As Dave Zirin points out, it’s not the pimping; it’s the hypocrisy. Katina Powell readily admits to being a whore; why won’t Andre McGee and his boss admit to being pimps?

Instead of writing corporate how-to books, Rick Pitino and his ilk should be delivering seminars in Big Pimpin’. Katina Powell isn’t close to being on his level.

As for the NCAA:

[O]ne wonders why NCAA president Mark Emmert doesn’t elicit cries of “stranger danger” when he enters a room.

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

No one who has, like UD, followed events at the University of Louisville over the last few years, can be surprised that the first longterm official trade in women at an American university was uncovered at that school. Its board of trustees is cretinous, catatonic. (The only trustee with guts – Steve Wilson – has begged the governor to let him quit, and the governor has obliged.) Its president – who keeps getting immense raises onaccounta he’s doing such a bang-up job – is a fully owned subsidiary of Richard Pitino and Bobby Petrino. Its student body and faculty has responded to the brothelization of their school with silence, or with rage at outsiders kicking over the stalls at the meat market.

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

Men in Mini Corvettes.

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

Meanwhile, in Virginia,
La Kid picks a pumpkin.

The eminently fuckable University of Louisville continues to thrill. The latest chapter in Whormitory Nights features a lawsuit against Katina Powell for writing that mean book.

The student would do better to direct her lawsuit against the UL trustees. They are the long-time proprietors of Mustang Ranch. And they’ve got far more money than that book’s ever going to make.

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UD is told by reliable sources that a consortium of UL fraternities is planning to sue Andre McGee and Rick Pitino for copyright infringement.

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

UL’s in-dorm brothel contributes to the decline of an entire industry.

Today, pornography is free, and finding real people who are into exactly what you’re into has never been smoother. It’s not that we’re living in an unprecedentedly immoral age, but that we no longer need to drive to seedy brothels in rural counties to procure our poison.

I did not.

Last night and
this morning,
Rehoboth Beach.

[Rick] Pitino still has a job because he’s one of the best coaches in college basketball history. Bobby Petrino was hired — actually, re-hired — because his brilliant football mind takes precedence over an extensive list of despicable acts away from the field, capped off by that Evel Knievel impression with his mistress along for the ride.

Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

Ten minutes ago.

She will blog from there.

Our universities’ latest nationally riveting sex scandal, second only to Penn State’s Sandusky thing, has started another one of those Is something wrong with our universities? conversations.

Richard Vedder takes note of “the financial excesses and corruption that pervade college sports,” and calls for the feds to form a national commission on the future of university athletics so we can decide whether we want to keep subsidizing pimps, pedophiles, and the coaches who love them.

Kansas University chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little, chief academic officer at Chapel Hill during years of the now-notorious Nyang’oro scandal, worries in particular about the future of public universities in America.

As well she should, given the way she did absolutely nothing throughout her UNC tenure about immense academic fraud at that school… But she takes no responsibility for all of that; she’s worried that public universities are going to die because of declining state support.

Whenever the heads of public universities condemn the stinginess of their legislatures, they loftily remind everyone that a mind is a terrible thing to waste. Yet as Vedder suggests, when your school looks like a money-hemhorrhaging joke run by idiots (sample headline for the University of Kansas: Kansas Football is Doomed, and the School’s Other Sports are Paying the Price), you make it awfully easy for politicians to shrug you off. When your school uses “transactional sex as a method of recruitment,” when sixteen-year-olds enter the dorms and “are told by people in power and players they’ve seen play on national television that in big time college hoops, women are just another item to be passed under the table,” it’s a little hard for university presidents to maintain their lofty academic airs.

Throughout his tenure as president, [University of Louisville president James] Ramsey has deferred to [vp for athletics Tom] Jurich in all athletics matters. He supported Jurich’s decision to keep Pitino, without punishment, after the Karen Sypher scandal. He supported Jurich’s decision to give football coach Bobby Petrino another chance despite the sex scandal that got him fired at Arkansas. He supported Jurich’s decision to keep football recruiter Clint Hurtt even after he was tainted by his involvement in the recruiting sex scandal at Miami… Already national commentators have lumped together all of Jurich’s controversial personnel decisions and concluded that UofL is guilty of condoning sexual misconduct for the sake of winning.

