Baylor and Auburn and Oklahoma State and so many other powerhouses down there all got runnin the place a superbooster who jest cain’t help himself. He loves that team so much. He names his first-born after it. He plans to be buried on its fifty yard line. He takes over the board of trustees and bullies the president and jest runs with that ball, buying players and covering up rapes and arranging seven million dollar a year salaries for coaches — all of which accounts for the tremendous football dominance of those three schools plus so many other universities (howdy, Bama!) located in the Lower Jock belt.

And twernt long before our nation’s powerhouse high schools got wind of how it’s done, so now you got even the New York Times writing about Valdosta High down in Georgia, which followed the southern jock school template to a T and got to the top of the national high school football pile!

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But shucks. Comes a time in a man’s life when his overt totally insane levels of vileness and corruption catch up with him and not even Touchdown Jesus will his sins forgiveth. He gets fired, the coach gets fired, the school gets hammered, and hey if you’d checked out the entire template for football universities, you’d have noticed that things don’t work out too well in the long run for a lot of them either.

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.

Ed Keller, baseball player for Oklahoma State University back in the day, chairs the board of trustees there… The Board of Trustees! Where have they been during OSU’s long years of academic fraud, pimping of coeds to football recruits, money gifts to players, etc. etc.? What is a board of trustees? What does it do?

Okay, so the best answer to those questions is (see Penn State) nothing and nothing. We know this. Does it bother Yeshiva University that a man just found guilty of massive racketeering is on its board of trustees? Does Brown give a shit that Steve Cohen is on its board of trustees?

The best answer to these questions is no and no. Au contraire, if you’re a sports slut like OSU, you positively want a board of trustees made up of mindless jocks and boosters. In order to get to Number One, your coaches are going to be breaking a lot of rules, and the last thing they need is even one trustee with a conscience.

How do you keep all the trustees in line? If you’ve read this blog for any time at all, you know how the thing is done. All BOTs have one really well-connected bully (see Auburn’s Bobby Lowder) who controls everyone else on the board by withholding information, threatening to drop them from the board, whatever. This person takes advantage of the fact that for most university trustees the position is little more than something to boast about rather than a series of meetings one really means to attend, etc. Note that some universities have boards made up of thirty, forty, fifty people. You don’t have to be an expert in organizations to know that these groups are pointless, bootless, bogus.

Sports Illustrated is going after low-hanging fruit like this Okie joke first; expect more such multi-part investigations. And expect, in each case, that at some point someone’s going to say Hey doesn’t this school have a board of trustees? What does the board do?

Answers: Yes. Nothing.

It’s a mad mad mad mad mad mad world at Auburn University; but every now and then, under incredible external pressure (lawsuits, legislative boycotts, mass uprisings), a glimmer of sanity appears.

As in : The dread Bobby Lowder has decided not to seek yet another term as an Auburn trustee (he’s been one since 1983).

To be sure, the rest of the trustees are a sad bunch; but getting rid of Lowder is a big first step.

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UD thanks an Auburn reader for the link.

Are you braced?

Then let’s go.

[One of dozens of lawsuits against MSU] contends that [now-jailed MSU athletics physician Larry] Nassar raped someone — a former MSU field-hockey player who was 18 years old at the time — in 1992 and filmed the act while doing so. [I]t alleges that MSU — and, specifically, George Perles, a current member of MSU’s board of trustees who served as the university’s athletic director at the time of the rape — went “to great lengths to conceal this conduct.”

The article cites ESPN’s extensive reporting on a university-wide culture that for years enabled Nassar’s student-rapes.

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Ask yourself. Why is Perles on a university board of trustees? What sort of a university puts an AD/football coach on their board?

The sort of university that believes its athletics program is the most important thing about it, and wants the hushing up of the program’s many scandals to take place at the highest levels. MSU chose to give an AD/coach who already had a record of significant infractions a position as a trustee. Think about that.

Think about the long reign of Auburn’s Bobby Lowder (background on Lowder in these posts). The model, at these and other morally catastrophic jockshops, is a virtually all-male culture of sexual entitlement, cronyism, and secrecy. It’s how you get Penn State and Baylor and the University of Kansas and too many other catastrophes to mention.

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.

But ol’ Buddy ol’ pal — echt Wacoan, echt Baylor trustee, echt pious hypocrite (“[Ken] Starr … chronicled frustration with Jones in a recent book. Starr almost resigned in 2011 after Jones made a crude remark about the Baylor Alumni Association at a Baylor football game…”) — inexplicably restricted himself to calling female Baylor students who drank at a party (none, apparently, were underage) “perverted little tarts.”

Then-Baylor University Regent Neal “Buddy” Jones referred to female students he suspected of drinking alcohol as “perverted little tarts,” “very bad apples,” “insidious and inbred” and “the vilest and most despicable of girls” in 2009 emails to a faculty adviser, according to documents filed in a Title IX lawsuit against the university.

Ten alleged sexual assault victims suing Baylor attached the emails in a Friday legal filing to show a culture “using the alcohol policy as a pretext to shame, silence and threaten to expel a female student.”

