OT: Jim Tressel named President of Youngstown State
Speeches about integrity, values, and honor are a staple of university presidents everywhere, and "lip service" doesn't begin to describe the situation at YSU now.
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2014/05/09/0509-jim-tress…
However, SnowSucks is a big fan of Tressel and YSU's decision, so Sweatervest has that going for him.
on the first controversy to come out of that school...I'm putting it at 3.5 yrs. And I'm curious what kind of car comes with that position...I'm sure JT has some high standards regarding vehicles.
do this to those who made that decision
SJ, what did you do to get sent to deep, dark Bolivia?
What will we do without your threads?
And I thought you were incommunicado once you entered Bolivia, no?
Nope. You're prevented from making new threads. I think you need 100 points to upvote and downvote as well, right?
Which means I can't create my own POSBANG thread to get me back to 100. Just watch when I become the president of the Internets. This place is going to get a well needed cleanse.
is your revenge? I have more faith in your Bolivian revenge plot. It better be hilarious, Shakey Jake. (Also, I assume it will take a while based on your point total, so you have a lot of time to think.)
Amazing how easy a ficticous internet shiv goes through thin skin.
The man is a shining beacon of hope for lying weasels everywhere. You too can have a job you're uniquely unqualified for if you just win some football games.
Aw hell, who am I kidding? Tressel is perfectly qualified. He can hand the academic workings over to some minion, just like he always did, while spending his time on the glad-handing circuit squeezing cash out of rich Bucknuts who never had any connection to YSU but would blow him and pay him for the privilege, if that's what he asked for.
It's a reflection of the #1 job that university presidents have now: fundraising.
This is hitting square on the head. The president deals primarily with issues external to the university, especially fund raising. The provost is the one dealing with issues about how the university is actually run.
Presidents exist largely to fundraise, which I imagine the Vest will do pretty well.
Yep, they are fundraisers before they are administrators or academics at most schools. If the Vest could raise all those funds in secret for OSU players, imagine what he'll do when he can raise money publicly!
and won a bunch of games. YSU is a hellhole of a school, so good for them.
Clinton, Bush and Obama got elected, so why can't Tressel?
And it appears that the NFL does NOT want him in their ranks if he's taking this job. JMHO.
all it comes down to is a popularity contest.
I cannot think of any sane reason why this just happened. I really can't. Youngstown St. just jumped the shark.
every time I've heard his name I've replied with "mickey monus is paying his salary" and wandered away
Youngstown, OH ceased to be a normal, functioning place many years ago. I'm not sure why this surprises anyone.
and Scum knows Scum.
The whole state of Ohio sucks.
Except for the part of Ohio that Bo Schembechler, Gary Moeller, Brady Hoke, Charles Woodson and Desmond Howard (and so many other Michigan Men) came from.
Nope. Those parts of the state suck, too. It's just that those people turned out okay.
is still in Ohio, yes? So they have that goin' for them, which is nice.
“Mr. Tressel has the personality and leadership skills, in addition to widespread community support, to dramatically raise YSU’s profile and prominence across Ohio and the nation.”
It might be the cynical me talking, but the basic qualification here is a successful, well-known Ohio native, if I am not mistaken. As long as we the circumstances under which that success came to be don't matter to YSU (and if they are willing to take Tressel back into the fold, they must not), then they couldn't have made a better pick most likely.
The adage that "cheaters never prosper" has officially been disproven. I really don't know much about the traits that make a great college president, but succeeding with two of the dirtiest football programs in their resepective divisions apparently counts for a lot.
For you to conclude that cheaters never prosper? You need to follow national politics more closely. Probably state and local politics too, wherever you may be located.
Youngstown is a wretched hive of scum and villiany even by the lax standards of NE Ohio. If you live in Ohio, it's common knowledge that it's had a long history of being a mafia town and if there is a diminished presence these days it's because even they want nothing to do with the drug gangs that now run the area. Youngstown is a perfect fit for Tressel because the whole area can charitably be described as a shithole. The sole redeeming point of the area is its aggregation of decent Italian restaurants.
I can best sum up the area with a small personal anecdote - we were in the area for a site visit earlier this year. While in the office, I saw a file cabinet with a bumper sticker that read:
"Youngstown, Ohio - ya gotta live somewhere!"