Talk about rushing to conclusions! Does that seem to you the record of a university that condones sexual misconduct for the sake of winning? Whoa, Nellie!

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

But look. Louisville’s is not the record of a university at all, is it? The opinion writer I quote above argues that universities are about this and universities are about that and the University of Louisville has to toss out all its pimps and whores and remember it’s a university yadda yadda.

I’ll tell you what’s wrong with this picture. Think about Donald Trump’s huge success so far in the presidential campaign. The more Trump behaves in a way diametrically opposed to presidential, the more votes he gets. Because a lot of Americans loathe government and love people committed to trashing it.

In the same way, a lot of people loathe academic institutions and love people committed to trashing them. Bring in squads of scummy coaches to run your school, give them complete freedom and the highest salaries in the state, and they will of course run your university into the ground.

To the cheers of thousands of onlookers.

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Where’s UL’s faculty? Have you heard a peep out of any of them?

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The University of Louisville has a permanent hard-on. It’s difficult to think when you’re like that.

But that’s the whole point.

Could it be that one of America’s sleaziest coaches, at one of America’s sleaziest schools, will have to leave? Lots of people are saying that the University of Louisville‘s basketball program has tipped over into Too Sordid Even for Division I and will have to sacrifice its coach, Rick Pitino.

*******

Louisville’s problem is not that it turns its dorms into whorehouses. Big deal. Recruiting 101. Athletics is the university’s front porch. And back room.

“You’re not gonna get players by doing those types of things,” [said Pitino] … what was behind this? What was the reason? An educated person can’t think you’re gonna get a recruit with a stripper coming in. This is University of Louisville, you don’t need any artificial help.” Funny, because you know what the rest of the world assumes? That free, naked, older women in the dorms would be exactly the type of thing that may interest 17 and 18-year-old boys. Why would Pitino staffer Andre McGee set up hooker parties with recruits? To bore them?

No, Louisville’s problem is that the university’s tell-all madam turns out to be a pleasant, articulate, believable person. UL’s last hope was that this woman would be a raving slut rather than a research and publishing genius who could teach UL’s tenure track cohort a trick or two. That strutting pious fraud Pitino will have to go.

The great Sarah Vaughan ushers him out.

Perdido, we look for our coach he’s perdido
We misplaced our coach Rick Pitino
While chancing a dance fiesta.

He’s perdido!

*********

UD thanks John.

Tenured American university professors have a kind of built-in public relations problem. Many people view them as rather unpleasant entitled sorts — they’ve got permanent jobs with enviable conditions, they’ve got a remarkable amount of time to themselves (including paid sabbaticals), they are highly respected and pretty well-compensated, and they don’t seem to have bosses or supervision of any kind, etc., etc.

We can quibble about how accurate this description is, but there’s no denying that a lot of people think it’s accurate. And there’s some truth in it.

Given this problem, it seems to ol’ UD that tenured professors should make at least teensy efforts not to play right into the stereotype.

Among the academic units at her own George Washington University, there’s one that seems to your blogger to engage in this play — and with reckless abandon.

The business school.

There’s the reckless abandon of its last dean having overspent his budget. By thirteen million dollars.

How shall it be repaid?

Robert Van Order, the chair of the school’s finance department, said the about 60 faculty members at the meeting discussed where the burden should fall. Some faculty thought the University should forgive the $13 million budget deficit altogether because it was incurred two years ago.

UD understands that this was some faculty. She’s just saying that it’s real unfortunate any faculty at all said Hey ancient history fuck it. Make someone else pay.

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

You’ve got a dean who just spent the school into the ground. You’ve got some faculty there who think the school shouldn’t have to pay anything back. So far, so bad.

