This blog has long written about how big-time athletics infects a university, attracting to it scads of unserious students, jocksniffer administrators, and rich, control-freak, alumni boosters. Eventually the university is run by the two guys with all the money: the alumni booster (Boone Pickens; Phil Knight) and the football/basketball coach (JoePa Of Blessed Memory and Cached Statue; Still-Uncached Statue Man Nick Saban).

Every now and then one of these hopeless little North Koreas, with their Dear Leaders who take students’ money in order to play the pointless war games (KILL AUBURN!) that keep students in a stupor, decides to improve itself, to look more like a university than an experiment in repressive desublimation. But whether it’s Penn State or the University of North Carolina, the systemic sickness of the jockshop (Professor Emeritus Sandusky puts PSU’s leadership in prison; Julius Nyang’oro’s depravity ushers in mandatory class inspections for all faculty) will always – as the UNC observer in this post’s headline notes – overwhelm any self-improvement efforts and reveal the sick joke at the permanent core of the place.

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UD thanks an UNC insider
for this post’s headline.

Motto of Auburn University: NEVER ENOUGH.

(Watch it here.)

Lamont Evans, associate head coach for the Oklahoma State Cowboys, Chuck Person, associate head coach for the Auburn University Tigers, Emanuel “Book” Richardson, assistant coach for the Arizona Wildcats, and Anthony “Tony” Bland, assistant head coach of the University of Southern California Trojans, were all named in the complaint.

How did “Book” get his nickname?

Arizona assistant coach Emanuel Richardson was nicknamed Pocketbook by his grandmother because she would catch him riffling through her purse. The name was eventually shortened on the basketball courts…

Whooda thunkit. This country’s institutions of higher education host criminal gangs getting rich off of their students!

Haha I mean our universities pay criminal gangs to get rich off of their students, as in the latest FBI raid of … Oh let’s see… If you were going to guess what name would be first on the massive university athletics corruption hit parade, what would it be?

Well, if you’ve been reading this blog for more than ten minutes, you’d be choosing between Baylor and Auburn… Auburn and Baylor… Yeah, let’s start with the A‘s… Let’s go with that glorious public university in the state of Alabam’… Ruled for decades by King Bobby Lowder, it is now the fiefdom of – among other sporty types – basketball coach Chuck Person, currently

facing six charges, including bribery conspiracy, solicitation of bribes and gratuities, conspiracy to commit honest services fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and travel act conspiracy, according to court documents.

Oh, but it’s so much bigger than one Person. Tune in today at noon for an update on America’s amazing big time university athletics programs.

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UD thanks dmf.

The funny thing is, it’s often very easy. You don’t really need my instructions on how to detect con men (it’s usually men), because most con men are right out there. Very, very obvious. Let us consider three of them who are currently in the news, starting with … let’s call him the mildest of the cons.

This man’s trickery is in the long and highly rewarded academic tradition of Julius Nyang’oro, Thomas Petee, and Leo Wilton — all of them professors who systematically, over years, provided fake courses and fake grades for athletes. For professors who don’t give a rat’s ass about actually educating anyone, ever, the rewards of this behavior are deep, profound, and monetary. Schools almost entirely devoted to their football and basketball teams – like the schools these men work and worked for – reserve their eagerest gratitude for professors willing to confer upon athletes the trappings of academic respectability. Administrators can’t do it; trustees can’t do it — only professors can put the A-/B+ on the record and keep players eligible.

The system works beautifully, except that occasionally mistakes of judgment are made, and some female pipsqueak hired to help with the grading (in all of the cases I’ve mentioned, except that of Petee, it was a woman) turns out actually to care about educating people. She’s appalled when she realizes she’s part of a con game, and she goes public with the scandal.

In the case of Florida State University’s athlete-positive professor, we’re talking about an online (has to be online – makes it much, much easier to cheat or indeed do absolutely nothing and ace a course) hospitality course called Beverage Management.

I’m not making this up. At FSU, we have entirely entered the world of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, where a local university offers a course called Eating and Drinking: Basic Parameters.

But don’t be too harsh. FSU started out with much more curricular gravitas for its players. For decades, a music theory professor there let hundreds of athletes cheat their way through his intro course. When that scheme was revealed and became a big ol’ national scandal, FSU had to hustle to find another online curricular home for people it didn’t give a rat’s ass about educating. It lowered itself all the way down to a person who heads one section of his 33 page cv Scholary Honors (some of his students have had it up to here with his spelling). (Oh. And there’s this.)

Where does FSU go now? When this latest cheating scandal is over, where can they go that’s even lower than online courses in Beverage Management?

Okay, so the two other con men the media’s paying attention to this week:

Like the FSU guy with his article-length cv trumpeting his amazing accomplishments (come to think of it, Professor Gun-Spree also has the self-presentation of an egomaniac), the children’s book author whose PEN nomination has been withdrawn on PEN discovering what actual Native American writers have been trying to tell the world for years – the writer is a con man – also displays a hilarious sense of his own greatness.

