… killing is something this blog has followed for a long time. (Feast your eyes.) Usually it’s guns, but sometimes students (see the marching band) just beat the shit out of people until they die.

Most recently, a shooter walked onto campus and killed one and injured four.

“To tell you the truth, I wasn’t surprised. [E]very time you turn around, there’s a shootout,” notes a person who lives across the street from the school. FAMU in particular, and Tallahassee in general, is just a mad wild ongoing BANGBANGBANGBANGBANG lately — guns galore, and they’re going off all the time and killing everybody. And hey lookit all they’re doing about it! Everything but anything about guns. Guns are sacred, and such a fine thing for our young people. Florida is WAY gun-friendly.

It’s a strange way, thinks UD, to go to college; but that is just your clueless elitist eastern seaboard dumdum speaking, isn’t it. I’m sure everything’s fine down there.

… marching band, but details like these are pretty newsworthy too.

There have been four athletic directors and three head football coaches in the past 12 months.

For an approximately two-week overlapping period, the university had two entire football coaching staffs; this resulted in an additional $55,000.

Just how good?

FAMU fans want to know when the football and basketball teams will be eligible for postseason play again. [Both are currently under academic sanction.] They want to see how [the coach will] tackle a budget millions of dollars in the red. Above all, they want to know if the athletic department is moving in the right direction after eight years with six different people … at the helm.

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.

You remember. Its marching band beat a band member to death in a hazing ritual.

In 2015, there was no postseason play, because both football and basketball were under academic sanction.

Also at that time:

There have been four athletic directors and three head football coaches in the past 12 months.

For an approximately two-week overlapping period, the university had two entire football coaching staffs; this resulted in an additional $55,000.

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How are things now?

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Well, the marching band hasn’t killed anyone else. That’s the good news.

Otherwise, personnel turnover remains amazing, with a brand new prez and brand new athletic director and TONS of other departures.

And of course the perennial tendency of this jockshop as well as many other jockshops to use the athletic budget for … whatever… remains firmly in place. Let’s see…

[T]he university’s athletics department is facing $1 million in “unbudgeted expenses” for this fiscal year …

[These include:]

FAMU paying out $400,000 in annual leave money due to [its former AD], fired Head Football coach Alex Wood, eight assistant coaches, the budget coordinator/facility manager, compliance coordinator and others who left last year in athletics.

$300,000 in unexpected expenses incurred during last September’s FAMU Tampa Classic against Tennessee State.

$300,000 in added “miscellaneous” expenses.

… The department has de-activated purchasing cards, but it is not clear if that is effective across the board.

Read the whole article. You kinda have to piece things together, don’t you?

Bottom line: FAMU, a scandalously bad university, hands out purchasing cards to any random person they’ve just hired for an athletics department that’s tanking the school’s budget, and ignores whatever “miscellaneous” things they buy with it.

… let us recall that the object of American university fraternity sadism is usually human rather than arboreal. And let us note that no matter how far apart one fraternity culture is from another (urban Asian-American, rural non-Asian), the defining commitment uniting them is wanton viciousness toward helpless young men interested in joining their club.

This long New York Times article sensitively evokes the particularities of the immigrant culture from which many members of manslaughtering Pi Delta Psi emerge; yet how striking to see that, however diverse, these young men haze in exactly the same humiliating and sometimes homicidal way – including criminal neglect of the dying – as much more mainstream fraternities.

On May 15, three and a half years after Michael Deng’s death, [his fraternity brothers] Kwan, Lai, Lam and Wong again filed into [a] Stroudsburg [Pennsylvania] courtroom, where dark oil paintings of dead men hung on the walls, framed by dusty red drapes. Just two weeks before, eight brothers who belonged to Penn State’s Beta Theta Pi fraternity were charged with manslaughter in yet another hazing death, this one involving an 18-year-old pledge named Timothy Piazza. The similarities between the two cases — Piazza, like Deng, died after going through something called “the gauntlet” (though physical abuse was not part of the ritual) — brought out more reporters than might have been expected, and as they set up in the hallways of the courthouse, many of the questions were about Penn State.

