College hijinks, people!
Just like over in Richmond.
Florida Atlantic University, a laughingstock, seems to have decided to do what it can to make itself less ridiculous.
Seriousness and tax exemption – the two essentials of our universities – are closely aligned. If the first (the philosophical foundation) vanishes, the second (the financial foundation) will be imperiled. If any particular enterprise with university in its name loses its seriousness, as expressed in a scholarly atmosphere, a liberal arts curriculum, and the training of students for higher study and for jobs, state legislatures and citizens will begin to question the special forms of financial support (there are many besides tax exemption, of course; tax exemption is shorthand for them all) they are providing. Politicians will appropriate less and less money; alumni will offer fewer and fewer donations. Eventually, for the worst among our universities, students will stop applying, which is already happening at South Carolina State University and elsewhere.
Simply put, if it’s impossible to detect more than a token amount of academic activity on a university campus – if the place is not serious – people are eventually going to withhold the designation university from that campus, and the money benefits that sustain it are also going to be withheld.
Thus when Holden Thorp, sports-battered ex-chancellor of the University of North Carolina, says
“Either we put the ADs back in charge and hold them accountable if things don’t work […] or let’s be honest and tell everyone when we select (presidents) to run institutions that run big-time sports that athletics is the most important part of their job.”
he is warning American universities that they are running out of seriousness. He is signalling to all of our schools that the management of sports events – and the management of their attendant activities (crimes committed by athletes; destruction caused by drunken tailgaters; constant buyout and other lawsuits running into the hundreds of millions of dollars; endemic cheating; deals with distilleries for the sale of alcohol to students; ceaseless scandals costing the school millions in damage control and personnel replacement, etc.) – has become virtually the entire job of the university president. But this group of activities does not describe a university president. It describes an athletic director. The person who manages the dispensing of fifty million dollars – the amount of money the Sandusky scandal has so far cost Penn State – to lawyers and public relations people is not – and, as Thorp makes clear, should not be – a university president.
This person should, of course, be an athletic director. Eventually, many American universities will have athletic director presidents – people who manage sports, and also manage, in their spare time, whatever few academic issues crop up.
Having athletic directors as university presidents makes all kind of sense. The UNC scandal wouldn’t have happened at all if an AD had been president, since academic misconduct from the point of view of an AD is… what? What is that? The AD doesn’t even know what it is, so whatever happened in the Afro-American Studies department at Chapel Hill is … whatever. Price of doing business. Way to stay in the game. Once the AD has real control over what goes on in the school, scandals won’t surface because they won’t be scandals.
Under the President Athletic Director regime everyone will be happy.
But this bliss cannot last. Eventually more and more people will realize you’re not a university, and you’ll have to take that word out of your name and get your funding from ticket sales.
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Meanwhile more and more schools at the moment have a Gordon Gee situation on their hands. Gee was a puppet intellectual (bow ties, spectacles) trotted out to mouth serious things, to keep the seriousness ball in the air.
Ever wonder why Gordon says such crazy shit? Babe, you don’t need a Freudian to know which way the wind blows. This is an angry puppet, a self-hating hypocrite, a man who used to have intellectual self-respect and now trades it every day for football money. Gordon Gee is a stage in the devolution of the American university president, a halfway point between mind and body, seriousness and play. His extinction will pave the way for President Nick Saban.
… talks himself out of a job.
… be my guest. I’ve spent most of the day admiring it.
Les UDs have what they always considered a posh neighbor across the street from their Shady Hill Square house in Cambridge. Fifty yards from their ivied walls lies the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a rather vague outfit to both UDs, but one they feel sure does good and high-minded things.
I don’t know why neither of us has ever had any interest in figuring out just what the AAAS does. Talking about it now, we were able to eke out a memory that the AAAS publishes the journal Daedalus, and that our long-ago neighbor and friend John Kenneth Galbraith was a member (we think). I’ve always been pleased that their rather small building in a large park keeps the view in that direction green and leafy…
All very nice, you say. And yet — who knows what evil lurks at Irving and Beacon Streets? A reader sends UD (UD thanks her reader) this scathing article from the Boston Globe, detailing an organization whose leader lied about having earned a doctorate (a lie that continues to help her get federal funds), makes an unconscionable salary (almost $600,000) for the head of a very small non-profit, and “requires workers to chauffeur her between the office and her luxury apartment along the Charles River in Cambridge.” (Back in 2003, the Globe had already taken notice of this woman.)
