… when a bunch of people on the University of Kentucky football team were merely locking down the campus and calling out police helicopters because of their pellet gun play…

But these guys (three of them) were just getting started. After that, there was the bar fight. Then there was the Eastern Kentucky University assault after the bar fight.

At least UK has a classy basketball program.

Big time. No question. And not just the University of Kentucky administration:

… UK’s basketball and football teams and their boosters … are rich and powerful and prone to trouble. [The programs] bring in a lot of money, and some of it goes to academics. But not nearly enough.

Sports are fun and exciting diversions. But at UK, as at many universities, athletics has become the tail that wags the dog.

[UK’s] rabid fans … think the university exists to support a sports franchise, rather than the other way around.

Basically everyone at UK is way dedicated to football (plus basketball, natch). The school’s academic ranking shows it: 112 in 2007; 129 today. Rah.

Still… with the whole nation lately beginning to absent itself from university football games, UK is no exception.

I don’t get it.

The weather forecast for tomorrow [UK vs Vanderbilt; UK won] is gorgeous; lower level tickets can be purchased for $20; and Kentucky is expected to win its first SEC game since 2011. So what’s the problem?

Last year’s average attendance in Commonwealth Stadium was 59,742, roughly 8,000 more than what we’re currently looking at for tomorrow.

This writer warns darkly of “ramifications down the road,” and we know what that is. Expect that academic ranking number to improve if UK’s not careful…

Add to this the fact that the sport itself is so spectacularly grody that it is “referred to in the news and by late-night comedians as a national shame,” as one professor notes (read this Guardian article from which the quotation is taken only if you get a kick out of witnessing car wrecks) and a university almost exclusively devoted to sport has its work cut out for it.

Excellent writing about one of America’s most prominent university figures, the University of Kentucky’s John Calipari. A sample:

Anyone who follows college basketball sooner or later develops a kind of ethical dementia. The sport is a perfect example of a functioning underground economy. Players have skills that CBS—to name only the most prominent parasite—values at something over $1 billion a year. Because this is not Soviet Russia, players find ways to get paid for these skills under the table, largely because a preposterous rulebook (and a feast of fat things called the NCAA) works diligently to prevent anyone from getting paid over the table. Since everybody involved in the sport has known this for decades, there’s a lot of the old nudge-nudge, wink-wink going on.

… But even in this culture, which is pretty much what a dockside saloon in Singapore would be if it had shoe contracts and golf outings, John Calipari always has been notable for the baroque happenings that seem to surround his every move. Coaches who have barbered the rulebook like Edward Scissorhands look upon Calipari with a weird mixture of awe and disdain. When he was but a baby brigand in the employ of the University of Pittsburgh, Calipari’s recruiting tactics very nearly incited a general hooley at the Big East’s annual meeting.

During his brief, and clamorously unsuccessful, stint coaching the NBA’s New Jersey Nets, a job he landed because of that UMass Final Four run that doesn’t officially exist any more [it was vacated because of rule-breaking], Calipari enlivened things by calling a reporter a “Mexican idiot.” Then he moved on to Memphis, a university with a proud history of employing coaches whom you would not trust to hang up your coat.

Those southern sports factories… You can’t keep ’em down…

… when all we care about is our receivers. When your football team is your university, as is the case at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, you’ll accept anyone who can catch a ball well, and you’ll make up pretend classes for those people to get A’s in so they can remain eligible to catch balls for your sports factory.

This has been true, is still true, and will remain true at all of America’s big-time sports schools, and if you think a little academic scandal is going to change that, you’re a fool. The system can’t work if you only admit college-level students.

The high schools do their bit – America now has a rich and complex system of diploma mills feeding their staight-A grads to the sports factories. All the sports factories have to do is keep the mill going – fake classes, fake grades, piece of cake.

If, as at Chapel Hill, the system occasionally breaks down and reveals itself to the world… Well, point one, the world already knew and doesn’t care; and point two, there is no point two.

And if, in a class action suit against the NCAA’s refusal to pay athletes for the commercial use of their names, the athletes’ lawyers point out that the only justification for this refusal – universities are providing athletes with an education – is a total joke (see above)…. Well, the NCAA has lawyers too. I’m sure they can get around this somehow. Still, it’s fun to read stuff like this:

The athletes are using the [Chapel Hill] case to contest the NCAA’s claim that the athletes were getting a meaningful education in exchange for helping universities and the NCAA make millions of dollars from their exploits on the football field or basketball court.