(Not physical abuse; alcohol abuse. Piazza was basically made fatally drunk.).

One might recall here yet more cultural diversity/brutalization unity in the death of Robert Champion at FAMU… And of course one can name, over the years, yet others.

However different we Americans may be on the surface, we are apparently all one when it comes to deriving collective pleasure from abusing other people until they die.

The question isn’t even: Why does a school as desperately bad as Texas Southern University even have athletics programs? The question is: Why is Texas Southern University a university? Why hasn’t it been shut down?

Texas Southern University fell in the bottom 5 percent of all institutions on graduation rates in 2011, graduating only 11.8 percent of its full-time freshmen within six years of initial enrollment. Some 80 percent of Texas Southern’s freshmen are from low-income families (i.e., Pell Grant recipients); 90 percent are from underrepresented minority grants and many are weakly prepared for college, with a median SAT score of 800 out of 1600 and an average high school GPA of 2.7. But so too are the students at Tennessee State University and North Carolina Central University, yet they graduate at rates more than three times as high (35.5 percent and 38.4 percent, respectively). In fact, Texas Southern performs at the very bottom of its closest 15 peer institutions and has for many years.

Sickeningly corrupt TSU needs to lose its accreditation. Its pathetic, out of control sports program is only a small part – but of course the most notorious part – of its utter institutional failure.

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As for TSU’s sparring partner, Southern University, here’s how it did in a recent APR review:

Southern University received the stiffest penalty of all; the NCAA said its [academic progress for athletes] data was unusable and barred all of its sports teams from post-season competition.

… and Scathing Online Schoolmarm, long a student of propaganda, finds them well worth a look. If you read through the SOS posts on this blog, you’ll see plenty of analyses of modern American sports agitprop.

The point of this genre of writing is to transform empty stadiums into … well, not full… everyone knows what’s what these days in university sports… But to transform the total embarrassment of empty stadiums (the stuff is broadcast) into the mild discomfort of half-full stadiums. And since shitty dissolute sports programs repel everyone, your hackwork here ain’t gonna be easy.

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Why is why SOS finds it sad that the people to whom editors throw these challenging assignments are usually the rookies, or anyway the worst writers on staff. Who else would take the gig? Your job is to rally the troops – to get the burghers of Bogalusa out of bed in order to hit terrible traffic, deal with scary drunks, sit for three hours while almost nothing happens, etc., etc., etc.

Those long empty hours give people plenty of time to contemplate less than attractive aspects of the sports program they’re supposed to be cheering. FAMU’s fans, for instance, will have trouble shaking off memories of their school’s homicidally hazing marching band…

But you won’t find a word about that ongoing unpleasantness in Jordan Culver’s piece in the Tallahassee Democrat yesterday. Culver begins with a lament:

[F]ans have been absent — if not totally nonexistent — during home games.

That’s home games, so I guess we’re talking, uh, even less than nonexistent for away.

What to do? The team stinks, the band kills its musicians, and to make matters worse vanishingly few people are applying to attend FAMU anyway. Into this desperate situation steps the local propagandist. What can he do to help?

There are basically two ways to go: Righteous rage against the people (we’ll see an example of that in a moment), and – the Culver option – humble entreaty. Culver goes ahead and acknowledges that the program’s a total mess, with new coaches stepping in every ten minutes or so… But please note! When I call FAMU coaches, they answer the phone and talk to me!

I call, he answers. I ask a question, he — to the best of his ability — provides an answer.

You can’t abandon a program whose coaches pick up the phone. Plus they all have “a vision.”

[FAMU’s interim athletics director] is willing to share [his] vision, and I think it’s one even the most disgruntled FAMU fan can get behind.

But what is that vision? Culver doesn’t quote the AD; nor does he quote any of the other people who will be running the FAMU program for the next few hours. He just says they all have a vision. The vision thing. We can get behind that, can’t we?

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Righteous rage against the people has certain inherent risks, familiar to the classic propagandists of communist countries. The greatness of humanity, its glorious freedoms – these are what life is all about. They’re especially what the freewheeling all-American ethos of sport is about. You don’t want to mess up that… vision… with nasty, coercive, or – God forbid – threatening language.

