… is that it flushes out comrades in arms — people like the eminent sociologist John Shelton Reed, a man who was there (extremely well-positioned, in fact, at the now-notorious University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) long before UD stumbled onto the corrupt university athletics scene. Long before UD began wondering what to do about coach salaries, perks, and buyouts bankrupting schools, for instance, Reed was on the case, as in a 1997 Wall Street Journal piece, where he wonders why professors don’t run amateur student/athlete sports:

It shouldn’t be hard to find professors — or to recruit “professors” — willing to work with the varsity teams. This would be in addition to their regular teaching loads, of course, and there’d be no extra pay — no more than for faculty members who work with other student organizations.

And there’d have to be restrictions on outside income. Just as we hold athletes to higher standards than other students, so we’d have to expect more of their coaches than of other faculty members. If we’re really going to keep college athletics amateur, student-athletes should be served by “teacher-coaches.” Better yet, let’s not call them coaches at all. Let’s call them “faculty advisers.”

Only trouble is, how do you get rid of a losing coach if he has tenure?

Reed sent me another “golden oldie,” as he called it, this one from way back in 1987. It’s an essay in which he evokes the special something in the air down south during football season.

Like the other piece, it’s mainly about farcical levels of corruption down those parts when it comes to keeping hopeless students academically eligible, dealing with team criminality, etc., etc.

But it’s also got some great local details:

People used to alter the road signs around here to read things like “Interstate 85/Wake Forest 0.”

And it ends with words of wisdom:

For a college or university, assimilating semi-professional athletics is like building a perpetual-motion machine: some do better than others; but the undertaking is impossible in the first place.

Unlike George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, all American university campuses know the truth about big-time athletics. They know precisely the difference between truth and illusion.

They have no illusions that big-time athletes are students. Watch the parade of prevaricators at the University of North Carolina who are shocked – shocked! – to find that academic fraud is going on there. We know they’re lying; they know they’re lying. It’s all very strange.

Yet on it goes. As his school goes the way of virtually all big-time sports schools, a University of Michigan regent offers an if/then:

If [academics and big-time athletics] can’t coexist, then intercollegiate athletics is truly an illusion.”

Yes, if and only if… Because… uh… We haven’t settled the question! Not enough data. Votes aren’t yet all counted.

But while you’re counting them, don’t forget that where academic fraud is concerned, Michigan’s tally is below Chapel Hill:

[In 2008,] Prof. John Hagen … was accused of assisting student-athletes in maintaining eligibility by teaching independent study courses that were well below University standards of academic rigor. In Hagen’s courses, the student-athletes had an average GPA of 3.62, whereas their average in other classes was a 2.57. Some students were found to have spent only 15 minutes with Hagen every two weeks, but earned up to four credits for the class. Hagen taught 294 independent studies courses from Fall 2004 to Fall 2007, 251 of which were to student-athletes. After months of investigation, the allegations were dropped…

Dropped! Dropped! Even Chapel Hill couldn’t find a way to drop them.

Truth or illusion. These people feel compelled to carry on as though we’re too stupid to see the difference. They of course see the difference all too clearly. They just don’t give a shit.

… tell a high-level Washington DC gathering of university administrators (they were there to talk about the, er, problem of college athletics) that the solution was easy: “Make athletic directors and coaches professors.”

UD, from her seat at the back of the room, silently applauded the man on his genius. “Yes,” she thought. “He has understood that if you wave a wand and declare the athletic staff professors, you destroy any ability the university has to defend itself as anything other than a sports team. There’s no longer an athletic side and an academic side; there’s no longer any protest from professors that too much of the budget goes to athletics; there’s no longer any concept of academic integrity that might be corrupted by athletics. It’s the final triumph of athletics over academics.”

This was years ago – before the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill went this man’s idea one better and somehow allowed an administrator who essentially worked for the athletics department to be a professor (she didn’t teach, but Deborah Crowder acted as a professor in almost every other way), and before Youngstown State University made a tarnished football coach its president. These were positive trends from the genius’s point of view, but then Penn State came along, and a lot of people seem to have decided that a university run in significant ways by its football team was not a good idea. So that was a setback.

You see these power tensions (does athletics run the school? should it?) at a school so academically bad that there shouldn’t be any sports program there at all: Florida A&M. Yet FAMU has so powerful a sports program (and sports ethos – for decades the university looked the other way while its untouchably powerful marching band hazed members to within an inch of their lives — and then last year the university kept looking the other way while the band did succeed in actually killing a member) that the trustees are in the humiliating position of begging the president to fire an athletics director they can’t fire. The AD is brand new; the president is brand new — FAMU has had to turn over a lot of new leaves in the wake of the bad publicity its manslaughtering marching band brought. Continues to bring, as multiple manslaughter trials (one person has already been found guilty) proceed.