Pretty lame to knock an entire region down to feel good about yourself. My father was an All-American and Academic All-American Tackle for Bo and is very proud to headquarter three large companies in his hometown of Youngstown. And I have a long way to go, but I have BBA and Law degrees from Michigan and I'm very proud to be starting a national company here also.
Youngstown has its share of issues like a lot of Rust Belt cities, but there are still great surrounding areas and great people that live here and are trying to help turn things around. Not sure where you're from, but that's like saying "METRO DETROIT SUCKS!" just because of the problems Downtown. And I hate Ohio State as much as anyone, but Tressel already paid pretty dearly for his mistakes, deserves a shot at the job and will do a lot of good for YSU.
Considering that he's just become president of a university, whatever he's paid isn't close to being "dear."
As to whether he "deserves" a shot at the job, I doubt very much that Bo Schembechler would have agreed with you, considering how Bo felt about his father losing out on a job due to a co-worker's cheating on a test.
Fair point I guess, but the penalty for his violation was connected to coaching football, and who knows how much of the failure came from the OSU Athletic Department (very easy for them to just put all the blame on Tressel and be done with it). Isn't that up to YSU to decide if that disqualifies him from the job? And I doubt you'd find all spotless resumes across university presidents. Is he supposed to never work again? Akron already had him in a high administrative job for 2 years before this, and he was a finalist for their presidency as well. Obviously I'm biased because I've met the guy and he's been good to my hometown, but I think he'll do a good job.
P.S.- Bo coached the YSU Spring Game for Tressel when I was a kid, FWIW.
Well, let's see, he's over 60 years old and has made a boatload of money. He's also left two institutions on probation, and is the subject of a show cause order that basically prevents him from doing the one thing he's qualified for. So, yeah, maybe it's time to call it quits on serving institutions of higher learning. If he really needs the money (doubtful), I'm sure he can draw big bucks offering inspirational words about leadership on the speaking circuit.
As another president famously said, "The buck stops here." You don't see a problem with choosing a university president who has repeatedly looked the other way (or lied and covered up) when he learned about violations in programs he was in charge of? Let's hope there are no Sanduskys around YSU, because nothing in President Tressel's past suggests that he would aggressively investigate and insist that wrongdoers be held accountable.
If you think a university administrator has to have a completely clean resume, I respect that even though I disagree. I guess I just look at it as more of a CEO job and I think his previous mistakes, while serious, shouldn't preclude him from getting a chance. In both the YSU and OSU violations, he was probably guilty of something but there were more people that were potentially responsible and they never really figured it out.
[A]ll of his issues in the past have surrounding characters and we never really found out to what degree all of them were responsible.
So, you don't think the man in charge should be expected to find out "to what degree all of them were responsible," as opposed to, say, lying and covering up so that it's impossible to determine who should be held responsible? You seem to have a pretty low (or cynical?) idea of what's entailed in a "CEO job." If a president doesn't need a "clean resume," I would hope they'd at least excel in areas like leadership and accountability.
When I say characters with regard to OSU, I mean people above him that may have conveniently used his mistakes to make him the full scapegoat for what may have been a bigger systemic issue. And for the YSU/Ray Isaac issue, it was a shady booster and they never figured out how much Tressel really knew. So if you'd also think that Ed Martin should disqualify Steve Fisher from ever holding a university administrator job, that's fair too. I just disagree.
...the "shady booster" was Mickey Monus, the Chairman of the Youngstown State University Board of Trustees, later convicted of conspiracy, bank fraud, wire fraud, mail fraud, tax evasion, 96 counts of interstate transportation of stolen property, and obstruction of justice and sentenced to 19 1/2 years in prison. The obstruction of justice cause involved jury tampering in Monus's fraud case done by Ray Isaac.
And it was Tressel who introduced Isaac to Monus.
It's as if people think YSU's own laughable internal investigation revealed the whole truth of the matter, and never bothered to notice what came out when the Feds got involved seven years later.
I forgot that Monus was Chairman of the Board, obviously not good. But since nothing was proven with regard to Tressel, I don't think it should keep him out of this job 20 years later. Just my opinion. I'm off topic anyway, I was more mad about someone using this to trash the Youngstown region altogether, just like I hate when people bash the Detroit area.
