As the University of North Carolina sport scandal begins to take off, pay attention to the details. People use phrases like sports culture all the time (Penn State, we are told, has to confront its sports culture) but until you look at things like the background of the trustees at Auburn or the background of the people who run the academic support program for athletes at North Carolina, you don’t grasp the reality.

UD attended a university sports conference a couple of years ago, here in Washington, where a high-ranking administrator at a local university demanded to know why coaches and coaching staff were not professors. They are teaching, after all; and erasing the line between coaches and professors will heal the rift between athletics and academics, making the university one big happy family.

If it seems a grotesque idea, it shouldn’t. It’s already being implemented, in a way, at a lot of universities, where the president is little more than a sports nut with impressive corporate or political ties, several of the trustees played football or basketball for the school, and plenty of professors sit on sports-oversight committees and don’t do anything other than enjoy the free tickets and other perks they get to make sure they don’t do anything.

“The athletic enterprise has grown so large and so remunerative that it may not be appropriate at universities anymore,” said Lew Margolis, a [University of North Carolina] public health professor.

Yes, it has grown into the university, to the point where we’re supposed to shed tears because Penn State and its surrounding towns and villages will go bankrupt because of football sanctions. Penn State created and sustained a happy seamless valley where children got fucked in its showers by one of its coaches and now just because of that you’re going to remove the very basis of our economy and indeed of our valley life itself?

Take it out of universities. It’s of course fully appropriate for the larger culture, which laps up the much viler world of professional football. But it is really rather inappropriate at universities.

… begins, with its hastily appointed new president, Zeithaml (the name translates roughly into Time + Castrated Ram).

In the tradition of Bobby Lowder at Auburn, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld at CUNY, and Gene Powell at the University of Texas, Helen Dragas, head of Virginia’s trustees, seems to be a paternalistic anti-intellectual with power issues. These people occasionally arise in positions of authority at universities, and it is always a catastrophe.

If you want to anticipate the likely plot trajectory of this catastrophe, go back to the history of American University’s board of trustees when the now-notorious Benjamin Ladner was AU’s president. That long ugly expensive story featured clueless rich trustees pumping Ladner full of cash and privileges (keep in mind that even vast academic salaries look pathetic to real estate moguls and hedgies) until his profligacy became a national scandal. Getting out of the scandal took ages and did terrible damage to an already scandal-scarred university. Conflicts among the trustees were open, protracted and farcical, with this one and then that one leaving in a huff, etc. Expect a similar soap opera at Virginia.

So let’s head into this post with the understanding that whatever UD – a native Washingtonian – says, she’ll sound like a snob. She’ll sound like someone who doesn’t know that the purpose of a university is to provide venues for boxing bouts full of beer drinkers. She’ll sound as though she doesn’t understand that public universities in particular exist to rent out arenas for whatever activity the voters of some city – say, El Paso – find amusing. She doesn’t understand that the head of a university is someone who spends most of his time in negotiations with the representatives of fight fans who like to drink.

The University of Texas system’s chancellor first tried to keep the fight from taking place in the university arena. He lost. It will go forward. He is now trying to prohibit liquor. The city of El Paso, and the elected leaders of the state, are screaming at him to back down on that too.

And he will. He will be made to back down on the liquor prohibition.

And that is university life in El Paso, Texas.

When Allen Frances and thousands of others in the field of mental health scream about the next, even heftier, edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, they have in mind, among many other forms of psychosprawl, learning disorder psychosprawl.

When the manual that university mental health people rely on to confirm a learning disorder in a student has a page like this – in which, as it appears to be saying, you can have the learning disorder known as Not Otherwise Specified (i.e., not captured by the DSM’s already immense number of diagnostic categories) – you know that universities are screwed. Virtually any student who wants special accommodations for tests and papers and projects can go to the campus disability office and come out with a diagnosis.

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A medical student at UD‘s George Washington University was flunking courses and had been told that expulsion was imminent. Off she went to the disability people who duly

concluded that [she] had a reading disorder — dyslexia — as well as a mild processing-speed disorder. [The disability office] recommended a number of academic accommodations, psychotherapy, investigation of the appropriateness of psychostimulant medication…

The whole enchilada. Psychotherapy, powerful stimulants…

GW Med was unimpressed with the disability office’s generous alarm and reiterated that the student was expelled, at which point she sued.

