Yes, Mike Rice U is now into bold type, garishly warring and litigating personalities, and the baying press in pursuit of the next hilarious unguarded statement. Penn State is still there, a tabloid whose faculty and administration desperately insist it’s back to being a … you know … quiet legitimate scholarly sort of thing (even though, as you read this, the only Penn-State-related word blasting through your brain is SANDUSKY SANDUSKY SANDUSKY). Penn State can give Rutgers pointers… As can the perennial yellow journalism schools, like Auburn, which is in the news for (get ready for it) absolutely total corruption.
We all know big-time sports is the front porch of the university. We’ve been told that by boosters again and again. And it’s true. Eventually, you can see everything. In big, bold type.
… that the only change in university sports wafting out of The Steamed Rice affair will be totally closed practices. Quite a few university coaches behave like Mike Rice – Rice simply got caught. So you have to keep coaches from getting caught.
Caught by the normal world. The cynical, twisted world of universities dominated, as Rutgers is, by sports, will let the behavior go with a handslap. Too much money at stake. You want the coach to make each player as much of an asshole as he is so they’ll win games. Rutgers didn’t fire Rice until the normal world responded normally to his disgusting behavior. Disgusting in any setting, but really disgusting in a university. Rutgers has no shame.
*************************************
So. Lesson? George writes:
Lock the gym doors. Hang a notice declaring that practice is closed. Tape brown paper over the windows if necessary.
But that strategy is clunky and risky in its obviousness. Not only will locked gym doors attract attention; your university’s coach is likely to feel free to be even more violent if he knows he’s truly alone with the players.
No, the solution, as is so often the case in university education these days, lies in synchronous interactive online pedagogy. The only way to keep the coach’s fingers away from the players’ necks is to separate coach and player, placing the players in the gym and the coach well away from them. A reasonably simple bit of software (SafeCoach) will allow practices to proceed nicely, coach watching and screaming from the comfort of his home or office. Players can turn the sound down when coaches enter into their most acute psychotic episodes.
France’s chief rabbi sounds like a real prince. When plagiarism from Jean-Francois Lyotard was found in his book Forty Jewish Meditations, he tried to suggest that Lyotard had plagiarized from him.
Now that the whole damn book looks plagiarized, he blames it on his ghost writer.
Not that he acknowledged having a ghost writer. Only now does it turn out… Je suppose it doesn’t look very good for your meditations to have been written – er, collated – er, plagiarized – by someone else. Although Ghosted Meditations is a very beautiful, very suggestive title! … How would it be in French? … Fantôme Méditations… C’est beau!
I think… I think therefore I… I think therefore I hire a ghostwriter…
It’s strange how even the chiefest among us never learn. Didn’t Gilles Bernheim notice all the attention Jane Goodall got? Doris Kearns Goodwin? All those Harvard law professors? How high-profile does the hire-a-ghost-writer-because-you’re-too-grand-to-write-your-own-words-and-then-fail-to-read-the-resulting-plagiarized-manuscript routine have to be for someone like the chief rabbi of France to notice?
Out he goes, his “rehabilitation” having failed, explains the sainted Rutgers AD who attempted the on-court conversion.
Tim Pernetti now tries to save his own ass. Good luck.
********************
UD thanks Wendy.
“Mike has undergone some pretty intensive sensitivity training as part of this whole deal and has dealt with, or continues to deal with a lot of those issues. This is not the kind of thing that once the basketball season is over, penance is paid,” Pernetti said. “I’ve had a sports psychologist working 60-to-80 hours with him since the suspension took place. He’s going to be involved in all those communities that he may have or will offend on the going-forward basis.”
He’s … troubled. Five minutes with the about-to-be-released DSM-V and you’ll come up with a list of disorders as long as one of Mike’s you-faggot-piece-of-shit tirades. They’ve got him in with a head man 60-80 hours so far and counting.
Who’s paying, by the way? That sounds expensive, and Mike is already real expensive – not only in sheer dollars (Rutgers pays him hundreds and hundreds of thousands each year) but in terms of what tatters of reputation the always shit-besmirched Rutgers (sports at Rutgers is the gift that keeps on giving) has left. Not to mention the lawsuits from parents of the players he’s…
Hey, wait! What about the players? Is Rutgers going to hire psychologists to spend 60-80 hours with traumatized eighteen-year-olds who came to college figuring yeah college… College. Where The Dark Knight drills balls at your head and calls you a fucking cunt.
