The University of Southern California is colossally corrupt. It’s corrupt almost everywhere: In its athletics program (I’d name names, but there are too many); in its med school (Puliafito; Varma; Tyndall); in its admissions system (Varsity Blues); on its board of trustees (Barrack), and now in its school of social work. (Click on my first link for details on all of these instances.) It has succeeded in attaining Yeshiva University levels of corruption.
You have to pay close attention to understand the massive social work school corruption – here’s a good, detailed description of it – but know that the person allegedly engineering the scheme was the dean of the school, a woman desperately greedy for money after she apparently mismanaged the school to a huge deficit. She and the local politician she bribed in exchange for lucrative contracts are currently under federal indictment.
And here’s the real beauty of it, given USC’s perennial, and, most recently, one billion dollar, problem with sexual harassment: The dean arranged the quick hiring onto her faculty of the politician’s son – even got the entirely unqualified dude a professorship! – although the guy only needed a job because he was about to be charged with sexual harassment at his current job.
The politician is “a graduate of the university, from which he received a doctorate in social ethics,” and yes, you cannot make this shit up.
Vanderbilt’s immune system worked: Scammers were unable to find anyone to bribe in order to admit the rancid rich.
Fact is, not all American universities are criminal in this way. Yale and University of Southern California certainly are: Both seem to offer multiple avenues of corrupt access. But there are other Vanderbilts out there, schools that avoid, among other things, hiring greedy shits to coach their students. (Along those lines: Did the University of Rhode Island not know why its new tennis coach was fired at Georgetown? How could they have hired the dude?) As this big-time story evolves, I think we’ll see more and more universities touting their … well, their legitimacy.
For the record: The more you monetize these non-profit settings – the more you look like, say, Yeshiva University, which spawned Madoff, Merkin, Rennert, and Wilf, the more bad actors you’re incubating across the entire system. People get the message, people! Look at the University of Louisville with its high-profile, highly-paid, low-lifes, from athletics to the office of the presidency. What do you think other people at the university, pondering this cast of characters, are going to conclude?
FBI Report on College Basketball Scandal
Details Las Vegas Meetings
The FBI’s criminal complaint that shook the college basketball world Tuesday and led to 10 arrests included accounts of three meetings in Las Vegas.
… The Review-Journal on Wednesday reviewed the complaint and found three meetings in Las Vegas between March and July involving coaches from the University of Arizona, University of Louisville and University of Southern California.
During the Pac-12 men’s tournament in March, Arizona assistant Emanuel “Book” Richardson met for dinner in an unnamed Las Vegas restaurant …
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Las Vegas Review/Journal
VERY.
[Athletic Director Mike Hamilton’s] resignation is effective on June 30, [just days before the NCAA’s infractions committee comes to pay a visit] but he will be on administrative leave beginning Monday. According to reports, he will receive a buyout of $1.335 million over the next 36 months or $445,000 per year ($37,083.33 monthly)…
Hamilton fired football coach Phil Fulmer in 2008, Bruce Pearl in March and most recently baseball coach Todd Raleigh. He hired Lane Kiffin to replace Fulmer, but Kiffin resigned after one season to take over the University of Southern California program, which was sanctioned by the NCAA.
According to the News Sentinel, Pearl is being paid $948,728, and Raleigh is owed $331,657.53 for a total of $1,280,385.53.
According to The Tennessean, Fulmer received $6 million when he was fired.
The football violations being heard by the NCAA this weekend are under Kiffin’s regime.
He also fired baseball coach Rod Delmonico and basketball coach Buzz Peterson, who received $1.39 million in 2005 when he was fired, according to the News Sentinel.
According to The Tennessean, the total cost of all of Hamilton’s firings is $9,070,385.53.
Ed Greif, a local sportswriter, does the numbers.
Tennessee: Hire guys you have to fire because they get caught breaking rules, then pay them millions and millions of buyout dollars for years. Genius.
Whoroscope, a poem by Samuel Beckett,
will be the UD category
into which we toss small stories
like this one,
from the University of Southern California.
Small stories within the big saga
of the university’s prostitution.
