Give a boy a sports program. Give him his own fleet of planes. Watch him play, and watch Iowa State University pay!

ISU president Steven Leath thinks he can fly, and he thinks he’s exempt from rules about using university planes (why does an impoverished – apparently impoverished, not great university have a fleet of planes?) for personal trips.

No one at ISU seems able to keep Leach grounded.

I mean, far from being able to control the lad, university personnel struggle mightily to hide the expensive damage he does as he busts up said planes in order to fly to vacation homes.

Iowa State University President Steven Leath caused “substantial damage” to a university airplane he was piloting when it made a hard landing at an Illinois airport last year — a costly incident kept quiet for 14 months… University pilots were sent to pick up Leath and his wife with the school’s second airplane. The roundtrip flight cost more than $2,200 and was charged to the “Greater University Fund.” Leath controls that pot of unrestricted donations, which Iowa State says pays for its “most critical needs.”

What could be more critical to Iowa State University (famed for having inspired Jane Smiley’s Moo, a novel jammed with campus incidents just like this one) than supporting its president’s ongoing effort to figure out how to land a plane while the wind is blowing? The man is a treasure. He’s the guy who explains why the sports program is too poor to do anything about academics.

“We are facing a number of very large, comprehensive serious lawsuits related to athletics,” Leath said. “So before we would change our budget structure and put money into academics, we want to at least get past some of these immediate lawsuits.”

Games, games, and the president’s toys.
All jolly things for all jolly boys!

The Leon Cooperman Professor of Finance and Economics at Columbia University must be in a pretty foul mood.

Not only is he the object of a colleague’s high-profile sexual harassment lawsuit; his very title has become besmirched. Leon Cooperman has just been accused of insider trading.

UD has said many times on these pages that corrupt, insane, and paranoid Chicago State University is America’s little North Korea on the Chicago Southside. Just as that country is an experiment in whether secretive ignorant madmen can run a state, CSU is an experiment in whether a similar grouping can run a university.

The two places have another characteristic in common – when you visit either location, there don’t seem to be many human beings about. I guess everyone’s in prison in North Korea, whereas in the case of CSU virtually no one applies or enrolls, which is another innovative aspect of that university: Can you run a public institution of higher education with no students?

UD has, in these pages, answered that question with a resounding yes: You can run a university without students. If the taxpayers of Illinois don’t mind continuing to fund the operation, you can simply have administrators fussing about with this and that – is the air conditioning system working? etc. – and the trustees can continue to hold their Top Secret meetings (which would not in reality be held – only alluded to in speeches from the latest Dear Leader).

[L]ast week [CSU’s] board of trustees approved a separation agreement with Thomas J. Calhoun Jr., who had been named president of the university just nine months earlier.

“But why was he asked to leave?” asked furious students and faculty at Friday’s board meeting.

To which they received a reply that was like an insult.

“Everyone agreed it’s in the best interests of Dr. Calhoun and the university,” said CSU Board Chair Anthony Young.

What does that even mean?

It was The Unanimous Will of the People. By Total Enthusiastic Acclamation the People Decided it was in The Best Interests of the State for Dr. Calhoun to go. Dr. Calhoun Accepts his Fate with Humble Trembling Gratitude and has Begged to enter a State Reeducation Farm so that he can Confess his Deviationism and Learn from the People How he can Better Serve the State.

All-American town!

Over at Chicago State University, the board of trustees handed Thomas Calhoun Jr. $600,000 in severance pay as they showed him the door after just nine months at the university’s helm.

… UD has said that WSU is one of those American universities that doesn’t have a president – only a football coach.

Someone at WSU had the bad idea of letting its latest president-impersonator (very latest – he won his audition only a couple of months ago) out to talk to the press. Everyone was wondering what he’d say on the subject of Coach Crazyass and his Merry Marauders, and this clueless genial man did not disappoint.

“Clearly, at the end of the football season, I think it’s very fair that athletic director Bill Moos and myself and coach (Mike) Leach all sit down and say, ‘Hey, is what we’re doing working?’ ” Schulz said. “But we don’t do that in the middle of the season for anything.”

