You name the scandal, one of America’s most Catholic educational institutions has a high-profile entry. Georgetown had more Varsity Blues bogus students than anyone else; its longtime tennis coach is just a plain old career criminal; a half dozen priests with Georgetown associations “have [recently] been credibly accused of sexually abusing minors.” It took ages and lots of pressure from students for it to revoke the honorary degree it gave to super-sexed Theodore McCarrick, a regular and adored presence in Georgetown’s chapels and classrooms. And so it goes.

And I mean yeah it really goes. Like every month. This month there’s the knotty little matter of one of its football players getting arrested for first degree murder.

Clearly the Jesuits running the school are weenies. A firm hand is needed, and UD recommends as next Georgetown president Pater Edmund Waldstein, a leader of the Adrian Vermeule-sponsored Cathophate-to-Come, who would not hesitate to burn people at the stake.

… having finally written a letter to that school’s president about their dirty sports programs (tennis, basketball, and particularly basketball), they would have done better to band together a few years ago and try everything to keep basketball player recruiter Kevin Broadus from being hired.

The New York Times refers to his time at SUNY Binghamton as the “scandal-ridden Kevin Broadus era.” Dude gets his own era and ever so serious Georgetown University not only scoops him up, but does a whole 1984 on his corrupt record and simply expunges it from his university About page!

Where do you think the sort of players who land your school in the scandal sheets come from? They come from recruiters like Broadus, whose apparent indifference to the danger some recruits might pose to the campus community was fully known to Georgetown when they hired him.

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PS: Don’t forget that Georgetown’s scandal plate runneth over: They are revoking Varsity Blues student degrees as well.

So far, in the wake of the college admissions scandal, that school has only had to deal with evil coaches and scummy parents… and, as of this morning, a lawsuit from the son of one of the scummy parents – a guy with real balls, if you ask me. He doesn’t want his fraudulently obtained degree to become meaningless when Georgetown expels him.

But listen up: For years G’town has been admitting all the teenybopper descendants of the crowned heads of Europe. Have you noticed? Town and Country has noticed. This short piece only brushes the tiara: they all go there, and … you know… you have to wonder…

I mean to say everyone’s going to start to wonder now, what with the larger scandal drawing attention to this particular campus. Royal pain a-comin’.

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UPDATE: Uh-oh.

But Elizabeth Kimmel, whose endless criminal prevarication has ruined her life and the lives of her children, merits it. The latest Varsity Blues parent to go to jail, Kimmel knew no bounds when it came to rigging bogus admission to hot schools for her dumb rich kids.

Or are they dumb? Her insane machinations condemn them to this judgment; and yet in the case of her daughter at least, a letter has surfaced that suggests otherwise. Kimmel’s lawyers of course described her throughout as motivated by pure philanthropy as she handed hundreds of thousands of dollars to corrupt, now also imprisoned, college coaches; but prosecutors had other ideas about her character.

‘In their pre-sentence memo, federal prosecutors disputed the Kimmel camp’s sunny view of the wealthy La Jollan’s charitable disposition, citing an e-mail authored by an unnamed Bishop’s faculty member. [Bishop is the high school the daughter attended.]

Days after [Kimmel’s] arrest in this case, a teacher at her children’s high school, unprompted, sent [Kimmel] the following e-mail:

“Attached is the college letter of recommendation I wrote for [your daughter] six years ago.

“‘Without a single reservation, I believed in her qualifications— her powerful intellect, her uncompromising sportsmanship, her sterling character — when you did not.

“‘Many of the faculty at Bishop’s — I could list ten off the top of my head — remember you as boorish, your treatment of us demeaning, insulting, unprincipled.

“‘But we loved your children and, in spite of their parents, always had their best interests at heart.

“’To that end, please forward my letter to [your daughter].”‘

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And, sad as it is to say this, given that letter about her, UD will add that Georgetown should rescind her degree.

Put his lucrative years of fraud and bribery down to advanced racket technique: A golden boy tennis coach at Georgetown University who taught the likes of the Obama kids, he recognized early that he could trade bogus athletic admission recommendations on behalf of the dim spawn of the super-rich and charge super-sums for the favor. Details here.