It gets worse. Tenured professors who teach in the business school’s masters in finance program have now refused to teach in it (it’s not clear whether all, or many, have refused) because, as part of paying back the money the last dean overspent, they’re taking a pay cut. Here’s how it works, as the new b-school dean explains.

[The full time] professors who teach [masters in finance] courses were paid “a rate substantially higher than their counterparts” in other masters programs. She said faculty, who were teaching two-credit courses for the program, were compensated the same amount as faculty who are paid for three-credit courses.

Okay, so that’s already pretty amazing. Three-credit compensation for two-credit courses. That’s a lot more money.

But look again at my headline. The chair of finance explains that, first of all, faculty have to teach on Fridays. And Saturdays! No self-respecting professor will teach on those days without extreme compensation…

But wait. Let’s look at the program’s website.

In the first year, classes are held all day on Saturday; and in the second year, classes are held on Thursday and Friday from 6 to 10 p.m.

Okay, so the chair of finance forgot about the Thursday classes. And in the second year there’s no Saturday teaching at all.

Does this seem to you hardship duty? I mean, virtually all Americans work a full week, including Fridays. Millions and millions of Americans work on Saturdays.

And then there’s the chair’s “more technical and time-consuming” argument. What does this mean? Are some of these on-line courses (more technical)?

UD has trouble following the chair’s reasoning about these courses, as reported. (It’s possible that the journalist got some of this wrong.)

“From the standpoint of just thinking about the market, from the standpoint of faculty, for the same credits and the same credit hours, it’s easier to teach a core course than to teach an MSF course,” he said. “And so a lot of what’s been the debate over the past few years is how much extra should people get for teaching it.”

He added that the program was originally created to give faculty in the finance department more time and pay to do research – which officials have historically said is key to boost the school’s reputation. But without the original benefits from the program, there’s no motivator for those faculty to participate.

So these courses are harder to teach than core courses – though the chair doesn’t really say why this would be true… But okay. In all departments, some courses are harder and some easier to teach. UD has never heard of faculty getting paid more for harder courses. Perhaps it is a common practice, and UD didn’t know about it.

But if these are harder and more time-consuming courses, why does the dean go on to say that the program (she assumes he means here the masters in finance program itself rather than the financial incentive ‘program’ set up to attract tenured professors to the program) they’re in was created to “give faculty … more time and pay to do research”?

I mean, put aside whether it’s a bit tone-deaf to say a program was created to give faculty more time and pay to do research…

I mean… UD doesn’t see this in the program’s mission statement… We created this program in order to free up our staff for more research and pay them more…

Ask in any case why a program whose courses are more difficult and time-consuming to teach was designed to give faculty more time for their research…

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

So to pay back some of what’s due back from the b-school to the university, the decision’s been made to start paying faculty at the two-credit rate.

“We have now aligned the credit hours compensated for with the actual number of credit hours taken by students in the MSF program,” [the dean] said. “This alignment matches the MSF faculty compensation with that of our other specialized master’s programs in a reasonable and equitable manner.”

At this, virtually the entire tenured faculty (it appears) resigned from teaching in the program, leaving it in the hands of less qualified adjuncts, and the quality is apparently going down the tubes.

Keep in mind that these programs charge students a fortune. If you start taking the program now, taught by adjuncts, some of whom have never taught in the program before, you are paying $77,280 for the privilege.

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

And oh yeah. If you design an expensive degree and you can’t get your own faculty to teach its courses without amazing incentives, a degree program your faculty dump in seconds if you take any component of those incentives away, you need new degree designers.

The latest econ professor to squawk about his or her university’s sports program – Colorado State’s Steven Shulman – reminds UD to mention that she thinks we’ll see, in a few years, at some schools, litmus tests for new hires in this field.

Are you an avid fan of football and basketball? Will you sign a pledge attesting to your intention to attend home games into perpetuity, your willingness to cancel class when a match-up will take place within 72 hours of a scheduled course session, your commitment to give C or higher grades to revenue athletes in your classes, and – most important – your promise never to subject the athletic program to economic analysis or talk to news outlets about your economic analysis of the program?

