UD‘s friend Paul Thacker is now a contributor to Forbes, and his first article shifts our attention from the recent University of Miami football scandal to the ongoing University of Miami Charles Nemeroff scandal.

Nemeroff – arguably America’s most conflict-of-interest-compromised professor – left Emory University under a vast black misconduct cloud, and was immediately, enthusiastically, hired by Donna Shalala at the University of Miami.

Thacker wants to know why. “Why would [UM] … snatch up a physician with such a history?” Why would they ask him to be part of a proposed new ethics center?

Indeed, UM seems to have perceived Nemeroff, with his years of COI problems, as an ethical model. Almost on the same day Shalala announced new rigorous COI standards for faculty, she announced the hiring of Nemeroff. An astounded former faculty member wrote to her:

[H]is seeming lack of integrity in simultaneously accepting “consulting fees” from the very company (Glaxo) whose products were the basis of an NIH grant on which he was the [Primary Investigator] is absolutely outrageous… [H]ow can one reconcile [your recent statements about new ethics policies] with the immediately prior hiring of so questionable an individual to such a prominent position? Does the university not perceive that this may be seen as the worst sort of hypocrisy?

Of course Shalala now has far more dire ethical – and criminal – preoccupations… Still, it isn’t hard to see her bizarre handling of Nemeroff as a kind of precursor.

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Scathing local coverage begins. Paul’s piece only came out about an hour ago.

More hilarity from schlock jock school the University of North Carolina, where – with no doubt the same awareness Donna Shalala had of Nevin Shapiro – the university’s president has allowed an entire department to sink into depravity.

The chair of the department – now removed from his position (expect a lawsuit, UNC) – reportedly let a freshman in need of remedial help with his writing take one of the chair’s upper-level courses the summer before the freshman began at the university. Getting a jump on those pesky bogus courses! Bravo!

The chair also earns his close to $200,000 salary by overlooking plagiarism and stuff like that. Read all about it.

Big-time athletics makes a sick joke of academic integrity is an abstraction. It’s important to know the details of systemic sports corruption at some of our once-respectable universities. It almost always involves a group of academic insiders – especially professors – implementing a very conscious policy, in cooperation with the athletics department, of grade and course selling.

Selling? Yes. Think of the money these sports factories have on the line. There are very high rewards for professors willing to play ball.

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Background on the sports agent teaching a UNC course here.

More here.

The reporter who broke the story about the University of Miami and Nevin Shapiro says to NPR:

But the reality is the NCAA is comprised of – it’s the universities. It’s the institution. It’s the presidents. It’s the power conferences and the conference commissioners, and in some way, shape or form, it’s – there’s no getting around the fact that they are all in bed together. You’re asking a governing body to look over universities that essentially help to establish that governing body’s power in the first place.

So it’s a little bit of an awkward marriage between the people who are expected to enforce are also made up by individuals who at – you know, at some point in their lives typically had worked within university structures, and I think that’s sort of what creates a lot of the gray area that people tend to attack when they go after the NCAA.

That’s the important thing. That’s what makes all of the university sports scandals so particularly, so intensely, disgusting. The NCAA isn’t a bunch of jocks acting like jerks with whom academic leaders are in constant conflict… because, you know, jock/intellectual… they’re naturally at odds, etc. … No. The NCAA is American university presidents. They run the fucker.

Here’s the NCAA logo.

Here’s what it should be.

Look. If you can’t make that campus attractive to people (UD has seen its palm-lined splendor), you’re not much of a president. Shalala did accomplish this.

Her problem is that she did it indiscriminately. She just looked at anything that might tart up the place and went there: football, Nemeroff:

The former secretary of health and human services raised some eyebrows when Miami hired Charles Nemeroff, a star researcher who left a previous job at Emory during a conflict-of-interest scandal, to lead the medical school’s psychiatry program.

Shalala swung wild and wide. And struck out.

Some will argue that eliminating amateurism for college football means the “bad guys win.” In fact, the opposite is true. Eliminating amateurism will diminish the role of those boosters who have polluted the college game. Some will wonder what minor league football is doing on campus in the first place — I have wondered about that myself. Yet, the game has found an important entertainment role connected to academia, and the billion dollar television contracts prove it is a valuable commodity.

Huh?

You’d think a law professor might have a grasp of argumentation.

We should promote professional sports on college campuses because it’s entertaining? Broadcasting all student sexual activity on large screens throughout the campus would also be entertaining. Should we do it?

“Eliminating amateurism will diminish the role of those boosters who have polluted the college game.” Yes, and that is why professional basketball and football in American are so pure and unpolluted. It doesn’t seem to occur to Roger Abrams that there are manifold other sources of pollution.

And …connected to academia? Big time sports as currently played on American campuses not only have no connection at all to academia; they’re actively destructive of it.

I mean, what does Abrams have in mind by academia? Classroom buildings adjacent to stadiums? The appearance on a television screen, during a football game, of the name of a university?

