The abundant nut cases – most lately Elise VOTE FRAUD YES!!! Stefanik – are rapidly being removed from positions of responsibility, leaving a gaping hole where rational conservatives are supposed to be. I worry about Mitt being spread thin.

This excellent question about the Smollett hoax right away reminded UD of another overdetermined hoax – a university one. And maybe in this overdetermined business there’s one small clue for us as we go about defending ourselves from hoaxers.

Seeking to destroy the faculty member who discovered his fraudulent credentials and research, West Virginia University epidemiology professor Anoop Shankar had an Indian friend go to this colleague’s office and …

“You Indians have nice brown skin,” [the colleague] allegedly said [to the student]. “But you smell weird with the spices that you use for cooking.”

Right about then the grey-haired professor supposedly pulled his chair closer and snatched at the young man’s penis.

[A second friend of Shankar’s, standing just outside the office,] claimed that from the hallway, he could then hear [the professor] rise from his chair and say loudly to [the young man], “Here, taste my white c–k.”

[The young man] said he fled rather than reciprocate and that [the professor] flew into a rage, his words echoing into the corridor: “I will destroy you!”

Allow UD to quote herself, starting with her post’s title:

PILING ON: THE SOCIOPATH’S UNDOING

When scripting these scenarios (one of the friends later confessed that Shankar had written and directed this drama), you need to be selective. Minimalism is more plausible than maximalism to most audiences. Deciding to throw in not merely an ethnic slur, but sexual harassment, and not merely sexual harassment but sexual assault, and not merely sexual assault but violent threat of retaliation, is just the sort of excess you’d expect from a sociopath.

Another example of piling on: The chief of staff at Upstate Medical College claimed

that he narrowly escaped a car bombing in Afghanistan… [that] he was hired by former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to work in the State Department, that he was in the White House when the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred in September 2001 and is close friends with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

1 University of Delaware
2 West Virginia University
3 Tulane University
4 Syracuse University
5 Bucknell University
6 Lehigh University
7 University of California – Santa Barbara
8 University of Wisconsin – Madison
9 Colgate University
10 University of Rhode Island

See, you think they’re all gonna be big dumb state schools with military industrial football programs. And that is certainly one category (West Virginia). But there are other categories:

WHEN IN ROME: Tulane, Wisconsin-Madison

MAROONED, NOTHING ELSE TO DO: Delaware, Colgate, Bucknell, Syracuse

LONG, CHERISHED, TRADITION OF ADMITTING MAINLY DRUNKEN ASSHOLE BULLIES: Rhode Island

FRATERNITIES R US: Lehigh

HIGH AS A KITE IN LALA LAND: UC Santa Barbara

Five Theta Tau brothers have anonymously filed a lawsuit against Syracuse University after offensive videos surfaced of a fraternity event.

The men accuse SU of “branding them as racist, anti-sematic [sic], sexist and hostile to people with disabilities”…

*************

UD thinks they must have meant aposematic.

Sematic: Chiefly Zoology. Serving as a signal, especially a warning. Compare “aposematic”. Now rare.

After each [university football] game, we see statistics: number of third-down conversions, yards gained rushing, interceptions and more. But no listing of injuries. There are always injuries. We see the player down who doesn’t rise; the trainers rush over, he is helped up or carried off. We know concussions abound; despite the protective gear, we sometimes see blood flowing. This week, legendary sportscaster Bob Costas said football may soon “collapse like a house of cards” because of one “fundamental fact. …This game destroys people’s brains.” He acknowledged that tackle football is most dangerous for youths under 20.

Why is there no injuries list for each team after each game? (I don’t favor exposing vulnerabilities opponents could exploit. Anonymized statistical reports suffice.) By not systematically reporting injuries as important information, the football world sanitizes its narrative, making the game seem less harmful than it is.

Samuel Gorovitz
Syracuse.com

… great big dirty world (quoting Randy Newman in this beautiful song). That’s why I’ve been posting somewhat less than usual.

