They love him at San Diego State; they loved him, for years, at Harvard. And Harvard still seems ambivalent about Piero Anversa; it doesn’t want to comment at all on the decade or so during which it did nothing and during which plenty of people knew Anversa was faking his research. It has nothing to say about why it took Harvard years and years and years to call for the retraction of essentially his entire body of work.
Officials at Harvard declined to comment on why it took so long to take action on Dr. Anversa’s published work. Dr. Anversa could not be reached for comment.
Through arrogance and bluster ol’ Piero has, since 2001, been peddling pretty obvious bullshit about how the heart can regenerate itself. Lots of legitimate scientists said he was a fraud, over and over again, but too much money was at stake. Harvard would do well to apologize for having given this person legitimacy for so long.
**********
And what country’s university system would be so farcically shabby as to welcome Piero and one of his, uh, associates to take up new prestigious positions?
ITALY’s, of course.
***********
Best part of this story: Anversa a few years back sued Harvard cuz pointing out that he was a fraud was hurting business. (He lost the suit.)
What’s the Italian for Da guy’s got balls?
Un uomo ha i coglioni … ?
If I can be sure of one thing about the moneyed mess that college sports in this country have become, it is that I don’t feel sorry for the schools that have willingly made basketball and football coaches the highest-paid public employees in thirty-nine out of fifty states while maintaining their showy convictions regarding the sanctity of amateurism.
New Yorker
[H]is verbal SAT score of 420 was below the minimum required at Florida, where the majority of freshmen scored 600 or above…
[There was] destructive impunity, drugs, and the company of bad actors he met through Florida football. This was the time when he snapped a selfie that later went viral — posing in front a mirror, a raised Glock handgun in his left hand…
[T]he Gators had so much contact with the Gainesville police that [Urban] Meyer once addressed officers at roll call. A running tally of arrests compiled by the Orlando Sentinel during Meyer’s six-year tenure reached at least 31, for offenses ranging from firing an AK-47 in public to throwing food at an employee at a Jimmy John’s sandwich shop.
The Boston Globe revisits the University of Florida’s contribution to the tragedy of Aaron Hernandez.
T.J. Gassnola is the president and head of the board of trustees of the University of Kansas. He is the face of the school. The front porch of the school.
T.J. runs basketball at KU, and basketball is just about all you’re ever going to read about when it comes to KU.
More specifically, he runs KU’s players. T.J. is in charge of giving them and their families huge wads of cash under the table at Las Vegas hotels to play at KU. T.J. keeps KU all basketball all the time. He is KU’s VIP, MVP, and HRH all rolled into one.
**************
Everyone knows there’s nothing wrong with outfits like Adidas – for whom T.J. also works – giving money to future basketball greats. This wise investment often starts well before these players launch their adventures in university education… well before they decide to take advantage of the intellectual resources of places like Lawrence.
KU enjoys an extremely lucrative business relationship with Adidas.
Marc Emmert’s multimillion dollar NCAA salary is predicated on his absolute indifference to the transformation of once-respectable American universities into stinky petty hilarious crime gutters, places run by people like T.J. Gassnola.
So. All good. Everyone gets rich: The player, his family, Marc Emmert, the University of Kansas, and ol’ T.J.
***************
So… FUCK the FBI. What the fuck? It sashays in like it’s king of the world, drags T.J. into court and makes him sing in exchange for reduced prison time for the many many naughty things T.J. has been up to … Worse yet, it makes KU and Emmert scrunch up their features, take a deep breath, and blow out the very best horseshit they can come up with about how shocked and disappointed and eager to be helpful they are…
UD‘s only sorry this woman is no longer KU’s chancellor – she came to KU after running Chapel Hill into the ground cuz of their athletic scandal, remember? She’s just the sort of person you want running a basketball factory, and she’s still getting paid too.