This week, Mary Willingham, the UNC learning specialist who blew the whistle on the lecture-style classes that never met, was named as a witness for the attorneys representing current and former college athletes in a class-action suit against the NCAA. The lawsuit is commonly known as the O’Bannon case, after former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon. He sued after seeing his likeness being used in EA sports video games without being paid.

The case, nearly 5 years old, has a trial date in June. Michael Hausfeld, one of the attorneys representing the athletes, said Willingham’s experiences as a former learning specialist for the athletes’ support program, plus her research into the academic abilities of those athletes, make her a strong witness. She would counter the NCAA’s claims that athletes can be barred from being paid for their athletic efforts because the universities are providing them an education.

“The NCAA is arguing that it is necessary to impose restraints on the athletes because in doing so, it promotes the integration of academics and athletics,” Hausfeld said. “We think that’s patently false, and we have other statistics that demonstrate that very vividly. Mary adds a personal experience which further highlights the falsity of that representation.”

I mean WHOOOPS. You forgot the educate them part!

But then, who could blame you? Ain’t nothing around here that looks like a university.

The University of Kentucky distinguishes itself not merely in football and basketball. The federal Office of Research Integrity has singled out one of its highest-profile professors for a decade of research fraud.

Eric J. Smart, a former UK professor of pediatrics and physiology, pediatrics vice chair of research and the Barnstable-Brown chair in diabetes research … falsified data that was included in at least 10 published papers and numerous reports and applications.

… Among the falsified data … were five grant applications and three progress reports about nonexistent “knockout” mice, which have been genetically engineered to have at least one gene turned off, or “knocked out,” through a targeted mutation.

The ORI found many of Smart’s published findings to be falsified also. In more than 33 instances the office found Smart to be guilty of manipulating “western blots” — an analytic technique that allows scientists to find a specific protein in a sample of tissue — to falsify data in publications and reports in order to complete his research.

Vice chair of research! As with their coaches, UK really knows how to pick ’em.

Smart’s now teaching high school at the wonderfully named Bourbon High; but the county superintendent says Smart has assured her “there is no evidence to base their (the ORI’s) allegations on.” Whew! You wouldn’t want someone who’s been systematically lying about the results of medical research for over ten years teaching your kids.

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By the way, Scathing Online Schoolmarm will point out that the article about Smart in UK’s paper says his research has now been “censored.” I think they mean “censured.”

… that the New Yorker magazine used to have an amusing feature (maybe it still does?) called Block that Metaphor!, in which the editors printed excerpts from writing that featured mixed or excessive metaphors.

SOS considers the problem of excessive and awkward metaphors in a recent piece of writing by a North Carolina state senator denouncing the athletic/academic scandal at Chapel Hill. As always, her comments are set off from the main text. The senator’s writing is bolded.

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The UNC academic fraud scandal is like a pesky staph infection that just won’t go away for university officials — nor should it. As reporters at the Raleigh News and Observer continue to dig, they uncover more and more dirty little secrets. The latest problems swirl around a pus pocket called the Academic Support Program.

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Okay, so first things first: Figurative language is basically a good thing; it’s there to pep up your writing, make it more vivid. But the figures you choose should have some pertinence to the situation about which you’re writing; they should help us envision it, or think about it, more clearly, as in this famous opening paragraph from Orwell’s essay, “Down the Mine”:

Our civilization, pace Chesterton, is founded on coal, more completely than one realizes until one stops to think about it. The machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal. In the metabolism of the Western world the coal-miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the soil. He is a sort of caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is supported.

The caryatid image takes our mind to that paradigmatic location, the Acropolis. Orwell thus has us, from the outset, exactly where he wants us, equating the miners with the foundations of civilization. Thom Goolsby’s pus pocket does have a connection to his subject in that we often talk about corruption in the language of spreading sickness. The “cancer of corruption,” for instance, has become a cliche. But his elaborately evoked, way icky, somehow comical image is simply over the top, especially for an opening paragraph. It suggests an out of control anger about his topic that immediately diverts the reader’s attention from the subject at hand to the mentality of the writer.

Here’s a really extreme example of a bad comparison, from Morrissey:

“We all live in a murderous world, as the events in Norway have shown, with 97 dead. Though that is nothing compared to what happens in McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried [Chicken] every day.”

