There have to be enough university professors and administrators who recognize that a soiled reputation is not worth it.
… If you have any doubts about how and when the athletics department lost its way, watch ESPN’s “30 for 30” documentary about Miami football, “It’s All About The U.” The backdrop is Miami’s national championship football teams of 1983, ’87, ’89 and ’91.
The show details how Miami developed a “bad boy” image through the taunting of opponents, player arrests and athletes accepting illegal benefits. The worst part is interviews with former players who come across as proud of their actions and the reputation they left at the school.
… Miami never has had a great fan base. Its average attendance for home football games the past three seasons has been 46,299, 47,551 and 51,509. That represents about 60 percent capacity of Sun Life Stadium…
[T]he athletics department likely operates at a deficit.
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Well, but as is usually the case, not a peep out of the professors. Maybe they’re the 45,000 people who come to the games.
How did things come to this, Donna Shalala? What have you done to deserve this? Maybe it’s that $1.2 million salary.
This Dead Spin blogger is only the first of many writers who in the next few days will turn their attention to the woman who has presided over all of the amazing events at the University of Miami – hiring Charles Nemeroff, fielding the most violent university football team ever, enabling Nevin Shapiro for years… Miami, in UD‘s opinion, is just a scummy school, and Shalala has let it get that way. She should go.
Nevin Shapiro, who orchestrated a $930 million Ponzi scheme and is serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison, told Yahoo! Sports that he gave [University of Miami] Hurricanes players gifts such as money, jewelry and yacht trips, as well as paid for sex parties, bounties on opposing players and even an abortion for a player’s girlfriend.
And it’s all alleged to have happened under the watch of former Miami athletic director Paul Dee, the former chairman of the NCAA committee on infractions …
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“Former Miami athletic director Paul Dee sat in judgment of USC and others while all of this went on under his nose.”
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“The hypocrisy of the NCAA makes me sick,” [one university president] told the Press-Telegram. “To allow institutions like Miami and Nebraska to chair and oversee its infractions committee is like putting foxes in charge of the henhouse.”
Why do people associated with conferences and schools make up the majority of the 10-person infractions committee?
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UD readers have already met the much-loved University of Miami sports benefactor – the “living scholar” after whom the Nevin Shapiro Student Athlete Lounge is named… Was named… Don’t know who it’s named after now… Allen Stanford?
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The sort of thing the University of Miami did during the Nevin Era will, I think, strike anyone as fully in line with the ethos of any serious American university:
Three sources, including two former Miami football players, confirmed that Shapiro offered bounties.
The booster told Yahoo! Sports he had a number of individual payouts for “hit of the game” and “big plays.” He also put bounties on specific players, including Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow and a three-year standing bounty on Seminoles quarterback Chris Rix from 2002 to 2004, offering $5,000 to any player who knocked him out of a game.
“We pounded the (expletive) out of that kid,” Shapiro said of Rix. “Watch the tape of those games. You’ll see so many big hits on him. Guys were all going after that $5,000 in cash. [Jon] Vilma tried to kill him – just crushed him – a couple of times trying to get that $5,000. And he almost got it, too.”
I mean, name any school that doesn’t offer $5,000 extra in scholarship money to an athlete who can kill a competing player.
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Anyway, the writer I quoted up there, the one pointing out that the Miami AD who oversaw the whorehouse during the Nevin years was also NCAA infractions chair… His thing is that the current head of the NCAA is a “detriment to the NCAA” because he’s “not a reformer.”
It’s true that Mark Emmert will do nothing, just as his predecessor did nothing, to rid American universities of the ever-erupting shit-volcano which is big-time football and basketball. But that doesn’t make him a detriment to the NCAA. Uh-uh. Au contraire. How do you think the NCAA chooses its leaders? The point of the NCAA, like any organization, is to sustain itself, not reform itself out of existence. For that, you need a guy as mercenary and cynical as the NCAA itself.
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UD thanks her friend Ralph for linking her to the Yahoo story.
Four out of five Tamarac [Florida] commissioners from the class of 2006 have been arrested. I haven’t seen an arrest rate that high since the University of Miami football team was winning national championships.
Michael Mayo, Sun Sentinel
… Miami gets a bad rap as a university with no money. If that’s what you truly believe, take some time to go walk around the downtown medical campus. Start exploring and you’ll never feel like UM has a lack of funds ever again. The money is absolutely there; the only question is the willingness to spend it on athletics.