Hard to think of an easier way to earn millions than having your assistant write a note to the admit office insisting that the tennis team needs this one great high school grad on it! With that money, Ernst bought a Chevy Chase (a neighborhood just up the road from UD that gets even higher prestige points than UD‘s own ‘thesda) house practically next door to the house of a super-rich lobbyist where – fun fact – Les UDs spent an evening, long ago, in the company of Morton Kondracke and other denizens.

Ernst was just gonna brazen it out and keep hitting winners through his upcoming trial; but facing an array of witnesses who would no doubt add details to his scoring record, he decided to plead guilty and go to jail. Meanwhile, a serious investigation of ever-scandal-ridden Georgetown University needs to happen.

There’s a popular children’s book called Everyone Poops; UD has one in mind called Everyone Steals. Seriously, do you know anyone (yourself included) who hasn’t stolen? If I didn’t already know that almost everyone steals, sometimes at a high level, the keeping of this blog over many years has certainly drummed it into me.

And my focus hasn’t even been billionaires (“Whenever people say, “Oh he earned his money himself,” I always say the same thing: “No one earns a billion dollars. People earn $10 an hour; people steal a billion dollars.”), but rather universities and university people. Universities, where you might think rates of simple theft – much less systematic looting – might be less impressive than in corporate, for-profit, settings.

And I mean, for all I know they are. But I also know that alongside academic institutions historically laced with larceny (Yeshiva University; the University of Louisville; several others), there are zillions of institutions — especially those blessed with this nation’s biggest sports programs — thick with thieves. To really see the depth of embezzlement, though, look beyond the wowza money corruption of big-time school sports and consider the sweet li’l Varsity Blues scandal, full of people like the crisply outfitted tennis coach at Georgetown University, who in his pre-carceral days taught the Obama girls how to play. Relentlessly, over many years, with the help of various co-conspirators, he shook down parents desperate to get their dim spawn into Georgetown. Gordon Ernst made millions in this way.

Or like the soccer coach at UCLA who, with a years-long, mob-like persistence identical to the Georgetown tennis coach, charged rich desperadoes $100,000 a pop to sleaze their kids in. He explained to the judge that, you know, he bought a house he couldn’t afford.

I guess at classier, godlier, places, it’s … the tennis coach…

Now, when UD says ‘godly’ she doesn’t mean Libertine University’s Jerry Falwell Jr. I want you to rid your thoughts of President My Brothers in Christ Just Gave My Big Ol’ Dick Ten and a Half Million Dollars to Shrivel Up and Go Away. Jerry’s debauchery has ruled the airwaves for the last couple of weeks; but today I want you to turn your attention to Georgetown University’s Gordon Ernst [scroll down], a truly committed professional long-term larcenist who somehow for over a decade was allowed to swan along the courts of Georgetown impersonating an upscale (gave the Obama kids lessons) tennis coach while fraudulently admitting any kid whose parents gave him two hundred thousand dollars. His wife seems to have been his accomplice and everything… And not one of the Jesuit bros suspected a thing?

The dude just got hit with more charges today – if his criminal enterprise hadn’t been shut down, half of Georgetown’s current student body would be made up of bad tennis players with billionaire forebearers – and it’s clear from descriptions of his MO that if you didn’t fully pay up he came after you. Ask Amin Khoury about that pesky $20,000 Gordie was owed.

I mean, Georgetown really needs to sit down and ask itself why it’s so corrupt, with all its Catholic airs. Something’s deeply wrong with a flamboyantly religious school which long harbored – knowingly? unknowingly? both options are bad – so flamboyantly criminal a person. Throw in Georgetown’s difficulty breaking relations with a whole host of priestly sexual criminals on and around campus, and it makes UD wonder whether she truly wants to live in Adrian Vermeule’s Cathophate.

UD‘s been telling you and telling you that most online classes are trash, trash, trash. Easy to cheat in SO many ways. You can of course pay someone to take them for you. If you do take them, you pretty much learn nothing. It’s a big ol’ ripoff, but no one cares. Students obviously love them; universities make bundles off of them at very small cost. It’s win/win/win/win/win! — if you’re a cynical nihilist, which I guess a lot of people are.

