A voice in a comment thread grapples with the latest mega-scandal at Rutgers University. (The football team boasts both an armed invasion gang and a coach who allegedly puts pressure on professors to pass players who have flunked courses.) The commenter attempts to argue that a thing which drains millions of dollars from a university’s budget has really nothing to do with the university. Hm.

Run away! Run away!

If you actually show up for the emergency meeting about your criminalized football team and the man who recruited it, it’s liable to be embarrassing. Reporters will almost certainly ask you for a comment, the way they did ol’ Martin up there. And what can you say?

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UD found a great comment – she recommends board members use it, or something like it – in this comment thread:

This is dumb, can we move on, this has zero impact on the academic integrity of the average student at Rutgers, stop blowing it up because of 1, or 2, or 3, or 4, or 5 players.

What’s great about this comment is that its player list can be easily expanded as more are arrested. In fact the current number is six, not five, so depending on when the board member uses it she can add numbers to reflect the latest total…. Stop blowing it up because of 1, or 2, or 3, or 4, or 5, or 6, or 7, or 8, or 9, or even ten players.

Like Yeshiva University’s Richard Joel, Robert Barchi of mega-scandal school Rutgers is essentially a rich guy who wants to be left alone to attend corporate board meetings with people like himself. He doesn’t wanna know from his school’s massively catastrophic overspending on athletics, and he certainly doesn’t wanna threaten his classiness (doctor, university president, corporate seat holder) by grubbing around with lowlifes like sadist coach Mike Rice and recruiter-of-criminals coach Kyle Flood. (The governor of the state has expressed a close variant of this approach: “I certainly have a lot more important things than worry about what wide receiver is suspend[ed] for a few games recently. Being governor of New Jersey and running for president is a little more important than that.”)

So as per usual, as the fact of his football coach having recruited a bevy of armed home invaders becomes national news, Barchi’s remaining above the fray.

In this he represents – as you know if you read this blog – one of the, er, dominant typologies among jock school presidents.

Some JSP‘s are totally happily down and dirty with their having to devote their entire tenure to football and basketball scandals (these include not only … problematic players and coaches, but also regular gigantic buyout payments and litigation costs when coaches are fired or leave or whatever, plus other pesky matters like the new stadium that fucked the institution’s budget but good and sits empty because no one attends games, post-game student riots, drunk and disorderly tailgates, that teensy academic scandal over in communication studies, etc., etc.). But some JSP‘s, like Barchi, come to the job with a sense of themselves incompatible with, say, spending days desperately lobbying the state legislature for alcohol sales in the stadium. They just don’t see themselves as liquor shills, and you’re not going to get them to do this sort of thing, however much money the empty stadium is hemorrhaging. He’s a high-ranking academic officer, dammit, and there are certain duties he will not perform.

But if, on your presidential daily rounds, you refuse to visit your school’s field of dreams, its denizens are going to feel offended. Like this guy. He’s really pissed with the president, and he’ll tell you why.

First, though, he wants to share a photograph with you. Granddad Flood cradles an awed baby in his arms right after a win on the field!

Okay, now that we’re in the Coacha Inconsolata mood, let’s roll.

The writer begins by quoting another local scribe shocked at Barchi’s refusal to help Coach Flood out of this latest mess:

Ask President Robert Barchi to step in and help? He can’t even pretend he likes the big-time athletics part of his job…

How can he not like the big-time athletics part of his job? What’s not to like?

And now the writer, noting the fact of Barchi having left Flood to twist slowly slowly in the wind, expresses his incredulity:

The president of the university – the president of a school embroiled in all sorts of negative publicity, with a coach who is the most visible face of said university – hasn’t spoken with the coach about the latest issue? Really?

Football’s the front porch, which means coach is the front face, and if you’d just rather not deal with that, if you prefer a sense of yourself as resident in a cloister rather than a flophouse with a wraparound porch, you’re going to avoid the coach.

Now the writer quotes another outraged Rutgers fan.

[T]o leave Coach Flood facing the media alone for the crimes by students and student athletes announced this week just isn’t right… Rutgers is the size of a small city and will have its bad elements who should be disciplined and prosecuted as appropriate.