And billion dollar tv contracts prove it’s a valuable commodity? Ask Donna Shalala, or any number of university presidents up to their asses in legal bills and bad publicity, how valuable a commodity it is. It’s precisely the outrageously big money that’s brought in all the scum and made university football and basketball lucrative but deadly to academia.

That is, again, if by academia you mean something other than buildings where administrators collect ticket and luxury suite and television proceeds. If on the other hand you’re okay with the Auburnization of our universities – if money and entertainment seem to you overriding ‘academia’ goals – if you think universities are money and entertainment centers above all (they will certainly become so under this regime, since no other activity on any campus can hope to compete with an immense high-profile billion dollar industry), then go with it. Go with it.

Here’s a big one; and one of her favorites: All her life she’s heard and read pragmatic reality-based broad-shouldered boots on the ground straight-talking university sports enthusiast types ridicule humanities types as pie in the sky dreamers, limp-wristed do-nothing childish emotional deluded obscurantists jabbering pointlessly away in empty jargon.

Yet from the moment, ten years ago, she began attending NCAA and NCAA-related conferences, and heard one speaker after another intone words like integrity and principle to complacent audiences, UD has recognized that these NCAA words have exactly the same value as words like (counter-) hegemonic, imbrication, and modalities among certain groupings of English professors.

Hollow abstractions prop up both groups as they struggle to maintain a sense not only that they are united, but that they are not marginal, not incorrect in their beliefs, and – in the case of the NCAA crowd – not corrupt.

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Of the two groups, which is the more pitiable? The more deluded? Foucauldian academics occasionally score a meaningful cultural intervention; their efforts to radicalize the academy have had an impact. The NCAA crowd is caught in the eternal recurrence of win/loss, with winning as meaningless as losing.

“[S]o many colleges have bent the rules in the great academic act of winning meaningless football and basketball games,” writes Buzz Bissinger of his initial reaction to the University of Miami story, “that it was hard for me to muster much excitement.”

It is not only the ultimate meaninglessness of their endeavor – a meaninglessness made more acute by its location within that most ardently meaning-generating institution, the university – that the NCAA crowd must shield itself from; it is its filth. Few people, beyond sociopaths like Bernard Madoff and Nevin Shapiro, want to think of themselves as corrupt, but hundreds of NCAA administrators and NCAA-governed coaches, university presidents, and players certainly know that they are corrupt, that they play important parts in a corrupt system, if only by looking the other way when coaches and agents and fans and players around them are corrupt.

Bissinger argues that Miami football is so corrupt that the program should be permanently killed, and Donna Shalala

should be hauled before Congress, where the allegations against Miami are 10 times more serious than all the steroid nonsense paraded about in Washington.

Once she has done her murky dance of denial, a grand jury should be convened. If it turns out she did know the outrageous conduct of booster Nevin Shapiro — such as filling virtually an entire hotel floor with prostitutes for Miami players to gorge on, like grapes — she should be charged with perjury.

But… eh. She knew and she didn’t know. You know? It’s what I’ve been saying. She kind of knows that the games are meaningless and the people running them are disgusting… but a palm-lined campus is such a beautiful thing lalalalala. Pitiable.

Cam Newton is such a beautiful thing. A $2.2 billion contract with ESPN is such a beautiful thing. Pitiable.

And today, as always, these pitiable deluded people are the talk of the town.

Matt Hayes, of Sporting News, correctly anticipates that stories about Donna Shalala’s professional football team bring the NCAA that much closer to extinction.

Why the hell should the multimillionaires running college football and basketball have to deal with some dipshit organization run by college presidents who put fine businessmen like John Junker out of business? Junker is our business, and the NCAA doesn’t seem to get that.

Sure, the organization is basically toothless; but it’s forced us to come up with all sorts of fake coursework for our team members… Sometimes it forces us to take important players off the field just when we need them… It takes our wins away… Shit like that…

Secession is the only way. Places like Auburn and Clemson and Miami and Alabama know exactly what they are, and they’ll thank us for finally allowing them to be what they are.

And don’t forget: With the NCAA and its financial penalties out of the way, there’s that much more to go around.

… Miami gets a bad rap as a university with no money. If that’s what you truly believe, take some time to go walk around the downtown medical campus. Start exploring and you’ll never feel like UM has a lack of funds ever again. The money is absolutely there; the only question is the willingness to spend it on athletics.

… PLEASE STOP thinking or insinuating that [President] Donna Shalala and [athletic director] Kirby [Hocutt] don’t want to win, or that they’d prefer to have a bunch of Rhodes Scholars who lose four or five games per year. That sentiment is beyond ridiculous. Both the president and athletic director want to win badly, but obviously want to do so the right way – with players going to class and not revisiting UM’s “Thug U” days.

When I think back to great UM teams, I don’t remember a bunch of guys getting arrested or failing out of school. Sure, there were some rough around the edges guys, but in all reality, no more than any other school.