Of course Goolsby’s isn’t that grotesque, but it has that same feel of absurd incommensurability, an unfitness to the topic under discussion.

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For many years some football and basketball players, known to the University as “Special Admits,” were assisted by the Academic Support Program and allowed to take no-show classes in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies. Billed as lecture classes, the courses were offered by none other than the chairman of the department. The classes never met — leading one to wonder why the courses were scheduled at all.

Mary Willingham, a reading specialist at UNC, worked in the Academic Support Program. She told reporters she met numerous athletes who had never even read a book, nor did they know what a paragraph was. Willingham reported numerous instances of academic fraud, but no administrator wanted to hear from her. Why would they?

These student-athletes (the term “student” is used lightly here) played in the all-important category of revenue-producing sports. Such individuals are precious commodities at any major university because college sports programs bring in billions of dollars every year to the schools that maintain them. The money comes from many different places, including trademarks, endorsements, media revenues, postseason games and big money from alumni donors.

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This is okay, though the final sentence in the first paragraph would have more impact if Goolsby dropped the last part of it (“which leads one to wonder…”). Just end with “met.” It makes the point, and the finality on the monosyllabic word “met,” combined with the white space before the next paragraph, nails the idea of the nothingness of the courses. In the same way, drop Why would they? at the end of the next paragraph. When expressing rage and disgust, you want to be cool, collected — even cold. Hot rhetorical questions dissolve the sharp substantive language you want.

Wordiness in general – saying much more than you need to – is a problem in this essay. Drop the parenthetic the term ‘student’ is used lightly here. It’s much better simply to use the term – without quotation marks – and proceed. Trust the reader to understand the irony you’re bringing to it. And think of the other words better dropped to make this attack lean and mean: The writer uses the ugly, clunky word numerous (just says lots, or tons, or plenty, or many, — trim your syllables when possible) twice. The final paragraph here would be better if you dropped all-important (precious makes the point). Individuals, like numerous, is a multisyllabic, vague, and rather pretentious word. If the writer had combined his first two sentences, he wouldn’t have needed to come up with another word for players. His second sentence should have ended at billions (same principle as in the first sentence of this excerpt). Or, once having dropped that verbiage, the writer could have attached his final sentence to this one:

These student-athletes played revenue-producing sports, making them precious commodities able to bring in billions from trademarks, endorsements, media revenues, postseason games and big alumni donors.

Okay, back to metaphors.

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It’s the gladiators who bring crowds to the arena and it should surprise no one that schools will do whatever it takes to field the best possible team. What is shameful is the continued smokescreen produced by the UNC administration around this scandal. Academic fraud has prompted no less than four investigations at UNC. One is currently being led by former Governor Jim Martin. So far the governing body of college sports, the NCAA, has not sullied its hands in the most recent fraud revelations.

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Should be no fewer than.

You see what I mean by an excess of metaphor and simile? In this short paragraph, gladiators wrestle with smokescreens and dirty hands. It’s not that any particular image is bad; but jamming them together, one after another, has the reader’s mind dashing off in distracting directions.

In the next few paragraphs, SOS will highlight in red language that if dropped would make this a more powerful argument.

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Governor Martin’s investigation should provide clear answers and solutions for dealing with the scandal. So far, administrators are using the former Republican governor’s inquiry as a dodge to avoid any comments. When asked about the problem, Chancellor Holden Thorp refused [say refuses] to talk, stating that everyone was focused on the Governor’s investigation and that’s all he had to say.

Further, university officials repeatedly claim that FERPA does not allow them to discuss developments in the academic fraud case or release records to the public. FERPA is an acronym for the federal “Family Education Rights and Privacy Act.” [Put this information in a parenthesis after your first use of FERPA.] The University claims this law does not allow them [Find a way to avoid repeating these words.] to release records or face the loss of federal funding. A few documents were disclosed, providing strong evidence as to the extent of the scandal.

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Weak or odd metaphor, redundancy, and unnecessary words will now appear again.

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It is past time for a criminal investigation into these fraudulent activities. For far too long, academic scandals have been treated with the soft glove approach. The local district attorney’s office should begin an immediate criminal probe. If the DA does not wish to handle this matter, he should request that the Attorney General appoint a Special Prosecutor to handle this case.

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The word “criminal” appears twice; you can drop into these fraudulent activities and for far too long. Adding the word “approach” to “soft glove” weighs it down. Just write with a soft glove. End on your strongest word – and that’s glove, not approach.