**************************
UD thanks Phil.
Well, you’d expect a column called OutSports to get a bit miffed at Rutgers University’s psycho homophobe coach (watch this for scenes from the groves of contemporary academe). No one else seems to mind: The guy was suspended for three games and is now firmly back in his role as coach/mentor to teenagers.
A student of sadistic university coaches, UD finds Mike Rice’s technique intriguing, if a bit retrogressive. Unlike trailblazing Bobby Knight, he doesn’t throw chairs at his players; nor does he seem drawn to locking concussed students in sheds… Like Tommy Tuberville, Rice is a traditionalist, employing a mix of direct physical violence and verbal savagery.
Rice replace[d] Fred Hill, Jr. who resigned … following a lengthy separation process in the wake of a profanity-laced tirade at a university baseball game on April 1.
Hill had to resign, I guess, because he forgot to throw punches while calling his players cunts. Technique is everything.
Even so, Rice had better watch it. Somewhere out there is an ambitious basketball coach able to call his players cunts, punch their faces, and throw furniture.
******************************
A basketball coach named Mike Rice
Treats his players not terribly nice.
“When their feet start to drag
They get punched and called fag.
Assault in defense of the game is no vice.”
******************************
Update:
The airing of a videotape of Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice using gay slurs, shoving and grabbing his players and throwing balls at them in practice over the past three seasons has the university’s athletic director reconsidering his decision not to fire the coach.
Oh, come on! It was only his first two-year-long offense!
… has gone under.
Hestia Publishers and Booksellers,
known as the Gallimard of Greece,
published the Greek translation
of Don DeLillo’s White Noise
along with many other
great modern novels in
translation. It has
not been able to survive
the Greek economic fiasco.
Brown – Nothing To See Here! – University.
**************
UD thanks Roy.
… gather ye assortative rosebuds while ye may controversy is here, at Inside Higher Education.
The Paterno zealots now begin the process of removing impurities from the state. As in Poland after communism, so in Happy Valley, those trustees who voted to fire JoePa are the object of a campaign to remove them from the board.
Big-time athletics always lifts the tone on campus. Northern Kentucky University students are currently focused on just what Athletic Director Scott Eaton did to make him hightail it out of town. The school will only say he’s been fired for ethics violations — and, I mean, fired immediately, with letters and lawyers and all…
So, as the student editorial I quote in my title suggests, it might be nice to know what’s going on, what manner of man the school hired and paid big bucks to not long ago. It goes without saying that a big part of Eaton’s job has involved lecturing students on morality… Leadership, teamwork, integrity, you know the drill.
So what’s up?
UD has covered stories of coach and AD miscreants for years, and she will share with you her guess on this one.
UD‘s gonna go with sex. She’s willing to throw some alcohol abuse into the mix, but she’s basically going to call this one as messing with the undergrads. The school claims it’s not financial; it also claims NKU won’t get in trouble with NCAA sanctions as a result of whatever Eaton did. That would seem to leave hanky-panky.
The nanny state once again tries to interfere with the free market – the Secretary of Education thinks there’s something wrong with both rogue and non-rogue big-time university sports programs. American public universities shouldn’t use mucho tax money to make Tubby Smith (soon, it’s rumored, to take his winning ways to Texas Tech!) rich as all get-out. Rick Pitino shouldn’t make $20,500 a day. And so forth.
It’s the exact same thing with so-called ‘insider trading,’ not to mention giving for-profit colleges a hard time. Government is the problem.
*****************
UD thanks JND.
… gets more front-page New York Times publicity today.
… FBI agents showed a former trader a sheet of paper with headshots of his former colleagues, with Mr. Cohen at the center. The agents compared the SAC founder to an organized crime boss who sat atop a corrupt organization.
He’s watching his dunce-nemesis, Alaska Rep. Don Young, twist slowly in the wind after having made his contribution to the Republican party’s effort to rebrand itself.
Of course Young has not apologized. Why should he apologize? Wetbacks is what they’re called.
UD definitely believes, along with Roman Hruska, that mediocrity has a right to representation in our government. She’s less sure about people like Don Young.