He writes an opinion piece in the school newspaper protesting the destruction of the university by athletics.

You’d think newspapers at Auburn and Clemson and Georgia and Montana and all of the other American universities degraded by big-time sports would feature similar professors – committed, responsible people capable of tracking and analyzing the deterioration and writing about it. Hell, many of these people have tenure, a level of job security unimaginable to most people. But – as UD discussed in what seems to have become her most famous column – for a variety of reasons, they don’t say anything.

Rutgers is an exception. William C. Dowling – a Rutgers English professor – wrote a 2007 book about how sports has long undone, and continues to undo, Rutgers. And now, with things far, far worse than when Dowling’s book came out, an economics professor there – Mark Killingworth – has described the ongoing (and, old UD will guess, ultimately failed) effort to “clean up” after its athletics mess.

A New York Times article about Dowling was written in 2007, when things looked way cool at Rutgers athletics. The author writes that “the number of undergraduate applications has risen along with Rutgers’s sporting fortunes, as have annual donations to the university.”

Really? Here’s Killingworth, 2012:

[B]ig-time University athletics hasn’t attracted more first-year students with high SAT scores, and hasn’t raised our “yield” (percentage of accepted applicants who actually attend), relative to peer institutions. Our academic rankings are sliding steadily downwards, and for two years running, our enormous athletic subsidies have landed us in the Wall Street Journal’s “football grid of shame.” This isn’t “building the brand” — it’s making us a punchline.

What happened to all them big donations and big smart students?

See, this is something sports factories don’t want to parse for you, but getting more jerks to apply to your school because they want to get pissed and join the fun is not a good trend. The state of Massachusetts has set up the University of Massachusetts Amherst to take those students.

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Killingworth touches on the Rutgers board of trustees. He is far too kind, merely asking them to “rethink their priorities.” No. They are the people who killed Rutgers. Like Penn State’s trustees (UD predicts all or most of them will resign in the coming months) they should be booted. Instead of holding the university in their trust and working toward its benefit, they shat on it and created the absolute failure Killingworth describes. Out they go.

What’s that? What was that you said? Professor? Sandusky a professor?

Ask yourself: What’s the most powerful constituency on a university campus? It’s almost always the professors. When professors get together they are very powerful. Where were Penn State’s professors when… Well, whenever? Why didn’t that totally fucked by football school have at least one Thomas Palaima, one William Dowling, one faculty member who spoke out about how sick the place was? You don’t have to have known anything about Sandusky to know the school was a football whore.

But no. Not only did the Penn State professors – displaying real degeneracy, franchement – just look the other way as their school turned into a cult of personality. Not one of them opened their trap to say… I mean, you don’t even have to write an essay! Just say you’re embarrassed! Just complain to the school paper now and then!

For that matter, where are the professors now? Where’s the formal statement from the faculty about how horrible these events are, etc? Why did it take Louis Freeh to complain about the culture of sport at Penn State? What happened to the headline that should have said

PENN STATE PROFESSOR ATTACKS CULTURE OF SPORT ON CAMPUS

Where did that go? Or – even better:

PENN STATE PROFESSORS ATTACK CULTURE OF SPORT ON CAMPUS

Like most of Rutgers University’s almost 30,000 undergraduates, Matt Cordeiro has never put on shoulder pads and played football on a Saturday before a sea of scarlet-clad fans.

Yet Rutgers athletic teams cost him [and every other Rutgers student] almost $1,000 this year, the most among schools competing in the top category of college football. The total includes mandatory student fees and university funding of the money-losing sports program, both of which rose more than 40 percent in five years.

“You have money sucked out of academics and huge subsidies going to athletics,” said Mark Killingsworth, an economics professor. “You wonder what is this place. Are we a university or what? …”

… Rutgers does not intend to diminish its ambitions. Last year, the university explored joining the Atlantic Coast Conference, and on Thursday [AD Tim] Pernetti said that the Rutgers program was “priced to move in every way.”

… (which unfortunately also taught accounting to Gary Foster). It’s by Dave Matter, in the Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune:

Over the last five years, the Big East school has used more than $115 million to cover its athletic department’s spending. That’s almost twice as much as any other major conference athletic department received from its university coffers. And here’s where it gets ugly: State funding cuts have forced Rutgers to withhold $30 million in scheduled raises for its employees.