But so what. I’m not blogging in order to share with you my distress that

globalization has allowed the capital and assets of the rich to travel more freely than those of everyone else. The result is rampant tax avoidance, labor offshoring and a class of elites that flies 35,000 feet over the problems of nations and their taxpayers. “The 1% can move anywhere they want and profit handsomely from the relocation,” says Peter Atwater, a behavioral economist. “But the 99% are left with the aftermath – the empty buildings of a deserted Detroit, the toxic waste from chemical plants in West Virginia or the unsustainable tax liabilities of Puerto Rico.”

Back in the mid-‘nineties, Christopher Lasch wrote a book whose title says it all: The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.

To an alarming extent the privileged classes – by an expansive definition, the top 20 percent – have made themselves independent not only of crumbling industrial cities but of public services in general. They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies by enrolling in company-supported plans, and hire private security guards…. In effect, they have removed themselves from the common life. It is not just that they see no point in paying for public services they no longer use. Many of them have ceased to think of themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America’s destiny for better or worse. Their ties to an international culture of work and leisure – of business entertainment, information, and ‘information retrieval’ – make many of them deeply indifferent to the prospect of American national decline.

Two decades later, it’s all much worse. Around $36 trillion has been taken from a world of suffering people. That’s almost as much as Harvard University’s endowment.

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And when UD thinks of little Delaware! Delaware, whose sweet flat little soybean fields she greets each summer on her way to Rehoboth Beach! Sweet flat little Delaware!

Mr Obama likes to cite Ugland House, a building in the Cayman Islands that is officially home to 18,000 companies, as the epitome of a rigged system. But Ugland House is not a patch on Delaware (population 917,092), which is home to 945,000 companies, many of which are dodgy shells.

Delaware, whose state tourism slogan, Endless Discoveries, is now Endless Justice Department Discoveries …

****************

No, no, she’s not blogging to burden you with her boohoohoo over this great big dirty world. She’s blogging to share magazine articles with titles like

ACADEMICALLY SKETCHY PROGRAM DEFEATS ACADEMICALLY SKETCHY PROGRAM, 83-66

She’s blogging to express admiration for the honesty about America’s universities that appears in this article:

To the NCAA, [academic fraud at the University of North Carolina is] a scandal, but to North Carolina and the athletes who took part, this was very obviously the right thing to do, a way of meeting scam requirements with scam action… By now, reasonable people see the NCAA’s insistence on the “college” side of college as a prerequisite for playing revenue sports as a mean-spirited scam — one bigger and more institutionalized than anything UNC is accused of doing. Academic fraud, in this case, is just what you call not keeping up appearances to the satisfaction of the people profiting off the scam….

The NCAA may well come down hard on North Carolina here, because that’s its role in this comic opera. UNC was playing their role to a T — the system as it is incentivizes exactly this behavior — until they went a little too far and made the “student-athlete” concept look the charade it is. In practice, the cheaters aren’t the programs that commit academic fraud. (Every major program does it to an extent, but one which keeps them from getting caught, which is what the NCAA prefers.) The cheaters are the programs that don’t even bother with the pretense that higher education is anything other than a cartel-imposed hoop to jump through.

Fuck the NCAA, and fuck anyone else who insists on forcing college upon kids who don’t want it just so their own paychecks can be bigger by dint of not paying the people who actually bring in the money. If UNC committed academic fraud, it was in the service of the reasonable, even noble, cause of letting athletes who wanted to do so focus on athletics. It’s merely an accident of history that college is in any way connected to amateur sports, and it’s time to start applauding the big-time programs that have found ways to take the academics out of college.

Damn straight. Whether it’s an international $36 trillion scam or a scam in the billions that’s turned some of our once-reputable universities into big fat jokes, we need to face up to it. We need to know absolutely everything we can about it. We need to be absolutely honest about it.

If we can’t do anything about it – and UD certainly thinks the trillion dollar one is unfixable – we need to figure out other ways to show the heavens slightly more just.

If we can do something about it – and we can definitely do something about the NCAA and the big-sport schools – we should fight. In particular, we should fight for the absolute decoupling of universities and big-money sports programs.

America’s FIFA.

Jalen Rose, on an ESPN podcast, said that such “bachelorette parties” are vital to the recruiting process. “As a 17-year-old, if I’m not getting (serviced), I’m not coming,” he said, pointing out that he visited UNLV, Syracuse and Michigan and “you know where I went (Michigan).”