Cunt and tart are both monosyllabic, and both end in T, but if you want to be president of the United States, not just a former Baylor trustee and current national laughingstock, you’re going to have to go all the way, like Mr. Trump.

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Buddy Jones – Bobby Lowder reincarnate – is Baylor. Know what I mean? You wanna know the deep structure, the god’s own truth, of a university, you take a good look at Buddy Jones, moral scold, sexist pig, and his state’s third-biggest water hog. Just like Ken Starr, he’s a walking talking religious hypocrisy doll; and boy do he sure hate women.

Buddy ain’t too bright when it comes to committing his thoughts to email. I mean, he knows enough to ask his correspondents to keep the emails private, but he doesn’t seem to understand the unlikelihood of this approach to privacy working.

In the 2009 correspondence, Jones also asked Davis to remove his name and comments from the email and wrote that his comments “are meant solely for you,” adding that at least one of the women should face expulsion.

Davis responded to Jones that day, saying the photos chronicling an engagement party did not include minors.

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So here comes all that correspondence for all of us to read – onaccounta oodles of never-ending Baylor rape trials and their evidence – and we get a good look at what we already knew: Southern sports factories are typically run by endless layers of assholes. The management structure of these schools is like that dim sum dish, thousand layer cake, only here it’s thousand layer assholes. Art Briles, Ken Starr, Buddy Jones – a whole royal asshole family ran Baylor, and now the place is trying to replace them with less assholery, but we’ve got a tradition here, people.

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For earlier posts on the asshole triumvirate, go here.

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NEW BAYLOR FIGHT SONG

(sing it with me)

Perverted Little Tarts!
Perverted Little Tarts!
Drunk and slutty through the years
Seducing with their arts!
They tempt our jocks and bring them low
Then claim that they were raped
Lord guide us as we courtward go
And pray that nothing got taped.

Well, yes. We all do.

The Bible thing allows you to differentiate between West Virginia University, where locals call Morgantown “a drinking town with a football problem,” and Baylor, which seems to have low rates of alcohol consumption, but shares UWV’s burning commitment to recruiting the best players regardless of, er, violent propensities.

At both schools there’s an unsettling conflation of football and the school’s spirit of choice (alcohol, God). And at both schools, whether they regard their players as Christian Soldiers or Frat Boys on Steroids, violence appears to be totally okay.

Goes without saying that guns and gangs (Baylor’s home, Waco, is in the headlines for biker/police shoot-outs) make up much of the rest of the social fabric at these locations.

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And don’t forget sex. Nobody competes with the University of Montana and Grizzlyville (used to be Missoula, but the football team is the Grizzlies) for broad-shouldered sexual assault. But Baylor’s in there trying.

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Anyone with the intestinal fortitude to examine the deep structure of Baylor – as in, how do you actually produce places like Baylor and Waco? – will tend to gravitate toward the school’s board of trustees, where a Bobby Lowder-like figure name of Buddy Jones seems to run the school and the town.

Buddy’s real enthusiastic about Baylor. Back in 2012, when they won a few games and all, his response was this:

“We like to use biblical analogies, and this is a year of biblical proportions,” Buddy Jones, a regent at the university, told the New York Times in 2012. “As we would say in Christendom, it’s like an early rapture.”

When his vision of the proper role of the booster was threatened by the alumni association, Jones (then chairman of the board of trustees) wrote to a fellow zealot that he couldn’t wait to

put on camp (sic) and load my weapons and go hunting for BAA game. Licking my chops.

Buddy’s official trustee statement has a rapturous boy/girl thing going to explain the nature of the school:

“Baylor’s uniqueness is her commitment to quality higher education by adapting to the 21st century, while never straying from her deep roots in God’s word and her role in his plan for mankind.”

Was Buddy the genius behind the groom’s cake at his daughter’s wedding?

[The cake was] an edible replica of Baylor’s … new stadium with a saluting bear in the middle. But perhaps the most impressive part of the cake is the video screen, which looks like it actually works. At the very least, it had a light in it that gave the illusion of working.

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So much of this comes together this Saturday night, when a match-up between two of the nation’s scummiest football schools – LSU and Bama – will feature a political candidate’s prostitutes and patriots ad. Layers upon layers upon layers.

The question at Auburn is whether there’s a first university. I guess certain parties at Auburn would like to think so; but when one quarter of your trustees played football for the school, and when until very recently the school was run by the legendary Bobby Lowder… And so many academic scandals UD has lost count… I mean… really?

So now there’s this breaking story about the jock major du jour at Auburn – public administration. How legit poli sci professors at the school tried to shut it down, and how the athletics department kept that from happening, in part by offering to pay for the major. The Wall Street Journal seems the main source for the story – they quote from various emails in which athletics personnel worry themselves sick about the intellectual well-being of their players if the major is punted – but it’s all over the place now…

What UD finds moving about Auburn is its tragic endless search for a home – a warm permanent curricular roof over the team’s head. Not long ago, under their legendary chair of sociology, Thomas Petee, a man who, like North Carolina’s legendary Julius Nyang’oro, was able to chair a program, teach regular classes, and teach AT THE SAME TIME hundreds of independent study classes per semester, Auburn athletes en masse took soc. That scam got blown and they reeled over to public administration, which is now also well on its way to oblivion.