… Via the Los Angeles Times review of Bad City, a book about disgusting events at pretty much always-disgusting University of Southern California. My coverage of these particular grotesqueries can be found here. Put University Southern California in my search engine for years of scandal and corruption.
[T]wo major scandals at USC involv[ed] two doctors employed by the university: the medical school dean, Carmen Puliafito, and a gynecologist who worked at USC‘s student health center. Both doctors took advantage of young women to satisfy their prurient desires. Eventually, the book becomes a pointed critique of USC’s culture of secrecy and its shameful efforts to protect its public image. The university’s supporting role in the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal serves as a kind of coda to a dark tale of privilege, amorality and coverups...
In one especially outrageous scene, [Dean] Puliafito brings a pair of addicts into his office at the Keck School of Medicine, where they don the doctor’s USC lab coat and an inflatable Trojan hat after smoking heroin...
It’s a list of categories UD introduced in 2012, and it has held up well over the years. Details of each type here.
The case of busybusybusy USC professor David B. Agus – known hereafter as David B.OGUS – seems overwhelmingly to have been ATELIER; his downfall, that is, probably involves his having hired an atelier of underlings to write his books for him cuz he’s too important to actually sire the little whippersnappers himself.
But, as UD always has occasion to say on these, uh, occasions, you can’t get good help these days. You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think, as Dorothy Parker pointed out; likewise, you can pay an atelier to write your book, but you can’t make it not plagiarize.
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A little Keck School of Medicine context: This school has the world’s most comically disreputable faculty: Drew Pinsky, Rohit Varma, Carmen Puliafito (oh wait; he wasn’t faculty: he was DEAN), etc etc etc; the larger institution has been right there out in front of the Varsity Blues scandal, a humongous political bribery scandal, and of course SCADS of sports scandals.
I mean to say that USC cannot really afford its latest Dr Bogus. But it’s got him.
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UPDATE: Cherchez la femme! The big mean lady who wrote books with my name on their covers is responsible for
more than 120 cribbed passages in three titles, some of which went on for pages.
So UD was right – it was Atelier.
Her advice for Dr. Bogus should he try for a fourth title: Read your employees’ work before you append your name to it. Use a plagiarism-detector. Seek new hired help.
On the University of Southern California board of trustees sits the man of the hour, Thomas Barrack, uber-slimy rich guy. But, as UD often has occasion to note, if you eliminated all slimy rich from your board of trustees, you’d end up with a priest and a community organizer, and there’s no money in that. So we shouldn’t be surprised that zillionaire Barrack, despite his slimy business practices, adorns a university BOT.
The question is whether, even by BOT standards, the just-arrested Barrack will prove too much for USC. We’ll see.
Bonus: This recent photo of our man.
… in the Capitol building with a bunch of sick losers? Even at his lowest, when he was living in his car, Klete Keller was never a loser, never sick. He was, by his own account (listen up – it’s a half hour long but worth the investment of time), an entitled jerk, a man who thought being an Olympian meant he could keep swimming swiftly and easily through post-Olympic life.
Life had other ideas, and, when Keller realized basically nobody besides a few swim team kids gave a shit that he was a champion swimmer, he got depressed and angry and stopped working (or was fired) and started drinking and lazing about. His wife threw him out and he spent extended time homeless and altogether down and out.
One of Keller’s former Olympic teammates, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss Keller’s apparent descent, drew a line from the “goofy, oafish” swimmer he knew in the 2000s to the aimless, rudderless, 30-something man who, he speculated, became a perfect candidate to fall into a radical, conservative rabbit hole of conspiracy theorists and rioters involved in insurrection.
His sister eventually let him move in with her, and that’s when things started looking up for him.
Until a few days ago, he had a steady job in a real estate firm in Colorado; he might well have lost that job now. His name has been erased from the firm’s website. He faces possible arrest.
We needn’t waste time accounting for Keller’s big enthusiasm for Fuckface – that is apparently well documented in his (now-erased) social media. Anyone who wants to can be enthusiastic about Ff. But it’s certainly worth considering the fanaticism that brought him from Colorado to DC to the violence at the Capitol.
