It’s hard to take very much glee
In the matter of E. Gordon Gee
He’s merely symbolic
Of crap hyperbolic
At all of the sports factories.

… schools.

*****

Update: LOL.

UD has started timing the appearance of these articles. How soon after the body has, as it were, begun to go cold, does this get written?

For the purpose of this blog, let’s assume the worst here and examine the landscape of the defensive line with Martin not being a part of it.

I mean yes yes of course he was arrested only a few hours ago for using a gun in the commission of a crime, and he already had a record of bad behavior, but put that aside. How will this affect our win/loss ratio?

The comments at the end of article are, as always, worth reading. They run the familiar gamut: Total denial (he was set up); shocked outraged disgust, and an insistence that he be kicked off the team immediately (I have never seen such behavior from a player on a big-time university football team!); a reminder that even with thugs the team eats shit; polite, tentative questioning of the coach’s recruitment strategies; an admission that a fan had noticed some, er, violent tendencies on the part of the player; immediate shouting down of the fan by other fans who tell him/her that if you don’t like violence don’t watch football…

***********************

Another Update:   SPIN IT, BABY! SPIN IT!

Wow. It’s rare that you read such pure unadulterated bathetic shameless spin. All praise to this writer for churning it out so fast and thick and pure.

… went the headline way back in 1988, an earlier insider trading season. Having covered oodles of more recently imprisoned Wharton grads on this blog, my question is: Is the Wharton school criminogenic? Does it take nice boys (they’re all boys) and make them naughty? Or is it (as UD suspects) simply notorious for being the go-to place to learn how to be a financial crook and to make, er, connections with other people along these lines? Just put WHARTON in my search engine for a sample of these amazing high-flyers! I’m thinking that if you’re not planning to defraud at the very least a thousand investors, you’re not going to bother applying to Wharton. I’m thinking that if you’re not planning to steal in the tens of millions you’re not going to bother with the application fee.

So – and I know – who’s counting? – but so the latest Wharton guy is Courtney Dupree, also a product of scandal-city University of North Carolina. Once a mover/shaker in his “super-chic loft on Broad Street in Manhattan’s financial district,” he’s now off to seven years in prison for an $18 million bank fraud. And The Legend of Wharton lives on.

… that Harvard University, a non-profit with all the tax breaks pertaining thereto, hoards a thirty-five billion dollar endowment… That all those Right-Not-To-Think states with their incredibly bad universities get huge tax breaks for luxury suites in their sports arenas…

And that some non-profit university hospitals… Well… Take a look:

[The University of Pittsburgh hospital’s] CEO, Jeffrey Romoff, makes almost $6 million a year. That makes him the highest paid CEO of any large nonprofit hospital in the U.S., according to a recent analysis by TIME. Romoff also has more than a dozen administrators that take in annual salaries of over $1 million, and according to the city, he has access to a private chef, chauffeur, and a jet, as well as one of the most expensive office spaces in Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh’s mayor is suing to get rid of the bogus non-profit’s non-profit status. He’ll probably win.

Why? Recall Oscar Wilde calling fox hunting “the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.” Romoff’s attorneys – as will be obvious to everyone – will be the unspeakable in defense of the despicable.

Well, Russia is the ultimate demoralized, degraded post-Soviet mess, and its higher education system is but a tiny part of all that.

Here at University Diaries, however, we’re particularly interested in that part. And we do well to remind ourselves that there are entire countries where university education is a bogus nepotistic cold hard cash joke. One Moscow college has apparently become “a fake thesis factory.”

As a columnist puts it in Novaya Gazeta:

“It is stupid to accuse kids of cheating on the [national standardized] EGE [test] in a nation where officials cheat on their doctoral theses.”

Having worked hard to accumulate tens of millions of dollars as head of the McGill University Health Centre, Arthur Porter understandably has done all he can to resist arrest and extradition back to Canada for having stolen it via kickbacks.

First Porter said he was deathly ill, but this apparently was a lie.

Then he said he was a plenipotentiary ambassador from Sierra Leone. Plenipotentiary is the highest rank available – head of mission, full authority to represent a government – but this also is a lie.

The two claims are impressive when you put them together – on oxygen, about to die of late-stage lung cancer, and at the same time representing Sierra Leone at the highest levels. The man deserves a medal from Sierra Leone, or from the United Nations. But again, unfortunately, he is making it up.

Having exhausted those two efforts to free himself from arrest and extradition, Porter will be interesting to watch at his trial. What lies will he take up there, by way of his defense?

UD will predict that he will move from lies about his physical health to lies about his mental health. He will claim temporary insanity. Oh, and three other men have been arrested for the same scheme. Porter will certainly blame all of them, and say they duped him into involvement. I don’t think Canada televises trials, but if it did, this would be, as I say, one to watch.

***********************

Adding insult to injury, McGill University has announced it is

cancelling plans to pave an “Arthur T. Porter Way” onto the hospital property.

Seriously. This is insane to spend [$450 million to renovate a football stadium] that is used six times a year. Maybe eight. It [is] also completely consistent with the rest of the great state [of] Texas, and the United States.