And sued. And sued. Tenaciously, the student has dragged her disability from court to court, only to lose again and again.

She has now lost yet again.

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This post’s headline is from a Scott Jaschik piece in Inside Higher Education. Scott links to a friend of the court addition to this case, brought by a number of university organizations. Basically, they argue that universities have had it with the costs imposed (let’s not even talk about how unfair this scheme is to other students) by increasing numbers of students taking advantage of an air-tight combination of the anything goes DSM and disability offices.

These organizations point out that among the accommodations universities have had to make are “comfort animals.”

How far does this go? What if you’re someone whose learning disability can only be comforted by masturbation?

Sure, we can laugh now. GW prevailed. But it’s not funny. These cases impose enormous burdens on schools. They make already obscene tuitions rise. Allen Frances is right to be angry about the DSM‘s crucial contribution to this scam.

… and other university sports apologists had their way, Sandusky would have been a Penn State professor.

… know everything, and those who know nothing and want to know nothing. Those who know everything are a small group of insiders extremely close to the president and the coach and local politicians. They do the president’s bidding. Those who know nothing and want to know nothing have a spotty attendance record at trustee meetings (why go?) but get a huge kick out of being able to say they’re a university trustee.

Auburn University’s board of trustees is instructive. For decades, ex-trustee Bobby Lowder basically ran the school – academics (intellectual inquiry at Auburn centers around figuring out how professors can help athletes cheat without the athletes getting caught) and sports. A power-obsessed, corrupt mover and shaker, Lowder typifies the broad-shouldered bullies who can intimidate and take over boards of trustees.

When the shit hits the fan at universities, unseemly blame-tossing almost always breaks out on BOTs — between members who’ve been meaningless muckety mucks, and the power boys. Recall the panic in AU Park when its president turned out to be robbing the school blind. In that case it was William Jacobs, strapping head of the BOT, who withheld information and shooed trustees away from his endless shoveling of money to Benjamin Ladner. When the American University story broke, the know-nothings moaned that they’d been blindsided.

Same thing at Pederasty State.

The trustees dislike how a few board members appeared to have been notified that charges against Curley and Schultz were imminent while the vast majority of trustees were left in the dark until Saturday.

Yes, and that’s in a big old article all about how we’re supposed to pity and admire the principled trustees… the good trustees, who got all beat up by the big boys…

No. When these things happen, the entire board of trustees has got to go. They are trustees, kids. The university is in their trust. They either didn’t do anything, or they worked as hard as all the other Paterno-tools to cover up things.

University trustees are, in UD‘s experience, either a nothingness or an embarrassment. Or both.

… but the quieter, ongoing, incredibly expensive bullshit of big-time university sports looks like this.

UD didn’t think Chicago State University, with its long history of negligence, corruption, and graduation rates barely above ten percent, had any more surprises in store for her (she’s chronicled its disgraceful ways for years on this blog), but now there’s this:

Chicago State has a policy that students with a grade-point average below 1.8 will be dismissed “for poor scholarship,” but records obtained by [the Chicago Tribune] show students were allowed to continue registering for classes with GPAs as low as zero. Meanwhile, President Wayne Watson was touting increased retention and graduation rates as evidence that the institution was improving after years marked by widespread financial mismanagement, scathing audits and a failure to graduate students.

Chicago State is what UD calls a Potemkin university. It exists almost entirely as a group of administrators collecting state and federal government money. As a kind of bonus, it ruins its students’ lives.

… its $250 million remodeling of its on-campus football stadium, a project Business Week calls “the most expensive renovation of a sports facility in NCAA history.” (UW could instead use an already-existing stadium a few miles from campus.)

Without the new stadium, UW officials explain, “the tailgating experience would be compromised.”

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A recent article about tailgating, in the Duke University newspaper.

An opinion piece about tailgating in the Louisiana State University paper.

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A fourteen-year-old found, after the event, half-dead in a portable toilet.

Your campus running like a sewer.

