University of Miami. President: Donna Shalala. Search her name on this blog and ask yourself: Why is this person still the president of a university?

She’s only just tamped down the Nevin Shapiro fiasco (thank God for Penn State!), and now here comes the Miller School of Medicine fiasco for University of Miami president Donna Shalala. Rather like big ol’ Larry Summers at Harvard with his interest-rate swaps and Allston expansions, Shalala’s all about thinking big and promising big and, you know, just going for it. Now she’s got a school hemorrhaging money as illustrious researchers like perennial UD favorite Charles Nemeroff receive millions in salary. Nemeroff’s BFF, Pascal J. Goldschmidt, Miller School honcho, must take most of the credit for this outcome.

Greed, ego – at Harvard or UM, you want to try to control these things.

_____________

UD thanks Roy.

Look at the Pope over there in Vatican City taking a star turn in What the Butler Saw as his city state fails to “shed its reputation as a scandal plagued tax haven.”

Look at the big happy family of University of Texas scientists who just went ahead and gave the family a huge state grant, without bothering to check with the provost or anything.

And look at another huge bureaucracy, the place UD‘s father spent his entire scientific career: the National Institutes of Health. The NIH just went ahead and gave America’s own tête d’affiche pour conflit d’intérêts (Charles Nemeroff has been called poster boy for conflict of interest so many times, I thought I’d jazz it up by putting it in French) another big grant, since you want to encourage his sort of behavior… or whatever…

I mean, it’s about bureaucracies, isn’t it? In all three cases? You’ve got cronies and histories of you do me and I do you and all… Everybody’s in everybody else’s pocket…

But eventually, as in all three of these cases, things get so brazen that the media notices; and then, if the money involved comes from taxpayers, politicians get all het up about it. As in this what the fuck? letter from Senator Charles Grassley to NIH. Grassley sends a copy to the notorious Donna Shalala.

*********************************

More coverage of the nettlesome Nemeroff.

*********************************

The latest University of Miami scandal jumps to the Miami Herald. Shalala and Nemeroff are trying out the no comment option, but I don’t think it’s going to work.

Donna Shalala’s University of Miami certainly knows how to keep it coming. They know if you want your sports program to be number one on the disgust parade, things have to keep happening. We all know the history:

In 1994 there were allegations that Miami-based rapper Luther Campbell and former Miami players performing in the NFL were offering cash for big hits—50 bucks a fumble, 200 bucks an interception.

In May 1995 an NCAA investigation found that positive drug tests of various Hurricane players had been withheld by the football program a week before the January Orange Bowl. Later in 1995, the NCAA found Miami guilty of eight different categories of rules violations. Among them: excessive financial awards, Pell Grant fraud, pay-for-play payouts, and failure to follow its own drug-testing policy. In 2006 Miami football players were involved in two brawls, one with LSU in the Peach Bowl and the other during the regular season with Florida International, in which safety Anthony Reddick was said to have used his helmet as a weapon.

More recently, the Nevin Shapiro scandal wiped all other sports stories off the pages for weeks. And just yesterday some ex-football coach sued the school for mucho money.

Can you imagine how much all this shit is costing the school? I’m not talking reputation costs. UM went into the reputation toilet long ago. I’m talking dollars. How much of this university’s budget goes for sports pay-offs?

Presiding over thug-ridden sports teams.

Picking up other universities’ conflict of interest discards.

Sucking up to people currently in prison.

Taking big bucks to be on boards of trustees that compromise your position and your university.

Put it all together, it spells Donna Shalala’s University of Miami. After the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, America’s most corrupt university.

Big-time university athletics, in which, writes George Will, “a 109,901-seat entertainment venue [is] attached to an institution of higher education,” has become “impervious to reform.”

This being the case, our only option is to anticipate the myriad ways it’s trying to hurt us, and to defend ourselves against as many of these as we can.

For instance, University Diaries has attempted, over the years, to flag the off-field fraudsters who make football so exciting for schools like University of Miami — guys like Nevin Shapiro with big mouths and big cars and big luxury boxes and big money. Before these guys go to jail, they tend to be BFFs with the university president and the coaches and players etc. … After all, what is a university if not an institution established to honor assholes waving cashwads? Who can blame Donna Shalala for falling hard for Nevin Shapiro?

