Graham Spanier, Holden Thorp, Gordon Gee, Donna Shalala, David Boren – As Chief Inspiration Officers of football factories, these leaders have taken whatever dignity the office of university president once had and run all the way downfield with it.

Rick Perry’s football factory – Texas A&M – has got itself a way-depraved chancellor who’s been out there boohooing over little Johnny Manziel and his drunken greedy ways. So the boy’s a lout — so what? Physical aggression, financial self-serving, and booze up the wazoo happen to be the values we cherish at this school, and Manziel’s three for three.

Er, none; and if you want to understand what’s going on at the University of Medicine and Dentistry New Jersey, at the University of Miami, or the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, you could do worse – as this commenter on a recent article has it – than think in terms of criminal syndicates.

People wonder why Colin McGinn, a philosophy professor accused of sexual harassment, opted to leave UM rather than fight. Well, some reports had it that President Shalala was in a rage and would make sure he was fired.

If this is true, it would make perfect sense in the context of UM’s years of criminal scandals. We are talking, at schools like UMDNJ, Chapel Hill and UM, about scandal-fatigue, about administrations that are saying stop. No more.

Basically McGinn has the misfortune of teaching at a school that can’t afford any more bad publicity. Its president is really pissed off. She didn’t sign on to be the butt of jokes, a permanent petitioner at the NCAA, a symbol of what’s worst in American universities. You come to her with some guy in philosophy who somebody says wrote some smutty remarks to a student and BOOM! That’s it. Donna’s had it. She explodes. All of her problems come from men. Men who beat up other men on the football field. Men who buy whores and cars for her athletes. Men who write smutty emails… Of course the irony is that of all the men beating up on Donna, McGinn is by far the most innocuous; in fact, he’s liable to be innocent of the charges. But McGinn has had the misfortune of being the last in line, the tipping point. Right now, Shalala is like Iran’s Revolutionary Guard: You whip out a cigarette and she’ll fucking blow you away.

Ah, Penn State. Took our eye off that ball for a bit.

Yeshiva University has been hogging the sex abuse limelight lately… But now that PSU’s most recent president, Graham Spanier, has sued Louis Freeh for libel, we must all pop our favorite antiemetic and swivel our attention back there.

UD doubts there’s an antiemetic strong enough for us to look at both campuses at once.

Weird bizarre shameless odd sad and insane are some of the adjectives the Bloomberg Business Week writer I quote in my headline uses in his piece as he tries to figure out why a once reasonably respectable man – a man now under criminal indictment for endangering the welfare of a child – launches an unwinnable lawsuit that can only bring greater disgrace to himself and the university that continues to employ him as a professor.

What can I say… It’s damnably difficult for people who’ve been university presidents, who have flown in (taxpayer-provided) private jets, and who have run massive sports empires, to think ill of themselves. Year after year they get spectacular evaluations from the trustees, who (at places like Penn State and Gordon Gee’s Ohio State) want caretakers who leave the coaches alone. Now suddenly just because some old fart coach got caught in the shower Spanier’s being attacked!

We’ve spent the last year watching several university presidents be destroyed by the sports programs on their campuses. Other presidents (Donna Shalala most notably) have been reduced to little more than NCAA petitioners. Yet UD doubts there’s one university president in America who thinks it can happen to him or her. Spanier’s nutty libel suit emerges out of the toxic, only-in-America combination of presidential grandeur and sports pimping.

No wonder America’s highest-profile student athletes are such campus heroes. Brain and brawn! Plus, these guys do what they have to do to win. At Donna Shalala’s AMAZING University of Miami, there’s yet another corruption scandal, with the baseball team caught up in the scummy world of steroids.

The University of Wisconsin has endured the taptaptap of bad news about one of its faculty for years, and for years it has closed its ears to it.

It’s our old friend Thomas Zdeblick, object of a federal investigation into his remarkably lucrative relationship with Medtronic.

Investigators … found that two papers Zdeblick co-authored were among 11 in which Medtronic employees, including those in the company’s marketing department, were secretly involved in drafting and editing, a practice known as ghostwriting.

Both papers were published in the Journal of Spinal Disorders & Techniques where Zdeblick has served as editor-in-chief since 2002. That role was the subject of a 2009 Journal Sentinel/MedPage Today investigation that found the journal frequently published favorable articles about Medtronic products under Zdeblick’s watch. The story noted that Zdeblick’s financial relationship with Medtronic was not disclosed by the journal.

