New Mexico State’s Robert Carpenter pulled back his arm and delivered a powerful punch to the face of Liberty’s Shiloh Robinson, sending the forward to the floor, [breaking his nose,] and leading to an ejection during an Aggies overtime win.
The beauty of it is the coach initially said Carpenter’s a great guy and I’m sure he’s remorseful and maybe we’ll suspend him for a game or something… And then I dunno someone must have talked to the coach cuz now it’s oh he’s suspended indefinitely blah blah.
When wee UD studied at the Medill School of Journalism, we often discussed the qualities of a good lead sentence; in particular, you want to pack a lot of information in without creating a run-on feel to the thing.
The AP writer who had to pack all of the repulsive behavior at New Mexico State into her lead had quite a task, but she acquitted herself well, finding a place in one sentence for the guns thing AND the cock-grabbing thing. Actual shooters (of guns) among team members appear a little farther down in the article. When there’s this much material, you have to be selective.
**********
For the venerable history of this institution, go here.
How sensitively put… Wouldn’t want to bludgeon the end of the sentence with the blunt force sexual … Want to gentle things along with the delicate smidgeon in nature…
And yet…
What do you really want? Do you want a writer who waves her crumpet and says Well I declare! Multiple sources … [wink wink nudge nudge]…
Or do you want ol’ UD to spill the tea… er, beans? UD, who has for years been covering what guys do to guys in the locker room when broom comes to shove?
Ok. While of course UD did not have the pleasure of attending the New Mexico State University haze, she’s pretty sure three or four guys held down each victim (the event was probably witnessed by much of the team, and to make the police investigation a snap, some of the stupider players probably recorded it on their cell phones) and while he lay writhing and shrieking one of them shoved the end of a straw broom up his rectum.
That night, vomiting with rage and self-disgust, the victim(s) took his nightly call from his mother, who heard something funny in his voice, got him to confess he’d been anally raped, and when she got off the phone with him she and her husband called the university, a lawyer, the cops, and the local newspaper.
NMSU, a wholly vile and dysfunctional location, all of whose leadership is interim times ten and desperately trying to leave, issues a pallid statement, shuts down the rape club, and prays the state legislature doesn’t hold against the school the fact that it’s a cesspool. (Spoiler Alert: The corrupt and mindless state legislature won’t hold it against the school. Boys will be boys. These are real bonding experiences.)
Now I’m not saying there were guns involved. Usually this quaint lad on lad action involves merely fists and brooms; but this being the USA I can’t see why there wouldn’t have been guns involved. Look at the team logo.
Maybe they shoved gun butts up their butts.
Ave Atque Vale:
Now they are a shit show. You have a player involved shooting, a catfishing, a fight with a rival. Shit even the cops chased [the] team bus down the highway. Yet here we are after all of that, [with hazing incidents and a decision] to suspend its season.
Yeah. I also called the “in front of the team” thing.
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The victim, whose name was redacted in the report along with those of the other players, said other incidents involving inappropriate physical and sexual touching had been occurring in locker rooms and on road trips since last summer.
What a team! If they don’t outright shoot you, they at least finger your anus.
[T]he new allegations involved potential violations of university policy and were separate from the November 19 shooting of a student from the University of New Mexico.
[T]he allegations involved multiple players hazing a teammate more than once with a police report filed.
What can we say on this blog about nauseating New Mexico State that we haven’t already said a hundred times? (All the up-to-date details you can stomach here.) In an academic landscape of booze, guns, hazing, and cheating, schools like NMSU, where reporters must distinguish among ongoing acts of vileness, stand out boldly.
You figure the highest paid person on campus must be the recruiting coach, cuz he’s the one bringing the hazers and the killers — people whose intrinsic violence does wonders on the court. And recruits can rest safe in the knowledge that the rest of the staff will hide the guns that do the killing from the cops. Definitely a team effort at this school.
I mean, some of these players make the shooter at Richneck Elementary look like a kid.
… and unless these same people have achieved high-level jobs in education and related fields.
Cindy Holguin, CEO of a New Mexico charter school, seems more than amply to fit the bill:
Holguin is … fighting back against allegations regarding her qualifications to lead the school as CEO.
[D]egrees held by Holguin from Belford University, … a proven diploma scam, [are] invalid and did not meet standards set by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.
Holguin told the Current-Argus the only degree she used in applying for her position was an associate’s degree obtained from the Carlsbad campus of New Mexico State University in 1995.
The university was unable to find a record of that degree when requested by the Current-Argus.