Having listened to him tell his story, I’ll offer this idea, sketchy and ill-informed as it has to be.
As I listened to Keller tell his tale, the phrase drama junkie kept coming to me. Also adrenalin junkie. After years and years of intense unrelenting swimming – in competitions, in practices – Keller had clearly built up a strong need for everything in life to be an unrelenting competitive test of his endurance in dramatic contests. He makes it clear that once his swimming career was over he entirely totally thoroughly collapsed. Ordinary vague daily life failed to be commensurate with the extraordinary small sharp warrior focus of the swimming pool. But Keller’s need for battle, self-testing, winning, superiority persisted.
Now this is a guy who dropped out of college – to focus on swimming, natch. One option as he left swimming would have been to finish his University of Southern California degree and get, like, a marketable skill. But he was, by his own admission, too arrogant for that. So down, down, down, he went. [Correction: According to this, he did eventually finish his degree.]
So my old friend Courtney, a really impressive all-around athlete, once sent me an article about the connection between athleticism and self-destructive behaviors. Here’s an excerpt from it:
If you’re an outdoor athlete and you’re good at it, you’re probably like I once was: a selfish, self-involved son of a bitch. It’s always more, more, more and me, me, me, and I was no different. I wanted to be the best. I wanted to do the hardest sport routes, to be the boldest on high, killer walls.
Why? Why not? I was addicted to climbing, and then to starvation, and when that wasn’t enough, I became addicted to drugs.
Maybe you see some of my method in your own madness. And perhaps your obsessions are “healthy”: wheatgrass, long runs, body sculpting, rock climbing. That’s great. But I tell you now, absent your passions you will feel the sharp scrape of withdrawal — just like any fixless junkie bug-eyed in a January alley. Reality can be reduced, at its sparest, to chemical reactions, our body craving the release of GABA, oxytocins, endorphins, serotonin, dopamine. It doesn’t care about their provenance. It just doesn’t. Cut off the source—any source—and you will pay.
The drama, injury, contests, even in some perverted sense the teamwork at the Capitol must have felt very familiar to poor Klete Keller, once a champion, then a loser, then a winner, and now at this late date once again a terrible loser. Turns out – maybe; I’m speculating – he never quite lost his addiction to bloody battle. And now he has drowned in it.
No, it’s not The Onion. Crazed Carmen Puliafito’s replacement as the head of the University of Southern California medical school – Puliafito’s protégé, by the way – turns out to have quite the naughty backstory himself, and since the story happened at USC and they appointed the guy dean anyway, UD thinks it’s time for the medical school at the University of Southern California to seek counseling. This is totally nuts, and UD‘s going to stop covering USC med school on this blog if things descend yet further into farce.
So. Meet the guy they chose to replace drug-crazed Carmen.
A young international student working for [Rohit] Varma on one of [his] research projects — an NIH-funded study of eye disease in Latinos — accompanied him to [a] conference.
The woman later told USC investigators that when they arrived at the conference hotel, Varma told the woman he had booked a single room and expected her to share a bed with him, according to two sources familiar with USC’s investigation. She told the investigators that when she questioned the arrangement, Varma claimed the grant money would only cover one room, the sources said.
She said that when she protested further, he took her cellphone away and threatened to have her visa revoked, according to the sources. The woman told investigators that she had no money to pay for her own room and ended up sleeping on a cot in Varma’s room, the sources said.
She reported the incident to USC, and the university’s Office of Equity and Diversity launched an investigation of Varma for sexual harassment and retaliation. Investigators found evidence to support her claims…
Just the sort of person you want when you’re desperate to clean house after orgy-meister Carmen.
(Watch it here.)
Lamont Evans, associate head coach for the Oklahoma State Cowboys, Chuck Person, associate head coach for the Auburn University Tigers, Emanuel “Book” Richardson, assistant coach for the Arizona Wildcats, and Anthony “Tony” Bland, assistant head coach of the University of Southern California Trojans, were all named in the complaint.
How did “Book” get his nickname?
Arizona assistant coach Emanuel Richardson was nicknamed Pocketbook by his grandmother because she would catch him riffling through her purse. The name was eventually shortened on the basketball courts…