… as the women on Seattle’s city council have discovered. They voted against a proposal to build a new basketball arena in the city, and the reaction to that decision helps you understand why so many once-respectable American universities (Rutgers, Chapel Hill, Penn State, Minnesota, Louisville) have allowed the culture of professional sports to turn them into national jokes.

You need to drill down to the trustees (feast your eyes on this photo), to people like the King of Oklahoma State University, to understand how it’s gotten so bad on so many American campuses that a few people are beginning to notice. You have to focus in on people like Jason Feldman, a Seattle attorney who, along with quite a few other men in Seattle, uncorked his rage against – let’s see – what did he call them – the whoring pieces of trash on the council who blocked his basketball fun.

How did it come to this? I mean how did the American university come to this? How do you get to a university that for more than thirty years harbored and adulated a child rapist? A university that for twenty years implemented an elaborate, completely bogus curriculum? A university that was running a whorehouse? You get there by putting in charge people who share the enthusiasms of Jason Feldman Esq.

Next stop: Visiting professorship, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

Here’s a professor at UC Chapel Hill who thinks that his institution having wasted ten million dollars on its latest sports scandal is impressive.

Over $5 million went to Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. The folks at Skadden, Arps got a couple million more. We paid $1.3 million to Bond, Schoeneck & King; another million to Baker, Tilly. Almost double that amount went to Edelman, a giant PR outfit, offering expertise on “corporate reputation management.” FleishmanHillard raked in almost $400,000. You’d think the Old Well had relocated to Madison Avenue.

Yadda yadda. It’s like Dr Evil threatening to “hold the world ransom for… one MILLion dollars!” These are pathetic sums.

Penn State has so far paid out $93 million in its sports scandal. Talk to me when you’ve hit fifty mill.

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UD thanks John.

… seems to have drawn more than a few eyes to itself. Its description of universities across America making their financially struggling students pay through the nose for football games they don’t attend is apparently compelling enough to have caught the attention of people.

The Washington Post, for instance, cites the article, and goes on to note that more and more schools are

requiring students who have few discretionary dollars to pay for something that has zero impact on their classroom experience. According to the Chronicle/Huff Post analysis, the 50 institutions with the highest athletic subsidies have many more financially needy students than those universities with the lowest subsidies.

What’s more, nearly all the growth in Division I athletics during the past decade has come at public universities. At the same time these university leaders were obsessed with conference realignments and big television deals, taxpayer support for public universities has fallen to unprecedented levels.

But what’s most devastating in the Post piece is the long memory of its writer. We all know that when it comes to the bullshit promises that university presidents make about football, a good memory – to quote Elizabeth Bennet – is unpardonable. Yet Jeffrey Selingo goes there.

Nearly 20 years ago, I wrote an article about a group of universities that had recently joined the elite of college athletics: the NCAA’s Division I. They included California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, Hampton University, Norfolk State University, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Ok kiddies so before I reveal the fate of those schools, go ahead and guess how well they fulfilled their presidents’ promises of huge revenue and huge increase in applications and huge prestige. Go ahead! Or – you don’t have to guess, do you? Because the names Cal Poly San Whatever, Hampton, Norfolk State and Whatsizface at Greensboro just come racing to your mind when you think of revenue and enrollment and renown and prestige… And all because of Div I football!

What’s more, look at the attention they’ve drawn to their sports programs!

[All] have been relegated to the backwater of college sports, with games on weekday nights on obscure cable channels. The only way many of these universities make it to the big time is to have their name appear on the stream of scores on ESPN’s ticker or as blowout fodder for elite programs.

That’s right. Not only did their elite Div I status do nothing (probably less than nothing) for their academic status, it didn’t even do anything for their athletic status. All at huge cost to their students.

Indeed Selingo is impolitic enough to trace the outcome of Greensboro’s Div I promises even more closely:

[Twenty years ago,] its student fees paid for 80 percent of the subsidy provided to the athletic department. Officials told me they expected the share of student support to fall over time as their teams established winning records and garnered more outside support… Greensboro students today provide 81 percent of the subsidy. In other words, nothing has changed except that the department’s budget has quadrupled since the late 1990s and the student fee for athletics has almost doubled, to about $700 a year per student.

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People wonder why universities keep doing this. I mean, eventually, as Selingo concludes, their students are going to leave in order to attend a school where they’re not “paying for someone else’s [child-like] dreams.” So why?