In addition, Holguin said she has an MBA from New York State University Online from 2007.
Holguin said she would not cite her degrees from Belford University, saying those were not degrees she was “proud of.”
The I didn’t cite them or We didn’t use them in assessing her qualifications for the job are classic diploma mill-revelation moves… Yes, yes, she got two PhDs from East Ipswich Institute of Holistic Theology… But those are totally irrelevant to her work as superintendent of schools, so they don’t count… I got those degrees when I was a single mother subsisting on dog food and I was desperate…
But Holguin, if these reports are accurate, goes way beyond that. According to my count, she’s got at least four degrees, and it’s possible that none of them exists. I’ve never heard of New York State University Online. New Mexico State University has never heard of Cindy Holguin. And for all we know, there are several other degrees she’s not proud of and doesn’t list for certain jobs…
This is one of the most impressive diploma mill hauls UD has seen, and she’s seen a lot. She has speculated on this blog before about how this happens – how you accumulate not one or two but four or five bogus degrees. Her theory is that once you enter the twilight zone, the outer limits, of university degrees, you are in danger of being lured even deeper into the universe. Why stop at Calaspia when you can take your spaceship to Deltora and then Eternia?
Of course this local columnist is right that the state of Nevada has a jaw-droppingly bad ed rep; but she errs in assuming even a non-desperate effort to change this.
UD has for years followed the states of New Mexico, Alaska, Hawaii, and Nevada (UD‘s Big Four) as they run their primary, secondary, and post-secondary schools into the ground.
Not one of these states seems to know how to run schools, much less care about running them.
Nevada in particular – entertainment capital of the world – is all about building The World’s Largest 800 Million Dollar University Football Stadium and stuff like that. It’s clear the state doesn’t even know what universities are. Or – again – care. The center of its world is Las Vegas.
Las Vegas. Nevada’s tax base relies on drawing stupid people to the state, and it’s done a bang-up job. State leaders understand there’s, uh, negative utility in drawing smart people.
So who can be surprised that no one there knows what plagiarism is, much less knows that you shouldn’t do it? The same local columnist expresses amazement that the University of Nevada Las Vegas for years housed a high-profile professor who has been loudly called out as a plagiarist since “his 1990 doctoral dissertation at [the] University of Toronto.” She seems surprised that UNLV seemed disinclined to do anything about this guy until the Chronicle of Higher Ed did a big story about him. A commenter at Retraction Watch notes:
UNLV management were probably too busy hushing up scandals with the basketball team to worry about something as trivial as plagiarism on a massive scale…
The columnist seems just as surprised that the Nevada System of Higher Education “copied large sections of [a Brookings Institution] draft report and submitted it to legislators as NSHE’s own proposal.” Why not?
… note that when the New York Times went in search of a sage, gravitas-rich voice on the absolutely shocking academic fraud at Notre Dame, they could only find Dave Schmidly.
Schmidly! Dave! Dave – comic-book ex-president of the unbelievably corrupt University of New Mexico; a man who tried hiring his son for a high-level university position [scroll down for some Schmidly posts]; a man drummed out of office by faculty… Yes, get Schmidly on the the phone! He’ll have something sage to say!
And he does. He obligingly knits his brow for the New York Times about how, you know, competition to recruit the best football players “increases the likelihood of people cutting corners.”
Dave would know about that! Why interview lots of people for a $90,000 a year UNM job when your kid’s sitting right here?
… Eh. It’s not as though the NYT could find a clean president of a big-time sports university to interview. It’s more a kind of how far down the list do we want to go thing… Donna Shalala? Yikes. No. Hey, there’s Tressel! He even used to be a coach! … Oh yeah. Scratch that…. Next…?
And it never has had any comment since the curious 2008 death of one of its faculty in a private plane crash. People who knew John Borchers at Stanford added their praise to this glowing obituary; and only if you bother scrolling down to the very last comment on the story do you discover (details here) that Stanford had hired a man with ten years of substance abuse behind him, and that Borchers took his plane up with the following substances in his body:
In addition to cocaine and Prozac, toxicology tests by the FAA turned up opiates, mood stabilizers and anti-psychotic drugs…
A raging addict was treating addicts at Stanford University, and Stanford never got anywhere near acknowledging that, much less explaining why it thought it was safe to have this man in patient care.
… Borchers was … under investigation by the Medical Board of California and in danger of losing his medical license. According to the NTSB, an April 22, 2008, accusation by the [Medical Board of California] “documented a history of substance dependence and abuse for more than 10 years preceding the accident, involving the misuse of at least four different substances (including alcohol) and treatment through at least six different programs for substance-related disorders during that period.”