… Rutgers … is coming off a 4-8 football season and has the Big East’s highest-paid coach in Greg Schiano. At just over $2 million a year, he makes more than any public employee in the state of New Jersey…

An economics professor at Rutgers writes one of those opinion pieces in the local paper that generate volcanic fury on the part of local football fans and…

But wait. Scroll down to the comment thread for the piece! Maybe there’s hope.

Excerpts:

[T]he football program has been a bust: 59 wins and 62 losses since the hiring of the current multimillion-dollar coach.

… [B]etween 2004 and 2009, the last year for which records are available, the university poured a total of $32.3 million in student fees and $75.8 million in direct institutional support into the athletic program. As of 2008-09, student fees and direct support — in other words, subsidies — provided more than 40 percent of the total cost of the program.

… Two years ago, the university committed itself to yet another stadium renovation and expansion, spending $102 million to increase the football stadium’s capacity. Another $12.5 million went for renovation and expansion of the building that houses the football program. The stadium rarely sells out, raising serious questions about how the university will be able to pay for it.

It’s a pretty typical story, if you follow university sports the way UD does. Gruesomely-run state with way-past-dire economy features large public university run by jocksniffers. Pointless, cost-overrun new stadium, overpaid coaches, secret deals, academic mission shot to hell, blahblah.

But sometimes things get so shameless, so squalid, that a certain perverted integrity emerges. The people who run Rutgers will run it into the ground, and damned if anyone’s going to stop them.

It’s unseemly at best that as the Rutgers University Board of Governors was approving tuition and fee hikes this week, school officials were also exulting over a pair of large donations that will pay for a nearly $5 million luxury lounge for the new football stadium.

We know all the excuses. It’s free money. The wealthy donors — two of them — wanted the money used for this specific purpose. They have the right to attach whatever strings they want. And of course the lounge will be really nice and fancy and be a helpful recruiting tool for a program that aspires to greater glory, and since it’s all private money, who cares?

But here’s how officials could have — should have — responded to the donors. They should have graciously explained that given the current economic conditions and pressures it simply wouldn’t be appropriate to accept that much money for such a frivolous project. To pursue the lounge, some of the donated money would have to redirected to another worthy cause, either in academics or even to some of the more neglected sports. Some funds could even have gone to restoring the lost sports programs that a coalition of supporters is still fighting to bring back.

And if the donors refused, school officials could have politely declined the offer and moved on. Because that luxury lounge is hardly an urgent need, or a need at all.

… Let’s remember that the $100 [million]-plus expansion of the football stadium was a boondoggle from the beginning. After the football team threw together a couple of successful seasons officials started bending over backwards trying to grow the program. The expansion project was only part of it. The school also threw silly money at head football coach Greg Schiano, including secret, lucrative provisions that eventually prompted investigations and an overhaul of the entire athletic department…

… I mean… If you’re having trouble knowing where to laugh (there are many laugh-locations), UD will insert parenthetical LOLs to help you.

Ready?

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Oh right. I need to remind you that … well, let UD‘s pal Mark Killingsworth remind you. Read this.

Ok? Now are you ready? Here goes.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

It’s been another difficult week being a Rutgers football fan. Keith Sargeant of NJ Advance Media reported on Wednesday that starting safety K.J. Gray and reserve linebacker Brendan DeVera had been dismissed from the program. On Thursday night, Sargeant reported as many as eight players were currently under investigation for credit card fraud [LOL] by the Rutgers police department. Sargeant’s colleague, James Kratch, also reported that Gray was recently charged for an incident in June that included driving with an open container and possession of marijuana. Training camp is less than three weeks away from beginning and the Rutgers football team already has their backs against the wall this season. For fans, this Friday the 13th certainly feels like another horror film sequel.

Football coach Greg Schiano is well on his way to being hired again at Rutgers. Feast your eyes on his past there, and look forward to the fun Rutgers will have defending Penn State’s most blind, deaf, and dumb employee.

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His old buddy Jerry’s in the news again.

Put aside the question whether the academic joke, financial catastrophe (UD thanks John for the link), and criminal bacchanalia university football represents makes it a terrific fit with American higher education. Put aside the fact that multiple high schools are unable to field a team because so few guys (thanks for the link, Charlie) are stupid enough to take part. Put aside the ritual militarization of high school games, with fights and gunshots becoming a structural part of the fun. (As Ravi, one of my readers, puts it, we’re heading toward “open carry on the gridiron.”)