*************
We had a nice tidy world here, see. Emmert and the whole “university” thing at KU did the work of shedding respectability-light upon the scheme so no one would think anything dark and criminal was going on. The players and the corporate suits and the coaches pocketed the money and kept their mouths shut. But now T.J.’s talking, and it’s… well, it’s Kafka, kiddies.
The most absurd moment of a most absurd day at the federal fraud case featuring one of college basketball’s most absurd characters had to be the following … well, actually, there are many contenders.
Maybe it was when Billy Preston wrecked his Dodge Charger on the campus of the University of Kansas. The fact a top incoming basketball recruit was driving such a car caused concern with the KU compliance office, which investigated who owned the vehicle.
Text messages later revealed Preston’s mother Nicole Player bragging about buying the car for her son, but … the car was … registered with “Nicole Player’s recently deceased grandmother” who lived in Florida.
KU was fine with this explanation. Who wouldn’t be?
[I]n the process of looking into the car, KU discovered a wire transfer to Player that came from a man named T.J. Gassnola. Player lived in Euless, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Gassnola hailed from Ludlow, Massachusetts, a little town a couple hours west of Boston.
There appeared to be no good reason for this exchange – and there wasn’t, at least by NCAA standards. Gassnola, a member of Adidas’ so-called “Black Ops” group and AAU team owner, detailed from the witness stand how he had plied Player with $89,000 over the course of nearly a year, including a $30,000 cash payout in a New York hotel room and another $20,000 brick delivered while in Las Vegas.
But wait, that’s not the best part.
Worried there was no proper explanation for the payments, Player texted Gassnola to inform him she had told KU officials the two had been involved in an “intimate” relationship, believing such activity would somehow make it NCAA legal.
If you can’t get enough of this stuff – and there’s TONS – go here.
Better yet, go here. This narrative, penned by Kafka after he dropped acid, is truly one of the greats.
‘Man Tries to Drown Girlfriend; Nearly Becomes Murder Victim Himself When She Tries to Saw Off His Head’
***************
This is the sort of news UD likes to read when she feels herself getting too coastal-elitey.
… presents agonizing problems for universities. How do you mark it communally without risking contagion? What if the student’s family has begged you to preserve its privacy? Students may want to discuss whether it points to larger problems with campus mental health care, or with quality of life at the school altogether.
Like other large urban universities, New York University has had more than its share of student suicides, including suicide contagions. It has had to retrofit its library to keep students from jumping off its high atrium.
This year, there have been two suicides in the med school, and, at the beginning of this month, an NYU freshman threw himself in front of a subway train. In the med school cases, the school announced each death, expressed sympathy, and reminded students of available counseling. It has very carefully not gone beyond this, even when prompted:
[Journalists asked NYU] if the school was concerned over a trend of suicide among medical professionals and if any larger efforts are being made by the university to prevent future instances, but the Medical school’s response didn’t tackle those questions.
“Because of the sensitive nature of this issue, we will not be commenting further,” the spokesperson said.
The school has been even more subdued about the 18-year-old male freshman who killed himself this month. Asked why, a spokesman said:
“If we believe that refraining from sending a broad communication can reduce the chances of a contagion effect, we are more than willing to absorb any resulting criticism.”
The spokesman cited “the university’s own research and personal experiences with suicide along with consultations with national experts.” Rather than make a large public announcement, the school has acted locally, contacting “anyone the university deems … in close proximity to the student: family, friends, professors, floormates and sometimes even the student’s entire school or degree program.”
*************
The real problem, if you ask me, is that suicide seems to all of us one of the most eloquent things we do. We attach all sorts of broad existential significance to the act, even if most actual suicides are, in the words of A. Alvarez, “a terrible but utterly natural reaction to the strained, narrow, unnatural necessities we sometimes create for ourselves.”
Moons can have moons and they are called moonmoons.