And now, while that beleaguered school’s trustees ought to be talking about how to teach the few students who continue to apply to FAMU, they’re spending all their time talking about the sports program. No one goes to the games; the new AD is fucking up left and right; the athletics budget is so huge it’s killing what’s left of the school… and not only that, but…

[Trustee Rufus] Montgomery also was critical of correspondence coming out of the athletics department to the trustees, saying the emails contained numerous spelling and grammar errors.

“It’s ridiculous. It’s embarrassing,” Montgomery said. “Please don’t let this happen again with athletics.”

But how are you going to keep it from happening? The only solution will cost the school more money in its athletics budget. They’re going to have to hire someone to rewrite the correspondence.

FAMU is a really interesting case right now. Like a lot of universities, it has for decades acted on the belief that a big noisy sports program is the front porch of the university. What do you do when the sports program at your school turns out to be the university’s front funeral parlor?

There’s no question that a program that beats people to death puts a damper on things. Fewer students apply. Very few students go to games. You’re losing so much sports revenue that you increase tuition big time, which turns off yet more applicants.

FAMU, UD thinks, could go either way. It could go the way of the genius and athleticize the whole school. Make the new AD the provost; keep pouring money into the football program, etc. Or it could suspend all or part of its athletics program and concentrate on academics.

You and I know which one it’ll be.

Did the same team that worked the magic at Chapel Hill work their magic at Kansas? And look who our chancellor is!

Aw, shaddap. Blood under the bridge. Leave it alone.

… she didn’t know exactly what big ol’ scandal they were up to now… But their recent hiring of the University of North Carolina’s finest stonewaller, Leslie Strohm, turns out to have something to do with their attempting to keep the results of an audit of the “KFC YUM!” arena (UD is not making this stuff up) out of the hands of the state attorney general.

He has explained to the university that it’s in violation of open records laws, but the university (which no doubt has excellent reasons to stonewall on this) continues to withhold the document. And who better to help them do this than the pride of Chapel Hill, Stonewall Strohm herself?

A sample of local press coverage.

That’s called earning the “U of Smell” nickname. This hiring stinks.

And so now here, with the University under fire for not turning over documents related to an internal audit of potential misdoing (on a number of issues, including The Yum Center), the school has hired someone who is alleged to be adept at covering up wrongdoing.

As UD explained here, one of America’s most ghastly jockshops, the University of Louisville, has scored quite the td in recruiting one of the architects of Chapel Hill’s undoing.

Here is one of her valedictories as she leaves UNC. It appears in UNC’s newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel:

TO THE EDITOR:

It is good news that Leslie Strohm is leaving her position as UNC Vice Chancellor and General Counsel.

I had strongly recommended to the administrative review committee that her contract not be renewed, following [ex-chancellor] Holden Thorp’s unfortunate resignation. I stated that “she is incompetent, dishonest and unethical.”

Her stonewalling on releasing records about the athletics scandal has only made things worse; with better advice, Holden Thorp might still be here.

Elliot M. Cramer

Professor Emeritus of Psychology

Do keep in mind, in case UD has not said it explicitly enough, that UL’s motive in hiring her is almost certainly her protect-the-dirty-sports-program-at-all-costs M.O.

Can’t keep in mind the details of each and every dirty sports program? Type UNIVERSITY LOUISVILLE into my search engine.

But just to whet your appetite: Here’s a sample.

She taught

160 independent study courses between spring 2004 and spring 2012…. [I]n spring 2005 she taught 20.

Let’s just start with that. Let’s start by trying to imagine what her daily life must have been like with 160 independent studies taught alongside a classroom teaching load.

Then let’s add her directorship of an ethics center. Her work as a summer school administrator for the philosophy department. During these years she was an academic advisor to the athletics program. She was associate chair of her department. She was Teaching Coordinator and Director of Undergraduate Studies for her department. She sat on a quadrillion university committees.

In addition: “UNC women’s basketball coach Sylvia Hatchell said Boxill completely oversaw the teams’ academics, making herself available for players at all hours of the day.”

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

It might seem a small point, but

[UNC’s] highly autonomous academic culture [the sort of culture that makes things like independent studies possible] is exactly what led to UNC’s academic-athletic scandal, according to the Wainstein report.

Datz right, kiddies. Thanks to Jan and Julius and Deborah and a whole, whole lot of other people, you can kiss any autonomy goodbye if you teach at unannounced spot checks to make sure all faculty are meeting their classes Chapel Hill. Keep your nose clean and fill out all your paperwork by five, sucker.