… PLEASE STOP thinking or insinuating that [President] Donna Shalala and [athletic director] Kirby [Hocutt] don’t want to win, or that they’d prefer to have a bunch of Rhodes Scholars who lose four or five games per year. That sentiment is beyond ridiculous. Both the president and athletic director want to win badly, but obviously want to do so the right way – with players going to class and not revisiting UM’s “Thug U” days.
When I think back to great UM teams, I don’t remember a bunch of guys getting arrested or failing out of school. Sure, there were some rough around the edges guys, but in all reality, no more than any other school.
Even? Especially.
UD‘s already noted the increasingly criminalized nature of the University of Miami – perhaps our only university able to go head to head, jail-time-wise, with the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.
Anyone surprised that an ethics honcho at the University of Miami is going out of his way to argue that a man caught stealing tens of millions of dollars from trusting clients shouldn’t really have to go to jail for very long doesn’t know this university.
Probably doesn’t even know that in an effort to hide his criminal career and give himself the look of a serious person, a philanthropist, Lew Freeman, like Bernard Madoff (a Yeshiva trustee) and like many others before them, gave lots of his dirty money to a university – the University of Miami, in fact. The University of Miami law school, in fact. An ethics seminar at the University of Miami law school, in fact.
The prosecutor said Freeman’s misconduct was particularly bad because he built a reputation as the “go-to” forensic accountant in South Florida who could be trusted by the community. He noted, for instance, it was “ironic” that Freeman sponsored an ethics lecture series at the UM School of Law.
Nothing ironic about it. Standard operating procedure for criminals hiding behind something legit.
But the University of Miami had better watch it. Eventually its rep will get so bad, the pool of criminals willing to underwrite its ethics seminars will dry up.
A medical faculty is a dicey thing. Among this cohort of professors at your university, you’ve always got lurking a few ghosted writers, courtesy authors, research fakers, plagiarists, etc.
But your biggest problem these days, what with the money to be made from selling drugs for pharmaceutical companies, comes from corporate shills using their university affiliation to look respectable.
Take Leslie Baumann, pride of the University of Miami. Leslie’s in trouble with the FDA.
… [T]he Food and Drug Administration has cracked down on one of the most widely quoted cosmetic doctors, sending shudders through the ranks of opinion leaders in fashion publishing and vanity medicine.
The F.D.A. recently sent a warning letter to Dr. Leslie Baumann, a well-known dermatologist and clinical researcher in Miami Beach, citing the doctor for expressing premature enthusiasm in the media about Dysport, an injectable antiwrinkle drug the agency had not yet approved.
Dr. Baumann’s comments in the media in 2007 violated restrictions on drug promotion, according to the letter; the agency asked Dr. Baumann to explain how she intended to prevent similar violations in the future.
Under the Obama administration, the F.D.A. has stepped up scrutiny of drug advertising, dispatching many warning letters about misleading commercials and online marketing efforts. But this is believed to be the first time the agency has warned an individual investigator — a medical researcher who oversees a clinical trial — for apparently promoting an unapproved drug.
… Federal rules bar drug makers and investigators on their clinical trials from promoting a drug before the agency has approved the product. Dr. Baumann violated the restrictions, the F.D.A. letter said, because she was an investigator on a clinical trial for Dysport and promoted it well before the drug’s approval in April.
“Early data shows it may last longer and kick in faster than Botox,” Dr. Baumann told the fashion magazine Allure in 2007. She made similar comments that same year to Elle magazine and during an appearance on the “Today” show on NBC in January 2009.
… Dr. Baumann, a former professor of dermatology at the University of Miami medical school …
Former? Why is she still listed as a faculty member? And don’t you think she should update her Amazon.com bibliography?
… to take off the top of his convertible. UD was wowed by the crowds of immense palm trees on campus.
Like almost every other university, Miami’s starting to have serious money troubles.
The article itself couldn’t be more ordinary and banal; yet another American university football player has beaten the shit out of one of his fellow students. Yawn.
This player, on being kicked out of a bar, “deliberately shoved a ladder, knocking off [a fellow student who is an employee of the bar], who fell headfirst onto the pavement.” The student’s a senior; he had almost managed to get out of Miami U without getting his brains knocked out by a sports hero. (As you know, UD has proposed that big-sports universities should issue protective helmets to all of their students for just this sort of eventuality.)