But UD says that if you’d rather try to see someone like Nevin coming, if you’d rather try to defend yourself against a class of people that accumulates like scum around your 100,000-seat arena, you should do what she does: Stay current on the scammers so that you can perceive patterns. Once you know the patterns, you can establish an early-warning system.

Yes, I have a brand new example for you.

Before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, natural gas broker Paul Lawing lived lavishly in big houses and flew in corporate jets to University of North Carolina basketball games.

Corporate jets to the game… and:

In October 2009, Lawing was placed on probation after pleading guilty to selling UNC and Atlantic Coast Conference basketball tickets for a total of more than $10,000 but not delivering them to the buyers.

That sort of thing.

[The people who run the BCS] have allowed their athletic programs to run completely amok. The two people who symbolize what the BCS stands for are, without question, Miami President Donna Shalala, who did everything but rename her school “Shapiro U” while currently jailed booster Nevin Shapiro was lavishing money on her and the one-time “U,” and, of course, Ohio State President Gordon Gee, whose two trademarks are his bow tie and his foot planted firmly inside his mouth.

It was Gee who made himself the Neville Chamberlain of college athletics last spring when he was asked if he would consider firing Jim Tressel as football coach and he replied with a straight face, “Fire him? I just hope he doesn’t fire me.”

The shame of it is that Tressel didn’t stay at Ohio State long enough to get around to firing Gee before Tressel left in disgrace. Of course, the NCAA, led by its top stooge, President Mark Emmert, has been so busy calling meetings and being shocked to learn that cheating is going on that it has yet to take any action against anyone — and will probably come down with a really hard wrist slap when the time finally comes.

John Feinstein, Washington Post

… differences in rigor, value… even legitimacy… among university courses.

In response to Donna Shalala’s insistence that Miami’s athletes are academically on a par with Stanford’s, Politifact notes her dependence on APR scores for the football team.

The APR measures, as its title suggests, progress — not academic achievement; students get points for being academically eligible and staying in school. To the APR, a student-athlete who scores all C’s in music therapy would “look” the same as one who scores A’s in organic chemistry.

… Mark Nagel, a professor in sport management at the University of South Carolina, described the APR as a “public relations mechanism” created by the NCAA.

“What APR is telling you is that the students are remaining eligible and retained on campus,” Nagel said. “It is not telling you their majors, educational outcomes or what they are learning.”

… “It’s kind of shocking (Shalala) would consider APR to be a valid comparative measurement or the most important measure of academic achievement,” [another observer] said.

UD‘s friend Paul Thacker is now a contributor to Forbes, and his first article shifts our attention from the recent University of Miami football scandal to the ongoing University of Miami Charles Nemeroff scandal.

Nemeroff – arguably America’s most conflict-of-interest-compromised professor – left Emory University under a vast black misconduct cloud, and was immediately, enthusiastically, hired by Donna Shalala at the University of Miami.

Thacker wants to know why. “Why would [UM] … snatch up a physician with such a history?” Why would they ask him to be part of a proposed new ethics center?

Indeed, UM seems to have perceived Nemeroff, with his years of COI problems, as an ethical model. Almost on the same day Shalala announced new rigorous COI standards for faculty, she announced the hiring of Nemeroff. An astounded former faculty member wrote to her:

[H]is seeming lack of integrity in simultaneously accepting “consulting fees” from the very company (Glaxo) whose products were the basis of an NIH grant on which he was the [Primary Investigator] is absolutely outrageous… [H]ow can one reconcile [your recent statements about new ethics policies] with the immediately prior hiring of so questionable an individual to such a prominent position? Does the university not perceive that this may be seen as the worst sort of hypocrisy?

Of course Shalala now has far more dire ethical – and criminal – preoccupations… Still, it isn’t hard to see her bizarre handling of Nemeroff as a kind of precursor.

******************************

Scathing local coverage begins. Paul’s piece only came out about an hour ago.

More hilarity from schlock jock school the University of North Carolina, where – with no doubt the same awareness Donna Shalala had of Nevin Shapiro – the university’s president has allowed an entire department to sink into depravity.