Not for anything! When you’re doing this well, you don’t fuck it up!

The Spokesman-Review covered the team’s recent history of encounters with law enforcement in stories on Sunday, revealing what appear to be systemic problems within the athletics department. Since Leach started coaching the team in early 2012, players have been arrested 29 times – more than any other college football program in the nation, according to ArrestNation.com.

The new prez has also said he won’t comment on team carnage that occurred before his ascension… WSU being a remarkably bloody location for a long time… And people are wondering why he won’t. But Mr President won’t say. That’s just how he feels. He just doesn’t feel like talking about that stuff. Fiddle-dee-dee.

As the school, under the leadership of Coach Crazyass, goes down the tubes, two factions are emerging. The allies of the coach think it’s a shame that the evil media is paying so much attention to non-events like football players breaking the heads and jaws of WSU students. This phenomenon – common on quite a few campuses – is as we all know a small price to pay for attracting the most aggressive tacklers in the country to your campus. You’re going to lose a few students. I mean, not to death haha! But to grievous injury… UD has suggested reducing the yearly student athletic fee of anyone who can show he or she has sustained significant physical or mental trauma from the lads.

The other side thinks all the attention WSU is attracting onaccounta its crazy coach and his marauding men is not a good thing.

“As a former WSU regent, I am saddened that the university’s efforts to focus on world class academic excellence are in danger of falling victim to a ‘just win baby’ mentality driven by the bottom line of big money athletics,” Marr wrote. “I encourage the regents to seize leadership on this.”

In response to this, the regents have been totally, unanimously, utterly silent.

Then there’s faculty, another peripheral group we certainly expect to keep its trap shut.

“[The coach is] embarrassing us on ESPN, on a national stage,” said Matthew Sutton, a history professor. “To me it’s just outrageous.”

Sutton said he initially brushed aside negative comments about Leach when the controversial coach was hired in 2011. Leach had been fired from Texas Tech in 2009 for ordering that a player be locked in an equipment shed, and later a darkened office, during practice.

“I gave him the benefit of the doubt,” Sutton said. “I’ve since realized that all the criticism from my colleagues about him was correct.”

Oh yeah now I see how it is! Before, this was just a dude with a bad behavior sheet the length of a football field, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt. But now – well, I guess all those colleagues who told me what a shit he was were right…

And why didn’t all of those colleagues… you know… designate a spokesperson and object to your university deciding to be led by a hopped-up son of a bitch? Now you’ve got yourself in the classic jockshop place: A clueless prez-impersonator; Coach El Duce and his Dudes; hospitals full of hemorrhaging undergrads; and even a fan base beginning to question The Wonderful World of WSU Football.

But don’t panic. There’s an established triage here: 24/7 surveillance for the team. Various forms of bribery (free tickets and more) to the cops to keep them from reporting stuff. Put the president back in his cage. Don’t worry about trustees and faculty – there will be a squeak here or there from them at worst. Hold off for a year on the next student fee increase. And for god’s sake: Hold a bunch of charitable events featuring players, staff, and coaches!

From the moment UD got a load of the now-notorious story of the UNH librarian and his gift to the school (the story has gone all the way up to the governor), she’s been calling bullshit on it. She hasn’t posted on it because she thinks it’s not only a non-story, it’s a kitsch story.

It’s about people projecting onto a photograph of a pale solitary thready bookish recently deceased man a big fat volume of values (scholarship over football, quiet reflection over rahrahrah, etc.) which seems not fully to have represented the guy. Yeah, he was a librarian and he liked books; he also spent years failing to complain to anyone, far as I know, about what a squalid party/football school UNH happens to be. In fact, “Morin got really into football in the year before he died: ‘In the last 15 months of his life, Morin lived in an assisted living center where he started watching football games on television, mastering the rules and names of the players and teams.'” (UD thanks Wendy for that link.)

That’s why UD wasn’t surprised when someone who knew him well said – well, look at my headline. The school decided to use much of his unrestricted gift to buy a scoreboard. He would have been “pleased” with it. You might not like it; you might think he wouldn’t have liked it. You’re entitled to your opinion, but not to any outrage on his behalf.

