When wee UD studied at the Medill School of Journalism, we often discussed the qualities of a good lead sentence; in particular, you want to pack a lot of information in without creating a run-on feel to the thing.
The AP writer who had to pack all of the repulsive behavior at New Mexico State into her lead had quite a task, but she acquitted herself well, finding a place in one sentence for the guns thing AND the cock-grabbing thing. Actual shooters (of guns) among team members appear a little farther down in the article. When there’s this much material, you have to be selective.
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For the venerable history of this institution, go here.
[T]he new allegations involved potential violations of university policy and were separate from the November 19 shooting of a student from the University of New Mexico.
[T]he allegations involved multiple players hazing a teammate more than once with a police report filed.
What can we say on this blog about nauseating New Mexico State that we haven’t already said a hundred times? (All the up-to-date details you can stomach here.) In an academic landscape of booze, guns, hazing, and cheating, schools like NMSU, where reporters must distinguish among ongoing acts of vileness, stand out boldly.
You figure the highest paid person on campus must be the recruiting coach, cuz he’s the one bringing the hazers and the killers — people whose intrinsic violence does wonders on the court. And recruits can rest safe in the knowledge that the rest of the staff will hide the guns that do the killing from the cops. Definitely a team effort at this school.
I mean, some of these players make the shooter at Richneck Elementary look like a kid.
New Mexico State’s Robert Carpenter pulled back his arm and delivered a powerful punch to the face of Liberty’s Shiloh Robinson, sending the forward to the floor, [breaking his nose,] and leading to an ejection during an Aggies overtime win.
The beauty of it is the coach initially said Carpenter’s a great guy and I’m sure he’s remorseful and maybe we’ll suspend him for a game or something… And then I dunno someone must have talked to the coach cuz now it’s oh he’s suspended indefinitely blah blah.
The gunny, sexually perverted basketball team is of course only the most obvious sign of thorough institutional squalor.
Current and former employees the AP interviewed described scenarios in which top-level administrators refused to hold themselves or others accountable, both inside and outside the athletic department. One said the “guardrails” designed to protect students and faculty — from everything from retaliation for whistleblowing to sexual improprieties — had all but disappeared.
“Because there’s so much churn in our upper administration, we never get to the point of hammering out who is actually accountable for upholding policies,” [one insider] said.
In one instance, a lawsuit last year filed by a Jane Doe alleges a longtime professor with ties to the athletic department “harassed and groomed female students for years, coercing them into sexual relations and bragging about the same” while school officials looked the other way. The plaintiff alleges she was sexually assaulted by the professor.
Another case alleges that two professors who blew the whistle about hiring practices they claimed flouted human-resource policies had their complaints intercepted by an administrator involved in the hiring, who then pushed for disciplinary cases to be opened against those professors. One has been demoted from his deanship.
[The] Office of Institutional Equity, which handles Title IX and other discrimination complaints and should have been on the front lines of the hazing allegations, [was] marginalized, with administrators ignoring some recommendations produced by the office and putting others off.
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Uh lets see what else.
misappropriation of funds
unethical hiring
humongous lawsuits filed by the latest set of massively overpaid now-fired shitskis
the decision to end a policy that “student-athletes would be dismissed if found guilty of (or pleaded no contest to) a felony. That allowed one player to remain on the team at the time the rules were changed. It also furthered New Mexico State’s reputation as a place where athletes and coaches get second chances — perhaps without accountability.” Nice way to put it. Perhaps without.
Look. Tons of universities in this country have forged winning basketball/football teams by scouring the junior colleges for naughty numbskulls who play really well. It’s a beyond-belief sordid thing for a university to do, but tons of them do it. Many come to grief as the bad boys launch crime sprees, start fights on the field/court, get involved in academic cheating scandals, rape people, blah blah. Small price to pay, says a school like Nebraska, which has an AMAZING record of recruiting crazyass assholes. It’s one way to field winning teams and who cares if players beat the shit out of students ahead of them in line for pizza just cuz they’re getting impatient.
UD will admit that, in a strong field, NMSU has distinguished itself. But the indecent tale of school-destruction is one it shares with many cohorts.
In this interview, he blames the shutdown of the basketball program, plus a purge of its coach and others, on a total lack of leadership at the school. No one’s home. Because no one’s home, someone recently hired a shitty clueless coach who probably doesn’t even see what’s wrong with hazing; because no one’s home, the lame duck chancellor let a university sports team full of gunnies and hazers form itself.
Eventually the gunplay and sexual assaults on fellow teammates (with the team watching) just got to be too much sleaze, even for bigtime university sports.
Plus they can expect a LOT of lawsuits, from players and coaches. Expensive.