The chair of the department – now removed from his position (expect a lawsuit, UNC) – reportedly let a freshman in need of remedial help with his writing take one of the chair’s upper-level courses the summer before the freshman began at the university. Getting a jump on those pesky bogus courses! Bravo!

The chair also earns his close to $200,000 salary by overlooking plagiarism and stuff like that. Read all about it.

Big-time athletics makes a sick joke of academic integrity is an abstraction. It’s important to know the details of systemic sports corruption at some of our once-respectable universities. It almost always involves a group of academic insiders – especially professors – implementing a very conscious policy, in cooperation with the athletics department, of grade and course selling.

Selling? Yes. Think of the money these sports factories have on the line. There are very high rewards for professors willing to play ball.

*****************************************

Background on the sports agent teaching a UNC course here.

More here.

Some will argue that eliminating amateurism for college football means the “bad guys win.” In fact, the opposite is true. Eliminating amateurism will diminish the role of those boosters who have polluted the college game. Some will wonder what minor league football is doing on campus in the first place — I have wondered about that myself. Yet, the game has found an important entertainment role connected to academia, and the billion dollar television contracts prove it is a valuable commodity.

Huh?

You’d think a law professor might have a grasp of argumentation.

We should promote professional sports on college campuses because it’s entertaining? Broadcasting all student sexual activity on large screens throughout the campus would also be entertaining. Should we do it?

“Eliminating amateurism will diminish the role of those boosters who have polluted the college game.” Yes, and that is why professional basketball and football in American are so pure and unpolluted. It doesn’t seem to occur to Roger Abrams that there are manifold other sources of pollution.

And …connected to academia? Big time sports as currently played on American campuses not only have no connection at all to academia; they’re actively destructive of it.

I mean, what does Abrams have in mind by academia? Classroom buildings adjacent to stadiums? The appearance on a television screen, during a football game, of the name of a university?

And billion dollar tv contracts prove it’s a valuable commodity? Ask Donna Shalala, or any number of university presidents up to their asses in legal bills and bad publicity, how valuable a commodity it is. It’s precisely the outrageously big money that’s brought in all the scum and made university football and basketball lucrative but deadly to academia.

That is, again, if by academia you mean something other than buildings where administrators collect ticket and luxury suite and television proceeds. If on the other hand you’re okay with the Auburnization of our universities – if money and entertainment seem to you overriding ‘academia’ goals – if you think universities are money and entertainment centers above all (they will certainly become so under this regime, since no other activity on any campus can hope to compete with an immense high-profile billion dollar industry), then go with it. Go with it.

Here’s a big one; and one of her favorites: All her life she’s heard and read pragmatic reality-based broad-shouldered boots on the ground straight-talking university sports enthusiast types ridicule humanities types as pie in the sky dreamers, limp-wristed do-nothing childish emotional deluded obscurantists jabbering pointlessly away in empty jargon.

Yet from the moment, ten years ago, she began attending NCAA and NCAA-related conferences, and heard one speaker after another intone words like integrity and principle to complacent audiences, UD has recognized that these NCAA words have exactly the same value as words like (counter-) hegemonic, imbrication, and modalities among certain groupings of English professors.

Hollow abstractions prop up both groups as they struggle to maintain a sense not only that they are united, but that they are not marginal, not incorrect in their beliefs, and – in the case of the NCAA crowd – not corrupt.

**********************************

Of the two groups, which is the more pitiable? The more deluded? Foucauldian academics occasionally score a meaningful cultural intervention; their efforts to radicalize the academy have had an impact. The NCAA crowd is caught in the eternal recurrence of win/loss, with winning as meaningless as losing.

“[S]o many colleges have bent the rules in the great academic act of winning meaningless football and basketball games,” writes Buzz Bissinger of his initial reaction to the University of Miami story, “that it was hard for me to muster much excitement.”

