Over the past several months, Mr. Tusk orchestrated the abortive Harold Ford Jr. campaign against Kirsten Gillibrand, a frequent target of the mayor's ire; he ran the political operation of a group of charter school advocates, working alongside the mayor's own efforts, to lift the cap on charters throughout the state; and he has signed on as the top adviser to Staten Island District Attorney Dan Donovan, convincing the friend and golfing buddy of the mayor that there's a Republican path to the attorney general's office this fall.

Mr. Tusk's informal status as the mayor's go-to guy has its benefits for both sides. Mr. Tusk provides the outsource-able political muscle--capable of acting as a cudgel to supplement the administration's efforts from the outside--and at the same time reaps the returns of a particular, and potentially lucrative, niche on the flank of Team Bloomberg.

"The mayor cares about one thing, and that's who can get the job done. If you can get the job done, he wants you on his team," said Ed Skyler, a former deputy mayor and Mr. Tusk's best friend.

A source close to the mayor puts it more bluntly: "Not only does he want Bradley on his team, he wants him to be a quarterback."

It was Mr. Skyler who brought his friend into the Bloomberg orbit in 2002 for a one-year stint in the mayor's office. The two had met at Henry Stern's Parks Department in the mid-1990s; they had both graduated from Penn the same year, but hadn't known each other. Mr. Tusk had met Ed Rendell, then the mayor of Philadelphia, in 1992 and had become an intern in Mr. Rendell's office, which allowed him to forgo the poli-sci department and major in creative writing instead.

"His parks name was Ivory," said Mr. Stern, who thought Mr. Tusk's ability stood out even among the young talent in his department.

Mr. Tusk went off to law school at the University of Chicago, studied under Cass Sunstein, and brought back some of the scholar's social norms theory-including the use of shame to affect social behavior-to Mr. Stern and the Parks Department.

"Ivory thought up a slogan we put on signs: 'If you don't clean up after your dog, you don't deserve to own one,'" Mr. Stern recalled.

He left for Mr. Schumer's office, and later decamped for a career-making job as the deputy governor of Illinois to Rod Blagojevich.

Mr. Tusk came back to New York to work at Lehman Brothers. When Lehman collapsed, his friends in the mayor's office recruited him back with the promise they would keep him busy. He ended up wrangling support for the term-limits extension, and then, for the reelection effort, as campaign manager--his first job on a campaign.

It was a strange one.

The idea was to project the inevitability of Mr. Bloomberg's reelection, even though internal polls showed it to be a close race. The strategy stood to make Mr. Tusk's $100 million campaign look underwhelming when the numbers rolled in.

"Bradley knew what the margin would mean for him professionally and he could have easily put out stories sort of lowering expectations," Mr. Skyler said. "Bradley basically put the mayor first and him last. And I think long term, people recognize that."

But for Mr. Tusk, who is now hanging a shingle as Tusk Strategies, being on Team Bloomberg makes for a unique niche, one that could prove difficult to navigate.

Mr. Tusk's lusty embrace of the Bloomberg operative-for-hire role has paid dividends for him, but it also irrevocably altered his relationship with the New York Democratic Party, and in particular with the man who may well be the next leader of the U.S. Senate.

"Clearly, there were people who I like and respect, who define the party's position, who didn't want me to do that," said Mr. Tusk of his work for Mr. Ford. "At the end of the day, if I think candidate X is better than candidate Y, and X calls me to help them, I'm going to take it. That's just the way I am."

"I think in New York City it has now become fairly common for Democratic consultants to work for an independent candidate, and I think that's a reflection that a lot of New York voters have voted for an independent candidate," said Howard Wolfson, the longtime Democratic operative, who now works for Mr. Bloomberg.

But Mr. Tusk's decision to handle a Republican candidate for attorney general--even a relatively moderate one like Mr. Donovan--is a step across the aisle that many of his fellow Democratic consultants have been unwilling to take.

Mr. Tusk scoffs at the possibility that such blatant party-crossing could cost him the top candidates in both parties.

"Would I love to run a presidential campaign someday? Sure, theoretically, it would be fun. ... If some Republican or Democrat who I like and want to work for believes I'm the best person, they're going to hire me. I firmly believe that."

"It's something you can do," said Hank Sheinkopf, the longtime Democratic consultant who worked with Mr. Tusk on the mayor's most recent reelection and said the young operative would be in his top-five people to have in a foxhole with him. "When the mayor's not in office, it will be a little more difficult. We don't know yet what the Bloomberg legacy will be."

Mr. Tusk sees his role broader than the Bloomberg orbit. He has unrelated corporate clients and is currently working pro bono on Ed Koch's New York Uprising campaign for nonpartisan redistricting (it also employs two former Bloomberg aides), and sees his success on charter schools as the first of what could become a model for battling entrenched special interests in Albany.