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Now if your problem is that you’re perceived as high-handed and out of touch, how do you deal with that?
Well, you instruct one of your underlings to instruct reporters that they are to report to your expensive public relations person who will condescend to say the following:
“Neither the academy nor President Berlowitz is going to respond to subjective, interpretive, and gossipy allegations from former employees and unnamed sources. …Nor are they going to respond to personal questions that are irrelevant, do not belong in the public domain and, frankly, smack of sexism.”
Wow! Winner! Touched all the bases there. Advised her not to speak directly to the press. Not even to answer the phone, a job for subordinates. Announced that James Devitt, NYU spokesman who looked at that school’s records in regard to President Berlowitz, is just a mean ol’ stupid ol’ gossip. Plus you’re all sexists!
All UD can say is, next time I see the Berlowitz limo whizzing by I’m gonna let out a Bronx cheer loud enough for her to hear and tell her to move the hell out. She’s lowering the tone of the place.
Ah, once again all good flows from big-time university athletics. Here it’s the University of Montana, some of whose professors wonder why the school has a devastating $8.6 million deficit.
The deficit may have something to do with all the rape in Missoula, some of it apparently committed by football players. When your city is known as the Rape Capital of America, people might be reluctant to spend much time there; and indeed the main reason for UM’s deficit involves a sharp downturn in enrolled students.
The UM professors who signed the opinion piece note a looming event sure to make UM as unattractive to new faculty as it is to new students.
Most recently, the university attempted to put a positive spin on the investigation conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice into how the university handled allegations of sexual assault. The administration claimed it had achieved a great victory by reaching an agreement with this federal agency. A closer look, however, reveals that UM, in a desperate effort to avoid another embarrassment, negotiated a legal settlement that forced it to accept all the recommendations and demands made by the federal government. Among these were a series of mandatory training programs which the administration promised to implement across campus. UM leadership must understand that training of faculty should be limited to procedural matters and cannot be used as a pretext to alter the curriculum, impose ideological positions, and threaten the fundamental academic freedoms of the faculty.
You see, because athletes at the university were sexually abusive, faculty will be forced to take Don’t Rape Your Students training sessions.
As I say, great and manifold is the goodness flowing from big-time university athletics.
… always puts you in awkward positions.
In response to Fadela Amara’s recent talk at the University of Chicago (background here), a UC student (who didn’t attend) writes:
For the far-right, it is a matter of marginalizing an undesirable religious group, and for people of Amara’s ilk, it is a matter of imposing their views of freedom and liberty in a manner that undermines those very principles.
One always hears this. Despite the fact that in France, for instance, 82 percent of the electorate supported the burqa ban (the French Senate approved it 246 to 1), one is always informed that opposition to the burqa means one is a far-rightist.
The campus group that sponsored Amara’s talk responds:
[T]he burqa ban had widespread political support in France from both the left and right. It is simply incorrect to associate Amara with the French extreme right. A member of the Socialist Party for 23 years, Amara firmly considers herself a “femme de gauche.” A practicing Muslim, born of Algerian immigrant parents in a ghetto outside Clermont-Ferrand, France, Amara falls squarely in the category of those the National Front, the far-right French political party, would love to see deported.
… to reveal all the petty inept mini-scandalous acts that may accompany anything bureaucracies do.
This is the real reason big scandals tend to grow, tend to be so difficult to tamp down. Bureaucracies are hydra-headed.
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Just as plagiarism scandals break out with one instance of copying, but almost always, on examination, yield tons of other instances of copying (they also, typically, yield related forms of bad behavior on the part of the plagiarist), so any given big-time athletics scandal on an American university campus will almost certainly – having drawn public and press scrutiny – bring to light routine subsidiary idiocies.
When the shit hits the fan in this big way, you can count on some big name on campus blaming journalists for it all — but of course this move (especially if made by someone in part responsible for the debacle) — simply becomes another hydra-head.
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And so it is in rattled rutted Rutgers, stuck in the deepening slough of its own despond. It started with an outrageously abusive coach, moved briskly to negligent administrators, and now has positively zoomed onward to useless, expensive search firms (the national scandal of often useless, always expensive search firms is what I mean by hydra-heads that lurk in almost all bureaucracies); an also-scandalous replacement appointment; a hectoring professor on a university committee.