… [Note that this] athletic [department is] associated with [Texas A & M, a school] of higher learning.

Well, yes… All of us with anything other than them itty bitty brains you see in the truly athletified recognize the Beckettian absurdity of big-time university sports. And it’s noble for Larry Bennett, a political science professor at DePaul, to go up against the surreal inevitability which is a new empty money-hemorrhaging basketball stadium there. But… you know…

There’s gonna be a university casino too! Bennett thinks

DePaul University should not be associated with it. […] By joining this project to DePaul we would be signaling that its institutional ethics are precariously situational.

But believe me, DePaul is so far past Bennett with this idea… I hear it’s looking into massage parlors too…

… nothing?

But the worst psychiatrists – and the merely mediocre – and the greedy – are. With hideous effects on our autonomy and our bank accounts.

That’s why, as David Brooks urges, we should regard the DSM with enormous skepticism.

… sings Cinderella; and this year’s Cinderella university story has got to be Rutgers, whose dream to be the Auburn University of the east is coming true, one day at a time. Rutgers has done it all, with amazing focus and commitment:

*** It has moved decisively toward shutting down the academic component of the university for the sake of athletics. The school’s athletic budget is massive; its academic more and more paltry. Eventually Rutgers as “teaching” and “research” “university” will be exclusively online.

*** It has hired and fired presidents with an eye toward greater and greater haplessness and indifference. Its trustees may be close to firing its latest leader, his function of taking the fall for the most recent string of athletic scandals having been fulfilled. Watch for Rutgers’ next presidential offer to go out to Nick Saban.

*** It has decided to retain its latest in a line of allegedly abusive and/or mendacious athletic officials. She and her rhetoric of integrity and triumph will stay; the letter protesting her cruelty as coach – signed by the entire volleyball team she once led – will be ignored.

These, and too many other strategies and initiatives to mention, are the outward manifestations of an American university determined to root out any scholarly residue, and just as determined to compete with Auburn, Texas Tech, Southern Methodist, Kentucky, and LSU for sports supremacy. A bold move, indeed, to go up against the southern powerhouses. But so far, Rutgers is doing everything right.

Have faith in your dream and someday
Your rainbow will come smiling through.

… says what needs to be said about sex segregation and hate speech in British universities.

Boris Johnson, in The Daily Telegraph:

The universities need to be much, much tougher in their monitoring of Islamic societies. It is utterly wrong to have segregated meetings in a state-funded centre of learning. If visiting speakers start some Islamist schtick – and seek either to call for or justify violence – then the authorities need to summon the police.

… These Islamist evangelists have no allegiance to the western society they live in and whose benefits systems they abuse: far from it – their avowed intent is to create a sexist and homophobic Muslim caliphate.

This blog has watched with bafflement as one British university after another colludes with sex segregationists and people who call for the murder of homosexuals. She truly has no idea why these schools do that. Depraved indifference?

Perhaps Boris Johnson’s opinion piece will help them begin to think about the matter.

And it’s Rutgers. At Rutgers, you bankrupt the school subsidizing athletics. At Rutgers, all that money you took from students buys coaches who abuse students. So that’s, uh, students buying their own abuse. Strange goings-on at a university.

At Rutgers, the new athletic director brought in to clean up the program after problems with abusive coaches turns out – allegedly – to have been an abusive coach.

In smaller ways, too, the new clean-up person at Rutgers already looks like an embarrassment.

[Julie] Hermann was also a central figure in a 1997 discrimination lawsuit filed against the University of Tennessee.

Former assistant volleyball coach Ginger Hineline claimed that she was discouraged from becoming pregnant while working under Hermann.

Hermann made remarks at Hineline’s June 1994 wedding that became central to the lawsuit, which ended with a jury siding with Hineline and awarding her $150,000.

Hermann denied the existence of the video at her introductory news conference at Rutgers on May 15.

“There’s a video? I’m sorry, did you say there’s a video? There’s no video, trust me,” Hermann said.

But The Star-Ledger posted a video on its website, showing Hermann at the nuptials joking that she hoped Hineline would not get pregnant any time soon.

I’m sorry, there’s a video, trust me.

In late April, lawyers for [Steven A.] Cohen and his firm met with federal prosecutors in Manhattan to make their best case argument about why the hedge fund billionaire and his SAC Capital Advisors should not be charged with criminal wrongdoing. But people familiar with that meeting said the lengthy presentation did not impress federal prosecutors, who are now considering whether to use a racketeering law aimed at prosecuting the Mafia and drug gangs to pursue a criminal case against Cohen’s hedge fund.

Always good, here at University Diaries, to look in on foreign fraternities and their way-cool activities. Here in the States, fraternities shuttle between good deeds at the local hospital and parties where they drink themselves to death. In Germany, it’s more retro, more teutonic, more… er… let’s not go any farther forward in time…

Our boys dress down; their boys love a man in cadet slacks. Our boys carry Bud cans; theirs carry rapiers. Ours stagger en masse down State U Boulevard; theirs stage torch-light parades.