Like Auburn and other all-balls-no-brains schools, Penn State packs its board of trustees with witless jocks, guys who played for the university back when. Garban (scan his bio if you have the stomach) was until recently chair, baby. Penn State doesn’t fool around. Penn State leaves nothing to chance.

Of course, if Penn State had any sense – intellectual, moral, whatever – the entire board of trustees would have resigned months ago. But even the trustees themselves know that Garban – Grade A Paterno beef – has to go. Garban, who knew a lot about the Sandusky situation but told virtually no one – certainly not his fellow trustees – is refusing to leave the board. And no one can make him leave.

Why not?

It wouldn’t be the Penn State Way.

… begins, with its hastily appointed new president, Zeithaml (the name translates roughly into Time + Castrated Ram).

In the tradition of Bobby Lowder at Auburn, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld at CUNY, and Gene Powell at the University of Texas, Helen Dragas, head of Virginia’s trustees, seems to be a paternalistic anti-intellectual with power issues. These people occasionally arise in positions of authority at universities, and it is always a catastrophe.

If you want to anticipate the likely plot trajectory of this catastrophe, go back to the history of American University’s board of trustees when the now-notorious Benjamin Ladner was AU’s president. That long ugly expensive story featured clueless rich trustees pumping Ladner full of cash and privileges (keep in mind that even vast academic salaries look pathetic to real estate moguls and hedgies) until his profligacy became a national scandal. Getting out of the scandal took ages and did terrible damage to an already scandal-scarred university. Conflicts among the trustees were open, protracted and farcical, with this one and then that one leaving in a huff, etc. Expect a similar soap opera at Virginia.

Let’s take a few comments from a recent Inside Higher Ed interview with Charles T. Clotfelter, author of a new book about big-time university sports.

[T]he ingredient that gives big-time sports its remarkable staying power is quite simply support from the top – the university’s trustees or regents – who want to have competitive teams. Period.

Doug Lederer, who interviews Clotfelter, notes what happened when Clotfelter asked universities “who sat in their presidents’ boxes and received complimentary tickets to games.”

Fully half the public institutions with which you filed open-records requests turned you down or gave you useless information. My favorite, from Berkeley: “The public interest served here by protecting the identity of major or potential donors, and thereby increasing the likelihood of acquiring financial support for the university, outweighs any incidental interest served by disclosing who those individuals are.”

Clotfelter, Lederer points out, calls for “ending the tax exemption for donations to commercially driven college athletics programs.” Why? Clotfelter responds:

The income tax deduction we have for charitable donations is usually justified on the basis that these gifts go for socially virtuous purposes like education or community service. In contrast, much of the work of contemporary college athletic departments is purely commercial. Were they not attached to a university, these departments would probably be classified by government statisticians in the entertainment industry, alongside amusement parks and minor league professional teams. So, based on the traditional justification of the charitable deduction, gifts to enhance the commercial enterprise simply don’t qualify.

Trustees, regents, donors, anonymous presidential box sitters, anonymous complimentary ticket holders — what’s missing here?

Oh yeah. Students, parents, faculty, and taxpayers.

Disgusting enough that absurdities like Auburn get tax breaks for being amusement parks; even more disgusting that these schools are run for the amusement of the people at the top.

Regular readers know that UD uses the phrase the mephitic factor to designate the intensity of bad smells in the air on this or that American campus at any given time.

Brown University, a fancy Ivy League institution, is an example of a High Mephitic Factor school — its gathering emanations of corruption and wrongdoing of late have an elite feel to them, coming from famous scientists on the faculty, and from sophisticated, wealthy trustees.

Auburn University, a school without academic or social distinction, represents the much more typical Low Mephitic Factor, where the shitty smell in the quads has to do with athletes and their associates who cheat — on the field, and in the classroom.

High or low, the mephitic factor is almost always about the same thing: greed. Pastor Newton pimped his son Cam to Mississippi State; now that same son is at Auburn, and it’s only a matter of time before the NCAA proves that the father pimped the son to Auburn too. Until then, Newton gets to play, and the campus gets to keep that smell.

[People at the NCAA] know (and believe they can prove) that Cecil Newton demanded money for Cam’s commitment, thanks to the Mississippi State evidence. They cannot prove that he made the same demand of Auburn, or that Cam was aware of his father’s pay-for-play schemes. This sounds as believable as a hooker not knowing she’s being pimped out, but it’s not about what probably happened. It’s about what can be proven, and as of this moment, it cannot be proven that Cam Newton or Auburn did anything against the rules.

Brown could clear some of the bad air; but that would mean acknowledging what’s going on there, not merely with one of its trustees, but, soon enough, in all likelihood, with another. The scientist, the trustees… After awhile, the campus smells, and schools that care about that, schools that have something to lose by way of integrity, need to act.