It’s a distinction UGA works to maintain.
Apparently, head coaches need to worry about their bosses dipping their toes into legal hot water this time of year as well as their players.
According to the FOX affiliate in Atlanta, Georgia athletic director Damon Evans was arrested Wednesday night following a traffic stop and charged with DUI.
The station reports that Evans’ 2009 BMW was pulled over at 11:55 p.m. Wednesday. Evans was given a field sobriety test, and then later refused to take a breathalyzer test.
(It also apparently took police officers quite some time to set the camera up for Evans’ mug shot as the athletic director appears to have nodded off at some point during the process.)
Rescind her degree; denounce her; make it clear you will have nothing to do with her. The University of Georgia – long designated on this blog The Worst University in America (not all posts at this link are about the University of Georgia; scroll around a bit) – has drawn attention to its worstness again by having spawned this vile nut. Without at least a statement expressing its embarrassment that it allowed itself to be sullied by her, the school will forever be known as the place that awarded a degree to one of the most squalid minds America has ever thrown up.
A Potemkin Village is “a pretentiously showy or imposing façade intended to mask or divert attention from an embarrassing or shabby fact or condition.” The three Bloomberg writers who make this comparison – it appears in a long piece summarizing the ongoing national basketball scandal, which they call “the worst since college basketball players were caught shaving points for gamblers in the 1950s” – mean to suggest, I guess, that the glitzy University of Louisville basketball team masked whatever there was of the shabby non-basketball University of Louisville.
It’s quite a statement. Can we have gotten to the point where we’re not a tad astonished by it?
I mean, yes, one remembers the witty president of the University of Oklahoma back in the ‘fifties telling a senator he wanted to “build a university our football team can be proud of.” More recently, the president of Ohio State, “asked whether the school had considered firing embattled coach Jim Tressel, … said: ‘No. Are you kidding? Let me just be very clear. I’m just hopeful the coach doesn’t dismiss me.'” One has no trouble imagining how the puling little president of the University of Alabama feels about his stature vis-à-vis Nick Saban. And of course we know how the leadership of Penn State felt about that… curious couple, Sandusky and Paterno. Going to jail for them was a small price to pay.
Still…
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And does the analogy really work? For after all, as is the way with many big-time athletic programs, there was never a clear separation between the shabby embarrassing academic UL and the rich degenerate basketball UL. The squalor of college sports spreads itself all over the campus – literally, as in the way the University of Georgia campus for a long time looked the morning after big games; and figuratively, as in the establishment of a house of prostitution in a UL dorm for players, recruits, and the fathers of recruits.
It’s not really that you’ve got on the one hand the glitzy sports program and on the other the hidden humiliating university. The whole thing tends toward looking like the Calais Jungle.
… the worst university in America. Go ahead and type UNIVERSITY GEORGIA in my search engine. You’ll get a few hits for other Georgia universities, but mainly you’ll get one unbelievable UGA scandal after another. The board of trustees tried to take over the student newspaper because they haven’t heard about press freedom. A professor shtupped one of his students in front of other students. Sports teams are endlessly full of gun-toting miscreants. After tailgating, the campus is literally a pile of shit. The school has outrageous rates of student alcoholism.
The school is of course on this year’s top-ten party school list; it always makes the list, and often tops it.
The latest is that Jim Donnan, UGA’s amazingly compensated football coach (he recently left), is under federal indictment as a Ponzi schemer. Most of his victims seem to have been his fellow sports morons.
UGA. As ever, a class act.
… brings its best minds to bear on the most important problem in the world:
How can we continue tailgating jest the way we like it?
Recall that in recent years at the University of Georgia (Our Library: Your Pissoir) the drunken mayhem, and the filth left behind on campus after the mayhem, has gotten to to the point where the administration has begun to notice. Given how much money the school makes on tailgaters, it needs to strike a delicate balance between encouraging alcoholics to play on campus, and keeping library personnel, the day after, from finding oceans of piss in the entryways.
Here are some thoughts about the problem, from a comment thread to this article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
University Diaries long ago named it The Worst University in America.
Today it was named Top Party School in America.
The University of Georgia, in Athens, Georgia, beat out Ohio University, in Athens, Ohio, as the top party school — a ranking derived from questions about the use of alcohol and drugs, the amount of studying and the popularity of fraternities and sororities.
Reed College has the best teachers. And Reed was second in the nation for “study the most.” Interesting combination.
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UPDATE: Indeed let’s take a closer look at Reed College. Let’s look at three highly ranked (on Rate My Professors) teachers at the college ranked “best teachers.” Let’s see if we can discover traits they may share.
First, their names: Jerry Shurman, Mike Foat, Jamie Pommersheim. Shurman and Pommersheim teach math. Foat teaches religion.
Shurman’s RMP page.
Foat’s.
Pommersheim’s.
Read them, read them. Then get back to me….
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Okay. What did we discover? In no particular order, we discovered that
1.) Professors are weird. No surprise there. But it may be that really good professors are strikingly weird. Weird in the sense that they bring themselves into the classroom. Not that they talk endlessly about themselves, but that they are themselves. Not emotionally withdrawn. Not fake. Open. Vulnerable to being called weird. Human beings. Individuals. Students may like this in particular because at a young age, when students are tentatively working on becoming who they are, these professors — aside from teaching them — model a certain comfort in one’s own skin, an achieved identity. This can be quite inspirational.
