All top secret, you understand. I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.

Yes, it’s more shit from incredibly shitty Georgia Tech, whose larcenous profs (and filthy dirty sports programs) continue, even after a long history of other larcenous profs, stealing from their grants and from the school with total abandon. Most recently, a conspiracy of profs who got CIA contracts spent YEARS stealing from everyone, and Georgia Tech just you know missed it. Or knew about it and let it go. The ringleader was a bigshot Head Scientist already found guilty of conflict of interest but fiddle dee dee let’s put him back in charge and see how it goes. COI. Big deal. We’re all boys here, boys will be boys, the dude draws big grants from big federal agencies, let’s go forward with him.

Schools with this many assholes over decades are either corrupt or totally out to lunch. Either way, Georgia Tech needs a new prez and a new board of trustees.

Damn. What’s up with Georgia Tech? “Administrators” overruling coaches who want to keep players who beat the shit out of their fellow students on the field? That’s fucked up, man.

First the double dipping couple; now this guy (still proudly claimed by his robbee), who seems to have stolen from the school this way and that way and this way and that way. And this way.

Kangari got reimbursed for more than $10,000 worth of trips to Las Vegas and Los Angeles where he and his family visited tourist attractions. The auditor called them “thinly veiled family vacations with no verifiable business purpose.” … “[I]nappropriate purchases” on his P-card [included] nearly $1,000 worth of textbooks, which matched his daughter’s class schedule, sent to him via email. He also bought nearly $4,000 worth of electronics, including a pink iPod Shuffle…. [According to school auditors,] “he was not even present at some of the events for which he requested reimbursement.” At some he said he sent his wife in his place. The audit also said Kangari falsified timesheets for an employee, costing the school an additional $1,800.

Gevalt.

… seems to have drawn more than a few eyes to itself. Its description of universities across America making their financially struggling students pay through the nose for football games they don’t attend is apparently compelling enough to have caught the attention of people.

The Washington Post, for instance, cites the article, and goes on to note that more and more schools are

requiring students who have few discretionary dollars to pay for something that has zero impact on their classroom experience. According to the Chronicle/Huff Post analysis, the 50 institutions with the highest athletic subsidies have many more financially needy students than those universities with the lowest subsidies.

What’s more, nearly all the growth in Division I athletics during the past decade has come at public universities. At the same time these university leaders were obsessed with conference realignments and big television deals, taxpayer support for public universities has fallen to unprecedented levels.

But what’s most devastating in the Post piece is the long memory of its writer. We all know that when it comes to the bullshit promises that university presidents make about football, a good memory – to quote Elizabeth Bennet – is unpardonable. Yet Jeffrey Selingo goes there.

Nearly 20 years ago, I wrote an article about a group of universities that had recently joined the elite of college athletics: the NCAA’s Division I. They included California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, Hampton University, Norfolk State University, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Ok kiddies so before I reveal the fate of those schools, go ahead and guess how well they fulfilled their presidents’ promises of huge revenue and huge increase in applications and huge prestige. Go ahead! Or – you don’t have to guess, do you? Because the names Cal Poly San Whatever, Hampton, Norfolk State and Whatsizface at Greensboro just come racing to your mind when you think of revenue and enrollment and renown and prestige… And all because of Div I football!

What’s more, look at the attention they’ve drawn to their sports programs!

[All] have been relegated to the backwater of college sports, with games on weekday nights on obscure cable channels. The only way many of these universities make it to the big time is to have their name appear on the stream of scores on ESPN’s ticker or as blowout fodder for elite programs.

That’s right. Not only did their elite Div I status do nothing (probably less than nothing) for their academic status, it didn’t even do anything for their athletic status. All at huge cost to their students.

Indeed Selingo is impolitic enough to trace the outcome of Greensboro’s Div I promises even more closely:

[Twenty years ago,] its student fees paid for 80 percent of the subsidy provided to the athletic department. Officials told me they expected the share of student support to fall over time as their teams established winning records and garnered more outside support… Greensboro students today provide 81 percent of the subsidy. In other words, nothing has changed except that the department’s budget has quadrupled since the late 1990s and the student fee for athletics has almost doubled, to about $700 a year per student.

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People wonder why universities keep doing this. I mean, eventually, as Selingo concludes, their students are going to leave in order to attend a school where they’re not “paying for someone else’s [child-like] dreams.” So why?

If you read this blog with any regularity, you know how UD answers that question. Her answer is very simple, and you will probably resist it, but she thinks she might be right.

They do it because they can’t think of anything else to do.

I mean, of course, some presidents – like the hack running notorious Florida State University – are anti-intellectuals whose animus against thought processes as such will always mean a teeny mouselike teaching staff and a titanic athletics program. And some big sports schools, such as the University of Montana, have scared away so many potential students with their rape statistics that they have nothing left but games and a few vocational courses. (Remember: Just as, at the end of life, hearing is the last sense to go, so at the end of a university’s life, football is the last activity to go.)