It might seem a small point. But it’s the biggest of them all.

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

Jan’s a sports-lover and it’s obvious that she’s very competitive.

UD has some very bad news for Jan.

I know, I know. She’s handling a lot of bad news just now, and it’s not nice to pile on. But I think she will appreciate knowing this, because I know she’s the sort of person eager to lift her game.

Thomas Petee, of Auburn University, taught

152 [independent studies] in the spring of 2005, [and] 120 in the fall of 2004.

Chapel Hill: 20
Auburn: 152

That’s a pretty shitty showing, Jan. If you don’t mind my saying. It’s pretty obvious which of the two of you was doing more for your school.

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

UD thanks Dave.

From one scummy sports program to another.

If you’re the University of Louisville, you’re looking desperately for people like Chapel Hill’s Leslie Strohm. The University of Louisville is one of the worst jockshops in America. It must be thrilled that it has wooed Strohm away from Chapel Hill.

Strohm was one of the key players behind a public records battle with the media as reporters attempted to look into a scandal involving student athletes and allegations of academic misconduct. UNC, with Strohm’s legal advice, used the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to deny numerous public records requests at the height of the scandal.

Attorneys for ABC11 and eight other media organizations sued UNC, claiming the university was illegally stifling public records requests stemming from the initial football investigation that led to NCAA sanctions.

Among the records the media was fighting for: un-redacted phone records, player parking tickets, and a full list of tutors including salaries.

ABC11 and other media outlets won the lawsuit, and the records were released.

Okay, she lost that one; but Louisville knows it’s going to have to do some major stonewalling of its own as national attention turns to our sports factories and the way they run.

And Strohm – well, she’s been through baptism by fire. She’s been at Chapel Hill. Time for her to turn her talents to another, uh, troubled university.

All fraternities and sororities at West Virginia University were suspended Thursday after an 18-year-old freshman was found unconscious and not breathing inside a fraternity house, just a week after a different fraternity was suspended after 19 pledges got into a street brawl, university officials and police said.

And of course there was the matter of that massive, massively destructive student riot last month. Etc. Etc. Do a “West Virginia University” search on this blog if you have a lot of time and a strong stomach. It’s cute to call a university a “party school,” but at perennial top-ten party school WVU what it really means is huge numbers of permanently pissed, violent students (and, in some cases, pissed coaches) who end up torching Morgantown and fucking up freshmen whose bodies haven’t adjusted to prevailing blood alcohol levels.

Still. It’s interesting to see that even WVU has a tipping point.

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

But don’t get too excited. A temporary cease-fire has been negotiated between the two primary factions – the university and the fraternities. Left out of negotiations so far are both the government and citizenry of Morgantown, which will have to be included in any future agreement.

Further, there are very likely to be conflicts within Morgantown, for instance between business interests (large numbers of students with near-fatal addictions to alcohol attract large numbers of bars) and public safety advocates. Any attempted crackdown on alcohol will also mean a very unhappy sports program, which understandably fears a falling-off in game attendance if students are no longer allowed to get drunk enough to burn down Morgantown.

On top of all of this, the numbers crunchers at WVA will have to be consulted, since they can provide crucially important estimates not only of riot-preparedness costs, but settlement expenses arising from wrongful death suits filed by parents. It will be the money managers’ job, moreover, to remind the university (see Penn State and Chapel Hill) that public relations firms tasked with the almost-impossible job of making squalid universities smell like roses do not come cheap.

Finally a University of North Carolina insider willing to trot out the whole 2+2=5, War is Peace, routine! Anyone can condemn the football and basketball scandal at that school as America’s largest instance yet of the way big-time athletics destroys our universities, and indeed in the past couple of weeks everyone has – in a myriad of opinion pieces – done just that. Lawsuits are flying, alumni are pissed, heads are rolling, etc., etc. It’s Penn State all over again.

Only a few people, under these weighty circumstances, will have the guts to go against the grain.

SOS knew that such people would have to come out of UNC’s business school.

So say hello to Michael Jacobs. Mike, c’mon down! We’re gonna do a close scathe of your prose, because you’ve earned it.

Paragraph #1:

For years we have been hearing about the “athletic” or “academic-athletic” scandal at UNC. Maybe I am missing something, but where was the athletic scandal? Were teams shaving points? Were tennis players intentionally making bad line calls? Were soccer players taking performance-enhancing drugs? Were athletes competing on the field who were academically ineligible?