A raging addict took a plane up at night, and if he hadn’t managed to crash it into a mountain, he might well have crashed in nearby Incline Village, killing people.
Chief lobbyist. The person who represented the university to the state government. A huge alcoholic, he’d racked up his third DWI (plus a non-DWI alcohol-related arrest) before the university finally pulled itself together and fired him.
This man is well-connected (‘son of longtime state Rep. Henry “Kiki” Saavedra’) and in a vastly corrupt, crony-ridden state like New Mexico I suppose that takes you some distance. But even in that context… Jeez.
In a rousing letter to the editor of the local newspaper (“If we aspire to be known as one of America’s great universities, we are going to need to act like we are one of those universities today! That is what is called vision! When we believe in our vision; when we support our faculty; when we support our staff; when we support our administration; when we support our coaches and athletic director; and yes, when we support our board of regents; success will be ours! It takes courage to stand tall in the face of criticism. It takes heart to support our student-athletes who are giving it their all, each time that enter a competition. It takes special people to take NMSU to a new place, and I believe we are in a place in our history, with people of passion, who can help us get there!”) the chair of perennial loser New Mexico State University’s board of trustees reminds his indifferent, pissed off community (i.e., no one goes to the football games, and everyone’s pissed that people like this trustee are bleeding them financially in order to subsidize an athletic program about which no one cares) about our old friend, Athletics as the Front Porch of the University. Nothing else has the capacity to receive the amount of media coverage athletics does! If you understood anything about marketing brands, you’d know that!
Chairman Mike overlooks – fails to mention? – what all anti-intellectuals who somehow end up running American universities overlook. See, branding goes both ways. All that attention sports gives you goes both ways. Don’t get it yet? Let me make it as simple as possible for you. When you’re like New Mexico State, and your sports program is profoundly, repeatedly, embarrassing, the embarrassment always goes way-national. Ask Keith Olbermann, who’s gotten incredible mileage out of NMSU’s pathetic attempts to get anyone – anyone – to sit through one of its games. Ask the ESPN anchors who covered a recent NMSU basketball game where the team and a group of fans responded to having lost (NMSU almost always loses) by rioting.
Ask anyone who has followed NMSU’s efforts to hire an offensive line coach (UD‘s not sure what this position’s salary is, but let’s guess around $200,000. In 2013, NMSU’s head football coach made $363,000.):
[Chris] Symington replaced Steve Marshall, and was the third offensive line coach over the past year for the Aggies. Symington departs as the second offensive line coach over the past year to never coach a game with the program.
Marshall, who replaced Bart Miller in January, departed the program for an assistant offensive line coaching position with the Green Bay Packers of the NFL.
The Aggies have had a revolving door at the offensive line post for a number of years. Prior to Marshall, there was Jason Lenzmeier (who was hired by the University of New Mexico following the 2011 season), Brad Bedell (hired by Arkansas State following the 2012 campaign) and Miller (hired by Florida Atlantic following this past season).
Considering Marshall’s sudden departure — he arrived in January, coached spring football with the program and then left — Symington’s hire appeared to be a good one.
Imagine all the money and administrative time that’s been taken up at NMSU with the saga of the vanishing coaches. I wonder why they all keep vanishing? And now everyone’s talking about the latest one, Symington, who looked so good…
Las Cruces police cited Chris Symington twice in a four-day span for huffing compressed air, the second incident unfolding Tuesday morning inside the bathroom of a Las Cruces drug store… Sunday night, Symington received his first criminal citation after a different LCPD officer found him “slumped over sitting in his vehicle and apparently having seizures,” a police report states.
That officer reported he saw Symington inhale compressed air from a canister.
Yes, when your university is so desperate to find yet another coach that you’re willing to scrape the bottom of the canister, nothing else going on at your university will receive the amount of media coverage the fall-out will.
The athletic director draws inspiration from the fact that his team played so well after having been arrested.
Half the Eastern New Mexico State University baseball team was arrested (fight, campus parking lot) and then, having been bonded out of jail, they played a winning game that same day.
“A lot of teams in that situation where they saw several of their players get arrested two hours previously could have folded right there at that point,” said [Jeff] Geiser.
How many teams can come back right away from mass arrest to play a winning game? Not many, baby. But our guys were totally not fazed.