UD‘s point is that all of these microbursts are routine aspects of any university. All universities have fanatic ideologues. All have presidents who don’t wanna know from sicko athletics. Almost all are robbed blind by search firms.
It’s only when the big scandal hits that all of these routine scandals come bursting out.
Alors, if you want to avoid the hydra-head deal, avoid the big scandal, right?
Should have thought of that before you spent all of your students’ money on that big ol’ dirty ol’ sports program.
You start at the beginning, and as you scan one sentence after another, your smile grows. At certain points, your smile goes way wide. Follow UD as she smiles through this article, in the Times-Picayune, New Orleans.
The headline at first looks disturbing, not smile-making.
LSU FALLS IN LOWER HALF
OF SEC IN PLAYER ARRESTS
DURING PAST THREE YEARS
Louisiana State University is trailing other SEC schools, which is… bad?
But wait! In arrests. LSU ranks somewhat lower than some other schools in the number of players arrested over the last three years. So – let’s see how it breaks down.
The arrest of LSU running back Jeremy Hill recently has made for negative headlines for LSU. But when it comes to that subject, LSU is in the lower half of the SEC going back to 2010.
According to an unofficial count tallied by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune in that span, four programs are in double figures [SMILE], led by newcomer Missouri [SMILE. WELCOME, MISSOURI, AND THANKS FOR BURNISHING, RIGHT AWAY, THE SEC’S FANTASTIC REP!] with 18, not counting two coaches’ arrest for DWI [BIG SMILE ON THE NOT COUNTING THE COACHES THING. ACTUALLY, LAUGH OUT LOUD.]. Vanderbilt has the fewest with only one in that span.
In between is Florida (17), Georgia (15), Arkansas (12), Ole Miss (11), Auburn and , Kentucky (nine each), Alabama (seven), LSU (six) and Mississippi State, South Carolina, Texas A&M and Tennessee (five each).
LSU fans were divided on whether there was a problem at LSU or if it was more of a universal issue, according to this poll we posted. [KIND OF AN UNCERTAIN SMILE AS I TRY TO FIGURE OUT THAT EITHER/OR… IS IT A PROBLEM THAT THE ONLY ELEMENT OF YOUR UNIVERSITY ANYONE KNOWS OR CARES ABOUT ROUTINELY FEATURES CRIMINALS? NAH! AND SINCE OTHER SCHOOLS ALSO FEATURE CRIMINALS ON THEIR TEAMS, DOES THAT MEAN IT’S UNIVERSAL AND THEREFORE NOT A PROBLEM BUT AN ‘ISSUE’? IF IT’S UNIVERSAL IS IT LIKE SUN SPOTS OR DECREASED COGNITIVE SKILLS AS YOU MOVE TOWARD YOUR EIGHTIES AND THEREFORE NOT A PROBLEM SO MUCH AS A PERMANENT UNFORTUNATE FEATURE OF EXISTENCE?]
UD‘s smile persisted as she scrolled through the comments made by New Orleans locals. She’s particularly fond of the comparative approach many SEC fans take to the problem or issue or universe. Frinstance:
[A]t least the arrests are for fighting, and not for mostly robbery (Alabama). I’d rather have problems for bar brawls, [than] people who were dishonest.
You said it! Bar brawls are nice clean man-on-man violence, not like sneaky robbery. There’s a dignity to bar brawls.
True, Halsey imploded before UVA could make him, like Cohen at Brown, a trustee. And true, Cohen’s ten billion dollar personal fortune puts Minor – who used to have two billion but is currently bankrupt ($100 million in debts; only $50 million to pay them — we’ve all been there) – to shame. But both men are big presences, big benefactors, at these two universities; and as both men fall apart, the universities look rather like Elinor in Sense and Sensibility, who laments to her sister that humiliation was “forced upon me by the very person whose prior claims ruined all my hopes.” (In Elinor’s case that would be a romantic rival, while in the present matter we are talking about creditors.)
Now, Cohen is far from bankrupt, but it’s pretty clear that his firm’s way-serious legal problems are emptying his hedge fund a mile a minute; and just as Minor’s pledged twenty-five million dollar gift to UVA seems to have disappeared, I’m thinking that any amazing largesse of that sort Cohen might have been contemplating in relation to Brown is similarly imperiled.