Establish a peeved, above-it-all, know-it-all tone from the outset and come out swinging. No apologies, no concessions. Your first paragraph should contain no use of the word football or basketball. You are going to concentrate instead on the sports that really matter at UNC, the high-profile revenue tennis and soccer teams.

Paragraph #2:

No doubt, there has been a scandal at UNC. But what happened in Chapel Hill was an academic scandal. This is not just about semantics. How you characterize the problem dictates how you devise the solution.

Jacobs has copied the response to the scandal that the entire leadership of the school attempted before it couldn’t anymore: Nothing to see here sportswise! (Penn State tried exactly the same thing: It wasn’t an athletic or an academic scandal there: It was just this one creepy guy, Sandusky, who showed up on campus occasionally… ) The UNC scandal is simply about bad business practices, and I’m a biz school guy, so I should know. I’m all about getting it done, solving problems, and I’m going to let UNC in on how to get out of this mess because – I’m now going to share one of those impressive b-school insights – ‘How you characterize the problem dictates how you devise the solution.’

This crucial sentence should really be rendered as it appears in its natural PowerPoint presentation habitat:

How You Characterize The Problem DICTATES How You Devise The Solution.

Paragraph #3:

Athletes were not the only ones enrolled in bogus AFAM classes. They might have been the intended primary beneficiary, but the scandal appears to have been germinated and incubated by the academic side of the university. Paper classes were the brainchild of “academicians” in the college of arts and sciences.

The first sentence is correct, and it means not that the scandal therefore was only academic, but that the scandal was endemic to the university as such. That is, it operated throughout all aspects of the institution, including fraternities (frat boys were the other big beneficiaries of the hoax), athletics, administration, and faculty. The second two sentences are incorrect. The scandal was the brainchild of Deborah Crowder in association with coaches, the hilariously titled Academic Counselors, and Julius Nyang’oro. It seems to have enjoyed tacit acceptance everywhere, all the way up to the woman now chancellor at a sports-above-all sister school, University of Kansas.

Note also Jacobs’ penchant for quotation marks. They designate the can-do biz guy’s contempt for the enemy – intellectuality.

Paragraph #4:

The irony is that now a vocal group of UNC faculty members is questioning whether big-time athletics can co-exist with a prominent academic research institution. The corruption of athletics is tainting the pure quest for knowledge, they contend.

SOS says: This is fine. He’s extending his point about stoopid “academicians.” But she would urge Jacobs, on rewriting, to put the words tainting and pure in quotation marks as well. Like this:

The corruption of athletics is “tainting” the “pure” quest for knowledge, they contend.

SOS knows what you’re saying. Put corruption in quotation marks too! But three q.m.’s in one sentence is too many, she contends.

Paragraph #5

The simple answer is yes they can co-exist, as they do at reputable institutions all across the country, if the academicians will run the academic program with integrity.

Here we see the cut through all the bullshit approach of the b-school boys. Simple, pragmatic, nothing fancy, just square your shoulders and get the job done. All you need is the guts, and unfortunately academicians are gutless. Notice that we’re in the fifth paragraph and the words football and basketball have still not appeared. Certainly reputable institutions across the country have been able to run their tennis and soccer programs with integrity. UNC can too, and this is how:

Paragraph #6:

The breakdown at UNC was due to a lack of appropriate controls and accountability systems within the college of arts and sciences. The primary gestation period for this scandal occurred under the watch of a chancellor who was a musician. While universities need scholars in all areas, including music, music is probably not the optimal background to manage a complex $1.5 billion organization.

Cherchez le musicien! You can get some pansy who fiddles while Rome burns, or you can bring in me and the boys to clean up the mess. It’s your choice! It’s your funeral! It’s your Requiem! Your complex organization (suddenly all that stuff about simple has become complex) needs Men, not Mice.

Okay, we’ll skip a bit, as Brother Maynard says.

Here’s the heart of the thing:

Many in the college of arts and sciences squirmed because [the new post-scandal provost] did not come from among their ranks. The fact that he was an expert in organizational control systems and accountability rather than romance languages made some faculty members uneasy. But Chancellor Folt had defined the problem correctly.

It was all those violinists with French poems dancing in their heads who did this to us, who dragged our fine complex institution into the dust! If you want to clean things up, you obviously have to go to the money guys!

Perhaps the scholars in Chapel Hill who are screaming from the mountaintop that we need to purge our research universities of athletics should pause, take a deep breath and internalize an insight from that great scholar Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and they are us.” The best scholars don’t make the best administrators.

Bravo, says SOS. Jacobs has managed to write an entire opinion piece about football and basketball at UNC without ever mentioning either sport. He has also failed to mention the existence of athletic directors and coaches — the people who, as more and more players now attest, ran the scam from on high for twenty years.