It is not only the ultimate meaninglessness of their endeavor – a meaninglessness made more acute by its location within that most ardently meaning-generating institution, the university – that the NCAA crowd must shield itself from; it is its filth. Few people, beyond sociopaths like Bernard Madoff and Nevin Shapiro, want to think of themselves as corrupt, but hundreds of NCAA administrators and NCAA-governed coaches, university presidents, and players certainly know that they are corrupt, that they play important parts in a corrupt system, if only by looking the other way when coaches and agents and fans and players around them are corrupt.

Bissinger argues that Miami football is so corrupt that the program should be permanently killed, and Donna Shalala

should be hauled before Congress, where the allegations against Miami are 10 times more serious than all the steroid nonsense paraded about in Washington.

Once she has done her murky dance of denial, a grand jury should be convened. If it turns out she did know the outrageous conduct of booster Nevin Shapiro — such as filling virtually an entire hotel floor with prostitutes for Miami players to gorge on, like grapes — she should be charged with perjury.

But… eh. She knew and she didn’t know. You know? It’s what I’ve been saying. She kind of knows that the games are meaningless and the people running them are disgusting… but a palm-lined campus is such a beautiful thing lalalalala. Pitiable.

Cam Newton is such a beautiful thing. A $2.2 billion contract with ESPN is such a beautiful thing. Pitiable.

And today, as always, these pitiable deluded people are the talk of the town.

Matt Hayes, of Sporting News, correctly anticipates that stories about Donna Shalala’s professional football team bring the NCAA that much closer to extinction.

Why the hell should the multimillionaires running college football and basketball have to deal with some dipshit organization run by college presidents who put fine businessmen like John Junker out of business? Junker is our business, and the NCAA doesn’t seem to get that.

Sure, the organization is basically toothless; but it’s forced us to come up with all sorts of fake coursework for our team members… Sometimes it forces us to take important players off the field just when we need them… It takes our wins away… Shit like that…

Secession is the only way. Places like Auburn and Clemson and Miami and Alabama know exactly what they are, and they’ll thank us for finally allowing them to be what they are.

And don’t forget: With the NCAA and its financial penalties out of the way, there’s that much more to go around.

… Miami gets a bad rap as a university with no money. If that’s what you truly believe, take some time to go walk around the downtown medical campus. Start exploring and you’ll never feel like UM has a lack of funds ever again. The money is absolutely there; the only question is the willingness to spend it on athletics.

… PLEASE STOP thinking or insinuating that [President] Donna Shalala and [athletic director] Kirby [Hocutt] don’t want to win, or that they’d prefer to have a bunch of Rhodes Scholars who lose four or five games per year. That sentiment is beyond ridiculous. Both the president and athletic director want to win badly, but obviously want to do so the right way – with players going to class and not revisiting UM’s “Thug U” days.

When I think back to great UM teams, I don’t remember a bunch of guys getting arrested or failing out of school. Sure, there were some rough around the edges guys, but in all reality, no more than any other school.

A school that lionizes national conflict of interest icon Charles Nemeroff also thinks nothing of lionizing seedy nursing home mogul Morris Esformes…

Morris’s overwhelming preoccupation for many years has been keeping his son, Philip, out of prison for having run with the whole seedy nursing home thing and turned it into the largest health care fraud in American history.

Philip, when not taking all of the federal government’s money, was himself long preoccupied with bribing the head basketball coach at the University of Pennsylvania to put Philip’s son – named Morris after Family Crook #1 – on the team, and thereby grant his admission to that Ivy League institution.

Head-spinning, ain’t it? Flamboyantly pious religious people, too — all of them. But maintain your focus! I’m trying to update you on all of this.

So Philip got twenty years but because of a ton of flamboyantly pious friends he got DJT to pardon him! Largest health care fraud ever MEH.

But not so fast! For some reason the feds would prefer that its expensive, protracted, extremely difficult fight to put Philip in prison NOT be blithely overturned by rich corrupt people. Athough Philip has indeed been released, the Justice Department “will pursue unresolved charges from Esformes’ healthcare fraud trial in 2019.” And since there were like three million original charges against the guy, the feds have a full plate of leftovers from which to choose. He will soon go to trial again, and because the man of God is guilty as hell, he’ll soon be back in prison, and it’ll be Arrested Development all over again.

The other University of Miami medical school story? Ne quittez pas.