On the other hand, if you are Clemson zealot Zach Lentz you are in a terrible vindictive snit, especially about the basketball team.

[S]upport for this team is dwindling at an astonishing rate and it has to wear not only on the coach but the players.

This first point is a variant of what SOS has long called coacha inconsolata (put the phrase in my search function), the evocation of the agonies suffered by coaches who through no fault of their own recruit criminals or make institution-destroying salaries or play to empty stadiums. In an echo of the notorious “kitten” internet meme, coacha inconsolata says Every time you fail to attend a game, a coach is worn down to a nub.

Same deal for the kids:

These student-athletes put hours of blood, sweat and tears into a job that’s sole purpose is to entertain the fans watching. The least we can do as fans is get out of our house or dorm and make the trip or walk over to support them. Maybe if we fans get behind the team from the beginning rather than waiting on a magical end-of-the-season run, we might see something special from a special group of kids.

First, then, you inflict guilt. Next up is the drill sergeant, barking his orders with numbing redundancy:

[T]here is no excuse. There is no excuse for there to be empty seats in the student section. No excuse for the people who have said of football game times, “I don’t care if they play at 2 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, I’m going to be there.”

Liars! Look what you said, and look what you did! No excuse, no excuse, no excuse!

The next thing is fully in line with the tendency of communist regimes to say exactly the opposite of the truth as if everyone knows this exactly the opposite thing is obviously true:

[P]eople love to go to sporting events. They love to be a part of the pageantry and witness the spectacular in person.

We don’t have to threaten our people with reprisals if they fail to show up for the May Day parade. Everyone loves pageantry and spectacle.

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It’s strange how Lentz hasn’t noticed the national conversation about massively tanking attendance at university sports events.

It’s especially strange since he’s writing about massively tanking attendance at his university’s sports events.

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Finally: The sobbing old-timer grapples with his lost world.

There was a time when students camped outside, waited in the cold and rain and people couldn’t wait to get inside to watch their team take on whoever dared enter the arena that night.

Why, I remember, back in two thousand naught eight…

… 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.

… FAMU is like any other American university.

[A lawyer for the defense in the Florida A&M marching band hazing/manslaughter trial noted that] students at the University of Florida have organized “Tough Mudder” teams for a competition so demanding and hazardous that participants are required to sign a “death waiver.” He also noted that University of Central Florida students have volunteered to compete in the “Warrior Dash,” an obstacle race that includes a crawl through a tent known as the “Poop House.”

A former president of notorious Florida A&M gives a talk in which he mentions nothing about the academic mission of the university (at least the reporter reports nothing), and in which he simply commands people to be positive about the place.

“We can’t have naysayer[s]; people who doubt and let the doubt overcome them in terms of what they are willing to do. …This year, we need to all get behind Florida A&M and don’t accept negative viewpoints about the university.”

But, you know, why? Why shouldn’t people be free to act on their ethical judgement and do what they’ve been doing since the violently hazing marching band beat one of its members to death not long ago? Why shouldn’t people stop coming to football games where the band plays, and stop giving money to the university? The university conducted itself hideously through the hazing scandal, basically blaming his death on the student himself.

And this is the aspect of the school’s culture – athletics and the marching band – that the speaker wants to make the top priority.

Florida A&M could begin to put a dent into its nagging athletic budget deficit in a short time if the Marching 100 band and the football program are given top priority, Frederick Humphries said Friday at the 220 Quarterback Club’s luncheon…

“The best indicators for black colleges; two things give the greatest visibility that they have,” he said. “It’s the athletic program and the marching band.

“If you were to put it in priority where you should spend some money; you keep your athletic program strong and keep your marching band strong.”

Yes, athletics – that’s the ticket.

Yeah. Attendance at football games is tanking at almost all universities. Only FAMU suffers the additional audience-alienation effect that comes from having a marching band that collectively beats its musicians – sometimes to death. This seems to be a real fan turn-off.