Econ professors are a seriously weak link in the American jock school chain. This blog has covered tons of economists who, with their specialized knowledge, subject their athletics departments to withering critique and then tell everyone about it. Here are some instances of professors, who, like Shulman (‘“Of course it sucks resources out of the academic side of the university,” Shulman said. “And it’s dishonest to deny that it does that… We are a land-grant university, and our mission is grounded in service to the citizens of Colorado. And to me what that means is keeping tuition low and affordable.”’), go after the game boys.

Remember Reed Olsen? Back in 2010 he told everyone at Missouri State University that their expensive new JQH stadium would not only not be profitable (the university insisted it would be profitable) but would hemorrhage money, and he caught hell for it. But of course he was right. As he explained in an email to UD at the time:

Let’s say that we are looking at a $2M ongoing loss in the arena. This is slightly more than 1% of the operating budget of the university. The university, because of a new state law, cannot raise in-state tuition more than [the] increase in the CPI. And for the last 2 years all universities in the state have agreed to not raise tuition at all in return for mostly stable state funding. So that means that most of this $2M must come out of cuts from other parts of the budget or the small increases in student fees from increased out of state tuition or other types of student fees. Students are assessed a fee for [the arena] which supposedly pays for free student seats at BB games. However, that revenue is included in the accounting, still leaving $2M left to pay. Faculty concern is that it comes out of our pocket.

If you’re Missouri State you definitely do not want people like Reed Olsen on your campus – people with the capacity to reason about the finances of your sports program. A simple interview questionnaire teasing out Olsen’s prejudice against sports programs would have saved MSU a lot of grief.

Then there’s Mark Killingsworth at Rutgers, a person just as persistent and tough-skinned as Olsen. Here’s a sample Killingsworth editorial. Excerpt:

The program is a financial disgrace. Since 2003-04, it has racked up $287 million in deficits. The university’s financial plan for sports calls for $183 million in additional deficits through 2022 — despite new revenue from the Big Ten Conference.

These deficits have been funded with subsidies from student fees (students have no say about that, of course) and university general funds. As even the university president concedes, athletics is “siphoning dollars from the academic mission.”

Then there’s Dick Barrett, once a University of Montana econ professor and now a state senator. He routinely offends UM regents by pointing out that their accounts of the athletic budget are full of shit.

Barrett called “bogus” the regents’ argument that millions of dollars in tuition waivers for athletes shouldn’t be counted as subsidies because no cash changes hands.

Tuition waivers for athletics totaled $8 million last year for all campuses, including $2.8 million at MSU, according to Frieda Houser, University System director of accounting and budget.

The university could have decided to “sacrifice revenue” in other ways, Barrett said. “It could decide not to charge other students as high a tuition.

“Students are subsidizing athletics, not just in their (athletics) fee, but they have to pay higher tuition so athletes can pay lower tuition,” he said.

There’s UD‘s pal Bill Harbaugh, econ, University of Oregon, exploding the myth of the program’s self-sufficiency. Vanderbilt econ professor John Siegfried is amusing on the subject of his and other schools’ prisoner’s dilemma. There’s Marilyn Flowers, chair of economics at truly sports-fucked Ball State:

… Ball State has more than $14 million budgeted for its athletics programs. Approximately 80 percent of the budget is paid for from student fees – almost $9 million – and institutional support – almost $2.5 million.

“When it costs so much for kids to go to school, and you charge them $800 a year and most of them don’t go to any games, that I think is really unfortunate,” Flowers said.

Even Auburn hears occasional squawks from its econ department. The chair of economics there warns that sports is so autonomously powerful on campus that it represents “a second university.”

As jock schools escalate their policy of robbing students and taxpayers to give multimillionaire coaches raises and pay back crushing stadium debt, the last thing they need is financially literate people exposing their … complex… bookkeeping. The entry interview is their only opportunity to head these people off at the pass.