The pertinent crime committed was the recruitment of criminals. That crime was committed by Flood alone – he being the ultimate decision-maker (you don’t actually think there are admissions committees that look at these guys, do you?). As for the bad elements, when these turn out to be not just players but coaches like (base salary close to $700,000) Mike Rice, you’re not just talking elements. You’re talking about entire enchiladas (which is why no one’s surprised that Flood also turns out to be fucking with the academic staff).

Okay, so get out your hankies – time for the Coacha Inconsolata final appeal:

Flood has been standing alone. Facing the media….alone. And representing himself, his team, his university – and mine – with dignity and forthrightness. Alone. And that is shameful and wrong.

BWAH!

But hey. It’s Jersey.

Five current Rutgers football players, including the cornerback at the center of a university-led investigation into coach Kyle Flood, were charged Thursday with assaulting a group of individuals, including one student whose jaw was broken during the unprovoked attack.

… [Nadir Barnwell, one of the men charged,] is at the center of the investigation of [Rutgers football coach Kyle] Flood, with the university looking into whether the Rutgers football coach broke school policy by contacting a professor regarding Barnwell’s grades. The junior cornerback was declared academically ineligible in the spring, according to two school officials.

Flood defied academic support staff when he contacted the professor, two sources told NJ Advance Media.

And then there’s the Rutgers basketball program.

Lordy lordy. I have seen me some scuzzy programs, but Rutgers athletics lately takes the cake.

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“Coach Flood exemplifies our university’s standards and values both on and off the field,” Rutgers president Robert Barchi said in a statement.

That wasn’t long ago, right after he gave him a contract extension and a big raise. And, you know, what Barchi said is absolutely true. Putting its students in harm’s way via sadistic coaches and criminal players, and not giving a shit about academic integrity, is the Rutgers standard.

PS: They’re gonna have to pay over a million dollars to buy Flood out of his contract.

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I knew this was going to get funny.

Hands-on research in Criminal Justice majors.

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From a comment thread:

[H]alf our secondary just got arrested.

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Coach Flood Sings to His Favorite Player

I know I stand in line until you think you have the time
To talk some football with me
And if we find someplace to meet, I know that there’s a chance
You’ll end up beating on me

I practice every day to find some clever lines to say
To make the meaning come through
But then I think I’ll wait until the evening gets late and I’m alone with you
The time is right, your perfume fills my head, the stars get red and, oh, the night’s so blue
And then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like “I love you”

Bottom line: A lot of your university’s sports heroes – coaches as well as players – are seriously scary people. That’s why even though many of them quite often do horrible things – crimes of violence – they almost never get prosecuted. Everyone’s too scared.

Some of these people are scary for obvious Richie Incognito reasons: They’ve been recruited because they’re humongous, violent motherfuckers and you really really really do not want to be anywhere in their way. Or in their vicinity. We all had a very good laugh when we saw this take on Rutgers coach Mike Rice (start at 1:05), but it’s kind of nervous laughter, isn’t it? It’s kind of like I cannot believe that a highly paid, high-profile representative of a university is a violent psycho… I don’t want to believe this…

I love my team! Want to cheer them on! Want them to win!

Oh. But in order to win a lot of teams seem to need psycho coaches who recruit angry motherfuckers like Richie Incognito.

Hm. Hm. Yes, it’s a problem…

Around midnight on April 12, 2014, Oregon State student Michael Davis said he and a friend had been arguing with some football players about cutting in line at a bar and he had fallen to the ground with one of them while fending off a punch. As Davis stood up, tight end Tyler Perry ran up and punched him in the head, knocking him to the ground, the police report states.

According to the report, Davis said a friend who played football told him that he “shouldn’t call the cops. We won’t have a starting lineup next year.” Another person involved in the incident said he “knew the males to be OSU football players so did not really want them in any trouble.”

Days after the incident, Davis said that one of his professors noticed several football players milling outside the door of a classroom and the professor told him to exit through a different door because she was afraid they were going to harass him.

Fuck, man. What did I tell you? Stay out of the way.

But hey. UD, qua professor, finds the bit about the professor really interesting. Look at the intriguing relationships and experiences you can have as a professor at a major sports school! There you are lecturing on Marcel Proust or the Burgess Shale, and you notice that outside your classroom door there’s all these big guys from the team milling about!

It’s like living in Naples, and I don’t mean Florida! It’s like – there they are! You know them. Your students know them. The police know them. The judges know them. Everyone knows them. They run the place, and they can do anything they want because they scare the shit out of everyone.