The other day, Iowa Hawkeyes head coach Kirk Ferentz decried the spreading influence of money in college athletics. This is funny for several reasons, but you don’t really need to go past the fact that Ferentz is paid $3.8 million a year to coach Iowa’s football team, and does so while providing a comically small return on investment. In situations like this, schools would normally cut bait and fire the coach, but Ferentz is protected by a buyout that makes his contract look downright reasonable.
… If Iowa were to fire Ferentz today, the school would have to pay a buyout of $17,531,360.
$17,531,360. For Kirk Ferentz. To not coach.
When that’s the context, $918,000 is nothing.
… violent and prevaricating coach , direct your attention away from Rutgers for a moment and take a look at the University of Alaska.
The larger picture for Alaska involves spectacular statewide corruption. Our two far-flung states – Alaska and Hawaii – are among America’s most filthy, and their substandard universities, and corrupt university sports programs, reflect that. Of course one of the reasons these programs can be so corrupt is that no one outside Hawaii and Alaska pays any attention. We look at big urban states like New Jersey.
But UA has its own sports scandal going, and it precisely echoes the Rutgers story. College Hockey News reports:
Former Alaska-Anchorage forward Mickey Spencer alleges that former coach Dave Shyiak hit a player with his stick during a practice in 2011, then told players to keep quiet about it. Spencer made his allegations in a letter written to the school president and Board of Regents, it was reported in the Anchorage Daily News.
According to the letter, Shyiak violently struck forward Nick Haddad during a drill because the coach got angry that Haddad didn’t stop in front of the net as instructed.
The Daily News obtained the letter. In it, Spencer said, “He tomahawked, lumber-jacked — whatever you want to call it — him across the thigh on his (hockey) pants. We knew this wasn’t a small deal, it’s kind of a big deal. I’ve seen a coach break a stick over a goalpost or the glass because he’s pissed about something, but I’ve never seen one take out his anger on a player.”
You can understand why Shyiak was frustrated; he had eight losing seasons in a row at UAA. Anyone would have attacked a player.
As at Rutgers, after the violent coach went, the UAA athletic director who oversaw the coach was also forced out. There’s a suggestion that the university didn’t take the players’ report of the coach’s violence seriously; there’s also the fact that the university announced nothing of all of this to the media. And now, for unknown reasons, the search for a new hockey coach has been called off.
UAA athletics is also, by the way, under NCAA investigation for an undisclosed something or other.
The Sarah Palin appointees making up this university’s regents have called a special meeting to discuss all of this. That should help.
… whenever a university sports scandal gets truly nationally and internationally bad, we’re always treated to the semi-literate self-important pointless maundering of the Designated Faculty Hitter.
The DFH teaches sports management or something; he’s a team booster whose job it is to cover the sports shit on campus with academic roses — to make the crime and abuse and cheating and sleaze look as though they’re activities that can be understood as part of the daily life of an organization recognizable as a university, rather than a syndicate or a gang or whatever.
The DFH for the country’s latest scandal-plagued darling, Rutgers, has just done his thing, and it’s time for SOS to take a good long look at it.
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Dear Rutgers University, [He’s written it in the form of a letter to Rutgers.]
“It is no coincidence that we all bleed scarlet”.
That familiar saying among those that call themselves “Rutgers Men” is also the very ethos of my being.
[Strange opening line. To whom – among the readers of Forbes magazine – is that line familiar? And Rutgers Men? SOS had no idea Rutgers was a single-sex school. But she can certainly confirm that already in the writer’s first sentence he has dismissed any female readers his letter might have had. And – the very ethos of my being. Wow. If a team motto is the very ethos of your being, I’m being not very interested in what you have to say about anything. The very ethos of my being is laughing at you.]
As a Rutgers College and Law School alumus, a former student-athlete and current faculty member of the School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University has been a major part of my life for over a decade. [Why? Since Rutgers didn’t even teach you about dangling modifiers, so now you’ve embarrassed yourself again, right after that ethos thing?] My blood is forever scarlet, and I am proud of it.
