Can they really have fired Rick Pitino?

And how many millions (buyout/defamation suit/other miscellaneous legal shit) is it going to cost them, now that much of UL’s endowment has been allegedly picked off by its last president?

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

And the capo di tutt’i capi too????

More buyout millions.

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

To recap: The board of trustees is about to sue the last president of the university and some of his comrades in – er – missing fundism to try to get some – er – missing funds back from them. The eyes of the world, the Justice Department, and the FBI, are upon their indescribably filthy sports program. They’ve just fired their famous basketball coach and their athletic director. They can expect humongous lawsuits from them. They can also expect various sports business deals to collapse and cost them more millions. They can expect enrollment to drop like a stone, along with attendance at basketball and football games. They’ve got some desperate nonentity in there as interim president to handle all of this.

Time for UL to apply for federal disaster aid.

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

[Pitino’s lawyer Steven] Pence promises that [the University of Louisville] ‘won’t fire Pitino without a bare-knuckle fight’….

According to Pence, Louisville would be in a legal fight over $44 million it would owe Pitino as part of his buyout clause.

Pitino’s always baring himself. A bare-knuckle fight; a bare-ass restaurant meal…

[If you didn’t expect this outcome, you’re like people who are still] stunned to learn that a game as inherently violent as football would lead to life-altering issues among players from repeated concussions and blows to the head.

Far worse, you’re like Louisville’s superscummy basketball coach, who says he’s “completely shocked” by the shocking corruption in university basketball. As completely shocked as he was by the whorehouse being run in a dorm lived in by basketball players and visited by recruits and their families.

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

So here’s UD‘s take. American university students are being trained to be Italians. Italians are living the good life and they don’t give a rat’s ass that their entire world is howlingly corrupt. In a New Yorker article about the sordid Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair, Adam Gopnik noted French anxiety about

what many in Paris see as the “Italianization” of French life — the descent into what might become an unseemly round of Berlusconian squalor …

The University of Louisville is the avant-garde: Can you grow a university whose students heartily endorse, and fork all their tuition money over to, Rick Berlusconi Strauss-Kahn Pitino? His sextortion, his whores for sixteen year old recruits and their fathers, his stuffed envelopes for sports agents in Las Vegas hotel rooms? Can you guarantee a university whose students will rush to the bookstore and buy out Pitino’s many books about how to be ethical?

The entire financial foundation of the University of Louisville rests on a bet that there’s no bottom – that students and alumni will be able — FOREVER — to look at a guy who could give Jerry Sandusky a run for his money and say WE LOVE YOU RICK. TELL US HOW MUCH MORE YOU WANT US TO COUGH UP FOR YOUR SALARY.

It’s a solid bet. This is Kentucky, after all.

This blog is ambivalent about the predictable call for the University of Louisville to get the death penalty (it’d probably be curtains for the whole university, since without its sports programs …), now that its totally stinky irredeemable stinkiness (there’s a reason they call it the U of Smell) has yet again wafted its way across the landscape of this great country of ours. When it comes to Louisville, it’s very much as George immortally put it to Martha: There isn’t an abomination award going that you haven’t won. The only thing left for that university to win is the death penalty.

One observer claims that the career of UL’s super-louche basketball coach will “almost certainly … end in a fall of Shakespearian dimension.” (That should be Shakespearean.). But if you start in the gutter and end in the gutter does that count as Shakespearean? Tragic?

And why are we here at University Diaries ambivalent? Because without the sex drugs and rock and roll we get from UL we’d suffer a fall of Shakespearean dimension.

… who, when UL president, allegedly speculated away up to $100 million of school money. He will be sued; he will have to spend the rest of his life paying lawyers to draw out the suits against him until he expires in sunny splendor in one of his Florida mcmansions.

Meanwhile, though, the school ain’t got much money left over for anything but what matters most to it – football – and as a result, it’s no longer able to provide much-needed advertising revenue to the local student newspaper.

The withdrawal of those advertising dollars threatens the existence of the paper, which is why UD just gave it some money. You might consider making a donation as well.

The Ballad of James Ramsey is being written as we speak, and since the whole point of University Diaries is to pay attention to strange and unsettling things that happen in our country’s university system, we will follow his saga closely here.