Or, as a commenter on an article about New Mexico State University’s football team puts it, “I will never understand fans from these terrible academic/athletic schools that need to have their teams competing on the highest level just to have their brains beat in.”
Let NMSU stand for dozens of American universities allowing themselves to bleed out as institutions for the sake of big-time football.
Let us once more, on this blog, attempt to understand the masochism that insists – against the simple sanity of one’s own university president, and a state senator – that hurling your expensive team against opponents who will always beat you by ten, twenty, thirty, forty points is a good thing.
I don’t want you to think that anyone from NMSU actually goes to these games. I mean, a few people do, but for most in the NMSU community, group psychosis apparently has its limits. Most people there prefer not to purchase pricey tickets in order to watch the players for their school get their brains bashed in.
At the same time, though, enough NMSU people want to get seasonally excited about new coaches and paradigms and shit that they refuse to let the president and the state senator divert football money toward, uh, education. An anti-intellectual school in an anti-intellectual state, NMSU’s thing is to sit on its ass being stupid while its team gets brained. Our purpose is to figure out why this is.
It’s not the spectacle of the brain bashing itself, since few attend the games. If attendance were good, our problem would be solved: We love gore, and the NMSU football team guarantees it. But people avert their eyes.
Since total massive loss is equally guaranteed, could a campy delectation of failure itself have set in? Are the denizens of NMSU Wildean rascals…?
No. They are sincere, ever-hopeful, dog-like fans.
Here’s the best I can do. The Buddha speaks always of compassion, and what’s going on at NMSU is a communal exemplification of this primary virtue. The hopelessly broken – ever freshly broken – body of this football team exteriorizes for an entire community the first noble truth of human suffering. The team is a precious sacrificial vessel through which, ritualistically, NMSU attains not intellectual but spiritual enlightenment.
… life on campus becomes so degrading, that students take desperate measures. UD vividly remembers the American University students who, stuck with a president whose corruption had become a national disgrace, simply drove all day up and down AU’s main drag, honking their horns and calling out to people on the sidewalk to help them get rid of the pest. They emblazoned their cars with signs like PRESIDENT LADNER: WE’LL HELP YOU MOVE.
All of Washington laughed; the tactic worked. Ladner resigned.
Jake Mayfield’s similarly desperate online petition (I just signed it; if this blog’s long chronicle of the mind-wastage of big-time university sports has meant anything to you, you should consider signing it too) is unlikely to work. New Mexico State University (background here) is much too far gone for anyone to make much of a difference. Unlike AU, located in an intellectually ambitious state (well, district), NMSU is located in what UD calls one of our Right-Not-To-Think states. Imagine trying to explain – let alone get support for – an academic university in Nevada, Alaska, Hawaii, New Mexico. Not gonna happen.
Still, there’s nobility in what Mayfield (a recent NMSU grad) is doing; it’s an important gesture, and one worth supporting.
Reasons? All the classics: Gotta pay a vile ex-coach hundreds of thousands in buyout bucks. Nobody comes to the shitty games. Current coach costing almost a million.
Solutions? All the classics: Stick it to the students — up their fees. (Nothing says grow your fan base like the combination of a bad team, an overpaid coach, and ripped off students.) And take out a whopper of a loan.
The University of New Mexico’s David Schmidly’s a ball o’ fire, leaping from nepotism to bid rigging allegations to faculty no confidence votes to the retention of violent football coaches to athletic directors who were allegedly in on the alleged bid rig to… nepotism again. (UD‘s Schmidly posts are plentiful. Go to it.)
President Schmidly tried to give his son Brian a $90,000 job at UNM, but public outrage made it impossible. Then – a lawsuit claims – he got him a job at the grateful company that got the rigged bid for UNM’s basketball arena renovation.
I used to predict that Schmidly would be pushed out, pretty soon, at UNM. He’s so supremely, comprehensively, bad. But just as UNM won’t get rid of Coach Locksley, it won’t get rid of Schmidly. Why? Got me.
They’re already paying through the teeth on contract buyouts for three other coaches.
Plus:
This year’s average attendance will likely be the lowest since 1992. The school’s ticket revenue projection is down over a million dollars over the last two years yet it will cost the University about $1.4 million to buyout the remainder of his contract.
All UD can say is Choose your state well. You’re free, in the United States, to move unaccosted from state to state, putting down roots, attending school, and working, where you prefer. Occasionally, you’re trapped; I understand that. But in most cases you do not have to go to a public university in Nevada, New Mexico, Alaska, or Hawaii — all states where there is simply no good option if you’re serious, or even semi-serious, about an education.
