Gary Barnett Out as Colorado Head Coach
2005-12-18
Posted by: badanov
We wondered silently last year how long Colorado football head coach Gary Barnett would be around with the scandals in his programs, and apparently it didn't take very long.
And the catalyst? A 70-3 pounding by Number Two ranked Texas in the Big 12 Championship game.
So, someone help us out here. This year-long gaining scandal in CU athletics results in the firing of a coach after an embarrassing loss, yet the same university can't seem to bring itself to provide some element of justice in an even bigger and uglier scandal, Ward Churchill.
Those readers unfamiliar with this other scandal can click this link for a blog which has dedicated itself to tracking this pitiful story of incompetence at the highest levels of Colorado University, a malaise which prevents people of good will from making the right decision about this excreble college professor.
And to be fair to Colorado, this school has had some humdingers for coaches. Before Bill McCartney and Rick Neuheisel was Chuck Fairbanks, a coach so bad that when he left a sportswriter commented: Fairbanks: The End of an Error.
But as bad as Fairbanks was he didn't lie to get the job. The university knew he was a marginal coach at best when he was hired, after poor performance in the New England Patriots. They knew Fairbanks could maintain a good program, but could not fix a broken one, as he proved at Oklahoma. They knew Fairbanks operated at the margins of NCAA rules. They gave the man his shot, then sent him packing, as college officials should, when he failed to deliver.
Like Barnett, Fairbanks didn't lie about his ethnicity. Nor did Fairbanks try to hide he actually sucked as a head football coach. Barnett and Fairbanks didn't create art copied from others, edit images and call it his own. Even a crappy football coach has his standards, and so did the University of Colorado.
Our guess is had Fairbanks told a Hiring Committee he was a brother and he then subsequently beat out other brothers for a coaching spot, we would have had a genuine crisis, and Barnett or Fairbanks would have gone down in Colorado history as the biggest embarrassment in higher education hiring practices.
Instead we have a professor with marginal ( in our view zero ) qualifications for a teaching position at a major university, making more than $100,000 a year and making the University of Colorado look like the utter fools they are in their search to evaluate said professor's work.
We keep hearing about 'tenure' which apparenly in this case means a college employee can lie to officials about gaining employment, lies which are at the base of that employment, can plagiarize works of art, steal passages from reading material to call his own original research, yet can rely on tenure to retain his job.
Our view is tenure should protect controversial/unpopular teachers from firing, but tenure ought to be based on personal conduct, so that when conduct in the course of employment which indeed not only affects the quality of the professor's work but also impacts on the academic credibility of the university itself becomes an issue, tenure ought not become a shield to preserve and uphold a teacher.
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