… as University of Washington president. Like Emmert – now running the NCAA – she’s a jocksniffer. She has also, like Emmert, never seen a corporate board seat she didn’t like.
One of Wise’s first acts as president is to fuck up all sorts of classes on campus because of a football game.
But it’s worth it because a huge national audience will see how important academics are to UW.
Yes. That’s her argument. UW will be able to showcase nationally how it doesn’t give a shit about holding classes, and this will persuade thousands of the most brilliant potential applicants that they should apply to the University of Washington.
The game is expected to snarl traffic through Montlake, disrupt afternoon and evening classes at the university, close clinics at the University of Washington Medical Center and play havoc with the workday schedules of thousands of fans.
… [Wise and other] university officials say the game is an opportunity to showcase the school’s athletics and academics to a national audience.
It’s much more than that. It’s also an opportunity to showcase UW’s commitment to keeping its clinics’ doors open, and its commitment to the quality of life in the larger metropolitan region.
T.J. Gassnola is the president and head of the board of trustees of the University of Kansas. He is the face of the school. The front porch of the school.
T.J. runs basketball at KU, and basketball is just about all you’re ever going to read about when it comes to KU.
More specifically, he runs KU’s players. T.J. is in charge of giving them and their families huge wads of cash under the table at Las Vegas hotels to play at KU. T.J. keeps KU all basketball all the time. He is KU’s VIP, MVP, and HRH all rolled into one.
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Everyone knows there’s nothing wrong with outfits like Adidas – for whom T.J. also works – giving money to future basketball greats. This wise investment often starts well before these players launch their adventures in university education… well before they decide to take advantage of the intellectual resources of places like Lawrence.
KU enjoys an extremely lucrative business relationship with Adidas.
Marc Emmert’s multimillion dollar NCAA salary is predicated on his absolute indifference to the transformation of once-respectable American universities into stinky petty hilarious crime gutters, places run by people like T.J. Gassnola.
So. All good. Everyone gets rich: The player, his family, Marc Emmert, the University of Kansas, and ol’ T.J.
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So… FUCK the FBI. What the fuck? It sashays in like it’s king of the world, drags T.J. into court and makes him sing in exchange for reduced prison time for the many many naughty things T.J. has been up to … Worse yet, it makes KU and Emmert scrunch up their features, take a deep breath, and blow out the very best horseshit they can come up with about how shocked and disappointed and eager to be helpful they are…
UD‘s only sorry this woman is no longer KU’s chancellor – she came to KU after running Chapel Hill into the ground cuz of their athletic scandal, remember? She’s just the sort of person you want running a basketball factory, and she’s still getting paid too.
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We had a nice tidy world here, see. Emmert and the whole “university” thing at KU did the work of shedding respectability-light upon the scheme so no one would think anything dark and criminal was going on. The players and the corporate suits and the coaches pocketed the money and kept their mouths shut. But now T.J.’s talking, and it’s… well, it’s Kafka, kiddies.
The most absurd moment of a most absurd day at the federal fraud case featuring one of college basketball’s most absurd characters had to be the following … well, actually, there are many contenders.
Maybe it was when Billy Preston wrecked his Dodge Charger on the campus of the University of Kansas. The fact a top incoming basketball recruit was driving such a car caused concern with the KU compliance office, which investigated who owned the vehicle.
Text messages later revealed Preston’s mother Nicole Player bragging about buying the car for her son, but … the car was … registered with “Nicole Player’s recently deceased grandmother” who lived in Florida.
KU was fine with this explanation. Who wouldn’t be?
[I]n the process of looking into the car, KU discovered a wire transfer to Player that came from a man named T.J. Gassnola. Player lived in Euless, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Gassnola hailed from Ludlow, Massachusetts, a little town a couple hours west of Boston.
There appeared to be no good reason for this exchange – and there wasn’t, at least by NCAA standards. Gassnola, a member of Adidas’ so-called “Black Ops” group and AAU team owner, detailed from the witness stand how he had plied Player with $89,000 over the course of nearly a year, including a $30,000 cash payout in a New York hotel room and another $20,000 brick delivered while in Las Vegas.
But wait, that’s not the best part.
Worried there was no proper explanation for the payments, Player texted Gassnola to inform him she had told KU officials the two had been involved in an “intimate” relationship, believing such activity would somehow make it NCAA legal.
If you can’t get enough of this stuff – and there’s TONS – go here.
Better yet, go here. This narrative, penned by Kafka after he dropped acid, is truly one of the greats.
