Context matters. If you’re the new president of a crime- and scandal-ridden university, you want to watch yourself. Given the scuzzy reputation of the joint, you want to do all you can, personally, to model a new, less scuzzy ethos.

So for instance if you’ve just taken over the notorious University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, a school UD has long described as having rolling prison admissions (scroll down and enjoy), you want to set a personal example of probity and non-greed and all the things UMDNJ has never before known.

You’ve taken over America’s most financially corrupt university as part of its recent merger with Rutgers University. And oh yeah that’s another thing. If at Rutgers you’re running a national laughingstock (thanks to endless sports scandals culminating in a Saturday Night Live skit about your sadistic basketball coach — again, scroll down… forever…) and a fiscal disgrace (thanks to your bankrupting the school to pay for your sports program), you really, really, really want to set a moral example as you begin to run the school.

But hey. It’s Jersey. Whaddya expect? You expect a president who can be content with his legitimate close-to-a-million-dollars-a-year salary? It’s fucking Jersey!

“It smells to high hell quite frankly,” said Jay W. Lorsch, a professor at Harvard Business School who focuses on corporate governance.

Yeah! The place stinks already; how ’bout bringing your own stink bombs to the game? President Barchi’s particular stink bombs are of course all about sitting on corporate boards – as the New York Times points out in this article, it’s the done thing if you’re a university president panting to make (as the title of a recent book about the practice has it) money for nothing. And Barchi adds an extra jolt of stink by sitting on the boards of companies who do business with Rutgers.

What with perennially expensive sports scandals, and a sports program that in any case is bankrupting the school, you won’t be surprised to hear that tuition at Rutgers is so high that student protests escalate by the day. It can only make things better for students to realize that instead of running the school Barchi is off to relax-and-rejuvenate corporate retreats. What better way for the president of a struggling, scandal-ridden, public university to comport himself?

… relentlessly unmasks that university’s sports lies (background here). Like Reed Olsen at Missouri State University, Killingsworth is part of a special breed of university professor: A smart economist able to detect all of the bs universities put out about how lucrative big-time sports on campus are (or will be; it’s almost always got to be will be). So for instance, in a recent opinion piece, Killingsworth writes:

Its report to the NCAA shows that the subsidy to [Rutgers] athletics is $28 million: $18.5 million from discretionary university funds and another $9.5 million from student fees. None of these funds are earmarked for athletics — the university is free to spend those dollars on anything it wants, or even hand them back to students and their families as tuition reductions. All told, the subsidy amounts to almost $1,000 for each undergraduate. The student fees alone work out to almost $330 per undergraduate.

Nevertheless, Rutgers officials from [President] Barchi on down repeatedly refer only to the $18.5 million in discretionary funds as a subsidy. They never mention student fees. Sayonara! $9.5 million in subsidies conveniently disappear.

Killingsworth barely touches on the reputational costs to Rutgers of its absolutely endless athletics scandal. He doesn’t need to.

… whenever a university sports scandal gets truly nationally and internationally bad, we’re always treated to the semi-literate self-important pointless maundering of the Designated Faculty Hitter.

The DFH teaches sports management or something; he’s a team booster whose job it is to cover the sports shit on campus with academic roses — to make the crime and abuse and cheating and sleaze look as though they’re activities that can be understood as part of the daily life of an organization recognizable as a university, rather than a syndicate or a gang or whatever.

The DFH for the country’s latest scandal-plagued darling, Rutgers, has just done his thing, and it’s time for SOS to take a good long look at it.

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Dear Rutgers University, [He’s written it in the form of a letter to Rutgers.]

“It is no coincidence that we all bleed scarlet”.

That familiar saying among those that call themselves “Rutgers Men” is also the very ethos of my being.

[Strange opening line. To whom – among the readers of Forbes magazine – is that line familiar? And Rutgers Men? SOS had no idea Rutgers was a single-sex school. But she can certainly confirm that already in the writer’s first sentence he has dismissed any female readers his letter might have had. And – the very ethos of my being. Wow. If a team motto is the very ethos of your being, I’m being not very interested in what you have to say about anything. The very ethos of my being is laughing at you.]

As a Rutgers College and Law School alumus, a former student-athlete and current faculty member of the School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University has been a major part of my life for over a decade. [Why? Since Rutgers didn’t even teach you about dangling modifiers, so now you’ve embarrassed yourself again, right after that ethos thing?] My blood is forever scarlet, and I am proud of it.

During my time on the banks of the Raritan, I have had the opportunity to observe the exceptional growth and evolution of our university from a number of perspectives. While we have made tremendous strides [Did Rutgers tell you about cliches?] over the last decade, we have also managed to inhibit our own success due to an alarming string of organizational failures. While the majority of the media and public [You could have written most observers, but that wouldn’t have been as pretentious.] have been quick to point fingers of blame at our leadership for much of the turmoil, they too easily neglect that leaders of great organizations do not make decisions in a vacuum. Between students, faculty and staff, [That should be among.] the Rutgers community is made up of more than 70,000 individuals, [Again, you could have said people, but individuals is far more pretentious, with more syllables.] all of which [whom] play some role in the direction of the university. Large organizations, whether they are state universities or multinational conglomerates, operate in such a way that blaming any one individual for the failures of the entire entity is simply naive and unfair. [Totally untrue statement. It’s often the case that one person is significantly responsible for a large institution’s failure. That’s why the president of Rutgers will be resigning soon.]