I mean, it’s very odd, isn’t it? The fact is that UNC has been following Jacobs’ advice for ages, and that indeed the athletic program was run brilliantly, generating massive profits and wins. So what happened?

What happened is something that the Jacobs model, to its everlasting peril, overlooks. What happened is that one rogue academician squealed. Mary Willingham is what happened, and no university management system, however complexly and pragmatically run, can control for the rare, bizarre emergence of an honest, non-Orwellian person in its midst.

The only way to control for the enemy within is indeed, to use Jacobs’ appropriately Orwellian word, to purge her. So this is how SOS would suggest revising the piece. Add this.

The screaming scholars of Chapel Hill have it exactly backwards: We don’t need to purge our research universities of athletics. We need to purge our athletics of research universities.

Lament on Chapel Hill

Time was when we couldn’t be prouder
Of Professor… er… Ms Deborah Crowder.
Her work with Nyang’oro
Was rapid and thorough
And no one was able to out her.

Florida State. The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Penn State. Certain schools stand out from the crowd.

Al Sharpton on the people who run the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

He’s got a point. Sports/money types exploiting black athletes.

Owen needs to explain more than her failure to mention to anyone a grotesque situation in the AFAM department. In response to a “Board of Governors member who asked [Owen in 2012] if the academic support staff was steering athletes to particular classes,” she responded:

“I hope not. I believe that they understand their responsibility to support the student and to help them make wise choices, but it is not in their purview to direct students to particular courses.”

However – given the fact that she’s been disciplined – she probably knew perfectly well that that’s exactly what was happening: Academic support staff were steering athletes to bogus classes.

Then there’s Owen’s remarkable lack of curiosity.

[Owen] learned roughly nine years ago that the department was offering far more independent studies than it could manage, and told [head of AFAM chair Julius] Nyang’oro to reduce them, the report said. But she never investigated why there were so many in the first place.

Yes, Julius, how about bringing them down from 150 to, say, 100? That would be more seemly…

It all makes UD nostalgic for Thomas Petee, chair of Auburn University’s “dumping ground for athletes,” aka the sociology department. Petee, like Nyang’oro, worked his balls off, typically taking on dozens and dozens of independent study students a semester.

Indeed, keep in mind, if you want to create a dumping ground for athletes in your university, that these guys – Petee and Nyang’oro – were both department chairs. That’s important. For bogus course schemes to work at maximum efficiency at sports factories like Auburn and Chapel Hill you really need a department chair to run them, because chairs have more institutional power than regular faculty, and because regular faculty in totally deeply corrupt departments can be counted on to keep their traps shut. They don’t want to piss off the chair, who must be hugely powerful – untouchable – if he’s able to get away with what he’s been getting away with for decades.

It’s obviously icing on the cake if you’ve got a dean in on it too.

Yes, of course you ask the question as you watch Keene State University students yet again burn down their town and call out all the riot police in a hundred mile radius: Where are the professors? Don’t professors teach there? Haven’t they noticed the decades of rioting that have made the name Keene State detested all over New Hampshire? (“Freshman Heather M. Fougere said she walked into Cumberland Farms on Main Street Sunday wearing a Keene State College sweatshirt. While there, an elderly couple glared at her, then looked away, she said. She kept her head down, she said.” Incoming! Freshman orientation at Keene State will soon include recommended evasive maneuvers when the local terrified populace bites back. Keep your head down! Lose the sweatshirt!)

So where are they, the people charged with educating Keene State’s students, the people who set academic policy, etc., etc.?

Well. You know. Keeping their heads down. Teaching in a charming New England town is a great gig, and you wouldn’t want to mess that up (the way Craig Brandon did) by complaining about anything, or putting any pressure on the kiddies. Use as your model the faculty at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill – if you see something academically or behaviorally, uh, non-standard, keep your trap shut. For twenty years.

One reporter did manage to find a couple of professors willing to talk. Let’s see what they said.

First, the whole thing is the media’s fault.

[A Keene State professor] attributed student behavior to cultural signals and the media, which faculty and administrators have little to no control over.

The same guy makes another salient point. All American universities burn down their host cities and towns.

“I don’t think there’s anything specific about Keene that makes it especially vulnerable to these kinds of events. These kinds of events — campus riots, student riots, alcohol-driven student riots — have become increasingly common across campuses.”

Nothing to see here! And anyway – when a certain behavior is common – let’s say for instance rioting – the only response is no response. I mean, it’s so common…

But the main faculty response, says the president of the faculty union, is the sniffles.

“I think generally faculty are saddened by the whole thing,” [Peter] Stevenson said.