Ah, a walk down memory lane. This is from a 2010 AAUP report expressing dismay at Phyllis Wise (then a high-ranking administrator at the University of Washington) following in the footsteps of UW’s then president Mark Emmert (who as current head of the farcical NCAA makes far far FAR bigger bucks than he did on all of his presidential corporate boards) and displaying her I could give a shit greed to the world.
To Wise’s claim that Nike’s board was interested in her special expertise in their line of work, the AAUP responded:
It is difficult to see what special interest the Nike Corporation could possibly have in Phyllis Wise’s research expertise in obstetrics and gynecology.
Er… How to screw your employees?…
UD is therefore SOOOO not surprised that Wise is insisting on leaving her latest place of employment with every penny coming to her.
One day after the board of trustees rejected her first attempt, the former UI chancellor again tendered her resignation Thursday night, saying she would not accept a position as special assistant to the president and that she is consulting with her lawyers about ways to protect her reputation…
‘[T]he University agreed to provide the compensation and benefits to which I was entitled, including $400,000 in deferred compensation that was part of my 2011 employment contract.’
I want it all! You think by changing your mind and ‘terminating’ instead of retiring me you can avoid yet more ridicule (the University of Illinois has generated tons of that over the last few years) about the four hundred thou reward for the way I handled Salaita and other matters?
YOU CAN’T FIRE ME. I RESIGN. I RESIGN AGAIN. I RESIGN AGAIN. AND AGAIN.
It’s what Kierkegaard called infinite resignation:
Infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith, for only in infinite resignation does an individual become conscious of his eternal validity, and only then can one speak of grasping existence by virtue of faith.
As Wise embarks on her spiritual journey, the rest of us can giggle at the spectacle (see this post, about comedy and repetition) of Wise and her university tossing the terminate/resign ball back and forth. At great expense to Illinois taxpayers, of course.
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UD thanks Wendy.
Paul Krugman, in today’s New York Times:
… Capital was channeled not to job-creating innovators, but into an unsustainable housing bubble; risk was concentrated, not spread; and when the housing bubble burst, the supposedly stable financial system imploded, with the worst global slump since the Great Depression as collateral damage.
So why were bankers raking it in? My take, reflecting the efforts of financial economists to make sense of the catastrophe, is that it was mainly about gambling with other people’s money. The financial industry took big, risky bets with borrowed funds — bets that paid high returns until they went bad — but was able to borrow cheaply because investors didn’t understand how fragile the industry was.
And what about the much-touted benefits of financial innovation? … [A] lot of that innovation was about creating the illusion of safety, providing investors with “false substitutes” for old-fashioned assets like bank deposits. Eventually the illusion failed — and the result was a disastrous financial crisis.
… An intriguing proposal is about to be unveiled from, of all places, the International Monetary Fund. In a leaked paper prepared for a meeting this weekend, the fund calls for a Financial Activity Tax — yes, FAT — levied on financial-industry profits and remuneration.
Such a tax, the fund argues, could “mitigate excessive risk-taking.” It could also “tend to reduce the size of the financial sector,” which the fund presents as a good thing…
University Diaries proposes CAT – a Corporate Activities Tax – to be levied on universities whose presidents and other administrators (and professors) sit on the boards of corporations like Goldman Sachs and thereby bring shame and ridicule to their schools.
Let Ruth Simmons and Mark Emmert and Phyllis Wise enrich themselves as corporate stooges. But make their universities pay a price for it.
The man who until recently managed Wesleyan’s investments wrote this to his wife in an email when he still worked at Wesleyan.
He was excited about the extra money he was about to make (Wesleyan paid him $500,000 or so, sickeningly low when you consider that his peers at Harvard until recently got thirty million dollars a year) from — just like Phyllis Wise and Mark Emmert at board-seat-crazy University of Washington — sitting on a bunch of corporate boards.
This guy, Tom Kannam, also opened up tons of new businesses while working for Wesleyan (he billed Wesleyan, according to a lawsuit the college has filed against him, for travel and other stuff associated with these ventures), and generally seems to have regarded his Wesleyan job as a kind of stupid side gig he held onto because it gave him access to information and connections that moved his real money-making activities along.
The Kannam family emails Wesleyan’s gotten hold of and presented in its suit are wondrous to behold. When Kannan tells his wife that Wesleyan has just updated its conflict of interest policy and that the policy looks really serious, she responds: Oucheroo.