What next?

Athletes at Auburn are like passengers on the listing Titanic, grasping desperately at one side of the ship for survival and, water rising, racing desperately to the other side.

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See, what people don’t realize is that when the athletics department chooses a major for the lads it’s not just a matter of looking for gut courses. You need an entire organization – you need please-mister-quarterback-let-me-touch-you professors, downtrodden and manipulable tutors, mercenary administrators (remember: athletics has huge money to spend on selected departments and majors), etc., etc. You have to set up a whole world for this to work, and you have to watch out for people who (cough) might be inclined to leak incriminating emails about what you’re doing. I’m sure that, even as I write, everyone at Auburn – trustees, deans, students, boosters – is working overtime to create this new world.

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UD thanks Derek and Andrew.

… 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.

… would wait a decent interval before the it had nothing to do with Auburn football bullshit started up. But here it is, bright and early Monday morning:

This is not a sports story. It has a sports element, but it is not a sports story.

As such, it is not a reflection on college athletics or Auburn specifically. It is a reflection on our society…

Auburn football players, past and present, were involved, but that is not the story. The story is that young people have had their lives snuffed out far too soon. The story is that we as a society have issues that need to be addressed.

… The sadness and anger that is being expressed today, the questions that are being asked, should be focused [on] the loss of lives, not that some of those involved, some of those who died, used to play college football. To make the sports angle the focal point of this story is to miss the greater issue at hand.

If you’ve read University Diaries for awhile, you know what I call this tactic: Going Cosmic. This thing that happened, this problem that confronts us, can’t be understood (the writer uses the word ‘senseless’ four times in his senseless opinion piece) or even in a modest way solved. No, no… it’s society, society, society.

It doesn’t occur to this fool that Auburn is a society, a self-enclosed world designed to generate bad outcomes. Its board of trustees is full of former Auburn football players. For decades the school was for all intents and purposes run by Bobby Lowder, a football-obsessed trustee. Cheating is endemic – player payments, bogus courses, you name it.

You want to understand the heart of Auburn society? Here’s an ESPN writer:

Here’s what we say to athletes from a very young age: Here’s a scholarship for excelling at a violent game, here’s fame for excelling at a violent game, here’s a chance at millions for excelling at a violent game. We reward young, immature people for excelling at a violent game and then, when that violence crosses over the constantly moving line of what’s socially accepted, we all jump back and gasp in faux horror like total phonies and call for drastic action.

Senseless! Tragic! Society’s to blame! Or, to quote again from this unconscionable local opinion piece: “What’s the world coming to?”

Oh Lordy Aunt Bee yes what’s it coming to??? I declare I need smelling salts.

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Tons of these coming in now. Just a senseless random event having nothing to do with Auburn’s football culture.

This writer is particularly pissed that an article in the New York Times about the murders quotes someone suggesting that “guns and marijuana appear to be a part of the culture around the Auburn football program.”

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Auburn football and guns? Nah.

“Today Auburn does not have to take a back seat to nobody academically or in sports, especially in football, and a big part of the reason is Bobby Lowder.”

… know everything, and those who know nothing and want to know nothing. Those who know everything are a small group of insiders extremely close to the president and the coach and local politicians. They do the president’s bidding. Those who know nothing and want to know nothing have a spotty attendance record at trustee meetings (why go?) but get a huge kick out of being able to say they’re a university trustee.

Auburn University’s board of trustees is instructive. For decades, ex-trustee Bobby Lowder basically ran the school – academics (intellectual inquiry at Auburn centers around figuring out how professors can help athletes cheat without the athletes getting caught) and sports. A power-obsessed, corrupt mover and shaker, Lowder typifies the broad-shouldered bullies who can intimidate and take over boards of trustees.

When the shit hits the fan at universities, unseemly blame-tossing almost always breaks out on BOTs — between members who’ve been meaningless muckety mucks, and the power boys. Recall the panic in AU Park when its president turned out to be robbing the school blind. In that case it was William Jacobs, strapping head of the BOT, who withheld information and shooed trustees away from his endless shoveling of money to Benjamin Ladner. When the American University story broke, the know-nothings moaned that they’d been blindsided.

Same thing at Pederasty State.

The trustees dislike how a few board members appeared to have been notified that charges against Curley and Schultz were imminent while the vast majority of trustees were left in the dark until Saturday.

Yes, and that’s in a big old article all about how we’re supposed to pity and admire the principled trustees… the good trustees, who got all beat up by the big boys…

No. When these things happen, the entire board of trustees has got to go. They are trustees, kids. The university is in their trust. They either didn’t do anything, or they worked as hard as all the other Paterno-tools to cover up things.

University trustees are, in UD‘s experience, either a nothingness or an embarrassment. Or both.

… is currently being sued over its reappointment of the bodacious Bobby Lowder to the board of trustees.

Qualifications:

1.) Must be a man.

2.) Must have played football for Auburn.

3.) Must be willing to take orders from Bobby Lowder.