupt, but hundreds of NCAA administrators and NCAA-governed coaches, university presidents, and players certainly know that they are corrupt, that they play important parts in a corrupt system, if only by looking the other way when coaches and agents and fans and players around them are corrupt.

Bissinger argues that Miami football is so corrupt that the program should be permanently killed, and Donna Shalala

should be hauled before Congress, where the allegations against Miami are 10 times more serious than all the steroid nonsense paraded about in Washington.

Once she has done her murky dance of denial, a grand jury should be convened. If it turns out she did know the outrageous conduct of booster Nevin Shapiro — such as filling virtually an entire hotel floor with prostitutes for Miami players to gorge on, like grapes — she should be charged with perjury.

But… eh. She knew and she didn’t know. You know? It’s what I’ve been saying. She kind of knows that the games are meaningless and the people running them are disgusting… but a palm-lined campus is such a beautiful thing lalalalala. Pitiable.

Cam Newton is such a beautiful thing. A $2.2 billion contract with ESPN is such a beautiful thing. Pitiable.

And today, as always, these pitiable deluded people are the talk of the town.

Vox populi, University of Miami.

An editor at the Atlantic hesitates to join the crowd and call for the professionalization of college sports – paying players, dropping the whole goes to class thing, etc.

Why even keep the “student” in student-athlete? There’s really no reason players at a big program like Miami should take classes. After all, it’s not like they’re real students. They’re just football players, right? They’re pros. Aren’t they?

Ending amateurism sounds like a no-brainer. Maybe it is. But one inevitable consequence of it is that absolutely nothing would stand between college athletes and sleazy boosters like [Nevin] Shapiro. There’s something in me that hates that. Whether or not it’s rational or fair, there’s something in me that says we need a mechanism in place saying it’s not okay to take college players to strip clubs or buy them jewelry — just as something in me says, all evidence the contrary, it’s important for those players to be enrolled in classes.

Some thing… some je ne sais quoi… arrests this person on the verge of agreeing with everyone else that universities should house hundreds of people whose only function is to hurl their bodies around in ways that excite large numbers of people. Whose only reward is strippers who do the same thing. Some thing… some almost-forgotten, impossible-to-articulate inkling… some metaphysical scent has wafted to this person’s nostrils and whispered that it’s important for players to do something other than play for us when they’re at a college.

Something in this person “hates” “sleaze.” Strong words. But what’s really being said?

If you take the player out of the college altogether – if you place this person in the pros – the problem disappears. Which is kind of interesting. It suggests that the college as such represents a different world from … the world. The college seems to be a different world, with pressures of its own toward higher things, better and more serious ways of life. Remove the silently but powerfully remonstrating college from the totally familiar, totally unremarkable dissipation most people, given enough money, will want to live, and no problem.

No one cares, in other words, about the behavior of professional athletes (except when it’s really, really, really appalling) because we don’t expect anything different. People care about the behavior of university athletes — because they’re at universities. If the university has any distinction as a location – any distinction at all – it lies here, in its call to its students and faculty to think rather than instinctively act; to be serious rather than always be at play; to hate violence and to love reason; to prefer reflection to impulse.

To be sure, there are locations in America to whose name the word university is affixed – Auburn University, Texas Tech University – which we all recognize to be mere locations, quads in the sand, nothingness. Nothing but games and the scandals that accompany them. We don’t get upset about the scandals emanating from these locations. We barely cover them. If we cover them, it’s just to laugh at them.

But there are all these other places in our country, these universities, where we feel shame and sadness and confusion, where we feel, as the Atlantic editor writes, that it’s not okay when large numbers of well-organized, well-financed members of the university community dedicate themselves exclusively to games and greed.

Within this inchoate discomfort lies the beginning of personal and collective efforts to define university.

… Day.

UD offers this poem, composed of Antrel Rolle’s comments about his friend Nevin Shapiro.

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WHAT’S TRUE AND WHAT’S NOT TRUE

To me it doesn’t matter
What’s true and what’s not true.