Yes, turns out there’s nothing sacred even about the classrooms at the big sports universities. Of course, we already knew that from Julius Nyang’oro’s University of North Carolina… Nothing sacred there at all… Nothing even semi-sacred… Professors are just as scared as everyone else.

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UD thanks the several readers who linked her to the ESPN article.

But wait. Many of these guys attended or graduated from some of our better universities. Ray Rice, Rutgers. Aaron Hernandez, University of Florida. Richie Incognito, University of Nebraska. Adrian Peterson, Oklahoma. Our internationally acclaimed higher education system has taken these and so many other NFL players in and educated them.

Sure, once they’re retired at 29 or whatever, and once the brain damage they got playing for these universities (Motto: A mind is a terrible thing to waste; so we use it, use it, use it!) starts up, they won’t make big NFL money. But they’re college-educated! They went to storied schools like the University of North Carolina!

Bankrupt? Financial stress? They’re not even carrying college loans!

Well.

Anyway.

… Sayreville thing), allow UD to reiterate her position.

This is a blog about universities and the problems with them. UD‘s interest in football (which under normal conditions would have to grow to become cursory) is restricted to what it’s doing to our universities.

UD (as you know if you read this blog) calls football The Freak Show That Ate the American University.

As for football outside the university: UD recognizes that millions of Americans need regular, massive, violent, pissed to the gills spectacles. She’s had little to say about the NFL, the tax exempt non-profit organization to which the nation has given the job of mounting the spectacles. Similarly, she’s had little on this blog to say about NASCAR. If universities began fielding NASCAR teams, she’d begin talking about it.

That there is a world of blood-lust outside the university is unremarkable. That universities – outposts of civil reasoning – are sometimes little more than football camps is quite remarkable. The university, as institution, starts out so high that its transformation into a football camp represents a resounding fall into the gutter.

We all know the schools that have really let themselves go – Penn State, Rutgers, Alabama, University of North Carolina, University of Georgia, Auburn, University of Miami, etc. – and we all know the obvious stuff covered by journalists: systemic cheating, sometimes orchestrated by professors; systemic corruption by money; high rates of player crime; budget-busting payouts of fired coaches. This blog covers that stuff, but also tries to evoke the daily, on-the-ground scummy environment that football camp university students and professors endure.

I don’t mean simply, for instance, the humiliation of being threatened all the time by coaches and high ranking administrators who are angry with you because you don’t go to games, or because you leave games early. How many emails per day does a typical University of Alabama student get from the school’s enraged multimillionaire coach harassing her about her non-attendance? How bad is she willing to be made to feel because she is focused on university studies? How often must she be made to defend her preference for reading over watching steroid poppers break each others’ skulls?

I also mean the literal filth of the university football camp. I mean the University of Georgia’s long struggle with post-tailgate trash all over campus (trash that includes human waste). I mean North Carolina State’s similar problem, concisely expressed by a campus journalist: “[W]hen the students get drunk, they don’t really care what goes where.”

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Why are university students en masse refusing to go to football games? Everyone’s worried about it. Michigan State’s AD says it’s “embarrassing,” but he doesn’t think it’s embarrassing that a coach putting on shows no one wants to go to makes three million dollars a year. One sports writer calls the non-compliant University of Miami student fans “pathetic,” but he doesn’t ask himself whether rational people might prefer not to be identified with a pathetically corrupt program. Florida A&M is all upset that no one goes to their football games. Does it occur to them that people would prefer not to have to think about manslaughter when they see a marching band?

One thing you can say for American university football. It’s giving writers an opportunity to have their Martin Luther moment and make a huge deal out of having a conscience.

For here is yet another football (well, Michigan football) boycotter, a person eager to share with us her willingness to, in good conscience, put up with scummy Rick Rodriguez as coach of the team, but not Brady Hoke… Brady Hoke who is about to cost the University of Michigan even more millions to get rid of than Rodriguez, and Rodriguez cost it oodles of millions…

Yes, it’s all been a pretty spectacle – The multimillionaire coach keeping a concussed player in the game is just the latest classy move from a school increasingly indistinguishable from Auburn. Scroll through my University of Michigan posts over the last few years (start here) if you have the stomach for it.

(Oh – and the game the latest Here I Stand fan is boycotting? It’s against Rutgers. Rutgers! Talk about a scum cosmic convergence. Rutgers.)

Yet another determined cocksman takes over a university and kills it.