You wouldn’t want to compromise the tailgating experience.

… quotes Wendy Brown saying what I’ve long been trying to say about online university education. As I sometimes do, I’ll interrupt her thoughts with some parenthetical responses:

As is well known, no matter how “high touch” it is, on-line education inherently isolates and insulates students, deprives instruction of personality, mood and spontaneity, sustained contact, and leaves undeveloped students’ oral skills and literacy. [Of all the defenses of online I’ve read, the most pathetic – and one of the most frequent – is that it’s great for students who are so shy, so introverted, that they will never open their mouths in class… Yes, with online we can make sure that no mean professor ever gets a chance to bring that introvert out of herself and incorporate her into a verbal as well as intellectual world! Bravo, online! …  Do you know how many students UD has had over her years of university teaching who said nothing in the first few weeks of her classes, and then, gradually, began to contribute, began to come up to her after class with ideas, etc? Do you know that these awakenings constitute perhaps UD‘s proudest teaching moments? But by all means nip this problem in the bud by leaving those students at home and putting them in front of screens! What a favor online is doing them!] Countless studies reveal that on-line courses necessarily dumb down and slow down curriculums. They reduce as well the critical, reflective and reflexive moments of learning, moments of developing thoughtfulness, navigating strangeness and newness, and of being transformed by what one learns. [This is the heart of my rejection of one of my readers’ claims that online allows professors to “share their insights” with students.  No it doesn’t, and Brown here explains why.] On-line education necessarily emphasizes … “content retention,” rather than what liberal arts education has long promised: the cultivation of thoughtful, worldly, discerning, perspicacious, and articulate civic-minded human beings. Thus to substitute on-line for on-campus education, especially in those first two years of college when students are initiated into university level inquiry, is to spurn the enduring Socratic notion of learning as a “turning of the soul.” It is also to privilege those courses that conform best to large-scale cyber teaching, those with the most information-based content. It would thus further orient students and the future of the university toward education conceived simply as job training and credentialing.

In her longer remarks, Brown mentions many other appalling aspects of online: Its sky-high drop-out rates, with the attendant debt … And why are the drop-out rates so much higher than on physical campuses, where they’re already pretty damn high? Because its such a blah, isolating, atemporal, nothing experience… like reading Waiting for Godot, very slowly, every day, over and over again… And of course because intellectually its also nothing; there’s none of what Brown calls turning; you’re a passive recipient of data, a memorization-machine, no human beings anywhere in sight, no professor to get you excited about ideas because she’s so excited about them. Who can get it up for that mindmush on a regular basis? No wonder so many onliners cheat! Anything rather than drag yourself through this soulless routine.

As one of my readers, a math professor, writes in a recent comment:

Learning mathematics can be done easily online. Provided a student is motivated. That’s the rub with online education in mathematics. It’s hard to be motivated. There is something about coming to class – even a boring lecture class – that keeps more students on track. In online classes they tend to fall by the wayside.

(You know one thing UD thinks is funny? UD has always found the way-popular motivational speaker phenomenon in the United States embarrassing and absurd. You can’t run a convention without hiring some clown to whomp everybody up first? Yet in its tacky clownish way the motivation industry tells us some baseline truths about organizing people and focusing their energies.)

(Oh and here’s a business tip from old UD: Start a company that hires actors, motivational speakers, students, to precede online classes with motivational speeches! Like that lady who talks to Winston Smith through the telescreen:

‘Smith!’ screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. ‘6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You’re not trying. Lower, please! That’s better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.’

Maybe a little nicer than that.)

Online is a boon in one way. Since it so dramatically represents the opposite of a liberal arts education, it helps us clarify the nature of authentic higher learning, helps understand exactly what we’re defending, and why we defend it so fiercely.

From Hassan Nemazee’s website cv:

– Member of the Visiting Committee of the Center for International Affairs, Harvard University 1998 – 2005

– Member of Visiting Committee on University Resources, Harvard University 1986-2002

– Member of the Middle East Center Advisory Council at Harvard University 1990 – 1994

– Member of the International Affairs Planning Committee, Harvard University 1990-1995

– In 1996 was named a John Harvard Fellow

– Taught seminars at Harvard and also in Japan and Korea in conjunction with Harvard University.