Our President Robert Barchi is a brilliant neuroscientist. [Irrelevant.] Our former athletic director Tim Pernetti is a tremendously successful entrepreneur [So? We know that athletic directors and their agents are capable of negotiating obscene, institution-destroying contracts, but this isn’t really why they are at the university.] and his successor, Julie Hermann, is a accomplished athletic administrator. [Who says? Isn’t it rather naive of you simply to assert this?] While each of them has shown great stewardship throughout their careers, there is no such thing as a perfect leader. [SOS says: This sort of condescending, statement-of-the-obvious, pat-the-reader-on-the-head phrase — no such thing as a perfect leader, I’ll have you know! — is a real winner when it comes to regaining all those readers your writing has already alienated.] That is why every organization creates levels of redundancy within their decision making structures to prevent any one individual from having to [too] much influence. While this might lead to red tape and bureaucracy, it also insures that [the] healthy functioning of the corporate ecosystem. [As at Rutgers?]

… The controversy that has struck our great university over the last few months is not due to the shortcomings of our leadership, but rather a result of a culture in which accountability and communication are misaligned. In any large organization, particularly one as complex as a major state university, there are so many moving parts, competing interests and differences of opinion that unless there is a concerted effort to have total transparency and debate, bad decisions are are all but guaranteed to be made. [Note the jargon and passive voice and general tone of haughty lecturing to the unwashed masses who don’t know anything about the complex mysterious intricacies of organizations. This is what UD calls going cosmic. The disaster – not controversy – at Rutgers is not about the all too familiar corruption of universities by mindless boosterism and greed. No, no, it’s some case study in organizational blahblah.]

At Rutgers, there has long been a movement by many faculty and alumni against big time athletics. While their voice might be that of the minority, those that believe that academic and athletic progress are not mutually inclusive have succeeded at creating a juxtaposition that has become endemic to the culture of our university. [Do you have any idea what the fuck he’s saying? This reads like a letter from Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice. Vacuous. Comically pretentious.] As both a professor who values academic progress and an entrepreneur who makes a living off of college athletics, I am equally guilty of helping promote these conflicting ideals. [What conflicting ideals? What’s the juxtaposition? What is he talking about?]

Instead of creating an environment based on accountability, where critical issues are brought out into the open and decision makers are held responsible for their actions, the university community has seemingly refused to learn from its past mistakes and has become seemingly forever mired in the morass of its own self-sabotage. [Morass and self-sabotage… weird mixed metaphor.  Deadly repetition of mousy seemingly.  And what is he talking about? He seems to want to attack critics of crushingly expensive and corrupt sports at Rutgers – it’s the fault of the critics; they’re not on board with everyone else, etc. That’s fine. Go after the nay-sayers. But go after them cleanly and directly.] Great organizations have culture, and culture only comes from a set of shared attitudes, goals, and values that every individual within that organization believes in. [Huh? This unanimity is certainly true of great cultures like North Korea. In the United States, especially in our universities, it’s just the opposite.] If those of us who owe so much to Rutgers cannot agree to bring our goals into sync, than how can we expect our University to do the same?

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There’s more, but – to quote Mr Bennet on one of the letters he receives from Mr Collins – I won’t sport with your intelligence further. A painstaking analysis of this writer’s appalling prose does seem to reveal an attack on those pesky dissenters whose efforts to keep sports from destroying Rutgers turn out to be responsible for this catastrophe. If only Rutgers had been as united as the folks in Paterno’s Happy Valley, the outcome would have been so much better.

Of the thousands of articles that have appeared in the last two days about Mike Rice, Rutgers, and the imperiled president of Rutgers, this, UD reckons, is the best so far, since it stresses not so much the fate of one or two miscreants, but the fate of Rutgers University.

Repeatedly, expert observers are quoted comparing Rutgers to Penn State (“This is a minor league version of Penn State.” “Rice should’ve been gone right away, and especially in the context of [Joe] Paterno and Penn State, neglecting to act is stunning.”), and they are right to do so, because it will probably take around a decade for most Americans to stop thinking Paterno/Sandusky when they think of Penn State. Rutgers is in the same place now.

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It’s quite possible that instead of thinking those two names, they’ll think instead of the names associated with new scandals at Penn State that have overtaken the Paterno/Sandusky scandal. Look at Miami U and Auburn (“Lies, I tell you! It’s all been lies!”) and the University of Tennessee and Ohio State and all. There’s a reason UD has always called big-time university sports the gift that keeps on giving. You’re given a toy with many moving parts when you’re given a big multi million dollar sports enterprise on a small university campus. Your marching band can haze a band member to death. Criminals on your team can rape people. Fans can riot, or constantly trash your campus beyond recognition. Your sadistic coach can appear on film being sadistic. You can’t, like Penn State, replace an academic culture with a corrupt sports culture for decades and then turn around when that absurdity implodes – as it always will – and say no, no, no, we’re a university, we’re doing all these great things. You are doing great things. But it doesn’t matter.

Like Graham Spanier and the rest of the pathetic crew, Rutgers’ Robert Barchi will probably be forced out of a job soon. He has already been outed as an enabler of depravity — which is virtually the job description of a Division I university president.