The guy also pointed out that what with the loss from the roster of
*the guy who recently shot and killed a UNM student he’s been fighting with,
*the two guys who are leaving cuz they can’t take the sleaze anymore,
*and the three hazers who are leaving cuz they’re expected in court (court; not basketball court),
the team doesn’t have enough players to play the game anyway.
How sensitively put… Wouldn’t want to bludgeon the end of the sentence with the blunt force sexual … Want to gentle things along with the delicate smidgeon in nature…
And yet…
What do you really want? Do you want a writer who waves her crumpet and says Well I declare! Multiple sources … [wink wink nudge nudge]…
Or do you want ol’ UD to spill the tea… er, beans? UD, who has for years been covering what guys do to guys in the locker room when broom comes to shove?
Ok. While of course UD did not have the pleasure of attending the New Mexico State University haze, she’s pretty sure three or four guys held down each victim (the event was probably witnessed by much of the team, and to make the police investigation a snap, some of the stupider players probably recorded it on their cell phones) and while he lay writhing and shrieking one of them shoved the end of a straw broom up his rectum.
That night, vomiting with rage and self-disgust, the victim(s) took his nightly call from his mother, who heard something funny in his voice, got him to confess he’d been anally raped, and when she got off the phone with him she and her husband called the university, a lawyer, the cops, and the local newspaper.
NMSU, a wholly vile and dysfunctional location, all of whose leadership is interim times ten and desperately trying to leave, issues a pallid statement, shuts down the rape club, and prays the state legislature doesn’t hold against the school the fact that it’s a cesspool. (Spoiler Alert: The corrupt and mindless state legislature won’t hold it against the school. Boys will be boys. These are real bonding experiences.)
Now I’m not saying there were guns involved. Usually this quaint lad on lad action involves merely fists and brooms; but this being the USA I can’t see why there wouldn’t have been guns involved. Look at the team logo.
Maybe they shoved gun butts up their butts.
Ave Atque Vale:
Now they are a shit show. You have a player involved shooting, a catfishing, a fight with a rival. Shit even the cops chased [the] team bus down the highway. Yet here we are after all of that, [with hazing incidents and a decision] to suspend its season.
Yeah. I also called the “in front of the team” thing.
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The victim, whose name was redacted in the report along with those of the other players, said other incidents involving inappropriate physical and sexual touching had been occurring in locker rooms and on road trips since last summer.
What a team! If they don’t outright shoot you, they at least finger your anus.
… makes sure its universities share fully in this bounty. Its two highest-profile campuses – U New Mexico, and New Mexico State – are POP POP POP POPPIN away with healthy rivalry, on the basketball court and off! (For the long glorious sports history – there isn’t any other history – of both schools, go here.) Now that both schools’ teams are literally engaged in an ongoing shooting war, the basketball coaches have, uh, started to issue statements and shit.
When your schools are dumpsters instead of colleges, and when your basketball teams are gangs (with the coaching staff apparently part of the gangs), instead of basketball teams, you should…
Oh I dunno. You’re down there with your guns and your gangs, leading your best life now, living out loud, standing in your truth, letting a smile be your umbrella, and ain’t no place of mine to look at the carnage and say one damn word.
This article, about impoverished University of New Mexico having just upped its coach’s already amazing compensation by $200,000, frets about a university well on its way to being about nothing but basketball.
But why fret? Honesty is the best policy. Like Nevada, New Mexico is one of our most brainless states, and UD has never picked up the slightest tremor of anyone there feeling anything but content about this.
And listen to the timid representative of UNM’s faculty senate:
“Our faculty also – and one might suggest, preeminently – contribute to the value of a UNM degree.”
UD appreciates her suggestion, but it’s obvious that the basketball team preeminently contributes to the value (such as it is) of a UNM degree.
The Locksley buyout and various Schmidly initiatives are gifts that keep giving… And of course when it comes to athletics in particular UNM continues really, really sordid, and things get worse and worse. Let’s quote a bit from a recent article:
In one of the poorest states in the nation, can UNM, which has only one of its 21 intercollegiate sports teams (men’s basketball) turning a profit each fiscal year, justify receiving well more than $2 million per year in state subsidies for athletics? Can it justify student fees totaling $4 million, a figure that has more than doubled in the past two years despite the objections of student representatives on campus?
The new Schmidly says uh I dunno… bad situation I guess but can’t do nuthin…
“The debt service continues to be a challenge for us,” [the athletic director] said, referring to paying down the $60 million renovation of the Pit four years ago. “The financial model was predicated on a naming gift…”
The perfectly named Pit is the basketball stadium. The morons who run UNM promised up and down they’d get some bank or pizza parlor to buy naming rights, only it didn’t happen…
I mean, the financial model?? What a great way to put it. This might be more accurate: I and the idiots with whom I play golf figured we might get the funding if we told everyone…
UNM students paid $1.9 million in fees for athletics in 2011-12, with a majority earmarked at covering the costs of student admission to sporting events.