It all started with [Columbus State University] president Tim Mescon’s obsession with the school keeping pace with Kennesaw State, where he worked before coming to Columbus. Specifically, Mescon wanted to bring football and Division I status to Columbus State, just like Kennesaw State has done.

The Great Columbus/Kennesaw Contestation! Watch as one man’s obsession carries him and his school to Victory!

Adding sports did not boost enrollment.

In fact, campus enrollment has declined. Why? Online enrollment has become so popular that many “traditional” students are opting for it.

Online students do not have to pay athletics fees. So while the athletics department expenses have shot up due to adding sports, the revenue to fund them has decreased.

So just cut back on sports, right? That would be the logical answer. But the administration doesn’t want that.

GAAAAAAAH!!!   CHARGE!!!!

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Lalalalalalalala.

Here at University Diaries, we never tire of quoting that thing beloved of university football boosters: Give the sport more money because it’s the university’s front porch.

Too true. Every outlet from the New York Times on down today features astoundingly violent (coaches and players) Rutgers University, and you obviously can’t put a price on publicity like this. It’s one thing to become a national laughingstock because of your mad sadistic basketball coach (who can forget the SNL sketch?). You’re moving to a whole other level when you recruit a quarterback who a few nights ago allegedly inflicted permanent brain damage on someone. Someone he seems to have left to die on the streets. Someone currently fighting for his life.

The quarterback, who’s from Minnesota, was named “Minnesota’s Mr Football in 2011.” Too right.

… campus in the country to start doing some marketing. If you read through these posts about Rutgers, you’ll discover that the school subsidizes its athletics program to the tune of millions and millions of dollars, so the place should be receptive to revenue-generating ideas.

Now that their quarterback-to-be has been arrested for beating a guy possibly to death (the guy is still alive, but in critical condition, having apparently been kicked twice in the head while down, etc.), Rutgers, with its notoriously violent coaches and players, would be a fool not to take advantage of the cachet its name now carries.

What UD is getting at is that the school should market a muscle car, or boxing gloves, or some sort of weapon (not a gun, because the Ruger is a gun, and that sounds too much like Rutger), and call it The Rutger. The name Rutgers is at the moment synonymous in the public mind with brutality; if Rutgers wants to make money, it’s going to have to strike while the iron is hot. There’s always another school (feast your eyes) vying for most sports-related assaults, rapes… And though Rutgers has a little breathing room here, given the sheer volume of violent incidents it has maintained over the last couple of years, you can’t let your guard down.

Get behind the wheel of a Rutger and own the road, baby.

The remarkable synergy between the values of universities and the values of big-time football is there for all to see: Commitment to free, independent thought, to dissent, to reason over violence, to sober deliberation over intoxicated impulse, to academic seriousness leading to the completion of advanced degrees, to academic integrity, etc., etc. And nowhere is that synergy on clearer display these days than at Washington State University, whose athletic director has compiled an enemies list of people who aren’t “on board and believing in what we’re doing.” No bowl game tickets for those people. Dissenters have been placed on a no-tickets list.

The list is based on “a crimson-letter file of any particularly snarky emails that haven’t properly embraced the new way.” As another true believer – this one from Rutgers – writes in one of Scathing Online Schoolmarm‘s favorite pieces of prose:

Great organizations have culture, and culture only comes from a set of shared attitudes, goals, and values that every individual within that organization believes in.

It’s the ethos that’s made North Korea such a success, and you’ll find it at almost all of America’s great football schools too – get with the game or get fucked.

One local writer doesn’t quite get it:

This is inspired marketing for a program that’s had almost as many empty seats as occupied ones for its last two home games.

Most schools rank donors for ticket eligibility on a priority list.

The place that’s foisted a decade of bad football on its audience suddenly has a blacklist.

[The AD] means it when he says he has to change the culture. But who knew what he had in mind was vindictiveness?

No, no, no – it’s not vindictiveness. And it’s not a moronic marketing strategy. No, no, no.

You are looking at it the wrong way. The Democratic People’s Republic of Washington State University is a benevolent, misunderstood state. It seeks, via shunning, to educate dissenters so that they may join the glorious new way.

This is also what re-education camps are for, and UD is certain the AD has these in mind too. Otherwise it would look vindictive.

… UD rides into town to save his ass.

