… sings Cinderella; and this year’s Cinderella university story has got to be Rutgers, whose dream to be the Auburn University of the east is coming true, one day at a time. Rutgers has done it all, with amazing focus and commitment:

*** It has moved decisively toward shutting down the academic component of the university for the sake of athletics. The school’s athletic budget is massive; its academic more and more paltry. Eventually Rutgers as “teaching” and “research” “university” will be exclusively online.

*** It has hired and fired presidents with an eye toward greater and greater haplessness and indifference. Its trustees may be close to firing its latest leader, his function of taking the fall for the most recent string of athletic scandals having been fulfilled. Watch for Rutgers’ next presidential offer to go out to Nick Saban.

*** It has decided to retain its latest in a line of allegedly abusive and/or mendacious athletic officials. She and her rhetoric of integrity and triumph will stay; the letter protesting her cruelty as coach – signed by the entire volleyball team she once led – will be ignored.

These, and too many other strategies and initiatives to mention, are the outward manifestations of an American university determined to root out any scholarly residue, and just as determined to compete with Auburn, Texas Tech, Southern Methodist, Kentucky, and LSU for sports supremacy. A bold move, indeed, to go up against the southern powerhouses. But so far, Rutgers is doing everything right.

Have faith in your dream and someday
Your rainbow will come smiling through.

The nanny state once again tries to interfere with the free market – the Secretary of Education thinks there’s something wrong with both rogue and non-rogue big-time university sports programs. American public universities shouldn’t use mucho tax money to make Tubby Smith (soon, it’s rumored, to take his winning ways to Texas Tech!) rich as all get-out. Rick Pitino shouldn’t make $20,500 a day. And so forth.

It’s the exact same thing with so-called ‘insider trading,’ not to mention giving for-profit colleges a hard time. Government is the problem.

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UD thanks JND.

Tuberville (background here: scroll down) to lucky University of Cincinnati!

Tommy Tuberville will make $2.2 million next season at the University of Cincinnati… UC will pay up to $931,000 to buy out Tuberville’s Texas Tech contract.

… it can be a kind of a brain-twister, can’t it? If that one, who put a player with a concussion in a shed, got in trouble, shouldn’t this one, who slapped a junior coach so hard “his headset went flying,” get in trouble too? Or is a slap less serious than negligence? That shed bit? Hm. Hmm…

Even if the Big 12 isn’t interested in setting a proper example, […] then [Texas Tech] should. After all, they were quick to pass judgement on their last coach, Mike Leach, for allegedly putting a player in a shed when he had a concussion. Now they need to practice what they preach. Stay consistent. If that was enough for Leach to be canned, then this is surely enough for Tuberville to be.

… — by far —” has really hit the ground running.

But then when you hire Mike Leach you should expect your money to be paying for more than coaching. When you take on at vast expense a person just fired – because of allegations of player abuse – by Texas Tech, pain slut … Texas Tech, a school that never saw a sadist it didn’t like… You should probably expect a little roughing up in exchange for all that cash.

You should also expect Leach to sue your ass and everybody else’s. Even though he always loses. After costing you millions of dollars in legal fees.

Yes, Mike Leach was quite the hot prospect when Washington State eagerly took him on board and gave him all its money. How utterly unexpected that just after he’s begun coaching there a prominent player has left the school, charging abuse by Leach’s staff. How totally shocked Washington State will be when Leach’s lawsuits against it start coming in.

UD long ago failed to be amazed by the criminal stupidity of certain American football factories. She does continue to be amazed that no responsible adults – faculty, trustees – exist at those schools.

Really? UD spends quite a bit of time chronicling university coaches who hit people – players, staff – when they get angry. Those of us who follow campus football and basketball can easily reel off five or so names of coaches who keep getting fired because they’re verbally and/or physically abusive to students.

And hell, most of them come from the same school!

That would be good ol’ Texas Tech, a school so masochistic UD calls it America’s university as pain slut. The latest thing is that cameras have caught good ol’ Tommy Tuberville hitting one of his coaches. Like right out there sose everybody can see!

Farewell to the most famed member of our academic community.

[D]angerously myopic … self-aggrandizing … [a Mussolini] in wingtips …
“I’d wake up every day and be afraid,” [one of Billy Gillispie’s players] says… [A] lunatic who has them running the stadium steps, barking like a mad dog at the moonlight… Six months after being fired at Kentucky, he received his third DUI in a 10-year span.

Texas Tech. A community of scholars.