Look merely at one professional team, the Raiders, which recently boasted the Three Violent and Insane Stooges (all were rapidly suspended or dumped or whatever).

UD doesn’t get it. If you really want to watch an insane obese male lumber about destroying everything in his path, you’ve already got the President.

… and nobody came.

Poor Rutgers.

This was a couple of years ago. The student’s question went to the immense disparity in the president’s salary and various coaches’ salaries. Annoyed that the president blew off the student, Mr UD pressed the president on problems in the athletics program.

The president of the University of Maryland responded to Mr UD along these lines: There’s little I can do about the program, and the program can blow up at any time.

UD has always been rather astonished by the president’s honesty; because this of course is the fundamental truth of all big-time university sports programs. The jock school president – in the favorite words of the second-highest paid employee in the entire state of Maryland – is a pussy bitch and a bitch pussy and a pussy pussy and a bitch bitch pussy pussy pussy.

And the jock school’s big-time sports program can indeed blow up at any time. If you know even a little about how they’re run – and the people who run them – you know why these programs keep blowing up.

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Real men die for the University of Maryland football team, like 19-year-old Jordan McNair, who didn’t get much of a life, but at least lived it taunted as a pussy and tortured to death by a first-rate football power.

[S]ome number of Maryland football staff members probably belong in prison.

Which is to say that just as the university’s president anticipated, the program, having killed a player, has now blown up.

You need to go back to Rutgers’ celebrated basketball coach Mike Rice to get a sense of the sick sadism characteristic of the man we Maryland taxpayers each year pay $2.5 million. I mean, try reading through all of this without puking (puking by the way is something the UMD coach makes his players do … part of the school’s force-feed ’em til they’re monsters regime… ).

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A Deadspin report concludes:

One perfectly reasonable question is why Durkin, Court, and Robinson, at the very least, haven’t already been fired. Former Maryland football staff members say the current coaching environment of the program is intimidation-based; current and former players say these men routinely use intimidation and humiliation as motivational tactics; current and former players say they have a pattern of pushing teenagers past the point of complete physical exhaustion, in some cases to weed out and punish players they’ve targeted as unwanted. A pattern has been described that makes what happened to Jordan McNair a likelihood, if not an inevitability, but it says deeply troubling things about what Maryland’s athletic department deems as acceptable coaching behavior that Durkin’s tactics weren’t rejected long before now.

But we know why they weren’t rejected. It’s really not about “what Maryland’s athletic department deems as acceptable coaching behavior,” because Durkin and Court were after all hired at great expense to torture teenagers to the point where they can win football games. It’s about Maryland’s administration.

So look at what the president of the university said to Mr UD. He has no control over the program. His job is to resolutely look the other way, and to irritably say nothing to people who insist on questioning him about a program over which, officially at least, he has authority.

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It’s a mad mad mad mad world. Over in the shabby humanities buildings they’re committing seppuku if they fail even for a moment to use scrupulously sensitive, politically correct, language; in the sports palaces, they’re getting in front of 19-year-olds’ faces and spitting pussy and faggot and fucker and shit and bitch at them while making them run on a hot field until one of them actually dies from the abuse.

Far out.

But routine reality at many of America’s big-time sports universities.

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UPDATE: In response to another coach (Will Muschamp, South Carolina) passionately defending Durkin, since much of the reporting about his program is based on anonymous sources:

A player is dead, but Muschamp is more worried about attacking ESPN’s article and the staffer giving them information.

Glorious University of South Carolina.

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As usual, Deadspin has the most trenchant response to Muschamp.

It’s too good a last name for a murder mystery writer to pass up, and one Kennedy Killingsworth stars in a series by Betsy Brannon Green.

Meanwhile UD‘s buddy Mark Killingsworth, an entirely actual econ professor at Rutgers, continues his real world, who-did-in-Rutgers-University, investigation in a series of opinion pieces in the NJ Star-Ledger.

Here, though, the mystery merely lies in the numbers — as in, how does Rutgers lie about the athletics deficits that are doing it in? — not in the reason the numbers have added up over the years to a current $47.4 million.

You can of course list particular things that have happened at the school. A commenter on Mark’s piece nicely describes one part of the deal in this way:

[It’s the old] wash/rinse/repeat cycle. Hire expensive coaches. Give them extensions which are not warranted. Coaches under perform, teams are terrible, fire/buy them out and then repeat.