Many more gory details here. The picture the investigation draws is one of rampant conflict of interest destructive of patient health and research integrity. An Emory professor to whom Medtronic gave $25.5 million protests that the money had absolutely no effect on the articles he wrote about its products.

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The Zdeblick scandal jumps to Reuters. Perhaps now, with the release of the Senate’s definitive report, this story will get the attention it deserves. The University of Wisconsin will no more respond to it than Donna Shalala’s University of Miami will face up to what it has in Charles Nemeroff. It will take international coverage of practices at schools like Wisconsin for the conflict of interest that corrupts academic medicine in the United States to change.

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Two of the featured Medtronic beneficiaries are at the University of Louisville.

University of Miami. President: Donna Shalala. Search her name on this blog and ask yourself: Why is this person still the president of a university?

She’s only just tamped down the Nevin Shapiro fiasco (thank God for Penn State!), and now here comes the Miller School of Medicine fiasco for University of Miami president Donna Shalala. Rather like big ol’ Larry Summers at Harvard with his interest-rate swaps and Allston expansions, Shalala’s all about thinking big and promising big and, you know, just going for it. Now she’s got a school hemorrhaging money as illustrious researchers like perennial UD favorite Charles Nemeroff receive millions in salary. Nemeroff’s BFF, Pascal J. Goldschmidt, Miller School honcho, must take most of the credit for this outcome.

Greed, ego – at Harvard or UM, you want to try to control these things.

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UD thanks Roy.

Look at the Pope over there in Vatican City taking a star turn in What the Butler Saw as his city state fails to “shed its reputation as a scandal plagued tax haven.”

Look at the big happy family of University of Texas scientists who just went ahead and gave the family a huge state grant, without bothering to check with the provost or anything.

And look at another huge bureaucracy, the place UD‘s father spent his entire scientific career: the National Institutes of Health. The NIH just went ahead and gave America’s own tête d’affiche pour conflit d’intérêts (Charles Nemeroff has been called poster boy for conflict of interest so many times, I thought I’d jazz it up by putting it in French) another big grant, since you want to encourage his sort of behavior… or whatever…

I mean, it’s about bureaucracies, isn’t it? In all three cases? You’ve got cronies and histories of you do me and I do you and all… Everybody’s in everybody else’s pocket…

But eventually, as in all three of these cases, things get so brazen that the media notices; and then, if the money involved comes from taxpayers, politicians get all het up about it. As in this what the fuck? letter from Senator Charles Grassley to NIH. Grassley sends a copy to the notorious Donna Shalala.

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More coverage of the nettlesome Nemeroff.

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The latest University of Miami scandal jumps to the Miami Herald. Shalala and Nemeroff are trying out the no comment option, but I don’t think it’s going to work.

Donna Shalala’s University of Miami certainly knows how to keep it coming. They know if you want your sports program to be number one on the disgust parade, things have to keep happening. We all know the history:

In 1994 there were allegations that Miami-based rapper Luther Campbell and former Miami players performing in the NFL were offering cash for big hits—50 bucks a fumble, 200 bucks an interception.

In May 1995 an NCAA investigation found that positive drug tests of various Hurricane players had been withheld by the football program a week before the January Orange Bowl. Later in 1995, the NCAA found Miami guilty of eight different categories of rules violations. Among them: excessive financial awards, Pell Grant fraud, pay-for-play payouts, and failure to follow its own drug-testing policy. In 2006 Miami football players were involved in two brawls, one with LSU in the Peach Bowl and the other during the regular season with Florida International, in which safety Anthony Reddick was said to have used his helmet as a weapon.

More recently, the Nevin Shapiro scandal wiped all other sports stories off the pages for weeks. And just yesterday some ex-football coach sued the school for mucho money.

Can you imagine how much all this shit is costing the school? I’m not talking reputation costs. UM went into the reputation toilet long ago. I’m talking dollars. How much of this university’s budget goes for sports pay-offs?

Presiding over thug-ridden sports teams.

Picking up other universities’ conflict of interest discards.

Sucking up to people currently in prison.

Taking big bucks to be on boards of trustees that compromise your position and your university.

Put it all together, it spells Donna Shalala’s University of Miami. After the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, America’s most corrupt university.