What makes this article interesting is that in an earlier draft the writer seems to have spent a good deal of time recounting all the schools that wanted to recruit the bruiser, and sharing his stats on the field. Commenters gave the reporter hell about this.
Not sure how being told which colleges recruited him is relevant in an article on alleged felonious assault.
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You had 4 people overseeing this article and not one of you thought, “huh, maybe we shouldn’t glorify a soon-to-be felon with 4 paragraphs of his athletic achievements”???
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This article is horrific and indicitive of a mindset focusing on sports stats of a felon vs. empathy for his victim. What about the victim who had brain swelling and bleeding? This is his second arrest for assault and the Miami coach couldn’t even mention care or concern during his press conference? This is sickening.
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And how is the man who fell from the ladder and landed on his head?????
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Glorifying felonious assault article with a pitch about a guy’s stats and recruiting history is why this paper is a joke around campus.
But of course the larger local booster press writes these things up precisely in that way: Five paragraphs describing the power and skill of the player, and how it’s going to be missed if he’s suspended, and then one final paragraph updating the victim’s condition. Why should student publications be any different?
Plus “I didn’t declare it, and that’s illegal.”
UD has already, uh, sung the praises of Harvard 大人物 Charles Lieber here. He has now been found guilty (max. sentence five years) of
two counts of making false statements to the U.S. government about whether he participated in Thousand Talents Plan, a program designed by the Chinese government to attract foreign-educated scientists in China. They also found him guilty of failing to declare income earned in China and failing to report a Chinese bank account.
See, you’re not supposed to take millions and millions of OUR dollars for your scientific research and secretly subsidize it with millions of dollars from our rich, interested-in-our-secrets, non-friends.
But for UD the real fun here is the whole vulgar bag-man thing, the image of Hahvahd lugging its piles of dirty cash onto airplanes. Will the TSA discover (sweat sweat) the C-Notes in my Louis Vuitton steamer trunk?
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It’s very University of Miami… And yet a closer look at Harvard yields Jeffrey Epstein’s stable of over-age girls, Andrei Shleifer’s Moscow Adventures, Larry Summers’ hedge fund presidency, etc. Let’s not give ourselves airs.
A … Los Angeles Times report …. alleged Barrack’s connection to the admission of Sheikh Khalifa bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani into USC, a prince of Qatar. After Al Thani’s denied admission to UCLA and his family’s alleged suggestion that a “substantial donation” would be made to USC if he were admitted, Barrack reportedly set up a meeting between former USC President C.L Max Nikias and Al Thani’s mother.
Al Thani subsequently began school at USC, and the Qatar Foundation — a state-sponsored organization in Qatar founded by Al Thani’s father — donated to USC’s “marine research center on Catalina Island,” according to the report.
… Barrack was also connected to the presidential pardon of Miami developer Robert Zangrillo, one of the 11 USC parents charged in the Operation Varsity Blues investigation. The White House news release, which included 73 pardons and 70 commuted sentences, stated that Barrack supported Zangrillo’s pardon.
… In a statement to the Daily Trojan Wednesday, the USC Board of Trustees wrote that Barrack stepped down from his position.
“Tom Barrack has voluntarily resigned from the USC Board of Trustees effective immediately,” the statement read.
See earlier post here.
… nothing makes you happier than scandals involving religious universities, places that often wear their piety on a very self-righteous sleeve. Obviously it’s more fun when those places (rather than yucky secular schools like the University of Miami) turn out to be fraud-ridden hellholes run by sordid people of the cloth. Think back over our posts covering Yeshiva University, Baylor, Seton Hall, St. John’s, St. Louis, Southern Methodist…
Schools that have never hidden their trashy nature – Liberty, for instance – don’t make the list because they’re so overtly icky that they don’t even qualify for hypocritical. (Put the names of any of these schools in my search engine for wonderfully stomach-churning details.)
Wheeling Jesuit, or whatever the wreck is calling itself these days, has a real place of honor on the Gruesome Godly list, having for years been run by a dissolute cabal headed by jacked up jesuit AND HEAD OF THE ENTIRE WEST VIRGINIA CATHOLIC CHURCH Michael Bransfield. The details of his depravity – in the article I just linked to – are, even by church standards, pretty remarkable. But as I’ve endlessly pointed out, whether it’s Jewish Yeshiva or Catholic Wheeling, you don’t get there without large all-male incredibly parochial boards of trustees and boosters making the world safe for the very vilest among us.