“The large, well-funded universities have hired large compliance staffs who literally escort athletes to class each day to meet the increased requirements,” complains the latest president (before him there was Patricia Slade) of Texas Southern University, one of America’s most notorious dropout factories. TSU’s president fails to see why schools which happen not to be able to afford escorts should be punished by the NCAA for low grades among their athletes. This outraged columnist agrees that just because some schools can’t afford to service their athletes fully, that doesn’t make them lesser schools.

… than a morally sick school just sitting there getting sicker and sicker.

Each line of this bland account of FAMU’s violent, deficit-ridden sports program should be read carefully. Note first that the reporter fails to mention the murderous FAMU band, a number of whose members will go to jail for hazing manslaughter.

While wondering why

Interim athletic director Michael Smith … detailed a deficit of $4.2 million in 2008 growing to a $7.8 million accumulated loss through this year.

the Tallahassee Democrat reporter doesn’t ask whether people might be so disgusted to be associated with a sick sports program that they won’t go to their games. He simply quotes the budget guy at FAMU saying the deficit must be because they’re losing games or something… Then he quotes some trustees.

Trustees noted that the vast majority of college athletics programs operate in the red…

Lala everybody’s doing it. Of course, at FAMU, the red is literal… Profusely flowing in fact…

It continues. Here’s one of the trustees, touting athletics less than three years after FAMU marching band hazers beat a fellow student to death.

“Athletics do a lot more for your school than just athletics. It creates an environment that energizes the community,” he said.

And here’s the new president:

“Athletics, I agree, is an integral part of an education. Its impact on the economic growth and economic development in this town and in Florida is extremely important,” she said. “We have to understand the level of commitment the institution has to athletics.”

You can’t have an education without sports, you see. And after all our sports program helps local businesses.

That’s a nice gentlemanly way to put it. A member of America’s most homicidal university fraternity (its body count puts even FAMU’s Merry Manslaughterers to shame) fails, in his comment in this post’s headline, to register the difference between bad things happening to you (adversity) and bad people killing you (murder, manslaughter, via hazing). Maybe this …. I dunno… call it moral aphasia… accounts for the fact that despite the truckload of bodies Sigma Alpha Epsilon has racked up, its members continue to perceive it as a fashioner of gentlemen… They’re constantly using the word gentlemen in talking about the place…

UD‘s take on this is what you’d expect. She understands that men in certain sorts of groups will always want to torture and kill each other. She fails to see why this activity should take place at universities, on campus or off. Attaching the word “gentlemen” to this activity has a nice rough irony to it, and UD is alive to this fun use of language. But it doesn’t really take you very far, again, in the direction of universities.

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Now, as universities become desperate about declining enrollments and that big ol’ loan to pay back on the new stadium, they will certainly be tempted, like the University of Massachusetts Amherst, to specialize in admitting all the violent gentlemen no other university wants. Big ol’ gangs of them, year after year, to bond and riot and haze. Like Zoo Mass (update on its AMAZING football team, football conference, game attendance, and stadium choices, here), these schools will get a reputation, and all the gentlemen in the vicinity will make a point of attending them.

In the not too distant future, Richie Incognito will be the president of a university.

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But back to Sigma whatever. Talk about adversity. Even a bank as astoundingly scummy as Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase finds this frat too scummy to do business with.

Early this month, JPMorgan Chase stopped managing an investment account for a prominent client: the charitable foundation of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, one of the nation’s largest fraternities.

The bank was concerned about SAE’s bad publicity, according to Anthony Alberico, a JPMorgan vice president who dealt with the foundation. SAE has had 10 deaths linked to drinking, drugs and hazing since 2006, more than any other fraternity.

“If JPMorgan is going to turn us down, who’s next?” said Bradley Cohen, SAE’s national president. “What if universities start saying SAE’s not welcome?”

Well. There’s always Goldman Sachs.

Where else but at never-a-dull-moment FAMU (put that acronym in my search engine for many earlier posts about FAMU’s homicidal marching band, its other high-level thieves, etc.) would the dean be in jail for stealing tens of thousands of dollars from students?

This post’s title headlined some articles about this event that were published earlier today. He’s now the former dean.