The shabby absurdity of online reveals itself, most recently and most amusingly, in the latest chapter of the endless college admissions scam, which is rapidly filling America’s luxury lockups with our wealthiest amoralists. Karen Littlefair (there’s something wonderfully eighteenth-century-drama about that last name) bought her Georgetown University son out of the bother of actually taking courses by handing Rick Singer thousands of dollars to hire someone to pretend to be the little shit.

Littlefair paid Singer’s college counseling business, known as “The Key,” to have an employee complete online classes in her son’s name, the criminal information states. She ultimately paid Singer’s company about $9,000 in exchange for an employee taking four classes, and Littlefair’s son graduated from Georgetown in May 2018, prosecutors said.

It’s seems so … little fair that sonny boy could be said to have… graduated from Georgetown, a university far too busy dealing with its naughty basketball team, a lawsuit from another Varsity Blues bogus degree holder (Georgetown revoked the degree, but the dude sees no reason why he shouldn’t hit them up with a zillion dollar lawsuit to get it back; and UD is certain wee fair Littlefair Jr. will feel the same way) , fallout from their AMAZING tennis coach, Gordie Ernst, and – UD predicts – their royal-heads-of-Europe scandal) to worry about the legitimacy of some scamster pipsqueak’s degree… But it gets better. I promised some laughs.

One of the classes required video conferences with the professor. Littlefair wrote that her son would be out of the country and that Singer’s employee “should have a stand in for [my son] that is highly briefed.” The Key associate confirmed she would “take care of the meeting” if the son was unavailable by using a “fellow male colleague” to stand in for Littlefair’s son, the documents state.

Littlefair also sent an email asking Singer to do “one more online course” in spring 2018 for credit at Georgetown, and the Key associate then secretly took an online class in her son’s name offered by Arizona State University. The credits were then sent to Georgetown and credited to Littlefair’s son on his academic transcript, the court documents say, helping him graduate.

In April 2018, Singer’s company sent her an invoice for $3,000. She responded that she thought she’d be given a “discount” because the “grade [Key associate 1 earned] was a C and the experience was a nightmare!” according to the criminal information.

Singer replied that he would not discount the invoice because the “process was a nightmare for all.”

Those fucking online courses! Their pathetic efforts to insure that highly paid fakes aren’t taking them for scuzzy people otherwise engaged overseas make them a nightmare for all. And… mes petites! … You gotta admit that when it comes to Thrifty Little Mama Littlefair… Well, allow me to quote Albee’s George: There isn’t an abomination award going that she hasn’t won.

For the next four months, Inmate Littlefair will follow in the footsteps of Martha Stewart and shed sweetness and light upon the meth heads in the next cell.

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UPDATE: “[Georgetown officials] are now implementing measures to prevent cheating and plagiarism in online courses…” Good luck with that, Jesuit fathers! Why do you think there’s a nationwide industry in online college scams like this one? Tell me how you’re going to prevent cheating and plagiarism? Do you realize that not only students taking online courses, but people hired to give them, cheat? It’s just as easy for some disembodied entity, hired by some school to present a series of screens to students, to fake her identity, ja? Pocket the money – give ten percent of it to some high school grad drudge who’ll actually handle 200 online humanoids for you – and head for Cozumel.

I’m telling you, the whole thing’s trashy. Ask Arizona State University, which specializes in the con and happily passed along one of Littlefair’s bogus courses to Georgetown.

But although it’s a national scandal, it’s far too useful and lucrative for schools and students to give up the racket. Entire football and basketball rosters would be gutted if it weren’t for bogus online courses! Instead, universities will implement all sorts of expensive, real free-thought-enhancing security measures: Mandatory fingerprinting; pinchy devices on the fingers to check your pulse or sweat glands or something … And please stick your head in this facial recognition machine, after which Mr Ness from the FBI wants to ask you a few questions. Breathalyzer, sperm sample, and inner-cheek swab go here.