Nothing was proven with regard to Tressel because the investigation into the alleged misdeed was conducted by Jim Tressel. If you want to think it's possible for such an investigation to have exonerated the man, have at it.
If you want to to imagine this in local terms, this would be more or less the equivalent (governance in Michigan is a little different, so I don't think the Regents is the place to assign a Monus equivalent):
Brady Hoke, in the course of recruiting Devin Gardner, introduces him to Stephen M. Ross. Ross begins making regular large gifts of cash, cars, jewelry, maybe some real estate, to Gardner (and no doubt others). When the school is informed of the allegations,MSC responds by asking Hoke to talk to Gardner and asking Dave Brandon to confront Stephen Ross. Both report back that there's nothing to the story, and the school reports to the NCAA and the media that their investigation is complete and no wrongdoing was discovered. (Later evidence will indicate that neither one actually bothered to even have the discussions with Ross or Gardner.)
Ross's real estate empire turns out to be a shell, hollowed out by his embezzlement of hundreds of millions (this is M, not YSU, so we need to up the scale) of dollars that he siphoned to the Dolphins and to Michigan recruits. Related Companies file for bankruptcy, the feds successfully prosecute a 109-count indictment against Ross for embezzlement and fraud and obstruction. The first trial ends in a hung jury, with allegations that Devin Gardner, of all people, was asked by Ross to tamper with the jury. A retrial finds Ross guilty and he spends the remainder of his life in prison. (Actually, Monus eventually got out by turning states evidence against his own attorney.)
Michigan voluntarily docks itself a few scholarships in acknowledgement of the Ross problem; the NCAA takes no action because the statute of limitations has expired. Hoke in the meantime has used his fantastic success with Gardner to move on to a much better job (I've having trouble maintaining the analogy here--what would it be?), where his first big recruit is somebody also rumored to be tied to the Ross empire and to have taken significant improper benefits.
Can you even imagine any of this?
I'm going to stop--I can't think of an equivalent to Clarett in light of all that had already happened in Youngstown and I'm already having trouble imagining a future career for Hoke equivalent to Tressel's arc. And Monus was a local guy, and the collapse of his business was devastating to the Youngstown economy (can't figure out how to work that, in AA--maybe Ed Martin could have instead been one of the Fords or something?). The point is that even just up to this point, this is pretty much all too fantastic to even contemplate. Things wouldn't have to get nearly this bad before the long-term academic career prospects of everyone involved--MSC, Brandon, Hoke, everybody at the Regents, everybody at UM legal--would be damaged, probably beyond repair.
What happened at YSU is not anything like your usual run-of-the-mill rogue booster, with school and coach looking the other way. It was one spoke of a criminal enterprise at the very heart of the school.
because they went out of their way to not figure it out. It was well known that the chairman of the Board of Trustees was paying Ray Isaac and it was well known that it was Tressel who made the introductions. The school couldn't uncover that in their investigation because their "investigation" consisted of actions like asking Tressel to talk to Isaac, and asking the athletic director to confront the chairman of the Board.
Not that such service to the institution should bar him from a later post at the same institution. He couldn't be more qualified for the job. Now if they could just appoint some money to the Board, they'd be all set.
If you think that a university presidential candidate with an academic background would have a particle's chance in hell of getting the job at any barely respectable institution if they had a plagiarism or academic cheating scandal on their record, you're seriously naive.
How about such a person getting the job at the very same institution where they committed the most serious of their acts of plagiarism?
It's beyond bizarre, and it really does say a lot about YSU.
Have to agree...if one looked at the bad sections of Detroit and Flint and used that for a yardsick for the state of Michigan, it wouldn't paint a terribly attractive picture.
As for Tressel, nothing you can say except that it is mind boggling how little character entered into the equation.
demonstrate their low ethical standards by hiring the college football world's face of lying and deceipt. (I was going to say sports world, but then I remembered Lance Armstrong) What a nice message to send to the student body at YSU.
Maybe I'm the only one who is actually surprised by this? I laughed when I heard he even applied. It really must be about fundraising, which is crazy. Can't he just be vp of development then???