Nemazee will go to prison for twenty years or so because of his Madoff-style fraud.

In addition to seeking to force Nemazee to forfeit $292 million, the indictment seeks his interest in five pieces of real estate, 16 corporate entities and one hedge fund, 14 securities accounts, 32 bank accounts, a 2008 Maserati Quattroporte, and a 2007 Cessna airplane.

“For more than ten years, Hassan Nemazee projected the illusion of wealth, stealing more than $290 million so that he could lead a lavish lifestyle and play the part of heavyweight political fundraiser,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said last week.

“Today’s indictment exposes the brazenness of Nemazee’s schemes and marks the end of his decade of deception.”

The man is virtually a creation of Harvard university:

Around the time George W. Bush joined its board, Harken [oil company, with which Nemazee is connected] received an unusual and sizable cash infusion from the Harvard Management Company, which handles Harvard University’s endowment, the largest in the nation. Robert G. Stone, Jr., a figure with ties to US intelligence and to the Bushes, was head of the Harvard board of overseers that approved financial strategies. Former employees of Harvard Management have recently made highly-publicized charges that the company engaged in Enron-style investment practices. (Prior to going to work for Nemazee and Quasha, Terry McAuliffe had publicly criticized Bush for his financial dealings with Harken, disparaging that company’s own Enron-like accounting. Both Quasha and Nemazee, like Bush, have Harvard degrees, and both have sat on prestigious Harvard committees in recent years.)

Madoff and Merkin got respectability cover from Yeshiva University; Nemazee got that and more from Harvard.

UD awaits details of Nemazee’s financial relationship with Harvard University.

She also awaits Harvard’s public reckoning with its extensive institutional support of one of the nation’s most notorious criminals.

… four? It’s almost impossible to count. Here’s the trustees page for UDC. A careful reading yields four real voting trustees… though I’m not sure.

And then you go to this Washington Post article and it identifies a whole other person as chair of the board of trustees.

This Post editorial notes that ten out of the fifteen seats for trustees are empty — the City Council and the Mayor can’t agree on appointees.

Meanwhile one of our most troubled universities operates with virtually no trustee oversight.

… at a State Department memorial ceremony today can be found here.

Adkins, a George Washington University graduate, was killed on his first diplomatic mission for the Foreign Service.

… and therefore a popular early theory about the U Idaho students knifed to death in their beds seems plausible: It was a random ugly encounter, during a night of barhopping, with someone who turned out to be a vicious asshole, who followed them home and killed them.

PhD student, criminology, Washington State University.

A reposting from 2016 in his memory (some links have expired):

Many big-time university coaches are variants of Donald Trump…

… but the one who comes closest to the original is Washington State University’s Mike Leach, a man who arrives at each new job trailing a longer and longer shitstream.

Variant doesn’t quite say it, actually. Leach

keeps a framed, autographed picture of Trump on the wall in his office in Pullman, Wash.

Leach has learned everything he knows from Trump: hit back hard; sue the shit out of everyone; discover conspiracies everywhere.

Leach’s latest is a perennial favorite: a media conspiracy. Some of his lads were allegedly involved in a fight at a recent party, and there are reports that one of them broke a fellow student’s jaw. Badly. He did it by kicking him repeatedly in said jaw while the student was unconscious on the floor.

Asked about it, Leach said it was all lies, all a media conspiracy.

When given the chance to correct any facts about the situation that he alleges the media got wrong, Leach said there were “too many to address…”

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See, this is what UD loves about Trump and Trump wannabes like Leach. They really don’t give a shit. They’ll just go out there and say anything… make a hail mary pass… kick the ball down the field see where that sucker ends up… The President was born in Kenya. I won’t tell you the facts about a situation whose facts I don’t know because there are too many facts that I know. Just go there. Just do it. Just brazen that fucker out. It’s an amazing spectacle, and Donald Trump is here to prove that it can take you far.

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Trump has done fairly well with high-profile, unconventional college coaches. But his past two big endorsements — Bobby Knight and … Leach, were fired for, respectively, putting their hands on a student, and making a player stand in a shed.