How to approach the delicate topic of football culture and the gifts it has given the American university? It’s not merely the obvious stuff – the pointless stupid scary violence that scads of sports heroes like Richie Incognito bring to campus (idle Google Newsing turns up the latest helmet-bashing-in-the-campus-locker-room, this one at the University of Delaware, where last February another player “was charged with assaulting three other students at a party.”).

This violence has turned professors into police:

Days after the incident, [an Oregon State student who got beaten by team members] 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.

The violence is hard-wired, of course, into the coaching of both university football and basketball, so that on a routine basis latter-day Bobby Knights are filmed and parodied (start at 1:15). The coaches are quickly replaced, sometimes by women, who are symbolically part of the clean-up routine cuz you know women just want to mother the team and would never be violent…

In fact, let’s pause there and think about the incredibly important role of women in big-time university sports. I don’t mean merely as tools of recruitment (several schools attract players via, er, dates with carefully selected female students), and objects of rape, assault, and harassment (see, most recently, the Norwood Teague unpleasantness at the University of Minnesota). And I don’t mean merely the importance of trotting out mom, post-assault, on Good Morning America. (Or, as Matt Hayes puts it, “GMA’s utterly repulsive decision to allow De’Andre Johnson on television to apologize for punching a woman in the face.”)

I mean, think about Donna Shalala’s tenure as president of Miami University. Her main role was as cover for a team that got in big on-field brawls and whose best buddy was Nevin Shapiro. She was like the Good Morning America mom times a hundred. They kept wheeling Shalala out to apply the back of her hand to her naughty charges, and this routine actually worked for a while.

*****************

A local commentator asks incredulously where the University of Minnesota found the likes of Teague (the answer is that they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a search firm). “Were the other finalists Bill Cosby and Donald Sterling?”

Donald Sterling, Zygi (“bad faith and evil motive”) Wilf, these are the guys who give professional basketball and football such a great name… And, as the commentator suggests, there’s not a lot of discernible difference between professional and big-time university football. Even in the matter of violence, there’s the NFL…

In the N.F.L., … fits of violence hardly blacklist players chasing roster spots. The day after punching [Geno] Smith, [Ikemefuna] Enemkpali latched on with the Buffalo Bills, whose new coach, Rex Ryan, has created a haven for wayward players…

(What a sweet, Victorian, girly way of putting it! A haven for wayward players! Like Ikemefuna’s teammate, the aforementioned Richie Incognito! The way Jane Addams created a haven for wayward girls! SWEET.)

… and there’s college ball, where getting kicked out for violence means the same thing it meant for Ikemefuna – you just find another team.

All of which is why, as UD has often recommended, universities with big-time football need football coaches, not academics, as presidents. (See Jim Tressel.) In a pinch, a politician will do. You could also go with a figurehead, a Queen Elizabeth to Nick Saban’s prime minister. But you’ll keep getting stories like the one coming out of the University of Minnesota as long as you take some guy – some random polite reflective well-meaning university denizen – and hand him the management of what is essentially a professional football team.

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The petri dish for university football culture is the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Their new field design is all about Vegas. A sample headline:

UNLV REBELS WILL BE PLAYING FOOTBALL ON ONE BIG CRAPS TABLE IN 2015

“The team’s field and uniforms now reek of the Strip — it’s glitz, gold, gambling and most importantly, its promise of future fortunes.”

This is a team with one of the worst records in university football. An appalling record. Very few people show up to their games. Season tickets sold last year: 3,890. In response, the university decided to build a $900 million, 55,000 seat stadium with an Adzillatron spanning the length of the field. Although they’ve cut back on that original plan, they’ll surely come up with something like it. And they’ve got yet another miracle coach who’s going to shock everybody with the greatest comeback story this side of Elvis.

If this gross miscarriage of justice doesn’t require the concerted attention of our elected representatives, I don’t know what does. UD would like to know what the commenter quoted in my headline thinks is an important use of our government’s time. Here you’ve got one of our nation’s great men, a great coach, dragged through the mud by some rogue organization…

Representative Katko is worried that Syracuse University’s fate raises “serious concerns that the NCAA standards are not applied in a uniform fashion nationwide.” Since virtually all big-time sports programs do what SU does, UD agrees with the congressman; but he needs to think about the logistical problems involved in suspending or shutting down all of America’s competitive basketball and football programs. To say nothing of what this will do to national morale.

