This blog has long written about how big-time athletics infects a university, attracting to it scads of unserious students, jocksniffer administrators, and rich, control-freak, alumni boosters. Eventually the university is run by the two guys with all the money: the alumni booster (Boone Pickens; Phil Knight) and the football/basketball coach (JoePa Of Blessed Memory and Cached Statue; Still-Uncached Statue Man Nick Saban).

Every now and then one of these hopeless little North Koreas, with their Dear Leaders who take students’ money in order to play the pointless war games (KILL AUBURN!) that keep students in a stupor, decides to improve itself, to look more like a university than an experiment in repressive desublimation. But whether it’s Penn State or the University of North Carolina, the systemic sickness of the jockshop (Professor Emeritus Sandusky puts PSU’s leadership in prison; Julius Nyang’oro’s depravity ushers in mandatory class inspections for all faculty) will always – as the UNC observer in this post’s headline notes – overwhelm any self-improvement efforts and reveal the sick joke at the permanent core of the place.

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UD thanks an UNC insider
for this post’s headline.

Their football coach reportedly showed up to practices and games stinking drunk; at a major fund-raising event, he gave a speech so rambling and foul-mouthed that institutional attention finally had to be paid to Steve Sarkisian’s drinking problem. He doesn’t work at the University of Southern California anymore, but his memory lingers on in a massive lawsuit he filed against the school for wrongful termination.

While the school grapples with the lawsuit and the ongoing bad publicity, the head of USC’s medical school, whose shady past and ongoing meth-fueled insane behavior the university appears to have been treating with the same avoidance it treated Sarkisian, finally erupted into public view two days ago, with a big LA Times story.

So, these are the two sexiest positions at any university – the massively overpaid and overpraised football coach; the similarly celebrated med school dean. Even when they’re not drunks and meth heads, these people tend to present schools with problems having to do with justifying their outsized compensation, anticipating outsized legal bills when the schools try to fire them, and just generally attempting to handle people who know damn well they make far more than the school’s president and indeed may have more institutional clout.

So at USC you had this hopeless, intimidated president gazing with horror upon a coach and a dean who may have been highly effective fund raisers and all but were also imploding or threatening to implode from addictions and addiction-generated naughtiness. The understandable impulse is to control the situation, to quietly make it go away, to avoid at all costs an award-winning press exposé of staggering corruption and hypocrisy at the top of a major American university.

To make matters even worse than this, both “coach” and “med school dean” are clean-limbed, healthy-living type things, allowing the school to lecture the student body and indeed the country about teamwork and exercise and the whole mens sana in corpore sano thing. USC had two rampant substance abusers coming out with this shit, which means they found themselves solidly planted in farce territory.

There’s yet another wrinkle with the Carmen Puliafito thing. Unlike Sarkisian, who became visibly fucked up due to his drinking, ol’ Carmen had been, far as we can tell, functioning at a very high level as dean even while snorting up everything in sight in every luxury hotel room in Pasadena. The guy was only exposed because the police got called by a hotel where Puliafito’s girlfriend overdosed. Word of it got to USC’s president, and then to the press, which ran with it.

Franchement, UD has trouble believing the guy was in fact managing to run the med school smoothly while spending most of his time drugging. UD’s gonna predict that as this story develops we will discover Puliafito’s behavior had been deteriorating for some time, and that people on his staff were increasingly doing his $1.1 million a year job for him.

Oh, one more thing. Expect Puliafito to sue USC, just as Sarkisian did. For… I don’t know. For not curing him.

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.

VIOLATED: Exposing Rape at Baylor University amid College Football’s Sexual Assault Crisis by Paula Lavigne and Mark Schlabach is scheduled to hit the bookshelves August 22.

Center Street Books of Hachette Book Group announced Wednesday it will publish the novel…

A person could be forgiven for assuming a story about an ostentatiously Christian university run by a six million dollar a year coach who looks the other way while his athletes brandish guns and gang rape would of course be fictional. It’s such a crudely conceived, over-the-top hypocrisy tale (including the last-minute desperate appointment of a female president) that most publishers would reject it as absurdly formulaic.

It Never Rains but it Whores

[Singalong.]

Did y’ever wake up in the morning
And grumble as you tumble out of bed?
Your strength coach arrested — solicitation.
You might lose SAC accreditation.
The school of Ken Starr and Art Briles
Is drowning in lawsuits and trials
Your regents are vile but they won’t do town halls
You’re out of compliance with Big 12 by-laws
Yes, all day long,
Everything you touch goes wrong.