Or, in Mark’s words:

[A]thletics deficit spending makes bigger deficits and lots of embarrassments, including personnel decisions that led to four athletics directors in nine years, three football coaches in seven years and over $9 million in severance pay.

But as to the larger mystery: No mystery at all. Put a bunch of unsupervised guys together, give them funny money, and WHEEEEEEE…

Too much of nothing, or too much of less than nothing: However you slice it, intellectual life at your basic jockshop is, er, a bit off.

Courtesy of Charlie, a reader, there’s this local yokel update on Oklahoma University, long ruled by Gotta Love Em! David Boren, and absolutely drowning in sports revenue..

But now they’ve got a new president, and he seems to have decided that the next step is to move toward creating an actual university on the campus, where “OU is bleeding money while Sooner athletics swims in it.”

Bleeding how much, you ask? After all, the more successful the front porch of the American university, the more successful the university, and it doesn’t come more successful than OU’s athletic programs, so OU must be…

One billion dollars in debt.

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The yokel struggles with this. How can it be? His final line says it all:

We will wait and see what [this spectacular disparity] means, but it would seem to mean something.

I think we can do better than that. I think we can specify quite precisely what it means. It means OU is a football team with some sort of shabby deadbeat school attached to it somewhere. It means that, as a witty long-ago OU president once said of his school, “We want to build a university our football team can be proud of.”

But we don’t really want to, or at least David Boren didn’t want to. He wanted to soak his students for higher and higher tuition, and deny raises to his faculty, while paying top dollar – over the top – to coaches and their minions. Even as OU’s new president began making noises about how this wasn’t a great way to run a university, OU announced they’d just given the football coach a $1.7 million raise.

The only word for it is surrealistic: “[A]s the academic side of the institution finds itself in dire straits, Sooner sports sits pretty.” Academically, although OU designates itself a university, there’s no there there. The whole place is football. And if you think you can reverse that winning, nothing-but-football record, you’re nuts. The new president is about to discover what the word “culture” — make that cult – means.

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And then there’s also massively indebted Rutgers – though here the debt in question is athletics itself. Rutgers economics professor Mark Killingsworth, after immense efforts to uncover the actual numbers from a most unforthcoming university, concludes that

the real deficit for 2016-17 … comes to a total of $35.4 million plus $11.9 million, or $47.3 million — the largest deficit in the history of Rutgers athletics. Despite [President Robert] Barchi’s oft-expressed pious hopes for athletics self-sufficiency, the program has now blown through a grand total of $193.1 million in deficit spending since he arrived in New Brunswick.

Killingsworth concludes by stating the obvious – obvious to everyone but the president and trustees of Rutgers:

[A]thletics deficits take money that could have been spent on academics, and shamelessly raise fees and costs for students.

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Rich jockshop; poor jockshop. Don’t make no never mind.

UD‘s having trouble making sense of this story. Give her a moment.

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And here’s the obligatory I AM STUNNED TO DISCOVER THAT A (choose one from Column A)

FOOTBALL COACH

BASKETBALL COACH

ATHLETIC DIRECTOR

is a super-sanctimonious-Christian fraud! You never see that combination at our universities! You never see a noisy pious moral scold who turns out to be a greedy horny cheating little shit!

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Hearken, ye sinners! O list, ye lost ones!

The Hugh Freeze saga at Ole Miss haveth everything. It haveth the alleged recruiting violations, the former player on the holy draft night of 2016 who telleth of the cash payments, the aggrieved former coach (Houston Nutt), the disciples from the NCAA Committee on Infractions, the lawyers, the escort service, the “misdial” to the escort service, the suggestion from the athletic director that perhaps the “misdial” was part of a “pattern.”

It haveth the mingling of the gods on the fields and the gods in the sky.

“I don’t stand over them, make them do it,” coach Freeze sayeth of his players and his religion to Kent Babb of The Washington Post in 2014. “Certainly they hopefully see that it’s important to me and maybe the way I live and the way these other coaches live. Maybe it attracts them to it.”

The Twitter feed of the man from Independence, Miss., doth lineth with his Bible.

Here we seeeth the juxtaposition that will never stop astounding, the one that has breathed through the whole story of this most American of games since Rutgers playeth Princeton in 1869 and the legend goes that a witnessing professor hollereth: “You men will come to no Christian end!”

Here, a grubby game (and deliciously so) intersects with a peacocky purity.