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UPDATE on the Big Daddies of online education, which most universities emulate in their own online programs: the for-profit companies:

“People just laugh in my face.”

First in thy wisdom you granted our Georgetown University Jesuit community a tennis coach who bribedeth rich parents over lo! many years for many millions of dollars and draggedeth our name into the mud. Then you sent us Kevin Broadus, a basketball coach, who had fully demonstratedeth his – O Lord – troubling recruiting policy at SUNY Binghamton but thou sentest him to us anyway. It was thy will, and thy will be done.

And now as we enter the Christmas season, amid annual singalong Messiahs and other forms of fervent prayer, we can only watch in despair – but undaunted faith – as three more hotly recruited basketball players rob and threaten students who perhaps came to our school because they are actually serious Catholics.

But what can we do, O Lord? “Despite being served … restraining orders last month, the three men played in Georgetown’s Saturday game against the University of North Carolina.” We can only follow thy will, which is that these three men continue to play basketball for us. Surely in the fullness of time your… sporting… intentions for us will be revealed.

The rich-shits-cheating-and-buying-their-kids’-way-into-good-colleges story is old news by now; but turns out it’s the gift that keeps on giving.

[Parents from high schools with large numbers of cheaters] were concerned that colleges would start banning all kids from the tainted high schools as a matter of principle.

It did not help matters when a boy [from one of the most notorious cheater schools] who had been rejected from Georgetown emailed [that school] to say he had been accepted to Harvard and wrote: ‘Fuck you. I’m going to Harvard.’ 

Vanderbilt’s immune system worked: Scammers were unable to find anyone to bribe in order to admit the rancid rich.

Fact is, not all American universities are criminal in this way. Yale and University of Southern California certainly are: Both seem to offer multiple avenues of corrupt access. But there are other Vanderbilts out there, schools that avoid, among other things, hiring greedy shits to coach their students. (Along those lines: Did the University of Rhode Island not know why its new tennis coach was fired at Georgetown? How could they have hired the dude?) As this big-time story evolves, I think we’ll see more and more universities touting their … well, their legitimacy.

For the record: The more you monetize these non-profit settings – the more you look like, say, Yeshiva University, which spawned Madoff, Merkin, Rennert, and Wilf, the more bad actors you’re incubating across the entire system. People get the message, people! Look at the University of Louisville with its high-profile, highly-paid, low-lifes, from athletics to the office of the presidency. What do you think other people at the university, pondering this cast of characters, are going to conclude?

Jared Kushner, Morris Esformes, Ralph Lauren’s kids, and millions of others (well, haha, not millions; only the very rich can buy elite college admissions for their kids) have been at it for years, and who knows why the DOJ decided today to make some noise about it… And they made a lot of noise – it’s all over the front pages! – cuz famous actresses and all are involved…

I mean, you knew, UD-reader — you already knew, right? — that what Philip Esformes did to get his uncoordinated dummy into U Penn via his amazing basketball skills is standard practice among a certain slice of this country’s obscenely well to do, ja? We are talking here after all about the cubs of some of America’s most powerful predators; you think they’re not going to use their money on the cubs’ behalf with the same scorched-earth aggression they used to accumulate the money in the first place?

And yes, UD is waiting with the same warm pleasurable anticipation you are for the secret recordings of these parents (full list, with adjuvant malefactors, here) as they open up about the vagaries of genetics… The kid’s a real flop and I have no idea why… It’s actually been an embarrassment in my career that I failed to produce even one above average child with any of my wives… See what you can do for her… I can pay the school or the coach or whatever up to ten million…

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So there are too many people being arrested at the moment to cover them all; let’s just focus on UD‘s close neighbor, Chevy Chase, Maryland’s own Gordie Ernst. (I actually had dinner, a few years ago, a few doors down from Ernst’s two million dollar house; the host was a big fancy lobbyist.) Let’s see what Gordie, then Georgetown University’s tennis coach, did.

[Ernst] designated at least 12 applicants as recruits for the Georgetown tennis team, including some who did not play tennis competitively, the indictment alleges. This assisted those applicants in their quest to gain admission to the school, according to the indictment.