… says UD (in an echo of Tolstoy’s famous “happy families” remark). UD has studied plagiarists for many years on this blog, and they are astonishingly similar to one another.

Bahman Bakhtiari, a University of Utah political scientist who has just lost his job, is true to the form.

First, he is a serial plagiarist. UD cannot think of any instance of professorial or artistic plagiarism about which she’s written on this blog where the plagiarist did not turn out to have plagiarized quite a lot before his or her latest plagiarism.

Second, he plagiarizes promiscuously. Anything – a scholarly article, a grant proposal, an opinion piece, a syllabus – can be an occasion for plagiarizing.

And third, he blames his troubles on other people. Graduate students, laboratory subordinates, and editorial assistants are the plagiarist’s traditional fall guys, but anyone will serve, and Bakhtiari offers a broad array of enemies who sought to undo him.

… that only in sports writing are mixed metaphors considered okay. I mean, here’s the first paragraph of a New York Times piece about the latest Miami thing and about how nobody involved will be punished very severely because the people running the games are greedy amoral shits, etc.

As college sports officials confront yet another cheating scandal — this one involving Miami, the latest in a conga line of blue-chip programs that have recently stumbled into the crosshairs of N.C.A.A. investigators — speculation over the extent of the fallout intensified Wednesday.

A conga line made up of blue chips stumbles into crosshairs which emit fallout.

SOS doesn’t find this a very lucid sentence. Good writing is supposed to clarify, not to muddy. But never mind.

Matt Hayes, of Sporting News, correctly anticipates that stories about Donna Shalala’s professional football team bring the NCAA that much closer to extinction.

Why the hell should the multimillionaires running college football and basketball have to deal with some dipshit organization run by college presidents who put fine businessmen like John Junker out of business? Junker is our business, and the NCAA doesn’t seem to get that.

Sure, the organization is basically toothless; but it’s forced us to come up with all sorts of fake coursework for our team members… Sometimes it forces us to take important players off the field just when we need them… It takes our wins away… Shit like that…

Secession is the only way. Places like Auburn and Clemson and Miami and Alabama know exactly what they are, and they’ll thank us for finally allowing them to be what they are.

And don’t forget: With the NCAA and its financial penalties out of the way, there’s that much more to go around.

How did things come to this, Donna Shalala? What have you done to deserve this? Maybe it’s that $1.2 million salary.

This Dead Spin blogger is only the first of many writers who in the next few days will turn their attention to the woman who has presided over all of the amazing events at the University of Miami – hiring Charles Nemeroff, fielding the most violent university football team ever, enabling Nevin Shapiro for years… Miami, in UD‘s opinion, is just a scummy school, and Shalala has let it get that way. She should go.

Nevin Shapiro, who orchestrated a $930 million Ponzi scheme and is serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison, told Yahoo! Sports that he gave [University of Miami] Hurricanes players gifts such as money, jewelry and yacht trips, as well as paid for sex parties, bounties on opposing players and even an abortion for a player’s girlfriend.

And it’s all alleged to have happened under the watch of former Miami athletic director Paul Dee, the former chairman of the NCAA committee on infractions …

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“Former Miami athletic director Paul Dee sat in judgment of USC and others while all of this went on under his nose.”

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“The hypocrisy of the NCAA makes me sick,” [one university president] told the Press-Telegram. “To allow institutions like Miami and Nebraska to chair and oversee its infractions committee is like putting foxes in charge of the henhouse.”

Why do people associated with conferences and schools make up the majority of the 10-person infractions committee?

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UD readers have already met the much-loved University of Miami sports benefactor – the “living scholar” after whom the Nevin Shapiro Student Athlete Lounge is named… Was named… Don’t know who it’s named after now… Allen Stanford?

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The sort of thing the University of Miami did during the Nevin Era will, I think, strike anyone as fully in line with the ethos of any serious American university:

Three sources, including two former Miami football players, confirmed that Shapiro offered bounties.

