David Garland, Baylor University’s president, speaks:

I don’t know any school that has been as transparent as we have and taken the extraordinary actions we have… We’ve also published, on our website, findings of fact which in many ways are findings of fault… From a Christian perspective, we’ve confessed our sins, tried to repent and tried to make restitution.

Deadspin’s Tom Ley responds:

I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen someone pack so many lies into so few sentences. [The] findings of fact report that Garland deems to have been such an extraordinary act of transparency was nothing more than a 13-page summary of the law firm Pepper Hamilton’s investigation into the school’s failure to handle sexual assault allegations. That summary contained almost no specifics, and there is no written record of Pepper Hamilton’s full investigation because the school asked the firm to deliver its report to the regents orally.

As for Garland’s appeal to look at his school’s actions from a Christian perspective, all he’s doing here is pulling the same sleight of hand that so many institutions that operate under the umbrella of Christianity have pulled so many times before: He’s taking the concept of redemption to mean that properly-identified Christians, like himself, always have a free pass waiting for them. This is how a hollow document, a few scapegoat firings, and engaging in legal battles with victims become repentance. Being a good Christian means whatever the good Christian wants it to mean, and David Garland fancies himself a good Christian.

… experts.

UD‘s reading it now.

——–

Well, ol’ UD will already take issue with the article’s sub headline, which has it that alumni and the “authorities” are really angry about Raping Football Players and the Men Who Love Them… But really, given the culture of Baylor (as amply represented by its departing sports ministry guy), are we supposed to buy that? Women are weak vessels and if they find themselves in an unpleasant spot with a man it’s because they forgot their burqa and their Bible. Boys will be boys.

——-

[One of many lawsuits against the school makes] the startling claim that at least 52 rapes by at least 31 players had occurred from 2011 through 2014 — a period when the once-hapless Baylor football program became a dominant force in the highly competitive Big 12 Conference.

Hey. Price of doing business.

Who can blame Baylor for believing that Baptist Propriety for Women would mean the weak vessels would confess their shame to the sports minister and then shut up about it?

Who can blame Baylor for knowing that you want the most aggressive person you can find for your football team?

——-

“Success in athletics means that all cocks rise,” Kenneth W. Starr, then the university’s president, told The Times in 2014.

Haha. I mean “boats.” He said success in athletics means that all boats rise.

——-

Some women on campus will of course gladly sacrifice their virtue for the sake of the team. It is their sacred honor to pleasure recruits. One lawsuit claims

“attractive female students” in the Bruins [a “hostess” program] were expected to ensure that recruits had a good time on campus by, for example, engaging “in sexual acts with the recruits to help secure the recruits’ commitment to Baylor.”

——-

So. Wait now for the academic scandal… Now that the door’s been opened on Baylor University, wait for details about what professors at Baylor were doing (are doing) to keep some players academically eligible.

… the University of Florida way.

Baylor University’s director of sports ministry will leave the school this summer…

[Wes] Yeary testified in defense of former football player Sam Ukwuachu, who was later convicted of sexual assault. Yeary said he would be comfortable with Ukwuachu returning to his home and being around his children.

Yeary also testified that Ukwuachu’s victim told him about the assault. He said he told her that if she would have called him on the night of the rape, he would have given her a ride home.

Yeary was allegedly involved in a separate case involving former Baylor football player Devin Chafin, who was dismissed from the football team June 1.

In a Title IX lawsuit against the university, Dolores Lozano accuses Baylor officials of not adequately responding to her claims of domestic violence against Chafin.

Lozano reported an assault to Yeary, the suit alleges, and Yeary then gave her literature to assist her in spiritual self-worth and preservation.

University of Oregon football co-offensive coordinator David Reaves spent little more than a day on the job but was paid more than $60,000.

… Reaves received $3,750 for 26 hours of work when he resigned Feb. 3 after being arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence. [He] also received a payment of $60,000.

… Ira Rennert, once again reminds students at the Rennert Entrepreneurial Institute how it’s done.

Loot, loot, loot; and then when you’re caught, appeal, appeal, appeal.

Go to it, kids!

What $65,000 in yearly tuition and room and board gets you.

When to the sweet silent thought of Sessions
He summons up remembrance of things past,
He finds himself caught up in indiscretions
In answer to the questions Franken asked.
Now does he drown an eye, unused to flow,
For Russian friends with whom he used to play,
And weep afresh what he pretended not to know,
And moan the absence of his vieux Sergey.
Now can he grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoanèd moan,
Which he new pays as if not paid before.
But all of this might be excused
If he be granted his recuse.

Texas Christian University’s most militant Disciples of Christ are to be found on its football team, where select players routinely fan out among the non-football-playing student population on campus and beat the shit out of them.

The bloodied president of the team’s booster club, The Flagellants, recently issued a statement: “For the greater glory of God.”

The greatest privilege of all is being able to shut out offensive ideas.

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

Freedom and safety both require a level of risk and a careful balance. Unhappily a free society is simply not compatible with never-ending, numbing comfort. A bubble is its own kind of cage.

The world of professionalized university sports is super-seamy. It’s like a Fellini film with the surreality edited out and the depravity left in.

As UD often notes on this blog, none of us minds the even greater depravity of truly professional sports, where bloodshed doping and cheating are part of the spectacle. In the professional game, these are perennial, structural, cultural elements, like soccer riots in Brazil.

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

But a lot of people retain a misty flimsy sense that a university… as opposed to a thirteen billion dollar professional league… that a university president… as opposed to an NFL commissioner…

So you get this… discomfort, when people are again and again made to realize that the NCAA is the NFL with less revenue (one billion v thirteen), and that major university athletic programs are … well, remove the word university.

Since everyone knows what a joke any academic component of most big-time university sports programs is likely to be, all it takes is for the tiniest shoe to drop for a ton of shit to hit the fan.

Take what’s been going on for a year now at the University of Missouri, where one – count ’em! one! – measly athletic academic tutor suddenly alleged that the whole tutoring of athletes thing was, you know …

Now Ms Kumar, like many of the people willing to profit off of the dungheap that is major university athletics, is not, on careful consideration, as pure as the driven snow. Her rap sheet’s up there in my headline. Yet her little peep about the program has a vast expensive arsenal of UM attorneys, investigators, and all the rest training its guns over the program with as much dispatch and authority as the Chapel Hill arsenal.

Yet while that fighting force roots out corruption, there’s still Ms Kumar, waiting with waning patience on the sidelines for her reward. One way or another she intends to make a lot of money – maybe a whistleblower settlement, maybe an exclusive magazine interview, whatever, but the point here is to pay off her debts.

Yolanda Kumar, the tutor at the epicenter of the Missouri athletic department’s joint investigation with the NCAA into alleged academic fraud, touched off a social-media firestorm Friday afternoon by offering to sell [names of campus wrongdoers] in exchange for about $3,000.

So add blackmail to the sordid landscape of higher education in the American heartland.

But this is nothing new for the University of Missouri.

Start one minute in.

This is the same thing UD saw this morning as she walked home along the CSX tracks from the Garrett Park post office.

An all-Herzog train!

… the rest of the illustrious Exeter crew.

… joke.