A commenter responds to Texas Tech coach Tommy Tuberville’s latest run-in with the law:

… Texas Tech head coach Tommy Tuberville has now been linked to two [fraud schemes] in the past year. Tuberville was listed as an investor in former Georgia coach Jim Donnan‘s “retail liquidation company”, GLC, which turned out to be a Ponzi scheme. Now, Tuberville is the subject of Huntsville Times report that lists him as the focal point of a fraud case involving an Auburn-based investment company.

What the commenter overlooks is that you can’t make TTU look bad, because TTU has been way, way worse than bad for years. Tuberville? Texas Tech recently announced that they’re raising his salary by $500,000. Good timing! He’s got a lot of investors to pay off! Plus attorneys to hire!

Texas Tech hired disgraced Attorney General Alberto Gonzales – paid him $100,000 to teach one course.

Texas Tech hired mad Mike Leach, then fired him when he allegedly concussed one too many players, and is now the object of an incredibly expensive lawsuit he filed against the school.

You don’t make sewers like TTU look bad.

——————-
UD thanks Dave.

[The University of] Texas [is] guaranteed an average $15 million a year for 20 years for letting ESPN build a channel around its sports.

… “I think we could ultimately end up with two conferences: one called ESPN and one called Fox,” Louisiana State University Chancellor Michael Martin joked at an Oct. 24 meeting of the Knight Commission.

Sports, and college football, matters to broadcasters because it draws a large audience to live programming, where viewers can’t skip advertisements with digital video recorders, according to a report by Barclays Capital analyst Anthony DiCelemente. That helps ESPN generate the highest earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of any Disney unit, at about $3.67 billion.

… Other schools’ anger at Texas is misplaced, said Mike Leach, a former Texas Tech University football coach. “Anyone upset with Texas is mostly rooted in jealousy,” he said. “These guys would walk on glass to make the same deal.”

Mike knows anger.

An editor at the Atlantic hesitates to join the crowd and call for the professionalization of college sports – paying players, dropping the whole goes to class thing, etc.

Why even keep the “student” in student-athlete? There’s really no reason players at a big program like Miami should take classes. After all, it’s not like they’re real students. They’re just football players, right? They’re pros. Aren’t they?

Ending amateurism sounds like a no-brainer. Maybe it is. But one inevitable consequence of it is that absolutely nothing would stand between college athletes and sleazy boosters like [Nevin] Shapiro. There’s something in me that hates that. Whether or not it’s rational or fair, there’s something in me that says we need a mechanism in place saying it’s not okay to take college players to strip clubs or buy them jewelry — just as something in me says, all evidence the contrary, it’s important for those players to be enrolled in classes.

Some thing… some je ne sais quoi… arrests this person on the verge of agreeing with everyone else that universities should house hundreds of people whose only function is to hurl their bodies around in ways that excite large numbers of people. Whose only reward is strippers who do the same thing. Some thing… some almost-forgotten, impossible-to-articulate inkling… some metaphysical scent has wafted to this person’s nostrils and whispered that it’s important for players to do something other than play for us when they’re at a college.

Something in this person “hates” “sleaze.” Strong words. But what’s really being said?

If you take the player out of the college altogether – if you place this person in the pros – the problem disappears. Which is kind of interesting. It suggests that the college as such represents a different world from … the world. The college seems to be a different world, with pressures of its own toward higher things, better and more serious ways of life. Remove the silently but powerfully remonstrating college from the totally familiar, totally unremarkable dissipation most people, given enough money, will want to live, and no problem.

No one cares, in other words, about the behavior of professional athletes (except when it’s really, really, really appalling) because we don’t expect anything different. People care about the behavior of university athletes — because they’re at universities. If the university has any distinction as a location – any distinction at all – it lies here, in its call to its students and faculty to think rather than instinctively act; to be serious rather than always be at play; to hate violence and to love reason; to prefer reflection to impulse.

To be sure, there are locations in America to whose name the word university is affixed – Auburn University, Texas Tech University – which we all recognize to be mere locations, quads in the sand, nothingness. Nothing but games and the scandals that accompany them. We don’t get upset about the scandals emanating from these locations. We barely cover them. If we cover them, it’s just to laugh at them.

But there are all these other places in our country, these universities, where we feel shame and sadness and confusion, where we feel, as the Atlantic editor writes, that it’s not okay when large numbers of well-organized, well-financed members of the university community dedicate themselves exclusively to games and greed.

Within this inchoate discomfort lies the beginning of personal and collective efforts to define university.