A forensic audit demanded by [University of Louisville] donors recently confirmed that under Ramsey’s leadership, the foundation [which Ramsey, quite the monopolist, ran, along with running the university] authorized excessive spending, including on executive compensation, and realized unrecorded endowment losses to the tune of $120 million.

Yes, yes, Lawrence Summers, when Harvard prez, lost one billion from the endowment, so what’s a paltry $120 m? I mean, your university can lose twelve million in a matter of minutes if you have ninnies minding the till, so big deal. Money in, money out. At UL specifically, the job of donors is to give money; the job of trustees is to take it; the job of students is to shut the fuck up.

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

Turns out, though, that even in America’s arguably most corrupt state, a few people find abundant high-level university theft annoying, and though Ramsey probably won’t live long enough to go to jail … wait lemme check his age… guy’s pushing seventy… that’s not that old these days!… he has, er, tons of money with which to countersue, to appeal, to fall mysteriously ill and delay his trial, to become a shimmy shimmy koko bop fundamentalist preacher and get too famous to finger blahblahblah… he might be able to swing it so he can spend the rest of his days weeping to reporters about how he’s being treated exactly the way they treated Jesus …

Poor (impoverished; pathetic) UL is right now floating on this very same stream of consciousness, asking themselves if they want to take a big financial and reputational hit (and when your most recent dorm renovation involved retrofitting the building so it’s no longer a whorehouse for your athletes, you got you some reputational issues) and go after Ramsey and his cronies… Already “donations to the university have been falling rapidly, down 25 percent from 2016–17,” and the question is whether allowing the Full-Ramsey shitstorm to hit the public in the interest of eventually clearing the air (‘cepn nobody who knows Kentucky thinks anything will ever clear its air) will appease donors or simply remind them what an icky place the school, grosso modo, is.

… scoots.

The board of trustees is also on its way out.

It’s a start.

Plenty of background on the U of Smell: Put Louisville in my search engine.

… now features the comical board of trustee meetings that all schools going down the tube feature. The cronies want yet another big tuition increase so that they and the coaches can continue to live in the style to which they have become accustomed; a powerful faction of disgusted trustees wants them to stop doing this.

During the meeting, [one trustee] questioned how the university spends money, calling [the school president] and his administrative team “masters of financial obfuscation.”

The sharpest debate of the meeting was over a transaction [the president] approved last year in which the university loaned $38 million of its cash on hand to the University of Louisville Real Estate Foundation, a creation of the U of L Foundation, which [the president] also runs.

[Two trustees] questioned why the loan was not approved by the trustees and whether the money could be used to fund more pressing university priorities or to curtail tuition increases.

Jason Tomlinson, the foundation’s chief financial officer, told the board that the transaction is not a loan but a “receivable.” But U of L’s independent auditors called it a loan in the university’s annual financial statements…

[One of the trustees] blew up at Tomlinson, asking how he could tell the board the deal is not a loan when the document governing the transaction has a file name of “University Loan to FDN.docx.”

The U of Smell has gotten so comprehensively smelly (put Louisville in my search engine) that a strong faction of trustees now wants the school’s ridiculous president to leave. The president refuses to leave.

The stage is set; all the rest of us have to do is sit back and enjoy the show.

If they had, the NCAA would look the other way – as they seem to have done with the University of North Carolina – because the offense would have been university-wide. If it’s not restricted to athletes – if it’s official campus-wide crapulousness – then the NCAA says fine, fine. Some schools don’t hire pimps to set up whorehouses in their dormitories, and some do. Some schools don’t steal their students’ education, and some do. It’s all part of the rich texture which makes up the tapestry of American university education.

(Haredi or halfback, you can now go to court and sue a school, a state, or the NCAA for having been deprived of an education.)

Bravo, Theresa Hayden. She teaches Human Trafficking at the U of Smell, and since a form of HT is happening right under her nose (one of many smells emanating from the U of Smell), she has decided to add to her syllabus the book chronicling the provision of women for campus basketball players and recruits and the recruits’ fathers in the players’ now-notorious dorm.

The book’s co-author is the madam who, in association with an assistant basketball coach no longer (ahem) at UL, coordinated the buying and selling.