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The reputation of the state’s flagship university is at stake and someone must take this matter seriously. [This is just blahblah at this point in the essay. Drop the whole thing, or risk looking like a blowhard politician.] Any prosecutor worth his salt would turn detectives loose on staff and administrators involved in the fraud and subsequent cover-up. If necessary, the General Assembly could consider legislation to make prosecuting this type of academic fraud easier.

Additionally, the UNC Board of Governors should seriously consider [Drop seriously consider; makes you look weaselly. If you think they should resign, say it forthrightly.] asking for the resignations of current UNC Trustees who failed to safeguard academic integrity. They have shown little willingness to get to the truth of this scandal and cure the infection. When UNC comes to the General Assembly for more funding, university officials should expect that legislators charged with representing the taxpayers will demand answers.

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He does circle back nicely at the end to infection, which gives the piece some coherence.

That scene from An Officer and a Gentleman captures what happens when a sports factory loses its assembly line — when all the investments and efficiencies fail and the place begins to shut down.

The University of Kentucky’s football team – the only game in town except for its basketball team, coached by the amazingly corrupt Calipari – is faltering, and customers are fleeing.

Recently, the University of Kentucky Athletics Department announced that season ticket sales for the 2012 UK Football team was down nearly 30% from last year’s totals. And, on top of that, roughly 2,000 unsold tickets were returned to the University of Louisville for the September 2 matchup. Needless to say, the apathy amongst the Big Blue faithful toward this year’s team is high. The question in most fans’ minds: How do we fix UK Football?

The writer is a fan. He proposes spending much more money on the team. The school just bought an incredibly expensive upgraded Adzillatron for the stadium, and there’s no doubt that UK will continue to spend every penny it has on sports. But what if all the money in the world can’t make the football team win? Meanwhile Calipari will probably play fewer and fewer games on the UK campus…

You see where this is going. Soon there will be no reason for the University of Kentucky to exist at all.

[T]he Penn State football program was sort of its own little fiefdom and people were aware to varying degrees of what was going on and … that never resulted in greater action until, you know, victims started coming forward.

… [F]or a long time now, there’s been a move, as football programs have gotten bigger, to sort of separate them from the university and when you bring in recruits to the university, you know, you say, this is where the students live, but this is where the football players live and this is where the football players eat and that sort of thing. And, you know, former players I’ve talked to at Penn State said you really could almost go through your whole career there hardly interacting with anybody who wasn’t part of the football program or part of your team.

That’s been a trend at a lot of universities, although I think Penn State to a greater extent. And, now, you’ve seen a lot of big programs sort of reeling that back and trying to reintegrate their football programs into the university as a whole.

Where is this happening? I can’t think of any campus where the trend is anything other than the exact opposite, with Kentucky’s John Calipari leading the way – he increasingly doesn’t even bother playing games on UK’s campus. Professional venues are much better than some dinky school arena.

No, the trend toward separation – or colonization of the university by the big sports teams – is obvious. There’s simply too much money involved in college football and basketball for things to go any other way.

A commenter at the Lexington Herald-Leader explains why it’s pointless for a local columnist to criticize the University of Kentucky basketball program.

But you’re a Kentucky fan, which means you’re much too far gone to give a shit.

Barnhart acknowledged that the [basketball ticket] increases could be considered ill-timed considering how Kentucky Coach John Calipari refused earlier this year to extend the series with Indiana on a home-and-home basis. That removed a potential game between top-five opponents from UK’s home schedule in 2012-13.

“I understand,” Barnhart said of any potential fan dissatisfaction. “There are some of those pieces that are difficult to reconcile.”

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Oh yeah. UK football sucks. The program is bleeding money.

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But at least Forbes ranks UK 427th best university in the nation!

UD always says that understanding the existential implications of, er, student-athletes would tax Jean-Paul.

A sports reporter grapples with it.

[The University of Kentucky’s] one-and-doners were finished being college students at the start of the SEC Tournament, or sooner.

Thus, it quacks like a fraud. It seems a lot like financial and academic fraud, systemic fraud, fraud by design and with a major university serving as the front.

… Sure, there are precedents. P.J. Carlesimo’s 1989 Seton Hall players, who lost to Michigan in the NCAA Final, simply went their individual ways after that game. No reason to return to school; their business at and for Seton Hall was done for the year, if not forever.