2.) Good teachers assign a lot of work and expect class participation and general engagement. But since the teacher has excited the student’s interest in the subject, the student does not seem to resent the work. Indeed, the student may wish to impress the professor with her work, her enthusiasm, because she admires the professor and wishes the professor to admire her.
3.) The professor is not condescending.
4.) The professor has a sense of humor.
5.) The professor is very smart.
6.) The professor somehow manages to anticipate your confusions, your questions. From Shurman’s reviews: “His ability to know exactly what you are thinking and stumbling over is uncanny.”
(Note to online instructors: Don’t try this at home.)
7.) The professor’s enthusiasm for his subject is contagious, sometimes dangerously so. (“He hypnotized me into taking Attic Greek my freshman year, one of the dumbest mistakes of my academic career…”) It also broadens and deepens his lecture content. (“Says fascinating things about the structure and meaning of math in class.”)
8.) Enfin, it’s a pleasure. “His class was a real pleasure.”
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Is this a scientific sample? No. Does everyone love these guys? No. Are they teaching under optimal, small-seminar, selective college conditions? Yes.
Still. Don’t we all already know that these are the attributes of really good teachers? Doesn’t this result simply confirm what we know?
This Boston Globe opinion piece tells you the reason.
From the moment she clapped eyes on him at a Knight Commission gathering a few years ago, UD knew Michael Adams, president of the University of Georgia, would be the NCAA’s next president. Unlike Myles Brand, who entered the job with a sense of morality as well as a sense of what universities are (he started his career as a philosophy professor), UGA’s man is a backroom politician all the way down.
His departure from UGA will be good news for that university. Otherwise, it’s barf bag city.
SOS doffs her hat to the editorial staff of the University of Virginia newspaper. Their response to GQ having ranked the school 25th Douchiest is lovely.
And the comments! Even lovelier.
(The school University Diaries has dubbed the worst university in America, the University of Georgia, comes in 13th.)
… the worst university in America. Now a new book tells you why. In detail.
It was 2009, and UD was so disgusted by what he said that she transcribed the gist of it and put it on her blog. Here it is.
College athletics is today the healthiest I’ve ever seen it. Everything’s looking great. Everyone here should be celebrating the positive values of university sports. We’ve learned we can be the great success we are and at the same time we can govern ourselves. We don’t need to be governed by outsiders. We’ve made incredible progress on all fronts. Enthusiasm and excitement and participation and profit is at an all-time high. Yes, escalating salaries stress the system. Yes, we continue to be challenged with our expenses. But these things are out of our control. Every one of these expenditures is necessary. We live in a market society, and we have to respond to market conditions.
Curley was then athletic director at Penn State. Things were just peachy at Penn State, said Curley. Tomorrow Curley will try telling that to a judge. Peachy! Far as he knew.
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If you go to my original Knight Commission blog post, you will see that right after Curley spoke, Robert Zemsky gave him hell. This is what Zemsky, an historian, said:
Trying to describe the place of athletics in the larger context of higher education is like trying to describe a burnt-out desert. You see, this discussion today — it isn’t going anywhere. We came here to talk about cost-containment, and it isn’t going anywhere. And that’s because any sense of values is missing.
Since you people don’t have any values, you put the marketplace up as the only thing that matters. That’s why you’re not ever going to reform at all. You’re part of the general loss of aura, loss of particularity, at our universities in America. Football on your campus is just like the NFL, you say, and, see, you’re proud of it. So what makes you a college? Absolutely nothing.
Used to be universities were supposed to be like churches — separate, special places, dedicated to higher things. They’re not special anymore. They’re just like any other business. So why tenure? Why tax exemptions? Look at Harvard and places like that. University endowments aren’t charitable donations; they’re hedge funds. University presidents make million dollar salaries, just like other CEOs.
It all tears at the fabric of the specialness of the university. You’ve all helped make that happen. Since you’ve been in business, things have gotten a whole lot worse. The university athletics engine will certainly stop running. But it will never reform itself. It’ll just run out of gas.
UD knows why he was so scathing. Like UD, like anyone in that room with even a bit of brain activity, a bit of decency, something short of total cynical venality, he was angry, insulted, and, having been given the floor, he was going to use it.
After Zemsky spoke, the president of the worst university in America stood up.
I resent this negativity. Why, at the University of Georgia we’ve got a heck of a program…
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It was an event UD will never forget. Of course Zemsky was numerically overwhelmed by the jockmeisters. The Knight Commission is where the jockmeisters get jiggy, all team spirit and tommyrot. Those of us in attendance who cared about the rot rolled our eyes and groaned as Curley delivered his pep talk. We had been invited to witness the bright-eyed depravity of American university football and basketball, and here it was, in the aspect of this trim elegantly suited man with his Happy Valley patter.