The indictment alleges that on Aug. 19, 2015, [William] Singer instructed an applicant to send Ernst an email containing false information about their tennis ability. In fact, the applicant did not play competitive tennis. Ernst then forwarded the email to Georgetown’s admissions office “to confirm my usage of three spots,” or that the applicant would be part of his recruiting class.

In April of 2016 the parents of the applicant sent $400,000 to [a bogus] charitable account set up by Singer. Between Sept. 2015 and August of 2016, Ernst received checks totaling $700,000 from one of the charitable accounts.

Gordie made millions in this way, but UD understands his desperation. Here’s a long article about the tragedy of Georgetown’s outdoor courts being temporarily unavailable due to construction. This meant that Gordie couldn’t, for a year or two, run his summer tennis camps.

Ernst will also not be able to share in the revenue generated by the camp, which previously was an important financial source for the coach. Ernst said that losing the camps has been a “big financial hit” for him and his family.

Luckily, as fate would have it, at the very same time Gordie was pocketing millions of dollars by taking bribes to admit lots of unadmittable people to Georgetown!

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Georgetown University removed Gordon Ernst as tennis coach in December 2017, after an internal investigation found that he had violated university rules concerning admissions, said a spokeswoman, Meghan Dubyak.

HYUK! Guess nobody told University of Rhode Island, which hired Gordie right after Georgetown booted him! But then the Catholic Church is famous for… moving its… bad actors… around from… parish? to parish….

But what’s truly beautiful is the way Gordie spun his desperate end of the road move back to Rhode Island as a shimmering golden no-place-like-home local-boy-makes-good tale:

“We are thrilled to have Gordie Ernst join the URI Athletics Family as our new Head Women’s Tennis Coach,” [the URI AD] said. “Gordie is highly regarded in the tennis community and has had terrific success throughout his career. I really like the fact that he is a native Rhode Islander looking to continue his career back in his home state.”

And luckily, the AD might have added, no one needs to bribe their way into URI, so we’re safe.

Gordie weighed in too.

 Throughout my life as a student-athlete and coach, I have had the good fortune to meet many great people and travel the world. While this has been hugely fulfilling, my heart has always remained in Rhode Island. I was born and raised in Rhode Island, my mother is the ultimate Rhode Island sports mom and enthusiast. My late father left huge shoes for me to fill as an inductee into the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame.

I’m gonna bet dad’s gazing down from heaven right now, eyes aglimmer, saying You little shit. I told you to stop stealing.

… is a George Washington University senior who has not seen fit to take any of UD‘s classes. Probably it’s because his aesthetic preferences (Favorite film: Scarface) are a bit fast for UD.

She will pay homage to him anyway here, since he’s a smart guy, a remarkable athlete, and has an unusual personal story.

(UD, as you know if you read her with any regularity, likes to feature students at her university – and at other schools – who seem to her intriguing.)

The Georgetown men’s tennis team hosted the annual Georgetown Classic exhibition tournament this weekend…

GWU senior Yan Levinski emerged as the singles champion, defeating Penn junior Phil Law, 6-2, 6-1 in the title match. Levinski, who defeated Georgetown junior Michael Clarke, 6-0, 6-2 in the semis, did not lose a set in the tournament.

Levinski was born in Ukraine; his father, who went to Australia for graduate school and stayed there, is an engineer in the defense industry.

An Australian tennis page gives us more information about Levinski:

Yan was inspired to play tennis after watching Yevgeny Kafelnikov compete at the Kooyong Classic in Melbourne. He was eight at the time and later admired Marat Safin, because ‘he is really unpredictable and the chicks love him’. A stand-out competitor in Melbourne’s top state grade pennant competition, where in 2006 he represented Kooyong, Yan came to the attention of the wider tennis community at Australian Open 2006, where he reached the round of 16 at the Australian Open juniors… At primary school, he was a grand master at chess and lists among his hobbies driving fast cars… ‘I play tennis like it’s a chess game,’ he says. Yan loves the feel of new balls, new grip and fresh strings. ‘Brand new socks are phenomenal.’

Oh, and by the way. 4.0 GPA, Fall and Spring 2009.