The booster told Yahoo! Sports he had a number of individual payouts for “hit of the game” and “big plays.” He also put bounties on specific players, including Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow and a three-year standing bounty on Seminoles quarterback Chris Rix from 2002 to 2004, offering $5,000 to any player who knocked him out of a game.

“We pounded the (expletive) out of that kid,” Shapiro said of Rix. “Watch the tape of those games. You’ll see so many big hits on him. Guys were all going after that $5,000 in cash. [Jon] Vilma tried to kill him – just crushed him – a couple of times trying to get that $5,000. And he almost got it, too.”

I mean, name any school that doesn’t offer $5,000 extra in scholarship money to an athlete who can kill a competing player.

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Anyway, the writer I quoted up there, the one pointing out that the Miami AD who oversaw the whorehouse during the Nevin years was also NCAA infractions chair… His thing is that the current head of the NCAA is a “detriment to the NCAA” because he’s “not a reformer.”

It’s true that Mark Emmert will do nothing, just as his predecessor did nothing, to rid American universities of the ever-erupting shit-volcano which is big-time football and basketball. But that doesn’t make him a detriment to the NCAA. Uh-uh. Au contraire. How do you think the NCAA chooses its leaders? The point of the NCAA, like any organization, is to sustain itself, not reform itself out of existence. For that, you need a guy as mercenary and cynical as the NCAA itself.

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UD thanks her friend Ralph for linking her to the Yahoo story.

— it’s the only school in America actively trying to transform itself from a university to a jockshop — has been chronicled, step by step on this blog.

And now, rather in the way San Diego State’s last president reduced it to shabby jockery and then retired from the mess he’d made, the president of Rutgers, having presided to his satisfaction over the reduction of his school to a sports whore, will soon take a well-deserved rest.

UD‘s friend Roy sends her the latest article detailing what Richard McCormick has done to a once-proud school.

In its lame, cynical, stupid way, the university tech office has begun its utterly predictable retreat from all of the devices it’s been foisting on students in classrooms, and on professors and administrators in meetings. Turns out it’s rude and unproductive to stare at a screen! And here we all thought it was so Real World, so frabjous, so multi-taskular!

I mean, let’s not even talk about online high schools and universities… Let’s just not go there at all. A moment of silence, rather, for those lost minds and souls.

Let’s just talk about the atmosphere in wired Duke University gatherings.

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And are you surprised that it’s the Office of Information Technology that’s getting its ass out of online first? Don’t be. They’re the ones who follow the studies and know exactly what’s up. So they’ve gone from being arrogant pushers of wired classrooms and meeting rooms – they’ve gone from ridiculing resistance to their electronics as antediluvian – to what we see now.

Now they’re Big Momma and Big Poppa, lecturing their immature, screen-addicted kiddies on how they have to grow up and throw it all away.

(A little historical self-consciousness will serve all of us well in this matter, by the way. Five years from now, these same people will start in on us again about how collaborative, interactive, Real World, and cutting edge the latest tech machines are.)

Yeah, so now the head of tech at Duke announces he’s had it with tech in meetings because it makes nothing happen; and a Duke professor announces it causes anxiety; and another Duke professor announces it makes you stupid.

Wow. Pretty much everyone without a financial or emotional investment in the technology knew this, said this, and published this ten years ago. I guess we had to waste the educations of hundreds of Duke students and spend a lot of their tuition on technology before Duke began to get to the same place.

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Oh, but there are hold-outs. There remain true believers.

To minimize distraction in the classroom, some faculty ask students to put away laptops – but that’s not always the best approach, said Lynne O’Brien, director of academic technology and instructional services for Perkins Library.

Instructors are better off asking students to work together in pairs, calling on individuals and using other strategies to engage participants, so “you’re at risk if you’re not paying attention,” O’Brien said.

O’Brien clings to the Barney approach: Okay kiddies now choose a partner and let’s learn Heidegger together, as a team! What’s on your screen, Katie! Ooh, that’s great! Show Jodie! And Billy – over there – are you paying attention, Billy? I’m afraid you’re not…

In the course of a massive fraud trial, details of university life in the state of Texas.