… Texas Tech, our nation’s raunchiest, most good old boy-ridden, sports factory. If you’ve got the stomach, type texas tech into my search engine and read all about it.

Or just consider the latest raunch: Upping the football coach’s salary “by $500,000 through 2015.”

The impoverished, salary-frozen faculty is upset – or at least some professors are upset…. I don’t think you get to be the national disgrace Texas Tech is without a lot of professors excited at the thought of debasing themselves for football.

… (Texas Tech, the University of New Mexico, Yeshiva University) are scandal magnets, always in the news for fuck-ups big and small.

Among the scandal magnets, the University of Miami has long been notable for its combination of sports violence and criminal associations. A blogger at the Miami New Times updates us:

The University of Miami sure has a problem with getting caught up with Ponzi schemers. First, high profile athletic booster Nevin Shapiro was busted for a scheme, and now the university is being sued for its involvement in the alleged Ponzi scheme run by Allen Stanford. The suit claims that UM kept nearly $6.4 million it received from Stanford’s company that it doesn’t deserve.

The provost of Texas Tech

suspects for-profit schools like the University of Phoenix are pilfering faculty from public universities to fill their ever-growing instructor ranks.

More specifically, he fears some of Tech’s 970-plus full-time faculty members are moonlighting for these schools as online course instructors, a practice Tech’s policies prohibit without his office’s consent…

Bob Smith can’t get Phoenix University to release the names of its faculty. He’s been hearing rumors that a number of Tech’s full-time, tenured professors earn extra money by running online courses for Phoenix.

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

Don’t you think it’s odd that Phoenix considers its faculty a state secret? What sort of university won’t tell us, or the people signing up for its degree, the names of the professors who teach there?

Robert Smith, provost at Texas Tech, says, in the Houston Chronicle, that professors at public universities are moonlighting at the for-profits.

… During a panel discussion on “For-Profit Education” at the July 2010 meeting of the Council on Academic Affairs of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) in Portland, Ore., the president of The Art Institute of Portland and the chief academic officer at the University of Phoenix (UP) were questioned about how many members of their faculties held full-time jobs at public institutions.

… [T]he UP official responded: “Oh, we hire a lot of your faculty,” meaning faculty members in the 188 public institutions represented by APLU.

A follow-up question revolved around measures UP does or does not take to determine if those same public institution employees have permission from their public employers to teach at UP, which has more than 450,000 students, with all but 100,000 taking courses online. The response: “We leave that up to the individual.” Finally, the UP official was asked whether UP would be willing to publish names and addresses of its faculty employees. His reply: “We’ll have to think about that.” [What sort of university doesn’t list its faculty members? In its catalogue?]

… Are the profits of UP and other for-profit institutions coming at the expense of taxpayers — federal and state – as well as parents and students paying tuition at public institutions?

This is a new one on UD, some extra-credit corruption in an already impressively corrupt industry.

No wonder that Cal State Bakersfield professor handling 700 online students in an intro math class had trouble getting many of them to pass the course. The same guy was probably handling 14,000 Phoenix students.

Texas Tech doesn’t need any more bad news. They’ve already got Mike Leach, Alberto Gonzales, and the Tornado of Ideas sculpture. Plus really drunk nasty tailgaters.

On the other hand, given all its trouble, the school is clearly becoming seasoned in the ways of disaster management. It has, for instance, taken down the web page of Rod Hicks, who has an endowed chair in the health sciences center, very quickly indeed.

It’s now trying to track Rod down, but although “TTUHSC asked Dr. Hicks to come home from Austin yesterday, … instead of coming home when planned he took a different flight. Our sources say the university was unable to locate him Friday.”

The Hicks embarrassment is very postmodern, very high-tech, very much about cutting-edge universities and faculties making use of the latest online teaching equipment.

KCBD reports:

… [Hicks] was instructing students this week from Austin via teleconference. We’re told that when the class ended, he left the video feed open. This is when students on the other side of the feed saw Hicks surfing for sexual material.

… We’ve learned through an open records request that Hicks was removed Thursday from his professorship of the endowed chair.

As of Friday afternoon, federal records do not show criminal charges of any kind but it is our understanding he may face civil and administrative penalties…

So he’s teaching via tv from Austin because whatever… Something better than his classroom in Lubbock is in Austin… It’s a summer class and maybe he’s summering in Austin… All he has to do is interrupt his surfing for an hour or so a couple of times a week to teach this class…

But that’s just the problem! When all of life is switching among screens (Hicks got his PhD online from Capella), it’s easy to forget that sometimes you’re not alone…