Teacher told us, when this happens, never to whine or wail;
The same things happen at other schools, but on a much smaller scale!

It never rains but what it whores;
If lady luck should happen to desert you,
Some gang rape’s never gonna hurt you,
So wait and the skies will all be blue.

It never rains but what it whores;
So what if all your troubles come in bunches,
Keep sticking to your silly little coaches,
And the sun will come shining through.

Bide your time and keep on hummin’,
Don’t you frown and sit around and weep.
Wait your turn, your day is comin’,
And you’ll be there on top of the heap!

It never rains but what it whores;
You may as well get all your worries over,
From then on you’re gonna be in clover!
Smile when you should cry,
For every cloud there’ll be a rainbow,
There’ll be a sunbeam for every raindrop by and by!

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[UD thanks many readers who have sent her Baylor updates.]

There’s always a country or state or institution pretty nearby that looms as the embodiment of your fear that your proud local culture is just this far away from sinking into the depravity of that other place.

[M]any in Paris [anxiously note the] “Italianization” of French life — the descent into what might become an unseemly round of [Silvio] Berlusconian squalor…

As in – France got this close to electing President Dominique Strauss-Kahn. (Dom and Don would have been great friends.)

Leave aside the details of the [rape and pimping] allegations against Dominique Strauss Kahn, the head of the IMF (his lawyer indicates he will plead not guilty). Just note that the New York Times states that he was staying in a $3,000 a night suite and was taking a first class flight to Paris. This is the IMF, the body that imposes austerity on indebted countries and is funded by global taxpayers. And this was the likely leading socialist candidate for the French presidency.

Money and sex sleaze is all over, of course (hence widespread Italianization fears), but let’s consider this warning to the University of Kansas (a public university) in the specific context of global elites and public money/general sleaze.

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First: The problem besetting Francois Fillon today is exactly DSK’s problem, minus the raping: Greed + Hypocrisy. Fillon is just as stern about austerity (for the common French; not for him and his family) as was DSK’s IMF. Now his decade-long extraction of roughly a million euros from the public purse – like DSK’s use of global taxpayer money for his hotel room and flight – has the French joking about le million de Fillon and referring to François Million.

Maybe the world should establish special austerity guidelines for elites: Spain’s Princess Cristina may soon be sent to prison for a few years – she’s accused of being her husband’s accomplice in taking six million public euros (he faces twenty years confinement)… Which really when you think about it makes Fillon’s takings seem very small indeed (one v. six million), and maybe they weren’t even illegal! DSK’s takings were even less (he wasn’t head of IMF long enough to raid it), and almost certainly they followed the letter of the law.

One reason to let most of the elites get away with it is that elite corruption that gets discovered begets much more corruption. Cristina’s father – the King of Spain when her story broke – apparently offered a two million euro bribe to some people to make her trial go away.

Having to deal with corruption is bad enough. Having to deal with corruption involving very rich and powerful people is a serious nuisance.

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Which brings me to the kings of America: our football coaches. It is they who assemble and – er – stabilize a roster of university or professional players, they who – at universities – command the highest public employee salary in twenty-seven of our states. (In other states, it’s basketball coaches.) They’re making scads more than the terrified president of their university, and, like Art Briles, they really get free rein. Everyone moves out of their way or enables them – campus police, town police, alumni, trustees, administrators, professors, presidents, chancellors, legislators… hell, governors — not a peep out of them. As for female students who may get beaten or raped by some of the players the coach has expensively recruited … Baylor’s football coach, Briles, allegedly “questioned why a woman was with ‘bad dudes’ from his football team after [he was told about] a gang rape accusation.” What kind of a dummy comes to a school that represents itself in this way and doesn’t know to expect gang rapes from bad dudes? Don’t women applicants read our admissions information? Baylor University seeks out bad dudes and deifies them.

Okay, so that’s the way of life. Like most corruption, it tends to feature elements of sex, money, and cover-up. I’ve always found it pretty remarkable that it thrives at universities, of all places – that bad dudes and even worse coaches dominate life on many campuses. But as with the Spanish monarchy, it takes far more than one disgusting eruption to bury the crown. You dump your current regent (he gets another job right away, maybe again at a noisily self-righteous Christian campus), take down his statue, and install a new royal house.