Because it’s a required class text, Breaking Cardinal Rules: Basketball and the Escort Queen does not appear as one slender singular upright copy among many other texts in the store; multiple copies loll sideways in the course stacks, making a striking statement…

From lemons Hayden has made intellectual lemonade; within a culture of smutty conspiratorial silence (similar to the silence that hushed up Peyton Manning‘s university past and the more recent rapes at Baylor University) she has taken a principled stand that will help her students absorb with dispassion the enormity of what the president of their university has allowed the institution to become. She has done what professors do.

Absent proof of “willful misconduct” by Pitino, forcing him out could leave U of L on the hook for the balance of a contract that runs through the 2025-26 season at a cost of roughly $50 million…

Having accumulated enough wealth to market two Florida homes for a combined asking price exceeding $30 million, [Pitino] can probably afford to negotiate an exit package without hardball haggling…

… you’d hit the bottle too.

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

[Darrell] Griffith’s boss, Dr. David Dunn, the executive vice president for health sciences and U of L’s top doctor, was placed on leave earlier this month pending the outcome of an FBI and campus investigation into whether he misused university funds.

LOUISVILLE U

folks you’ve heard of scandalous schools
history is full of scandalous schools
but you ain’t heard nothing til
you’ve heard about louisville

it’s a place that’s crawling with thieves
has a board that trustees try to leave
till you’ve seen dorm rooms rockin’ with whores
you ain’t even darkened their doors

they call the campus louisville u
what a fucked up campus can do!
it’s the lowest graduatingest, med school on probationest
school the world ever knew

the ed school dean’s in the pen
med’care fraud hits again
pitino petrino mcgee
sexy sexy whooooeeeeee!

they keep their audits on the down low
about their bank accounts nobody knows
secret foundations funnel the cash
the u of lou has made itself absolute hash

lots of low-lifes among their teams’ lads
and even the president’s paid to be bad
so here’s my warning to you
keep away from louisville u

…and has that ever paid off. Scenes from their most recent game.

There was booing …from the sparse crowd even before the first quarter ended, and the stands – where some fights broke out – were largely empty by the midpoint of the third quarter.

Miami, playing in an empty stadium, was held to 146 total yards and just six first downs. The 58-point loss was the worst in Miami’s history, surpassing a 70-14 loss to Texas A&M in 1944.

UM’s athletic director, surveying this empty stadium, blithely reminded everyone to “make sure we continue to support our team.”

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

Yeah, it’s all gonna be okay. Maybe we’ll get a new coach.

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

Miami’s AD doesn’t understand that if you want people to go to your games, you shouldn’t make them puke forever.

[Rick] Pitino still has a job because he’s one of the best coaches in college basketball history. Bobby Petrino was hired — actually, re-hired — because his brilliant football mind takes precedence over an extensive list of despicable acts away from the field, capped off by that Evel Knievel impression with his mistress along for the ride.

Throughout his tenure as president, [University of Louisville president James] Ramsey has deferred to [vp for athletics Tom] Jurich in all athletics matters. He supported Jurich’s decision to keep Pitino, without punishment, after the Karen Sypher scandal. He supported Jurich’s decision to give football coach Bobby Petrino another chance despite the sex scandal that got him fired at Arkansas. He supported Jurich’s decision to keep football recruiter Clint Hurtt even after he was tainted by his involvement in the recruiting sex scandal at Miami… Already national commentators have lumped together all of Jurich’s controversial personnel decisions and concluded that UofL is guilty of condoning sexual misconduct for the sake of winning.

Talk about rushing to conclusions! Does that seem to you the record of a university that condones sexual misconduct for the sake of winning? Whoa, Nellie!

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

But look. Louisville’s is not the record of a university at all, is it? The opinion writer I quote above argues that universities are about this and universities are about that and the University of Louisville has to toss out all its pimps and whores and remember it’s a university yadda yadda.

I’ll tell you what’s wrong with this picture. Think about Donald Trump’s huge success so far in the presidential campaign. The more Trump behaves in a way diametrically opposed to presidential, the more votes he gets. Because a lot of Americans loathe government and love people committed to trashing it.

In the same way, a lot of people loathe academic institutions and love people committed to trashing them. Bring in squads of scummy coaches to run your school, give them complete freedom and the highest salaries in the state, and they will of course run your university into the ground.

To the cheers of thousands of onlookers.

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

Where’s UL’s faculty? Have you heard a peep out of any of them?

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

The University of Louisville has a permanent hard-on. It’s difficult to think when you’re like that.

But that’s the whole point.