But most of the universities doing themselves in via football are simply overseen by people – academic leaders, trustees, even faculty (remember the many loyal faculty foot soldiers at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) – for whom football (and sometimes basketball as well) is the very definition of a university. Their job is to worry about naming rights, beer sales, how many classes they can cancel around game days, cleaning up campus after tailgates, preparing for NCAA investigations, covering up crimes committed by athletes, building new stadiums, recruiting faculty who will help athletes cheat their way through their courses, and so many other things. They find these activities totally engrossing, and they will pursue them until vanishing state appropriations and vanishing enrollees force them to call it a day.

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UD thanks Prof. Mondo.

Jalen [Kitna] was the 44th ranked QB in the country coming out of high school, choosing [the University of Florida] over offers from Boston College, Georgia Tech, Liberty, and Tennessee.

You just missed – by this much! – having child pornography added to your long list of whacked out campus erotic exploits.

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As for what this means for the Univ. of Florida: On the upside, it’ll give people someone to talk about other than Aaron Hernandez. And the like.

Wisconsin fired Paul Chryst on Sunday, fired him five games into the 2022 college football season, fired him with a career record of 67-26. Just sent him packing, humiliated the former Wisconsin quarterback, as if his previous seven seasons — all ending in bowl games, the Badgers winning six of those — hadn’t happened.

This is where college football has gone. Into the dumpster, into the land of toxic make-believe.

Into the SEC.

Trees aren’t even shedding leaves yet, and already five Power 5 schools have shed their head football coach. Wisconsin on Sunday joined Nebraska (Scott Frost), Arizona State (Herm Edwards), Georgia Tech (Geoff Collins) and Colorado (Karl Dorrell), firings that will cost those schools more than $50 million in buyouts. All five are public schools. The money comes from somewhere, a shell game of shady boosters in the background writing checks, money diverted from more noble potential causes. Cleaning up a landfill, for example...

[University coaches?] Clemson’s Dabo Swinney, Georgia’s Kirby Smart, Texas A&M’s Jimbo Fisher and Alabama’s Nick Saban have contracts in the $100 million range…

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You know, toting up all the money pathetic states like Alabama give their coaches, blah blah. It’s like NFL concussion stories. Blah.

…dies… If the football player actually kills the dog…

But that’s East Carolina. Maybe Baylor would have kept Zamora on even if he’d killed his dog rather than just beating him to within an inch of his life. Baylor’s special.

The ECU dog-killer is a typical American higher education story, a glorious tale of the life of the mind in our country. He was dismissed from Georgia Tech after multiple conduct violations. Instantly thereafter, East Carolina found itself uncontrollably attracted to this scholar/athlete, whose presence on campus, ECU was sure, would be a great boon for everyone involved.

Which university will now bid on the dog-killer? Recruitment coaches all over the country are eyeing his stats even as we speak.

Eight of the fifteen American university football teams that dominate the “most flagrant chaplaincies” list also dominate the “most team arrests” list.

“MOST FLAGRANT CHAPLAINCIES“:

Auburn University
University of Georgia
University of South Carolina
Mississippi State University
University of Alabama
University of Tennessee
Louisiana State University
University of Missouri
University of Washington
Georgia Tech
University of Illinois
Florida State University
University of Mississippi
University of Wisconsin
Clemson University

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MOST ARRESTS:

1) Washington State: 31
2) Florida: 24
T-3) Georgia: 22
T-3) Texas A&M: 22
5) Oklahoma: 21
T-6) Iowa State: 20
T-6) Missouri: 20
T-6) Ole Miss: 20
T-6) West Virginia: 20
T-10) Florida State: 19
T-10) Tennessee: 19
T-12) Alabama: 18
T-12) Iowa: 18
T-12) Kentucky: 18
T-15) LSU: 16
T-15) Marshall: 16
T-15) Oregon State: 16
T-15) Pittsburgh: 16
T-19) Arkansas: 14
T-19) Michigan: 14
T-19) Oklahoma State: 14
T-19) Purdue: 14
T-23) Auburn: 13
T-23) Colorado: 13
T-23) Kansas: 13

Ah, the life of an American university professor… After robbing his graduate students of thousands of dollars, Georgia Tech Environmental Engineering prof Jochem Teizer was not only allowed to resign (rather than be dismissed, a black mark on his record that might put a crimp on future thefts), but will, it seems, walk off without anyone filing criminal charges.

UD loves the detail about little Jochem’s train collection. Students must have delighted in watching this adorable eccentric make his teeny cars go vroomvroom … Watch the choochoo, kiddies! [Slips hand in students’ back pockets.]

Yes, yes, he’s been made to pay back the money.

… by which university professors could exploit their students for personal gain.

All of the strategies she mentions are… strategies, whereas Georgia Tech’s Joachem Teizer runs rings around all of those strategists simply by using the most direct approach imaginable: He tells his students to hand over their money to him. Teizer basically holds up his students.

The one complexity in Teizer’s approach comes at the very beginning: He only targets students who don’t speak English very well.