Then, despite the objections of undergraduate and graduate student representatives, came significant increases in those fees. In 2012-13 the students paid $3.2 million and that figure was right at $4 million this past year (2013-14).
“Student fees have been a godsend for us the last couple years. But we, historically, have been on the real low end, and now we’re probably right in the middle,” Krebs said. “But I think there’s a limit to what you can put on the backs of the students.”
In 2012-13, six of the 10 other schools in the Mountain West Conference received more money from student fees than did UNM, as did nearby regional schools New Mexico State University and UTEP.
“I don’t see a huge increase in the student participation around fees, but I do think some nominal increases are probably in their future,” Frank said. “How fast and how much is something we’ll talk to the students about.”
The last fees went up without any talking to anyone. Students objected to them and the school said fuck you. Clearly student fees in years to come will be predicated on the same financial model.
West Virginia University is gradually reducing itself to nothing – no foreign languages, a lot fewer professors, no grad program in math, fewer undergrad programs.
Shit, place ain’t got no money, and customers are voting with their feet.
Lotsa boohoo about all this from the liberal elites, but hold on jest a minute! Hang on jest one sec! UD ain’t crying, and she’ll tell you why.
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As you know, UD sees no reason why a country (Hungary) or a state (New Mexico, Nevada, West Virginia, Florida) that wants to reduce itself to an intellectual desert should be kept from doing so.
The American system is already correcting for this. Notice, for instance, how Hampshire College has stepped up to offer an easy transfer to New College students who can’t take it anymore. Nevada has always done beautifully on the dumbshit tourist trade and doesn’t need fancy theories to run casinos. Its wretched state university system should call it a day; smart young Nevadans can go to California. Same deal for other pro-ignorance states – this is a big country with oodles of good (and some supremely great) universities.
As for West Virginia. Feast your eyes on UD‘s coverage, over many years, of WVU – a hopelessly drunk and disorderly party school in a hopeless state from which those who can flee are fleeing. Morgantown runs with squalid bars in which frat boys try to kill pledges via drink. The kids riot after purty near every football game. The football and basketball coaches continue to be paid like princes. It’s a world, to be sure; a party school world which is about what a state like WV can manage if you tell it to establish a university. But you’re never gonna get the yahoos in the legislature to smarten the place up, and fact is most of its students are fine with the way things are. Those who aren’t will find good schools in driving distance: FIVE states border WV, and three of them have good schools.
Thuggery is mainstreamed at the University of Alabama…
That’s not quite right. It’s celebrated; it’s an occasion for amusing witticisms, as it was for the Alex Murdaugh defense attorney who pointed an assault weapon at the opposing table and said “Tempting.” In this case it’s Haw look at me I carry guns so much officials have to check me for them before I play basketball. Haw.
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Don’t bother Bama none that they recruit murderers and accessories to murderers. Guns? Everybody’s got ’em and fuck you.
Huh? Who says he ain’t reading the room? What room? The US House chamber?
Anyway Brandon Miller’s pregame pat-down can’t hold a candle to New Mexico State’s pre-game introduction, where each basketball player pulls off his pants and invites the other players to finger his anus.
Due to the [two] shootings that have occurred at my apartment complex, as well as the on-campus shooting, I am saddened to say that I will be leaving the University of New Mexico. My family and I feel this is the best decision for me and my safety. I will be entering the transfer portal …
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[Brooke] Berry’s mother, Amy Berry, told Ken Sickenger from the Albuquerque Journal that Saturday’s incident was “the last straw.”
“Brooke really likes the basketball team, and she wanted to stick it out, but she was scared,” she said. “She called us Sunday morning crying and said, ‘I want to come home,’ so her dad and I drove down 14 hours to get her. If something happened to her, we’d never forgive ourselves.”
Berry arrived in New Mexico from Billings, Mont. She lived at Lobo Village, a student-housing complex just west of the UNM basketball arena, otherwise known as The Pit. The two previous incidents happened close enough to Berry for her to be concerned for her safety.
“Brooke called when a shooting was happening, and she was hiding in the bathtub,” the mother told the Journal. “I was thinking, ‘This is crazy.'”
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The university has released a statement.
Brooke’s being a real GIRL about this… Everyone at UNM has hidden in a bathtub during a gunfight outside their room! BFD! What a baby.
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The traditional New Mexico State/University of New Mexico men’s basketball rivalry game has been cancelled. The latest dorm killing was between members of the rival teams, and since NMSU killed a UNM guy the rivalry’s been settled: NMSU wins.