If you read this blog with any regularity, you know how UD answers that question. Her answer is very simple, and you will probably resist it, but she thinks she might be right.

They do it because they can’t think of anything else to do.

I mean, of course, some presidents – like the hack running notorious Florida State University – are anti-intellectuals whose animus against thought processes as such will always mean a teeny mouselike teaching staff and a titanic athletics program. And some big sports schools, such as the University of Montana, have scared away so many potential students with their rape statistics that they have nothing left but games and a few vocational courses. (Remember: Just as, at the end of life, hearing is the last sense to go, so at the end of a university’s life, football is the last activity to go.)

But most of the universities doing themselves in via football are simply overseen by people – academic leaders, trustees, even faculty (remember the many loyal faculty foot soldiers at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) – for whom football (and sometimes basketball as well) is the very definition of a university. Their job is to worry about naming rights, beer sales, how many classes they can cancel around game days, cleaning up campus after tailgates, preparing for NCAA investigations, covering up crimes committed by athletes, building new stadiums, recruiting faculty who will help athletes cheat their way through their courses, and so many other things. They find these activities totally engrossing, and they will pursue them until vanishing state appropriations and vanishing enrollees force them to call it a day.

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UD thanks Prof. Mondo.

THE FUTURE COURSE UNFOLDS

Wired, fake, and weaponized
The future course unfolds
On vast autumnal campuses
Of russet tones and golds

To Chapel Hill’s fake courses
And laptop domination
Add in a military force
To public education

Why, asks this writer, is Temple University going to be the next school to screw itself over but good by building a new football stadium? Why? And why does no one ever ask why?

The question that we never seem to ask is why… What we won’t ask, what we never ask, is why a college such as Temple University – or any college, really – should care [so much about things like football and football stadiums]. We won’t ask how a Top 25 ranking or a visit from ESPN helps fulfill the mission of an institution of higher learning, or why such an institution should spend any of its resources pursuing them, particularly when those resources are financed in large part by taxpayer and student debt.

Take, for instance, the University of Akron’s stadium, “a $55 million project that would be funded exclusively by private donations and stadium revenues. When it hosted its first game in 2009, it was a $62 million project funded primarily by student tuition and fees… [This] year [Akron’s deeply indebted stadium] is attracting the lowest attendance in the MAC.”

David Murphy provides other examples. There are many.

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

But okay. Let’s go there. Why? Big stadiums and big football programs have nothing to do with (indeed they erode) the academic mission which defines a university, and they will almost certainly do terrible damage to everyone at the school (via deficits and scandals) except for the athletic department and whatever trustees own companies doing sports-related business with the university.

Some people will claim that the mystery of the new stadium is essentially a religious mystery, having to do with the “unchurched” American’s evolution away from houses of worship and toward football fields.

Clemson University coach Dabo Swinney is aggressively Christian, even letting one of his players get baptized on the 50-yard-line during practice, never mind that Clemson is a state school.

A Georgia public school is looking into a mass baptism on its football field that was posted on YouTube but later taken down.

If your font is a fifty yard line, you’re stadium-building on faith, not reason. The economics of New Life Stadium are simple: The Lord will provide.

But there’s more to the stadium mystery, I think.

UD suggests that at some universities it’s a combination of not being able to think of anything else to do, plus sexual fantasy. The two things are related, because when people don’t have much to do, when their lives seem kind of drifty and pointless and empty, they’re liable to do a lot of fantasizing.

I think some leaders of universities – presidents, trustees – don’t know what to do with themselves. A very high-profile professor, a leader, at the University of North Carolina spends years negotiating pretend grades for pretend student papers and thinks nothing of committing the grade-haggling to writing in an email. What was Jan Boxill thinking? asks the Chronicle of Higher Ed. The answer is absolutely nothing, just like her colleague Julius Nyang’oro; they were just sort of drifting along, lost in erotic reverie about their beautiful athletes for whom they would do anything, including destroy themselves and their university. An assistant coach at the University of Louisville comes up with the idea of turning an athletes’ dorm into a brothel. Why? Popped into his head one day during a sexual reverie. Popped into his head while he was thinking hard about how to make his beautiful athletes’ lives even more beautiful.

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

You have to have a high threshold of embarrassment to read people describe their feelings about football.

I loved football. I loved it desperately. Even now, four decades later, I remember endlessly damning myself for being too small to play it at a big-time college. I ached for it, for the violence of it…

Look at the shirtless boys with faces and torsos painted in the school colors; look at the cheerleaders on the fields, the ‘waves’ surging through the stands.