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So okay this article. This article is about what its author daintily refers to as “the situation in Lawrence.” He’s not very specific about it, but all of the links in this sentence begin to scratch the surface. He’s worried about Baylor-corruption contagion; he uses the fate of Baylor as a cautionary tale for Kansas.

Many universities have an alarming tendency of allowing sports-related problems to fester because they won’t deal with them head-on. Coaches become too powerful and too autonomous to challenge. Image protection overwhelms honesty and transparency. A toxic tolerance level for bad behavior and bad students builds up.

At Baylor, a basketball player murdered his teammate in 2003, and the coach at the time (Dave Bliss) maliciously smeared the dead man in order to cover up NCAA violations. Within the football program, the [last coach,] (Art Briles, may he never coach again) expended quite a bit of energy keeping accusations about his players from going public or reaching the school’s judicial affairs office, and in obtaining special treatment from the administration. Briles had allies above him in athletic director Ian McCaw and school president Kenneth Starr.

The writer urges Kansas – which, remarkably even by university athletics standards, boasts “six incidents involving Kansas basketball players, in some form or fashion, that have come to light within the past two weeks,” not to deepen its institutional corruption by acting like Baylor (he could have chosen Florida State etc. etc., but Baylor’s the most recent) and adding cover-up to corruption.

If the Kansas trustees are smart and conscientious and concerned about the university as a whole and not just as a basketball power, they’re pushing hard for all the facts – and, if warranted, for immediate and significant action. Public action.

Don’t spend more energy trying to hide problems than fix problems. Don’t, at any cost, follow the Baylor blueprint.

But of course it isn’t just the trustees, and anyway we have no reason to think that the same trustees who let KU turn into dreck will reverse course. (And look who’s running the place.)

And speaking of reversals – given the history, over the last decade or so, of the University of Kansas, I’m afraid the corruption-contagion arguably goes the other way: Kansas has stunk to high heaven for a long time.

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Update, Fillon:

[I]nvestigators [are] now also probing whether Mr Fillon awarded the highest French state honour – the Grand Croix de la Légion d’Honneur – to the wealthy owner of a literary review in return for giving his wife a well-paid sinecure.

… with the same extensive ties to Yeshiva University.

Today’s highest-profile arrestee, Mark Nordlicht, even shares Madoff’s biography. Both had fathers who were financial crooks. Both were deeply involved with Yeshiva University, as were many of their associates. And of course both ran/allegedly ran virtually identical Ponzi schemes.

UD is certain that if the Lord had granted Nordlicht the length of time he granted Madoff, Nordlicht would, like Bernie, have been able to do fifty rather than a measly one billion dollars worth of business.

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A brief review of the latest batch of YU-affiliated miscreants.

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“We have to start to become embarrassed by this. There has to be a huge re-set in the Orthodox community.”

Start here: Your most public institution – Yeshiva University – is an increasingly criminalized location. Admit this and start cleaning it up. Remove Wilf’s name from the campus. Remove Rennert’s name from the campus. Strip of their degrees YU graduates who go to jail for massive financial crimes. And don’t strip quietly. Make a public statement repudiating them.

Find a president who doesn’t hide your affiliation with Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, but who owns up to it and says that you’re now ashamed of it, and ashamed of the greed that made you decide to make those men campus heroes.

Admit that it’s time your university stopped making the news for all the wrong reasons. Admit that your hypocrisy – a pious Orthodox face hiding a cynical self-serving face – has done terrible damage to the school and has somehow got to end.

Subject all of your trustees to financial review by outsiders, with an eye toward conflict of interest and fraud. Then get rid of most of your trustees.

That’s what a huge re-set looks like. At least the beginning of one.

The American university that put Bernard Madoff on its board of trustees and made him (wait for it) treasurer has never – in the life of this blog, anyway – been out of the gutter news. Sex scandals, money scandals, an entire campus named after a convicted fraudster, a Moody’s rating so low as to be beyond belief…

I could go on. All of which means that this blog has never been able to lose sight of Yeshiva.

YU’s constant corruption is doubly interesting in the context of its pious self-image. It joins company with Baylor University and Liberty University as a national epicenter of religious hypocrisy.

Actually, YU is triply interesting — because of the pathos (it shares this with the other two schools I just mentioned) of there being many good and thoughtful and authentically spiritual people on campus. You can go to the campus newspaper and read their Job-like endless plaints.