Allegations against Teizer came from about 10 Asian graduate [engineering] students he supervised. [An investigator] learned the students are not fully fluent in English.

The first allegation, made in October 2013, notes that one student told school officials he paid more than $10,000 in cash to the professor in 2011.

Auditors estimate the total payments are double that sum.

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In a detail that I know you will like as much I do, Jochem Teizer specializes in “resource detection.”

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UPDATE: And Georgia Tech not long ago got rid of Bonnie and Clyde!

What is it about Georgia Tech?

Jonathan Hart’s done done it but someone done told on him.

Jonathan Hart was appointed professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Alberta in 2004. In 2011, he was also appointed professor of English studies at Durham University. Neither was a part-time position, and it appears that neither institution knew about Professor Hart’s dual roles until the facts came to light at the end of last year.

A spokeswoman for Durham confirmed that it no longer employed Professor Hart but declined to comment further on an “individual staffing matter”.

A spokeswoman for Alberta said the institution had “become aware” of the fact that Professor Hart had also taken a position at Durham and was “looking into” the matter.

How’d he do it?

You know.

Teach one class a week… Semester off here, semester off there… Get a bunch of guest lecturers and TAs to teach your courses… Get a bunch of independent studies and handle them mainly online… Get only tiny grad courses and cancel class sessions left and right…

His next publication:

Jonathan Hart, “Toward a Definition of the Doppelganger.”

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So – a few more words on this. Here’s a hiring notice from Durham (Scroll down to #5.) So he’s been at it since September 2011. Bravo! The only thing vaguely comparable UD can remember is that gorgeous jet-setting pair, Jacko and Sainfort, late of both Georgia Tech and the University of Minnesota. Hart kept the scam going for two years; J&S were discovered more quickly, but then Minnesota in its dithery nice Minnesota way held on to them for another five years.

Here’s a little bad news for Jonathan Hart, above and beyond the notoriety he’s now enjoying: Georgia Tech went after J&S in the courts bigtime. Georgia Tech was not amused. We are talking mucho reimbursement plus a felony charge.

It took over five years, but after tons of investigations and charges and repayments, the husband/wife team of Jacko and Sainfort at the University of Minnesota (also, at the same time, drawing money from, Georgia Tech) is taking its leave of that school.

To this day, UD has no idea why Minnesota held onto these extremely highly compensated people for so long. UM knew within minutes of recruiting them that they were naughty.

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UD thanks Bill.

… of the Alabama university student who got naked and went to the campus police station, where he banged on windows and threatened the policeman who came outside to investigate, ended as badly as it’s possible to end. The policeman, after repeated threats from the student, shot and killed him (there’s a security tape of the incident).

It’s too soon to say anything with confidence about this event, beyond the fact that it’s heartbreaking. The student was a freshman, a wrestler, and, according to his friends, had no record of this sort of behavior. Theories abound – a psychotic break, drugs… Many observers wonder why the policeman was unable to find a non-lethal way to calm things.

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David, a reader, reminds UD that a couple of years ago the Georgia Tech police (actually, now that I look at the link, it’s not clear they were campus police) were able to do enough roughing up and pepper spraying of a crazed student to take him down:

[S]everal officers had their handguns trained on Shrotri and were ordering him to drop the sword, according to another report also obtained by the AJC.

“You will have to kill me,” Shrotri responded.

A scuffle ensued after one of the officers squirted pepper spray at Shrotri. Officer Robert J. Turner, 29, of Griffin, had his right hand cut as he tackled Shrotri.

The Heisman winner and quarterback of the national championship team had a father who apparently had offered his son’s services to Mississippi State for $180,000. The national championship basketball team was on probation. One of the game’s premier programs (USC) already is on probation, with another (Ohio State) ready to follow. The Ohio State case already resulted in the earlier-than-expected departures of Buckeyes coach Jim Tressel and potential Heisman contender Terrelle Pryor. Over the past 12 months or so, the 2004 BCS championship, the 2005 Heisman presentation and the 2009 ACC football championship have been vacated. And now we have one division – the ACC Coastal – that has half its membership (Georgia Tech, Miami and North Carolina) in hot water with the NCAA.

But that only scratches the surface.

Wow. Sounds bad. And when you realize they’re incredibly highly paid and highly touted University of Minnesota professors, it sounds even worse. For Minnesota. The story’s been kicking around for years. UM’s been keeping them close anyway. The school seems to have separation issues.

He specializes in risk and uncertainty; she’s into the “cognitive processes underlying the interaction of people with complex systems.” So you put that together (Sainfort and Jacko are married) and you get two high-rollers who maybe figure they’ll give double dipping in the complex system that is a university a whirl …

Georgia Tech, where they used to teach, is going after them through the courts for the two full-time salaries they got even though they’d already taken jobs at Minnesota (where they also pulled down salaries). Plus it’s after them for fraudulent billing, theft of funds… pretty much everything determined faculty thieves can do.

Hold them close, Minnesota! Keep that half million dollar joint salary aloft! No doubt they are innocent, and will go on to great things.