These men, either of whom could have written “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” represent countless sports-factory denizens spending their days in a haze of university-hatred and hormones.

Is hatred too strong? What sort of emotion allows you to seek and destroy any vestige of intellectual seriousness?

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One key here is hiring retired politicians as university presidents, good old boys who don’t give a shit about “academia,” whatever that is. The sort of men currently running, for instance, Florida State and Oklahoma University.

[The university’s academic unit can go, but] the football team must be saved because the intense tribal loyalty generated by big-time sports is one of the chief mechanisms employed by universities to create the illusion that they exist. I’ve lived in Chapel Hill and experienced the closest thing to full-scale Dionysian revelry one is likely to find in modern America, on Franklin Street after the men’s basketball team won it all. It was thrilling. It felt like we were one people, all of us, conquerors. But it was also an illusion (I wasn’t a student at the time), a false consciousness manufactured by the university to conceal its non-existence as an academic institution.

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

Listen to this song. It also asks why. Listen to its lyrics, and imagine them sung by a university president as he or she thinks about one of the school’s football players. You just tiptoe into all my dreams…. It’s the kind of passion that will not be denied, no matter how many hearts are broken.

*************
UD thanks Ian.

This much we know. But Gerald Gurney and Mary Willingham also touch on something UD finds of increasing interest:

Providing a quality education for all athletes has been sacrificed for a tribal fanaticism for college athletics.

Tribalism and fanaticism are precisely the sorts of things universities are supposed to stand against – to educate against. These profoundly anti-social and anti-intellectual motives have traditionally found a home in the private, peripheral space of the fraternities. How amazing, now, to watch tribalism and fanaticism infect entire American universities! To watch presidents and trustees who are just as brainless and belligerent as some of the school’s frat boys!

Recall Kevin Carey on the nihilistic tribalism of some American universities:

[The university’s academic unit can go, but] the football team must be saved because the intense tribal loyalty generated by big-time sports is one of the chief mechanisms employed by universities to create the illusion that they exist. I’ve lived in Chapel Hill and experienced the closest thing to full-scale Dionysian revelry one is likely to find in modern America, on Franklin Street after the men’s basketball team won it all. It was thrilling. It felt like we were one people, all of us, conquerors. But it was also an illusion (I wasn’t a student at the time), a false consciousness manufactured by the university to conceal its non-existence as an academic institution.

The source of the athletics fanaticism, from this point of view, is quite obvious. Increasingly, without the athletics, there’s nothing there.

******************
(Photo link is from a new sports cafeteria at the University of Oregon.)

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.

Mary Willingham at Chapel Hill. An anonymous professor at Rutgers. An anonymous broken-jawed student at Rutgers.

Let’s call what’s happening at the American university what it is: A peasant revolt.

The once-stable hierarchy we’ve come know –

Coach
Players
Boosters
President
Professors
Students

– is being shaken to its foundations as sporadic uprisings escalate among the people. The Rutgers professor suddenly refuses to give a passing grade to a football player, and, when the coach strong-arms the professor, the professor continues to refuse to back down.

This was a coach who didn’t want to lose arguably the best player in what was an historically bad secondary for Rutgers a year ago, and wasn’t going to let a lowly professor take [Nadir] Barnwell away. He was going to use his rarefied status as the highly paid leader of King Football to make sure that no meager academic policy was going to get in the way of wins and losses.

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

The problem is the “bloated sense [of] entitlement among players and coaches who … start to feel as if they can get away with just about anything. Being treated like campus gods can do that, a campus to which they are often only nominally tethered.”

We have all seen the disturbing footage of statues being forcibly taken down, and we rightly worry about the fate of other monuments dotting the homeland.

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

It’s pointless to wallow in nostalgia for a time when students gratefully absorbed blows to their faces from good secondaries and professors regarded membership in bogus academic departments as their contribution to the team’s defensive line. The question is What Is To Be Done.

Begin by remembering this. Welcome to my little village! says poor Marie Antoinette. Wake up before it’s too late.

This writer is talking about the big-time stuff, football, basketball. He thinks paying the players would make matters even more sordid. He sets the scene:

[P]ractically all of the dozens of football players [at the University of Southern California] with whom I interacted [as a tutor] resented their schoolwork, or to be specific, the requirement of it. They viewed it as a particularly onerous element of the raw deal that was playing collegiate-level professional sports for free. Without quite saying it, they viewed amateurism as a farce, a predatory bargain struck long before any of them had nailed their first slow-moving quarterback. They could live with the exploitation, it seemed, but certain things fell beneath their dignity, compulsory study being one of them.

