Florida State University has a decade of cheating scandals, sports scandals, sports-related financial scandals, and football player assaults behind it. (For a reasonably full list, scroll down to the “Controversies” list on this page.) Its board of trustees is made up of a guy who used to be captain of the football team plus a bunch of football boosters. Its president is an inarticulate political hack who, like the notorious Gordon Gee, answers to the football coach. Its coach, like FSU coaches before him, seems able to get FSU to admit any person who plays superior football, regardless of criminal record. Many FSU fans consistently defend and demand the reinstatement of players who break the law in outrageous and frightening ways.

The ongoing pathetic hashtag campaign, initiated by an FSU professor who seems not to have been able to get off his ass before this to protest conditions at his school, will probably make matters worse for bottom-of-the-sports-schools-barrel FSU. The campaign notes the obvious and irrelevant fact that you can discover other activities going on at FSU besides football. Et alors?

They don’t call it the front porch of the university for nothing, babe.

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t lecture UD about how you’ll never see ten thousand screaming fans in a John Milton seminar so shut up about our sports program, and then, when you’re cornered, say FSU has John Milton seminars so shut up about our sports program. It’s your fault that the only thing anyone notices about your school is sports, and that your best-known professor is Dale Olsen, who, you recall, served under football player/FSU President Wetherell.

UD doesn’t think you should feel bad about any of this, or seek to distort it via tweets. Become who you are! said Nietzsche. Own it.

[Florida State University President T.K. Wetherell] should tell the whole world what an absolute shame it would be if [Coach] Bobby [Bowden’s]’s iconic career is tainted because of the malfeasance of others. He should point out how unfair it would be for Bobby’s reputation to be disgraced because some nameless, faceless tutors helped FSU football players cheat in an online music course.

This kind of statement, from Mike Bianchi in the Boston Herald, upsets UD.

There’s an elemental unfairness in dismissing FSU’s tutors as nameless and faceless. They have names; they have faces. They’re human beings, and they deserve to be recognized for their part in the nation’s largest cheating scandal.

But what Bianchi also overlooks is that they were only little cogs in the big cheating machine that is Florida State University.

Why make it appear they acted alone? No one group of people can create an entire university devoted to academic violations on behalf of sport. There’s the music course’s professor, a notoriously negligent instructor whose course had served FSU athletes well for decades until something went tragically awry. There’s the university’s board of trustees, willing to do their part to keep everyone stupid and unethical. There’s the university’s coaching staff who recruited the players. And of course there’s Wetherell himself, who continues to preside over a massive joke at the expense of Florida’s taxpayers.

Give credit where it’s due, says University Diaries.