The two schools are working out a new money-saving arrangement in which the big game will not take place at all anymore. The schools will share the cost of weapons and ammo and let the guys work out the rivalry by killing each other every year at this time.
If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you know that the University of New Mexico is among the lowest of the low, not merely in terms of sports, but in terms of academic standards. (Feast your eyes. Skip over the New Mexico State posts, which also come up when you put UNIVERSITY NEW MEXICO in the search engine.). People pretend to be shocked when The Next Thing happens, but if you know UNM, the fact that they’ve just suspended their $800,000 a year football coach for – it’s alleged – racism, abuse of players, and, in the case of this post’s headline, not really dealing very well with rape allegations against his players – you ain’t shocked.
UNM has placed Davie on unpaid leave for 30 days and says he will have to take mandatory trainings, including on cultural sensitivity.
You bet.
************ Update: Sports journalism’s best commenters are just getting started over at Deadspin, but there are already a few gems. Like this one:
The judges will need a moment to consider whether Dave Bliss’s post-UNM career should be taken into consideration when deciding the title of “biggest asshole to coach for the Lobos.”
So pause a moment to think what University of New Mexico instructor Daniel Barto’s daily life at that benighted school (in a benighted state) is like. He opens the paper and reads the following opening paragraphs:
University of New Mexico athletics has projected ticket revenue for the current 2017-18 fiscal year that it didn’t come close to reaching this past season.
And this comes after the recent retirement of its athletic director, the launch of two state investigations related to … possible fiscal mismanagement and the reality of failing to balance eight of the department’s past 10 budgets.
In fact, UNM has budgeted to spend about $1 million more from ticket sales this year than it actually brought in last year from its three revenue generating sports of football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball.
Read the whole thing. It gets more delusional with every paragraph. Barto reads things like this every day.
This blog has spent years documenting wild wacko wastrel UNM. (The link includes non UNM posts – jump around.). If you want to know what its like to actually belong to the UNM community, read Barto’s letter in the student newspaper. After reviewing the serious financial difficulties of many people on campus, he notes:
This [financial difficulty] pertains to us all — except one certain delusional department that seems to think that the hard math of budgeting does not apply to them.
I am talking about the Athletics Department, the department that has the most paid administrators of any other on main campus.
This department was headed by director Paul Krebs (salary $319,262) until he “resigned” after committing fraud. Paul used UNM money to fund a personal golfing trip to Scotland. This trip ended up costing New Mexico taxpayers even more, because Paul failed to get enough people to lock in for the discount group travel rate.
Pathetic Paul, so much money to embezzle but too few friends to even embezzle with.
Of course the Athletics Department claims, “We bring in the most money!”
But this is a lie of omission. The department wastes more money than it brings in. According to the ABQ Journal, since 2007 the Athletics Department’s expenses have exceed[ed] their revenue every year except two. As of 2016, the department has a $1,525,257 deficit that the University must cover.
Barto is angry. Of course he concedes that the state of New Mexico itself is one of the most dissolute in the nation; he understands that public universities in our most corrupt states are royally screwed. But he still can’t help hoping for things to change.
His letter hasn’t yet attracted any comments. If it does, UD feels pretty certain they’ll be abusive, semi-literate, and deeply deluded.
Of course this local columnist is right that the state of Nevada has a jaw-droppingly bad ed rep; but she errs in assuming even a non-desperate effort to change this.
UD has for years followed the states of New Mexico, Alaska, Hawaii, and Nevada (UD‘s Big Four) as they run their primary, secondary, and post-secondary schools into the ground.
Not one of these states seems to know how to run schools, much less care about running them.
Nevada in particular – entertainment capital of the world – is all about building The World’s Largest 800 Million Dollar University Football Stadium and stuff like that. It’s clear the state doesn’t even know what universities are. Or – again – care. The center of its world is Las Vegas.
Las Vegas. Nevada’s tax base relies on drawing stupid people to the state, and it’s done a bang-up job. State leaders understand there’s, uh, negative utility in drawing smart people.
So who can be surprised that no one there knows what plagiarism is, much less knows that you shouldn’t do it? The same local columnist expresses amazement that the University of Nevada Las Vegas for years housed a high-profile professor who has been loudly called out as a plagiarist since “his 1990 doctoral dissertation at [the] University of Toronto.” She seems surprised that UNLV seemed disinclined to do anything about this guy until the Chronicle of Higher Ed did a big story about him. A commenter at Retraction Watch notes:
UNLV management were probably too busy hushing up scandals with the basketball team to worry about something as trivial as plagiarism on a massive scale…
The columnist seems just as surprised that the Nevada System of Higher Education “copied large sections of [a Brookings Institution] draft report and submitted it to legislators as NSHE’s own proposal.” Why not?