However:

[T]he tragedy at the heart of college sports is college sports. Paying the players would only ensure the continuation of athletic programs as currently constructed. Everything would remain as it is, with the freakishly lucrative enterprises that are Division I college football and basketball nestled awkwardly within our higher education system. Payment would, in fact, give the system needed space to grow, protect it with a thin veneer of legitimacy, and free everyone from the constraints that have lately burdened the good time of college athletics.

Constraints here means the need for universities to find ways to pretend that these guys are in some sense students.

The pretense works fine as long as the university is itself, tout court, a pretense – the University of Alabama, Clemson, Baylor.

The pretense is always falling apart at Blanche DuBois schools, schools that continue to flatter themselves that they’re universities (Penn State, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill). At UNC they have spot checks to make sure professors are meeting their classes – – along, of course, with spot checks to make sure athletes are attending them. It’s one big pre-school program.

Today the American universities not only form the best system of higher education in the world, but are morally impressive institutions. They are not incoherent, nor are they in crisis.

Well, I guess this ain’t Allan Bloom.

No, it’s UD‘s hero, Richard Rorty.

She likes Bloom, but she likes Rorty more.

Her other heroes? The two Christophers: Christopher Lasch and Christopher Hitchens.

Albert Camus. George Orwell. Philip Rieff. Tony Judt.

Can we derive some coherence from these dead white males? Can we say why the same human being would swoon reading both hyper-righties and hyper-lefties? (And weren’t Lasch and Hitchens sort of both?) Why the same human being would applaud when Rorty says universities aren’t in crisis, and when Bloom says they are?

Do we want simply to say, with Gwendolyn, that ‘In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.’? Because all of these men wrote well (Rieff wrote like a jerk, yes, but not all the time. Not in his earlier days.), and some of them (Orwell) wrote insanely well.

No. Surely we want to grant UD a tad more depth than this. It’s not merely about writing style. Yet writing style is part of it. These men are all impassioned moralists, impassioned social justice warriors, and their prose shows it. Their prose has the sort of kick you get when you actually care about what you’re saying, when you believe that language is politics and that politics is how you decrease human suffering. It’s very much like what George Saunders says in an appreciation of E.L. Doctorow:

What I found particularly inspiring about Doctorow was the way he would tweak form to produce moral-ethical effect — the way that he seemed not to see these two things as separate. Reading his great “Ragtime,” for example, I can feel that all of that technical verve is there necessarily — to serve and escalate meaning and emotion. But as important — the verve serves and escalates the fun, the riveting sense that a particular and wonderful human mind is having a great time riffing on the things of this world, trying to make sense of them. The work exudes fascination with the human, and a wry confidence in it, and inspires these feelings in us as we read. Doctorow, we might say, role-models a hopeful stance toward what can be a terrifying world.

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

In the same remarks of his I quote from at the beginning of this post, Rorty says:

If I were writing a history of the American university, I would tell an upbeat story about the gradual replacement of the churches by the universities as the conscience of the nation. One of the most important things that happened in the U.S. in the twentieth century was that the universities became the places where movements for the relief of human suffering found privileged sanctuaries and power bases. The universities came to play a social role that they had not played in the nineteenth century.

An impassioned atheist, Rorty reveres the American university as the place where arts- and sciences-inspired free and democratic discourse about the world and how to improve it, and about humanity and how to know and love it, thrives. The university is where we gather to read and talk about morally charged language, like Doctorow’s.

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

Remember what Bartlett Giamatti called the university: a free and ordered space. When Rorty calls the university “not incoherent,” he doesn’t mean it’s coherent, as in fully pulled together, fully ordered and organized around some shared principle or faith. (And as readers of this blog know, once a university decides to organize itself around Joe Paterno, forfuckinggetit.) He means it’s coherent enough – it’s ordered enough to be free enough to generate the sorts of conversations, readings, and experiences that tend to make people (students, professors, readers of the research professors and students generate) more lucid and more compassionate. And more free, rather in the way of, as Saunders puts it, having fun — being part of a classroom where people are experiencing “the riveting sense that a particular and wonderful human mind is having a great time riffing on the things of this world, trying to make sense of them.” That mind, in the university setting, is a collective one, made up of the free and at the same time ordered synergy between a professor and her students.