**********
Autumn Refrain
The skreak and skritter of evening gone
And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun,
The sorrows of sun, too, gone . . . the moon and moon,
The yellow moon of words about the nightingale
In measureless measures, not a bird for me
But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air
I have never – shall never hear. And yet beneath
The stillness of everything gone, and being still,
Being and sitting still, something resides,
Some skreaking and skrittering residuum,
And grates these evasions of the nightingale
Though I have never – shall never hear that bird.
And the stillness is in the key, all of it is,
The stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound.
**************************
If you’d like more poetic thought on the moon, the full moon, and nothing but the moon, there’s also T S Eliot’s Rhapsody on a Windy Night (for full depressive effect, listen to Jeremy Irons or Tom O’Bedlam recite this poem), and Sylvia Plath’s The Moon and the Yew Tree (go here for UD‘s analysis of the Plath).
Theme of them all? Shall we sum it up?
Regarde James Merrill: AU FOND EACH SUMMIT IS A CUL-DE-SAC
[T]he men going to trial [in the national basketball bribery scandal] are facing decades in prison for something that no one truly believes is a crime. We know that the victims in this case — the universities — are not actually victims, that they are willingly complicit in the deals that get done. If they weren’t, would Kansas have signed a 12-year, $191 million extension on their apparel deal with Adidas after Adidas victimized the university by allegedly funneling $90,000 to [one basketball recruit] and $20,000 to [another]?
… at the Schoharie County Apple Barrel
Country Store. She bought pumpkins.
It’s the site of the terrible crash.
The people in the limo
were on their way to
Brewery Ommegang
outside Cooperstown.
A court in Madrid is investigating whether around 500 Italians received express law diplomas from the King Juan Carlos University, the spokesman said. The Italians were granted the degrees despite having little knowledge of Spanish, according to media reports.
In a scandal dubbed “Mastergate”, the university already faces claims of gifting degrees to [Spanish] politicians by allegedly awarding them good grades without them turning up for class.
The allegations forced the resignation of Cristina Cifuentes, former head of the Madrid region, in April and ex-health minister Carmen Monton earlier this month.
The new leader of the conservative Popular Party (PP), Pablo Casado, who has a Master’s degree from the university’s now-closed Institute of Public Law, is also under fire.
Rampant Titleitis (the uncontrollable compulsion to put Dr. in front of your name) keeps claiming ministers in the Spanish government, and might help take down the government itself. And the next government.
Here at University Diaries, we’ve learned, over the years, that most of the world’s countries feature a nice tight symmetry between universities run by larcenists and people from all over the world with money who desperately seek Doctor.
You can tell a Titleitis university by the Koenigsegg CCXR Trevita its director, paid a pittance by the government, tools around town in.
Since the ‘mastergate’ scandal broke, [King Juan Carlos University] has closed its Institute of Public Law and filed a complaint for alleged misuse of funds involving former director Enrique Alvarez Conde.
Spanish radio Cadena Ser has also revealed that Alvarez and his deputy in the institute allegedly received unexplained money transfers of close to €200,000 ($230,000) between 2012 and May this year.
We’re shocked – shocked! – to find degree-selling going on here.
*************
The last president of King Juan Carlos University.
If I may quote myself.
And damned if we don’t have a tradition. Now comes Hoss Willis (not his real first name, but see if you can watch this tv news report about all the people involved in this latest Baylor University story and not conclude that every one of them should be named Hoss) (as in Hoss) which some guys uh these two guys claim done said bad shit ’bout our womenfolk and plus you know blacks and Jews and all…
UD is curious about one small detail. Pussy singular or pussies plural? Here’s what one attorney charges:
“Willis made [a] comment to the effect ‘the reason Baylor has such highly qualified (black) football players is because Baylor has the best blonde haired, blue-eyed…’ and he used a very bad term relating to the young girls at Baylor.”
I’m thinking pussy singular.
UD also likes the way the news report, whenever it mentions that an investigator flew to France, shows us a picture of the Eiffel Tower with an airplane next to it.