During my time on the banks of the Raritan, I have had the opportunity to observe the exceptional growth and evolution of our university from a number of perspectives. While we have made tremendous strides [Did Rutgers tell you about cliches?] over the last decade, we have also managed to inhibit our own success due to an alarming string of organizational failures. While the majority of the media and public [You could have written most observers, but that wouldn’t have been as pretentious.] have been quick to point fingers of blame at our leadership for much of the turmoil, they too easily neglect that leaders of great organizations do not make decisions in a vacuum. Between students, faculty and staff, [That should be among.] the Rutgers community is made up of more than 70,000 individuals, [Again, you could have said people, but individuals is far more pretentious, with more syllables.] all of which [whom] play some role in the direction of the university. Large organizations, whether they are state universities or multinational conglomerates, operate in such a way that blaming any one individual for the failures of the entire entity is simply naive and unfair. [Totally untrue statement. It’s often the case that one person is significantly responsible for a large institution’s failure. That’s why the president of Rutgers will be resigning soon.]
Our President Robert Barchi is a brilliant neuroscientist. [Irrelevant.] Our former athletic director Tim Pernetti is a tremendously successful entrepreneur [So? We know that athletic directors and their agents are capable of negotiating obscene, institution-destroying contracts, but this isn’t really why they are at the university.] and his successor, Julie Hermann, is a accomplished athletic administrator. [Who says? Isn’t it rather naive of you simply to assert this?] While each of them has shown great stewardship throughout their careers, there is no such thing as a perfect leader. [SOS says: This sort of condescending, statement-of-the-obvious, pat-the-reader-on-the-head phrase — no such thing as a perfect leader, I’ll have you know! — is a real winner when it comes to regaining all those readers your writing has already alienated.] That is why every organization creates levels of redundancy within their decision making structures to prevent any one individual from having to [too] much influence. While this might lead to red tape and bureaucracy, it also insures that [the] healthy functioning of the corporate ecosystem. [As at Rutgers?]
… The controversy that has struck our great university over the last few months is not due to the shortcomings of our leadership, but rather a result of a culture in which accountability and communication are misaligned. In any large organization, particularly one as complex as a major state university, there are so many moving parts, competing interests and differences of opinion that unless there is a concerted effort to have total transparency and debate, bad decisions are are all but guaranteed to be made. [Note the jargon and passive voice and general tone of haughty lecturing to the unwashed masses who don’t know anything about the complex mysterious intricacies of organizations. This is what UD calls going cosmic. The disaster – not controversy – at Rutgers is not about the all too familiar corruption of universities by mindless boosterism and greed. No, no, it’s some case study in organizational blahblah.]
At Rutgers, there has long been a movement by many faculty and alumni against big time athletics. While their voice might be that of the minority, those that believe that academic and athletic progress are not mutually inclusive have succeeded at creating a juxtaposition that has become endemic to the culture of our university. [Do you have any idea what the fuck he’s saying? This reads like a letter from Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice. Vacuous. Comically pretentious.] As both a professor who values academic progress and an entrepreneur who makes a living off of college athletics, I am equally guilty of helping promote these conflicting ideals. [What conflicting ideals? What’s the juxtaposition? What is he talking about?]
Instead of creating an environment based on accountability, where critical issues are brought out into the open and decision makers are held responsible for their actions, the university community has seemingly refused to learn from its past mistakes and has become seemingly forever mired in the morass of its own self-sabotage. [Morass and self-sabotage… weird mixed metaphor. Deadly repetition of mousy seemingly. And what is he talking about? He seems to want to attack critics of crushingly expensive and corrupt sports at Rutgers – it’s the fault of the critics; they’re not on board with everyone else, etc. That’s fine. Go after the nay-sayers. But go after them cleanly and directly.] Great organizations have culture, and culture only comes from a set of shared attitudes, goals, and values that every individual within that organization believes in. [Huh? This unanimity is certainly true of great cultures like North Korea. In the United States, especially in our universities, it’s just the opposite.] If those of us who owe so much to Rutgers cannot agree to bring our goals into sync, than how can we expect our University to do the same?
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There’s more, but – to quote Mr Bennet on one of the letters he receives from Mr Collins – I won’t sport with your intelligence further. A painstaking analysis of this writer’s appalling prose does seem to reveal an attack on those pesky dissenters whose efforts to keep sports from destroying Rutgers turn out to be responsible for this catastrophe. If only Rutgers had been as united as the folks in Paterno’s Happy Valley, the outcome would have been so much better.
… Eyed Click Beetle on my trash can.