That period reached its culmination when her mother posed nearly nude in French Playboy and told interviewers that her ex-husband had a rabid hatred of Jews and privately referred to Adolf Hitler as Uncle Dolfie.

A few blasts from Marine Le Pen’s past.

UD‘s been attempting to follow that university since 2009, and has gradually discovered that it’s so bad it’s virtually impossible to understand.

She means that in any given newspaper article about this school, you cannot really make sense of what is being reported. (Here are some earlier attempts.)

So now there’s

Alabama A&M Chief
Operating Officer Arrested,
Charged with Theft

And with “possession of a forged instrument.”

Kevin Rolle, also the school’s executive vice president, last year sued a bunch of other people at the school who said something bad about him. The case was thrown out of court. Now he’s been arrested (okay, read the following slowly…):

The allegation against Rolle appears to center around a dispute over more than $6,000 he received as a reimbursement for moving expenses after he moved to Huntsville in 2009 to work for the university.

State auditors claimed earlier this year Rolle had been paid $6,534 to cover moving expenses, but they could find no moving company records to related to the move.

Alabama A&M initially said Rolle should not have been reimbursed. [This is where things start to get woozy. No records because no moving costs ….?] The university told auditors Rolle had repaid the money in January. [Okay.] But the university later changed its position. [Position is maybe an odd way to put it. Changed its story?] In a response to the state audit the university included an invoice from a moving company for the amount in question. [Ah! Here it is after all!]

Alabama A&M also included statements from two people claiming they were present when the moving truck arrived from Spartanburg, S.C. [Wow. Witnesses. Looks as though after decades of malfeasance Alabama A&M is anticipating that the state might not believe them.]

The statements were from the assistant to Alabama A&M President Andrew Hugine and and an executive with Aramark, a company that has a number of service contracts with the university. [They both happened to be standing around when… ? ]

I’m not the only one confused. The governor’s confused.

Gov. Robert Bentley questioned the university about moving expenses among other issues in a June letter. The Governor asked the university to provide the “front and back” of the check to pay the movers or the reimbursement check to Rolle. The Governor also asked for a copy of the check Rolle gave the university for his repayment. [So the succession of events is this: Rolle understands the university will reimburse him. He sends in his payment check, and gets reimbursed. Years pass. An audit happens. It turns out he should not have been reimbursed for the move. He repays the university. At first there is no paperwork to back up anything claimed here other than the payment of six thousand plus by the university to Rolle. In response to the audit, however, the university now hands over an invoice from the moving company.]

Bentley also questioned why an Aramark representative was at Rolle’s house on the day of the mover’s arrival. [Something smells fishy to the governor.]

Remember: This arrest is about forgery – or possession of forged docs – as well as theft.

And of course more details will emerge as the trial proceeds. This story is exactly one hour old.

But let’s speculate. Don’t you think it likely that the school has been trying to get rid of this guy ever since he initiated the lawsuit? Isn’t it likely that the theme of retaliation will play an important role in his courtroom defense? And isn’t it also possible that the governor has for whatever reason decided to do something about the larger corruption of Alabama A&M?

If so, this trial will mark the beginning of a lot of revelations.

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

So as the story builds, I’ll provide updates. Here’s one:

Rolle produced an invoice to examiners that the moving company could not verify, the report said. Examiners also said the moving company did not have Rolle’s name in their database.

… as Tom Lehrer calls the south, and ain’t it the truth. UD loves her a good university sports scandal, and aint nuthin like a southern university sports scandal.

And hell. Even by southern scandals, the cast of characters at the University of Louisville, known to one and all as the U of Smell, is way past southern gothic.

UD’s own name for UL is Mount Louisville onaccounta most of its troubles got to do with men mounting women. Bobby Motorcycle Petrino, Rick The Table Pitino, Andre Dorm Couch McGee…

And now we can add the procurer’s procurator, the lawyer hired by Katina Powell, Counsellor Larry Wilder. Larry’s interior of choice, if you will, is a little different: He likes trash cans.