Barchi wants to hold on to two corporate money-for-nothing seats. Who wouldn’t? But as the leader of the state senate points out, they are both grotesquely obvious conflicts of interest. The corporations in question even do business with Rutgers.

Barchi would be an idiot to turn down hundreds of thousands of dollars of free money, yes. But his job, and whatever reputation Rutgers has left after its zillions of other scandals, are in peril. What to do? Hm, hm, hm…

So far, Rutgers hasn’t done much of anything. Barchi seems to think he can wait this one out, stonewall until everyone loses interest. UD isn’t sure this is a good move. UD can think of a better move.

Barchi can take for his model here the NCAA’s chief legal counsel, who warns that Ed O’Bannon’s class action lawsuit (details here) “threatens college sports as we know it.”

Take the high road, in other words. Go the dignity route. University presidents on corporate boards, university football and basketball – these are beautiful things, with venerable traditions… things we threaten at our peril… things that are simply the heart and soul of the great American university. When you threaten a president’s ability to double her compensation by attending biannual meetings with a biotech at the Regis Bora Bora, you threaten university life as we know it.

… violent and prevaricating coach , direct your attention away from Rutgers for a moment and take a look at the University of Alaska.

The larger picture for Alaska involves spectacular statewide corruption. Our two far-flung states – Alaska and Hawaii – are among America’s most filthy, and their substandard universities, and corrupt university sports programs, reflect that. Of course one of the reasons these programs can be so corrupt is that no one outside Hawaii and Alaska pays any attention. We look at big urban states like New Jersey.

But UA has its own sports scandal going, and it precisely echoes the Rutgers story. College Hockey News reports:

Former Alaska-Anchorage forward Mickey Spencer alleges that former coach Dave Shyiak hit a player with his stick during a practice in 2011, then told players to keep quiet about it. Spencer made his allegations in a letter written to the school president and Board of Regents, it was reported in the Anchorage Daily News.

According to the letter, Shyiak violently struck forward Nick Haddad during a drill because the coach got angry that Haddad didn’t stop in front of the net as instructed.

The Daily News obtained the letter. In it, Spencer said, “He tomahawked, lumber-jacked — whatever you want to call it — him across the thigh on his (hockey) pants. We knew this wasn’t a small deal, it’s kind of a big deal. I’ve seen a coach break a stick over a goalpost or the glass because he’s pissed about something, but I’ve never seen one take out his anger on a player.”

You can understand why Shyiak was frustrated; he had eight losing seasons in a row at UAA. Anyone would have attacked a player.

As at Rutgers, after the violent coach went, the UAA athletic director who oversaw the coach was also forced out. There’s a suggestion that the university didn’t take the players’ report of the coach’s violence seriously; there’s also the fact that the university announced nothing of all of this to the media. And now, for unknown reasons, the search for a new hockey coach has been called off.

UAA athletics is also, by the way, under NCAA investigation for an undisclosed something or other.

The Sarah Palin appointees making up this university’s regents have called a special meeting to discuss all of this. That should help.

Well, you’d expect a column called OutSports to get a bit miffed at Rutgers University’s psycho homophobe coach (watch this for scenes from the groves of contemporary academe). No one else seems to mind: The guy was suspended for three games and is now firmly back in his role as coach/mentor to teenagers.

A student of sadistic university coaches, UD finds Mike Rice’s technique intriguing, if a bit retrogressive. Unlike trailblazing Bobby Knight, he doesn’t throw chairs at his players; nor does he seem drawn to locking concussed students in sheds… Like Tommy Tuberville, Rice is a traditionalist, employing a mix of direct physical violence and verbal savagery.

Rice replace[d] Fred Hill, Jr. who resigned … following a lengthy separation process in the wake of a profanity-laced tirade at a university baseball game on April 1.

Hill had to resign, I guess, because he forgot to throw punches while calling his players cunts. Technique is everything.

Even so, Rice had better watch it. Somewhere out there is an ambitious basketball coach able to call his players cunts, punch their faces, and throw furniture.

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A basketball coach named Mike Rice
Treats his players not terribly nice.
“When their feet start to drag
They get punched and called fag.
Assault in defense of the game is no vice.”

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Update:

The airing of a videotape of Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice using gay slurs, shoving and grabbing his players and throwing balls at them in practice over the past three seasons has the university’s athletic director reconsidering his decision not to fire the coach.

Oh, come on! It was only his first two-year-long offense!