Either have a great basketball program or have a lousy one with great students. Give me the great program every time. [I] don’t care if our starting point guard got a D in anthropology. I don’t care if our center cheats on an English lit test. That’s on them. These guys are here because it’s a step on the way to pro ball. If they want to apply themselves in the classroom and get something more out of the college experience, that’s great but I don’t care about that either. These guys aren’t here to learn how to fix the world’s problems. They’re here to entertain the fans and bring money into the school via tv and ticket revenue, as well as raise the school’s profile to a segment of perspective attendees.

A lot of people will disagree with me and that’s fine but I feel like I’m being realistic and honest and they are not. Look into ANY D1 school with a fine tooth comb for 10 years and you’re going to find dirt. Only difference between SU and those other schools is that for some reason our school and our coach were the subject of long-term NCAA harassment and they were not.

From the comment thread on this article (UD thanks Alan for the link to the article).

Mi Chiamano Jimi

Yes, they call me Jimi,
but my true name is Mother Teresa.
My story is short.
A championship team
I embroider on campus.
I am happy happy and at peace
and my pastime
is to make friends at the YMCA.
I love all things
that have gentle sweet smells,
that speak of love, of spring,
of dreams and fanciful things,
those things that have poetic names …
Do you understand me?
They call me Jimi…
Buds in a vase…
Leaf and leaf I spy!
That gentle perfume of a flower!
But the flowers that I make,
Alas! Vacated.
Other than telling you about me, I know nothing.
I am only your martyr who comes out to make your school a champion.

Syracuse can still stubbornly cast its basketball coach, Jim Boeheim, as a martyr because college revenue sports embody the Lance Armstrong principle: Cheating is a universal expectation, so the crimes of individual cheaters don’t have as much impact. Armstrong, once the winningest cyclists of all time, broke the rules in a sport where the rules barely mattered. (In fact, from 1996 to 2010, every single Tour de France champion except Carlos Sastre had either tested positive for cheating, confessed to cheating or been suspended for cheating.)

Unless you understand the tao you can’t understand. And you can’t understand the tao.

[Costas] said that the bottom line for [university] higher-ups is that the consumers of football and basketball games generally prioritize athletic performance over academic success.

“If they found out that half the team was composed of illiterates, but the team went to the Rose Bowl or to the Final Four — they had that choice — or they had the choice of a competitive, entertaining team, but everyone was a legitimate student, most of the alums and most of the people in the stands would choose ‘A,'” Costas said.

 

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… Boeheim is still number one among the Syracuse faithful … [and] any mere university administrator [had better not] even think about removing Boeheim as head coach.

As with most major college coaches, Boeheim is virtually untouchable and clearly a more important figure on campus than the university president. Indeed, there are many presidential careers that have crashed and burned seeking to control powerful coaches and booster organizations.

… The scandals at Syracuse and North Carolina, the shadows over Duke, the many scandals of the past and future will not vanish. The only thing that ultimately will vanish is the integrity of American higher education.

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[The Syracuse scandal is about the ways in which] perfectly nice universities with wonderful faculty and illustrious alumni turn themselves into trash bins.

…Boeheim says he’s “not going anywhere.” The question is why that’s his decision, and not school President Kent Syverud’s. The simple answer is that no one has the authority to criticize Boeheim, much less fire him.

Presumably Syverud, who has been on the job for only a year, is not an unethical man, nor [University of Tennessee Chancellor Jimmy] Cheek an amoral one. Both have respected records. Syverud is a legal scholar, and Cheek an award-winner for teaching excellence in agriculture who has worked hard to lift Tennessee into rankings of the top 50 research universities. (Full disclosure: I have met Cheek and like him and have occasionally donated money to Tennessee women’s athletics.) But no lone tweedy president or chancellor has the clout to stand up to coaches and athletic directors backed by power bases of rich fanatical donors.

[W]hat (the NCAA) did to Jim Boeheim, I think has really been sad, and I think you’re going to see an appeal process by him. What about the millions he’s raised for cancer? I don’t want to hear it. I happen to be a big fan of Jim Boeheim as a human being and as a person.