What? You think that in absolute terms, as it were, it was a lousy thing to do with his money? Now you’re guilty of betraying this guy’s wishes.

It’s gone way past Orwellian in Pullman Washington, where the most criminalized football team in the country, Washington State University, enjoys high praise from the police chief even as his officers keep arresting its players. The team’s coach, a big-mouth bully trailing accusations of player abuse from coaching job to coaching job, is loudly and persistently outraged that his guys, currently subjecting the WSU student body to torture and disfigurement, should be arrested at all, given that most of this stuff started during fights and other people were also fighting but his guys were picked up just because everyone knows who they are and just because they’re the biggest so they inflict the most damage.

Add humongous, ever-growing student athletic fees, and you’ve certainly got a creeping Ick Factor problem on that campus…

WSU is becoming a kind of laboratory for an emergent reality in American football schools. Until now, we’ve been told to regard player violence on many football campuses as a sometime thing – this domestic violence, that armed robbery, that melee, that beat-up freshman. The coach’s job was to be the wounded daddy, disappointed that junior had misbehaved. The player disappeared and we went on with the show.

WSU shows us how this picture has evolved. The coach has gone from disappointed daddy to belligerent defender of violent people. Sure, they’re violent! But so are a lot of other people, and if other violent people aren’t arrested, our guys shouldn’t be.

The violence itself has become less individualized and more team-centered: Attacks aren’t just one lunatic like Richie Incognito; they’re now liable to be three or four players working as a … team. Which is how schools like WSU rack up national most-arrested titles.

Everything’s getting more explicit: Under pressure from splashy New York Times exposés, police departments like Pullman’s are more likely to actually arrest players.

And though schools keep trying to fudge the numbers, huge spikes in student fees to pay for the glorious athletics department have not gone unnoticed.

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UD thinks Mike Leach, a very high-profile Donald Trump supporter, knows exactly what he’s doing. Once a man like Trump is elected, the sky’s the limit.

… got to. It’s on my piano bench.

Frighteningly attractive.

Trash all around.

Motto of the MUSC Board of Trustees:

TANKED UP OR NOT AT ALL!

… on her twenty-sixth birthday.

… justice.

…just as nasty billionaires, in a beautiful synergy, need the, uh, colonic properties of universities.

Bernie and his comrade in trade Ezra Merkin were madly generous, madly esteemed trustees of Yeshiva University. That pious institution made them look pure as the driven snow, preoccupied with things of the mind, things of the spirit; and Bernie and Ezra for obvious reasons valued this look highly.

Yeshiva continues to confer sweetness and light upon the likes of Ira Rennert and Zygi Wilf; and in this it resembles many other American universities, whose buildings and scholarships and professorships bear some seriously nasty names.

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Here’s one. Much-esteemed University of Pennsylvania benefactor Howard Marks is an investor who writes judicious memos about how “markets make mistakes and the greatest market mistakes are driven by emotion – [like] too much greed…”

Marks himself owns but has never lived in a 22,000-square-foot Manhattan apartment which among many other things contains “30 rooms, six terraces, two dozen closets, two chefs kitchens, [and] two libraries.” It sits there on Park Avenue, completely empty, year after year. Like the California venture capitalist who got hold of a long-public beach only in order to post armed guards there to keep anyone from using it, Howard Marks has been driven by some emotion or other to dispense $52 million in order to spend years and years loudly, daily, breaking down the walls of two floors of dead space.

His downstairs neighbors have had enough and are suing. They point out that he’s been breaking building construction rules involving noise levels and hours of work per day for years, and ignoring their pleas that he stop. He has made their lives hell. Not only does he not give a shit; his lawyers are fighting the neighbors tooth and nail.

U Penn gets all excited and writes of Marks as if he’s a god because he gives a few hundred thousand to some of their writing programs, while their benefactor directs his real money to this twisted nihilistic project characterized by vacancy, aggression, and stunning waste.