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Okay, so one of the school’s longest-serving leaders resigned in 2013, and here’s the most positive appraisal I can find of him.

Now the guy’s son, once a member of the university’s Board of Directors, has been arrested for voting fraud and bribery. Yeshiva once again gets prominent ugly mentions in the national press.

The NCAA doesn’t like what the U of Smell has been up to. It’s one thing to run a morally prostituted organization, and a whole other thing to run an actual house of prostitution.

As long as President-for-Life Rick Pitino‘s University of Louisville maintained whore-parity with the NCAA by way of greed, cheating, and hypocrisy, things were copacetic; but Louisville went too far when the university extended the logic of sports recruitment to the establishment of a dorm-centered sex biz dedicated to the pleasuring of seventeen year old prospects and their fathers.

Pitino’s wittle interim campus mouthpiece has denounced the monstrous NCAA charges against The Dear Leader and pledges the full resources of the university in defense of their sovereign.

He recruited a criminal onto his team. Nothing to notice there; virtually all universities take risks on certain players. But when this freshman immediately got to work at WMU, attacking a woman at gunpoint before suiting up for even one game, the feckless Fleck broke out with torrents of bullshit about what he’d done by bringing this man into the WMU community. Let’s listen.

Let’s listen, keeping in mind that it took a local news station less than an hour to find the player’s criminal record. WMU says it doesn’t do that… It doesn’t look at players’ criminal records because I dunno who ever heard of criminal behavior among football players? Why waste your time with that? WMU says it’s considering doing that now, going forward and all.

You dig as much as you want, you can say you have something, you don’t have something, you can dig as a head coach as much as you want and it is what it is at this point, and you just have to be able to use it for the future players as you continue to recruit them… There is zero tolerance for anything like that within our culture. Zero… I brought those two gentlemen [there were two WMU football players involved; this guy’s teammate “ordered the victim to take her shirt off, while holding a gun to her forehead, according to the testimony.”] into our culture and if I would have told you I knew what was going to happen, I wouldn’t have obviously done that because that’s not what our culture’s about. I feel like I failed because I couldn’t work in their lives to get them to not make that decision. We do everything we possibly can, every single day, to teach and promote decision making and we will continue to do that.

Ya gotta admit that in years of my recording scummy things scummy coaches say, this drivel (produced by probably the highest paid person at that university) rules. The big lie pompously reiterated (Zero. Zero.). Reiterated use of a voice one can only call the subliterate subjunctive. The obscene hypocrisy.

That’s what you pay your university coach for though, ain’t it? You’re after a guy who doesn’t give a shit about importing dangerous people to university towns if they can play football.

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UPDATE: I mean, really. Why has Fleck not been fired? Jesus.

Yeshiva University. Baylor University. Our nation’s flagship religious hypocrisy campuses.

… the amazing greed, hypocrisy and incompetence of Yeshiva University’s president, Richard Joel. The financial and moral ruination of that university at his and his friends’ hands (these include the current board of trustees and some former trustees, like Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin), its reduction to a Moody’s basket case, represents one of the most stunning university stories of the decade. Berger has been right on top of it throughout.

This is a university that has named one of its campuses after the Wilfs. Its Entrepreneurial Institute bears the storied name of Ira Rennert.

The latest dispatch from Berger captures two out of three Joel attributes: greed and hypocrisy.

As his college’s finances continued to crumble last year, Yeshiva University’s president, Richard Joel publicly took a pay cut. Then months later, he privately pocketed a deferred compensation payment of $1.6 million.

That payout took Joel’s total compensation for 2014 to $2.8 million, among the highest packages for college presidents nationwide.

… In the year that Joel received the $1.6 million payment, Y.U. ran an operating deficit of $150 million, according to recently released tax records.

That same year, Y.U.’s endowment fell by $90 million, the school was forced to sell $72.5 million in real estate, and Y.U. entered into negotiations to spin off its prestigious but money-losing medical school, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

The investor ratings service Moody’s demoted Y.U.’s debt rating to junk status in January 2014 and it has not been raised since.

When you think of the various sorts of noise students and faculty are making at universities across America lately, it’s staggering to consider the almost-total silence at Yeshiva, where people who care about things like spirituality, ethics, and the value of serious study have allowed themselves to be ruled by cynical hedgies for years and years. UD feels confident Yeshiva’s next president (Joel retires soon, with full honors) will maintain its legacy of robbing the school’s mouse-like professors and students.