Big-time university athletics, in which, writes George Will, “a 109,901-seat entertainment venue [is] attached to an institution of higher education,” has become “impervious to reform.”

This being the case, our only option is to anticipate the myriad ways it’s trying to hurt us, and to defend ourselves against as many of these as we can.

For instance, University Diaries has attempted, over the years, to flag the off-field fraudsters who make football so exciting for schools like University of Miami — guys like Nevin Shapiro with big mouths and big cars and big luxury boxes and big money. Before these guys go to jail, they tend to be BFFs with the university president and the coaches and players etc. … After all, what is a university if not an institution established to honor assholes waving cashwads? Who can blame Donna Shalala for falling hard for Nevin Shapiro?

But UD says that if you’d rather try to see someone like Nevin coming, if you’d rather try to defend yourself against a class of people that accumulates like scum around your 100,000-seat arena, you should do what she does: Stay current on the scammers so that you can perceive patterns. Once you know the patterns, you can establish an early-warning system.

Yes, I have a brand new example for you.

Before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, natural gas broker Paul Lawing lived lavishly in big houses and flew in corporate jets to University of North Carolina basketball games.

Corporate jets to the game… and:

In October 2009, Lawing was placed on probation after pleading guilty to selling UNC and Atlantic Coast Conference basketball tickets for a total of more than $10,000 but not delivering them to the buyers.

That sort of thing.

… the core values of a university.”

As the nation slips into post-Happy Valley tristesse, people like the ex-president of the University of Michigan begin to tell the truth about big-time university football. Turns out football isn’t the university’s front porch. It’s the shower stalls out back. Plus, as this guy notes, big-time football is in fact an aggressor against the university, a predatory embodiment of anti-university attitudes and behaviors: Groupthink, authoritarianism, fanaticism, secrecy, brawn over brain.

As we slip, too, back into business as usual at university sports programs – the coach arrested for his third DUI and afterwards put right back to work coaching; a player only dismissed from a team after his fourth arrest – it’s good to recall that this campus activity is structurally corrupt, subject at all times to sex scandals, money scandals, crime scandals. When you consider all the elements in play in football – recruitment, staff salaries, tailgating, alcohol, the absurdity of the NCAA, academic cheating, a culture of secrecy, etc. – you know that Shalala’s Miami and Spanier’s Penn St. are chapters in a never-ending story.

[The people who run the BCS] have allowed their athletic programs to run completely amok. The two people who symbolize what the BCS stands for are, without question, Miami President Donna Shalala, who did everything but rename her school “Shapiro U” while currently jailed booster Nevin Shapiro was lavishing money on her and the one-time “U,” and, of course, Ohio State President Gordon Gee, whose two trademarks are his bow tie and his foot planted firmly inside his mouth.

It was Gee who made himself the Neville Chamberlain of college athletics last spring when he was asked if he would consider firing Jim Tressel as football coach and he replied with a straight face, “Fire him? I just hope he doesn’t fire me.”

The shame of it is that Tressel didn’t stay at Ohio State long enough to get around to firing Gee before Tressel left in disgrace. Of course, the NCAA, led by its top stooge, President Mark Emmert, has been so busy calling meetings and being shocked to learn that cheating is going on that it has yet to take any action against anyone — and will probably come down with a really hard wrist slap when the time finally comes.

John Feinstein, Washington Post

… without all the other unwelcome news stories swirling around the University of Miami. But with each event, the place looks more and more like a scandal-magnet.

… differences in rigor, value… even legitimacy… among university courses.

In response to Donna Shalala’s insistence that Miami’s athletes are academically on a par with Stanford’s, Politifact notes her dependence on APR scores for the football team.

The APR measures, as its title suggests, progress — not academic achievement; students get points for being academically eligible and staying in school. To the APR, a student-athlete who scores all C’s in music therapy would “look” the same as one who scores A’s in organic chemistry.

… Mark Nagel, a professor in sport management at the University of South Carolina, described the APR as a “public relations mechanism” created by the NCAA.

“What APR is telling you is that the students are remaining eligible and retained on campus,” Nagel said. “It is not telling you their majors, educational outcomes or what they are learning.”

… “It’s kind of shocking (Shalala) would consider APR to be a valid comparative measurement or the most important measure of academic achievement,” [another observer] said.