And let’s end with Paolo Macchiarini, shall we? Stem cell research of course is the hard-science con man’s Emerald City … And this guy, like the others, didn’t exactly hide his borderline-psychotic world of lies.

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UD thanks Barney.

… hero of mine. Especially today, with Stone’s release of an email exchange he had with the notorious Richard Spencer.

In an April 18 op-ed in the New York Times, Stone defended Spencer’s First Amendment right to speak at Auburn University.

According to Stone, he received an e-mail from Spencer thanking him for his piece saying, “[he thinks] it will be looked back upon as significant in changing the contemporary free-speech debate.”

In the e-mail, Spencer also expressed his desire to return to his alma mater for a speaking event.

… Stone wrote back, saying that he thought Spencer’s views were not worth discussing, and that he would not extend him an invitation.

“My strong support for the right of students and faculty to invite speakers to campus to address whatever views they think worth discussing does not mean that I personally think that all views are worth discussing. From what I have seen of your views, they do not seem to me [to] add anything of value to serious and reasoned discourse, which is of course the central goal of a university. Thus, although I would defend the right of others to invite you to speak, I don’t see any reason for me to encourage or to endorse such an event.”

More here.

Now ah say ah say son you got yourself one helluva problem down at Baylor with some of these here big money boys trying to make all the regents resign just cuz they ground the school all the way down to shit and cost it so far a cool $223 million (and it’s early days!) with all them rapes on their watch.

The ongoing scandal has already claimed Baylor’s president, athletic director and head football coach. But the booster group says the purge hasn’t gone far enough and the regents haven’t assigned much blame to themselves. The boosters argue that a small group of board insiders controls the university and occasionally meddles in day-to-day business.

Damn right! Dumbest thing Auburn University ever did was get rid of trustee-for-life (I mean, spozed to be) Bobby Lowder, who for 29 years ran pretty much the entire school, all in the sacred name of football, and didn’t give a flying fuck about so-called ‘scandals’…

So now you get ol’ Bobby on the phone (after the bank thing and finally getting thrown off the BOT I think he’s available) and you have him talk to Baylor’s trustees and tell them how to keep their asses planted firmly on the board for at least 29 years, and how to keep running the show.

From the student newspaper at … Auburn?

… as UD calls Auburn University, now congratulates itself – well, a local journo congratulates it – on having avoided hiring the Beastly Briles Boys.

UD loves that. Auburn is – has long been – arguably the dirtiest sports program in the United States. (Put Auburn in my search engine if you dare.) And now it’s Oh look we kept our hands clean and didn’t hire rape-enablers! Aren’t we pretty!

It’s a beautiful thing.

What’s even more beautiful is that, the way things are going on this country’s campuses, next year the cheer will be volleyed back and forth from one side of our universities’ stadiums and arenas to the other. Call and response.

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But hey maybe not. Maybe when you’re down to He Hits Women cheers, you begin asking yourself whether you want to be there.

Famous French popularizer of science Étienne Klein is apparently a serial plagiarist. Like Cary Grant in that movie, he is a very classy thief, his pinches revealing un homme très cultivé – Zweig, Zola, Bachelard… AND… UD is thrilled to add… Klein steals from an old friend of the Soltan family! Roman Jakobson was a Harvard colleague and Cambridge neighbor of Jerzy Soltan’s. Even after death the two men remain neighbors – their graves lie a few feet away from each other in Mount Auburn Cemetery. And even after death (especially after death – all career plagiarists know it’s better to steal paragraphs from people not in a position to complain) Jakobson is making himself useful…

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Recalling UD‘s typology of plagiarists, Klein is clearly an Atelier, done in, I’m going to guess, by one of the many little people he hires to write his books for him.

… but meanwhile there’s a blog about universities to maintain, and I just happen to have some stuff here that I think you might like…

Close to home, there’s the fun story of one of the fraternities at UD‘s place of business, George Washington University. We’ve had to pay a lot of attention to fraternities on this blog, given the hilarious disconnect between what many of these cults broadcast about themselves and what they actually are/do. The American university frat story is a subset of the American university big-time sports story, in which these closely allied units grab our elbow and direct their alcoholic breath to our face in order to bray about their charity car washes and team work and brotherly love and inspirational school spirit. And we buy it, which is pretty remarkable…

So yet another GW frat has been shut down or suspended or whatever (happens constantly), but this time it’s not about the routine gruesome party or trashed hotel.

The chapter was under investigation after DC Leaks hacked the personal email account of a White House staffer and alumnus, which included messages from Pi Kappa Phi’s Listserv from February 2015 to June 2016. GW’s Greek life official said in a message sent to students that the chapter was shut down after officials found information that showed the group had violated University standards.