As Dave Zirin points out, it’s not the pimping; it’s the hypocrisy. Katina Powell readily admits to being a whore; why won’t Andre McGee and his boss admit to being pimps?

Instead of writing corporate how-to books, Rick Pitino and his ilk should be delivering seminars in Big Pimpin’. Katina Powell isn’t close to being on his level.

As for the NCAA:

[O]ne wonders why NCAA president Mark Emmert doesn’t elicit cries of “stranger danger” when he enters a room.

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No one who has, like UD, followed events at the University of Louisville over the last few years, can be surprised that the first longterm official trade in women at an American university was uncovered at that school. Its board of trustees is cretinous, catatonic. (The only trustee with guts – Steve Wilson – has begged the governor to let him quit, and the governor has obliged.) Its president – who keeps getting immense raises onaccounta he’s doing such a bang-up job – is a fully owned subsidiary of Richard Pitino and Bobby Petrino. Its student body and faculty has responded to the brothelization of their school with silence, or with rage at outsiders kicking over the stalls at the meat market.

… is a little tricky. Sure, you’re promoting yourself, making yourself look interesting, etc. But you don’t want to go too far. You don’t want to look like a braggart.

Of the many home pages UD has read, none has come anywhere near that of Jonathan Sacks for throwing humility – even faux humility – to the winds and beyond. Sacks, a rabbi, has in the past lamented that

Humility is the orphaned virtue of our age… Humility — true humility — is one of the most expansive and life-enhancing of all virtues … True virtue never needs to advertise itself. That is why I find the aggressive packaging of personality so sad. It speaks of loneliness, the profound, endemic loneliness of a world without relationships of fidelity and trust. It testifies ultimately to a loss of faith…

So let’s see… On his home page, Sacks introduces himself as a “moral voice for our time.” He quotes “H.R.H. The Prince of Wales” calling him “a light unto this nation.” He quotes Tony Blair calling him “an intellectual giant.”

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As a moral voice for our time, Sacks has a whole lot to say about, well, morality. Pages and pages and pages on how we should live, what’s good, what’s bad. He obviously takes his moral voice for our time gig very seriously.

And yet beyond the perhaps small matter of his hypocrisy in regard to humility, there’s the more pressing matter of where he gets his money.

His academic position is funded by Ira Rennert. Sacks is the Ira Rennert Professor of whatever. And Ira Rennert has just been for the second time found guilty of looting one of his businesses to pay for a personal residence so psychotically ostentatious (it’s the largest and most expensive private house in America – kind of the concrete embodiment of the Sacks home page) that during his first trial his lawyer “demanded that photos of it not be shown, arguing that doing so would inflame the jury.” He bought a business, forced it into bankruptcy, took all of its money, and built a house for himself with it. Two judges have told him he has to give the looted money back. Rennert will, of course, keep appealing.

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Oh, and he gave some of the looted funds to Sacks.

Also to another man of heavy virtue, Joseph Lieberman, Rennert Professor of something else.

There’s a lot of other stuff about their benefactor – involving payment of taxes, industrial pollution, and eh you don’t wanna know.

And Sacks and Lieberman certainly don’t want to know. That’s their prerogative. But they should stop posing as moralists.

Today’s announcement of the “biggest case of insider trading linked to the fast-growing threat of global cybercrime” is red meat to ol’ UD, who loves her some high-level hypocrisy.

Admittedly, the arrest of a Pat Robertson-trained preacher for his part in “an alliance of U.S.-based stock traders and computer hackers in Ukraine [which] made as much as $100 million in illegal profits over five years after stealing confidential corporate press releases” lacks the panache of Yeshiva University’s Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin – they, uh, handled far more money – but this apparent graduate of Regent University’s online (I assume he did these online) MBA and Divinity degrees certainly does know how to use computers, for school and for work.

He was described in this way a few years ago in some SEC correspondence:

Mr. Korchevsky holds a B.A. degree from Sukhumi University, Sukhumi, Georgia, a M.Div. degree from Regent University and an M.B.A. from Regent University.

You can watch oodles of YouTubes of Korchevsky preaching if you’d like. Helps to know Ukrainian. Just put his name in the search engine.

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Update: A local paper calls it “an incongruous mix of Christianity and criminality.”

Really? How incongruous is the use of religion as a cover for crime? I think the word the reporter is going for is congruous.