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

All of this is by way of background for a few comments on this intriguing opinion piece in today’s New York Times.

Kevin Carey is clearly on Bloom’s side. This is his opening paragraph:

To understand the failures of the modern American college system — from admissions marketing to graduation rates — you can begin with a notorious university football scandal.

So we’re going to talk about Chapel Hill as emblematic of what has made American universities a failure. Not just a failure – a nothing. An illusion. Carey’s title: The Fundamental Way that Universities are an Illusion. Later in the piece he will talk about them as Easter eggs – beautiful on the outside, dead on the inside.

The Nyang’oro fraud went on as long as it did because

U.N.C. had essentially no system for upholding the academic integrity of courses. “So long as a department was offering a course,” one distinguished professor told the investigators, “it was a legitimate course.” … The illusory university pretends that all professors are guided by a shared sense of educational excellence specific to their institution. In truth, as the former University of California president Clark Kerr observed long ago, professors are “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.”… When college leaders talk about academic standards, they often mean admissions standards, not standards for what happens in classrooms themselves. Or they vaguely appeal to traditions and shared values without any hard evidence of their meaning… The problem for students is that it is all but impossible to know ahead of time which part of the disunified university is which. [And the problem for faculty is that this] kind of profound dissonance can knock askew the moral compasses of people who have ostensibly dedicated their professional lives to education. How else to explain the many people at Chapel Hill — including, incredibly, the director of a center on ethics — who abetted or ignored rampant fraud?

It’s the free and ordered thing again. Carey believes the freedom Rorty identifies in the American university has dissipated into disorder, so that anything goes in terms of pedagogical content, which makes the world safe for the endemic cheating we know goes on at virtually all big-time sports schools. At such schools – the cutting edge, Carey seems to argue, of the frayed American university – even faculty – even ethics faculty – are cheaters. And why? Because they recognize “no shared values,” no “shared sense of educational excellence,” that would give existential identity, much less academic integrity, to the place where they happen to work.

In response to this, I’d like to cite Rorty once again:

In one sense, [the term “morality”] is used to describe someone relatively decent, trustworthy, and honest – one who gives correct change, keeps promises, doesn’t lie much, can usually be relied upon to take an appropriate share in cooperative efforts, and so on. It seems to me if you’re not that sort of person by the time you’re eighteen, it’s probably too late. I don’t think that sociopaths who enter the university are corrigible by any measures that the academy might adopt. If the family, the community, the church, and the like, haven’t made you a relatively decent member of society, haven’t given you a conscience that stops you from cheating the customers, administering date rape drugs, or doing a lot of things we hope our eighteen year olds won’t do, the university won’t either. The academy can’t take on the job of straightening you out, of creating the conscience that the rest of the culture didn’t manage to produce during your first eighteen years.

This is the same point UD tirelessly makes about the absurdity of ethics courses in business schools – and those are older students. They’ve had four or five years past undergraduate school to acquire a sense of decency.

And how much more hopeless when you’re whatever age professors Jan Boxhill and Julius Nyang’oro were when they dedicated year after year of their lives to robbing students of an education and trashing their school’s integrity…

Carey wants us to believe that the openness of their work setting, the structural trust of faculty and students upon which the maturity and generativity of the American university rests, knocked askew the fragile moral compasses of Boxhill and Nyang’oro. But that trust did nothing to their morality because they lacked morality all by themselves; they were the sort of people who take advantage of the trust others place in them, and the openness of the American university simply made it easier for them to do the sorts of things they do because of the way they are. UD doesn’t think we should press the great free liberal arts schools of America in the direction of moral explicitness and constraint merely because some of the people there are bad actors.

Now that the entirely random (all are called to cheat; few are chosen) Adzillatron of Fortune has swiveled its gigantic screen in the direction of Syracuse University, and now that the nation’s media is riveted to that school (you can’t buy this kind of publicity), it’s time for UD not only to remind you of her way-beyond-legendary column on the subject of professors and big-time sports; it’s also time to put in a word for the ladies.