Of course the crucial figure at this event was not this clown, but University of Georgia president Michael Adams. Here after all was an academic figure, the academic figure, the equivalent of Penn State’s president Graham Spanier — Spanier, who will also be doing a song and dance in front of a judge tomorrow. Adams – chief academic officer, gravitas-man, Big Think defender of the athletic status quo.
The school UD has for years and years called The Worst University in America is at it again.
The student editorial staff of the University of Georgia’s The Red & Black newspaper walked out Wednesday evening after a non-student was named editorial director with final say on all editorial content.
The Red & Black’s student editor-in-chief, Polina Marinova, along with other top student editors and staff members, walked out after Ed Morales, who had been the paper’s editorial adviser and then became editorial director, was given full editorial control of the newspaper.
“The students have lost control of the paper, and a student newspaper is supposed to be run by students,” Amanda Jones, design editor for The Red & Black, said in a phone interview. “We’re losing power while they are hiring permanent employees that are not students. We are losing control. At this point, every single top staffer walked out.”
In a post on RedandDead, a blog set up by Marinova, she said, “Recently, editors have felt pressure to assign stories they didn’t agree with, take ‘grip and grin’ photos and compromise the design of the paper.”
Morales “had no comment,” and why should he? Why should he talk to the press? Why should he talk to anyone? Have you ever heard of an editorial director, under crisis conditions, who would condescend to talk to anyone about it? No, no, no – grip and grin and bear it, kids! You decided to attend the worst university in America! What did you expect?
Did you expect better than this from a draft memo written by one of the new overseers of the newspaper?
In a draft outlining the “expectations of editorial director at The Red & Black,” a member of The Red & Black’s Board of Directors stated the newspaper needs a balance of good and bad. Under “Bad,” it says, “Content that catches people or organizations doing bad things. I guess this is ‘journalism.’ If in question, have more GOOD than BAD.”
You see the capital letters? You didn’t expect capital letters? You accepted Georgia’s offer of admission! I told you not to.
Scroll down for more of the draft memo. Note the combination of haughty condescension and borderline IQ.
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You know what your core problem is? The thing that’s going to keep the place a post-tailgate shithole?
Your president. Michael Adams makes Glenn Poshard look like Simone Weil.
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UD thanks David.
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The more of the draft memo you read, the more obvious the institutional dementia of the University of Georgia becomes. The place has really gone mad.
… is Southern Methodist University, which, despite its beyond-notorious sports past (people keep talking about its death penalty in relation to Penn State), seems determined to get right back up on that particular horse and ride itself into oblivion again. Their athletic deficit is over a hundred million dollars, and they just fired – in an act of obvious desperation – the swaggering bigmouth athletic director in charge of making that deficit much, much bigger.
Read the background here, if you can stomach it.
Like the University of Georgia (which UD has long designated the Worst University in America), SMU has a president who seems a wholly owned subsidiary of the NCAA, a jocko di tutti jocki who will do absolutely anything to get SMU back on track toward another death penalty, either via the NCAA or via institutional bankruptcy.
… the University of Georgia the worst university in America (scroll down). But the grotesquely violent University of Massachusetts Amherst – a sort of baccalaureate Beirut – certainly holds the number two position. Do they have gang-legacy admissions? UD wonders how they manage to score, every year, the biggest baddest bandits among the country’s undergraduate pool.
It’s not merely the drunken riots – a staple of many large state schools. It’s things like this – home invasion, assault, and robbery – that distinguish U Mass. How many universities boast groups of hardened criminals among their undergrads?
… our stupidest state (just as she has long called the University of Georgia the worst university in America). But Florida has always been a major stupidest state contender, and now their incoming Senate president has, I think, tipped things over so that, yes, Florida is the stupidest state.
University of Florida professor Mike Haridopolos (here’s his appropriately shady-looking faculty page) is an absolutely stunning idiot. His idiocy is as stunning as the sun right in your eyes at the tip of Key West at noon.
The faculty didn’t want him appointed, but it’s an old Southern tradition to put politicians – and their wives – in universities so they can pocket money and throw their weight around.
[Haridopolos was hired at the] University of Florida as a guest lecturer in their Department of Political Science at a starting salary of $75,000, nearly double the $40,000 average for the position. UF faculty and the Democratic Party of Florida cited his lack of academic credentials or input by faculty prior to his hiring, as well as perceived conflict between his obligations as a state senator and an employee of the university.
And now a course wouldn’t ya know it! The ol’ boy “failed to disclose on required state forms that he was paid thousands of dollars by the marketing arm of one of the state’s largest appliance retailers for two years.”
Haridopolos told state ethics investigators he didn’t read the directions for filling out a financial disclosure form in 2004, then repeated his mistakes year after year — assuming he was doing it correctly.
“And I feel pretty silly,” he said, according to files released Wednesday. “I mean, I’m a college professor and I didn’t do it right.”
HYUK! And Isa professor and everything!
“I think what I did is I didn’t read the directions that well to start, and I just kept doing the same things year in-year out,” Haridolopos told the investigator, adding he spent no more than an hour filling out the forms.
He also said that he hadn’t read the separate instruction sheet and overlooked the notice that a specific description of assets over $1,000 was required, along with the name and address of his creditors.