No, it’s not Clinton/Weiner-level; but you gotta admit in its own small way it’s kind of impressive. A just-graduated GW person, fraternity prez, moves too quickly to the White House, still “being dead in his sins and the uncircumcision of his flesh,” (Colossians 2:13), and his frat-prez correspondence gets a high-level hack, which if you’re GWU you’re likely to find a mite embarrassing.

Pi Kappa Phi was [already] under disciplinary and social probation until Dec. 31, 2015 for hosting a registered off-campus event with alcohol where several attendees – some of whom were underage – had to be treated at a hospital for overconsumption of alcohol. The chapter had been on social restriction until June 30.

But that’s a trifle here. That’s like… Aren’t all fraternities under social restriction? Let’s get to the good stuff.

The email hack included Listserv messages instructing members to watch out for puking pledges, [and to] contribute to a slush fund; [the messages also included] anti-semitic remarks calling members “Jewish” for not donating to philanthropic events.

“This is such a bad violation of recruitment policies [responded our man] and nationals could royally fuck us if they wanted to… I’m not being a narc but you gotta at least keep a clean paper,” he wrote.

An April 2016 email reprimanded two fraternity members for yelling “fuck you you fucking faggot” at their gay neighbor for 20 minutes during a party, which allegedly led the neighbor to consider pressing criminal charges.

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And here’s something from the big-time sports part of the frat/sports industrial complex.

The University of Memphis. Put university memphis in this blog’s search engine and feast your eyes on one of America’s most lurid locations of any kind, much less a university location. Memphis, like Auburn and Clemson and Baylor, is one of those schools that UD grudgingly admires for their determination to be faithful to what they truly are: totally amoral football-game-makers. Scummy cheating coaches flying high on zillion dollar salaries; broad-shouldered who-gives-a-shit trustees; recruits who spend so much time on the field, or playing video games, or shooting guns, that UD worries they might not have enough time to get their schoolwork done…

University of Memphis football players Jae’Lon Oglesby and Kam Prewitt fought Tuesday night over video games and Prewitt was later taken to a local hospital because of injuries to his mouth, according to a university incident report obtained Thursday morning.

Oglesby told university police that the fight took place between 9 and 9:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Carpenter Complex, a residential building on campus. Oglesby said he then left the complex and returned to his apartment, which is located off campus on Patterson Street. Officers subsequently visited Prewitt’s apartment to check on him and determined that he needed medical attention, according to the university incident report.

Gunshots were fired at a car belonging to Oglesby after 10 p.m. Tuesday, according to a police report. Oglesby told officers that he did not see who fired the shot but that he had been in an altercation with Prewitt earlier in the day.

And that was Tuesday night! Homework night! Imagine what they’re up to on Saturday.

… 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.

Made out of words taken from a newspaper article.

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THREE DAYS INTO MAY

All of this is no more than mere footnote;
Quite good for schadenfreude but little more.
Yet cast your gaze a little farther west…
Oxford! Where finer scandals lie in store.

Oh yeah? This commentary in the aftermath of UNC’s two-decade-long massive academic fraud ups the the rhetoric-ante and informs us that universities have souls, UNC has a soul, and it’s looking at its soul being ripped out.

Most immediately, the soul-threat the writer has in mind is trouble with a couple of accrediting bodies; but you and I know that beyond a brief probation, UNC will be fine. The NCAA has let it off lightly and so will the accreditors. All will be well. Indeed, UD has no doubt that in a few years things will have so supremely settled down that UNC will be inaugurating an improved academic fraud game plan for its athletes and other interested students.

But this matter of a university’s soul… UD has done some scooting about online, and people do make a habit of assigning souls to universities. The soul seems to be a central meaningful place or group: the library, the faculty. It may be a common faith (Notre Dame’s Catholicism.) Or it may be non-profitness rather than commercialization.

Here’s the Soul Man himself, Cardinal Newman:

[The university] is almost prophetic from its knowledge of history; it is almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human nature; it has almost supernatural charity from its freedom from littleness and prejudice; it has almost the repose of faith, because nothing can startle it; it has almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation.

Or in UNC’s terms:

It is almost unbeatable in its knowledge of free throws; it is almost its own search-firm in its knowledge of football recruits; it has an almost supernatural advantage in its freedom from standards and integrity; it has almost the repose of sleep, because nothing can enlighten it; it has the beauty and harmony of hunky competitors.

By which UD means that while most writers, after Newman, consider a university’s soul some central meaningful spiritual/intellectual aspect of the place, after UNC, writers will need to take on board the fact that the only soulfully alive place on some campuses seems to be the athletic department. Surely the soul of Penn State, Auburn, Baylor, Alabama, the University of Oregon, and UNC lies somewhere in the vicinity of the locker room. And that is a soul that no accrediting body can rip out. Only a bad coach can do that.