The guys?  Sure, sure, the guys.  King Coach, the Coach God, with his massive salary and pep talks about character;  the “Vice Chancellor and Athletics Director” (think I’m kidding?  when you’re the absolute bottom of the barrel, you better believe you make your AD a chancellor);  the president of the university, docile, kittenish BFF of his coachly master… We’ve seen this adorable bumbling crowd so many times…

But without the receptionist in the background of all this high-profile bonding, athletes would never be able to stay eligible.  People forget that at schools like Chapel Hill and Syracuse, the entire elaborate system gets sacked and broken like Joe Theismann without those sweethearts over in the corner stamping AAAAAAA all day.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s chatter captures an important truth about corruption and hypocrisy as they play out at some of our highest-profile big-time sports universities. Everyone knows that universities like Auburn and Clemson are corrupt; but Auburn and Clemson are consistently corrupt; they wear the daily mask of honest hypocrisy. They have a modest, becoming, forthcoming, hypocrisy.

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

Think of it this way.

“[A] state like Illinois with a high corruption rate makes a better investment than a state with a moderate corruption rate… The reason is that the return for your bribe is more certain in a highly corrupt environment.”

It turns out that a very corrupt state offers its own kind of transparency.

That’s the kind of transparency I’m talking about. Almost all big-time sports universities are highly corrupt, but only some are transparent about it.

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

Or think of it this way: Who do you prefer to represent international banking, Lloyd Blankfein or the Reverend Prebendary Stephen Green? Recall Blankfein’s reliable mask as he testified in front of Congress; compare this to the reverend’s chilly refusal to lower himself to discuss his own lowness… his refusal to accept his lowness.

What I’m trying to say is that the truly contemptible universities are those, like Duke and Chapel Hill, who keep flouncing around like Blanche Du Bois, denying that they’re just as whorish as Clemson and Auburn. Duke’s Beloved Leader – like Rev Green – refuses to discuss his program’s latest scandal. UNC doesn’t want to talk about the likelihood that it’s as corrupt on the graduate level as it is on the undergraduate. (UD thanks Ken, a reader, for this link.) But they owe it to us – the American taxpayers subsidizing their luxury boxes full of drunken louts and their departments of exercise sciences doing the Beloved Leader’s bidding – to be transparently corrupt.

… background, the film The Hunting Ground begins to generate commentary.

Along with institutions like Harvard, Notre Dame and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “The Hunting Ground” takes on the fraternity system — in particular, Sigma Alpha Epsilon — and even throws down a challenge of a sort for the National Football League with a not-so-subtle suggestion that teams should think twice about drafting one of the top college prospects, Jameis Winston.

Mr. Winston, the Florida State University quarterback, is the focus of one of the film’s more incendiary segments. The Heisman Trophy winner in 2013, he was accused in 2012 of sexual assault by a female student. He has asserted his innocence, did not face criminal charges and was recently cleared of violating Florida State’s student code of conduct by the university. He is widely expected to be among the first several players chosen in this spring’s N.F.L. draft. But “The Hunting Ground,” directed by Kirby Dick, makes a mockery of Florida State’s investigation, and Mr. Winston’s accuser, Erica Kinsman, speaks publicly about the case for the first time in the film, at length.

It’s often only years later, when the lawsuits start teasing out emails, that you understand how certain harrowing instances of university research misconduct get to the point where, as at Duke University, “the methods used by [a] research group [weren’t] validated — and yet they [were] being used to assign patients to clinical trials.”

And just as in the University North Carolina Chapel Hill academic fraud case the (ignored, defamed) whistle blower was a person who ranked low in the local hierarchy, so in the Duke case, Bradley Perez was just a medical student, and when he complained to the now-notorious Anil Potti about the bogus research Potti was involving Perez in, the faker drew himself up to his full measure of fakery and told Perez “he takes it as a personal insult if people don’t believe in what he is doing.”

Perez persisted, casting about for other administrators who could help him put an end to Potti’s fraud. They weren’t helpful. They still aren’t. Two of Duke’s highest level administrators – Sally Kornbluth and Victor Dzau (famous Victor Dzau!) continue to insist they knew nothing about Perez’s early and frequent warnings.

Did Kornbluth know about the Perez case? Did Victor Dzau, who was then Duke Chancellor?

The answers are yes and yes.

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One scientific observer, considering this case as it has now revealed itself, comments:

“There is more to this story than the heroic and principled actions of an erudite young man and the shame that has befallen a great university in blindly and selfishly defending its own. It is indicative of a lack of understanding of the scientific method among many scientists… The Duke scandal is extreme, to be sure. But irreproducibility in academic research is common. And the reward structure and complacency of universities is to blame.”

There’s money on the table, in other words, so let’s not fuck it up.