Heck, Andrew Gaze’s first day enrolled at Seton Hall was the first day of practice. Right after the Michigan game, he returned home to Australia. His one-and-done lasted from Day 1 of practice to the last game of the season. So long, mates!

If Seton Hall was in violation of anything — internally or by NCAA code — it wasn’t charged. Kentucky is apparently clean, too.

Being and nothingness. In big-time university sports, it’s hard to tell the difference.

Mike Bianchi, Orlando Sentinel.

[University of Central Florida] basketball coach Donnie Jones is being accused of using a convicted felon with ties to a sports agent as a conduit to funnel big-name recruits into his program.

Sadly, my first response when I read this story in The New York Times Saturday was this: Doesn’t everybody?

… At this point, it’s impossible to know if Jones is breaking the rules or simply pushing the envelope. And, frankly, when you look at the sad state of the NCAA, does it really matter?

Auburn, the national football champion, had a star player who somehow kept his eligibility and won the Heisman Trophy despite the fact that his father tried to sell his services for $180,000.

UConn, the national basketball champion, has a coach in Jim Calhoun who will be suspended for a grand total of three games next year despite the fact that the NCAA says he runs a cheating program that “fails to promote an atmosphere of compliance.”

John Calipari has been in charge of two different programs that had to vacate their Final Four appearances because of NCAA violations. He now holds the premier job in college basketball at Kentucky…

A local paper reviews the accomplishments of the departing president of the University of Kentucky.

UD comments in parenthesis.

Take Todd. Since his hiring, UK has had one of its longest stretches without an NCAA investigation. [What an achievement! What’s it been – more than a year?] But with UK sports, calm is a relative term. In just the past four years, Todd has had to manage uproars over basketball coach Tubby Smith’s departure, the hiring, firing and $3 million settlement for the next basketball coach, Billy Gillispie, and the hiring of John Calipari, which was shortly followed by news that his most recent Final Four appearance had to be vacated. Calipari was not sanctioned in the Memphis matter. [So we’re between NCAA investigations PLUS Calipari wasn’t sanctioned! Was Todd a great president, or what?]

Then there was the controversy over coal magnate Joe Craft’s organized donation of $7 million for the new Wildcat “Coal” Lodge, which led one of Kentucky’s most famous authors, Wendell Berry, to withdraw his papers from UK. [Ah hell who gives a shit about that.]

Most recently, Todd gave [the UK athletics director] a $125,000 raise on his annual base pay and extended his contract until 2019, which put Todd at odds with his own Board of Trustees in the last few months of his tenure.

More legacy at the link.

… opinion piece in the Lexington Herald-Leader. Tom Eblen writes an advertisement for the next president of the University of Kentucky:

… Many Kentuckians are suspicious of new ideas and averse to change. They avoid risk for fear of failure or criticism. Ignorance and powerful vested interests often combine to keep the status quo.

Your biggest distraction in this job will likely be UK’s basketball and football teams and their boosters. These programs are rich and powerful and prone to trouble. They bring in a lot of money, and some of it goes to academics. But not nearly enough.

… [A]t UK, as at many universities, athletics has become the tail that wags the dog.

… [Y]ou will face a sports scandal or several. You will constantly be at odds with rabid fans who think the university exists to support a sports franchise…

… is what professors at the University of Kentucky call the entire academic side of their university.

If you’ve read University Diaries for any time at all, you know UD has long argued that only prodigious bourbon intake can explain the way the school is run.

Now, UK goes from the valley to the Peek — Joe Peek, UK professor of finance and newly-elected faculty member on the university’s absurd board of trustees.

Peek talks all kinds of amazing shit. Here’s some of it:

At the June Board of Trustees meeting, the budget that was approved included another $6 million for Coldstream [Research Park]. …My understanding is that Coldstream was supposed to be profitable long ago, and UK has already invested over $11 million in it. …I have heard, but do not know for sure, that an evaluation of Coldstream is on the agenda. Why would UK give Coldstream more money and only afterwards evaluate it?

Is UK really number 129 [on the US News and World Report ranking]? … Facts [like this one] don’t cease to exist because UK administrators choose to ignore them. … We are supposed to be Kentucky’s flagship university; it is about time we start acting like it.

Readers’ comments on the article are also intriguing:

[UK] has been held captive by basketball for as I long as I can remember (5+ decades).

UK [:] excellence in pharmacy and basketball…

Lets work together to end UKs idiotic sports obsession…