"What I'd like to do is take that general set of policies and figure out, how do we corral all these different people and resources, who agree on all these different principles, to have one effort to get things done?" Mr. Tusk said.

"The era of the union special interests may be over as we know it--for the time being," said Mr. Sheinkopf. "So Bradley Tusk may be the right guy at the right time. This may be his moment."

rpillifant@observer.com

In his speech at the University of Chicago commencement last weekend, Mayor Bloomberg did a most honorable thing, and, in attacking political correctness, praised the University for its support of John Mearsheimer. Here's the quote:

No, that's not an endorsement. But at a time when Walt and Mearsheimer have come under unfair and vicious political attack for a brave and important contribution, it sure is fair. I understand from a friend who was there that the line got the loudest applause of anything Bloomberg said. So the hive of Leo Strauss is now a hive of realists.

Ben Smith discovers that the city's Economic Development Corporation chief Andrew Alper has another love other than New York: the University of Chicago, where he is chairing a $2 billion capital campaign.

Alper closes a fundraising message for his alma mater with the words: Crescat scientia; vita excolatur!

Our sentiments exactly.

-Matthew Schuerman

football will drop out of sight until next autumn. Or perhaps I should say ought to drop out of sight, but may not

if well-known players are arrested for murder and lesser crimes, as was the

case in 2000, which seemed to be a particularly splendiferous year for gaudy

transgressions committed by glamorous athletes.

It's often alleged, and just as often stoutly denied, that

you will find more violent criminals on the local eleven than you will in the

society at large. The preponderance of evidence favors the allegers over the

deniers. The game, apparently at whatever level played, puts a premium on

recruiting thug-ugly types, and it has ever been so.

Nonetheless, most footballers aren't violent criminals. In

fact, they're so roughly used by the game that, with the help of the United

Steel Workers of America, A.F.L.-C.I.O., they're trying to organize a union

called the Collegiate Athletes Coalition-the better to pressure the filthy-rich

National Collegiate Athletic Association, which runs big-time football, into

providing such things as medical insurance for the gridiron's wounded veterans.

In 1883, a Harvard faculty committee charged with

investigating the game was so shocked by the violence, brutality and barbarism

of the players and the spectators that it recommended the school shut down

football at the university. Historian John Sayle Watterson writes, "From the

beginning football encouraged its participants to demonstrate their machismo.

In 1879 the beefy Yale player and future artist Frederick Remington claimed

that he went to a local slaughterhouse and dipped his uniform in blood to make

it 'more businesslike' …." Any Sunday afternoon TV viewer of the National

Football League will see plenty of blood on the uniforms and will hear John

Madden, a former coach and much-celebrated announcer, delight in the carmine

smudges.

Legend has it that when President Theodore Roosevelt saw a

newspaper picture of a bloodied Bob (Tiny) Maxwell, a gigantic guard lured away

from the University of Chicago to play on the Swarthmore 11, he reacted by

threatening to close football down unless something was done to prevent

physical mayhem on the gridiron. In fact, Tiny was not injured until after

Roosevelt had called his conference, but that he was a semi-professional player

whose expenses were taken care of by a Swarthmore alumnus is true enough.

Lately Swarthmore has

gotten out of the football business entirely. In recent years the school's team

had been outstandingly unsuccessful, a situation that the college's board of

managers believed could be improved on only by offering more athletic

scholarships. Since Swarthmore's incoming freshman classes generally numbered a

mere 375 students or so, the thought of diluting the school's brains with so

much brawn was too repulsive to admit. Ergo, after more than a century of

kicking the pigskin around, Swarthmore is a football power no more.

Swarthmore is by no

means the only school to "de-emphasize" football or to drop it completely; and

the schools that have given it up entirely don't seem to have paid much of a

price for their decision. Georgetown University, which gave it up in 1951, has

only gained in status. The same and more holds true for the University of

Chicago, which after dropping big-time football in 1939 has come to have a

unique reputation as a place of serious, non-rah-rah learning.

That leaves about one million and one football schools.

What's with them? Murray Sperber, a professor at Indiana University, makes a

compelling stab at answering that question in a new book called Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports

Is Crippling Undergraduate Education (Henry Holt).

Mr. Sperber, whose previous book about college athletic

departments is entitled College Sports

Inc .,  maintains that the athletic

departments of all but two or three universities are losing enormous amounts of

money, despite the billions being paid to these schools by the television

networks and other commercial interests. "The main causes of athletic

department red ink," concludes Mr. Sperber, "were waste, mismanagement and

fraud and this situation continues today." In addition, Mr. Sperber documents

other forms of rule-breaking, such as paying athletes salaries and keeping them

academically eligible to take part in the lucrative gladiatorial entertainments

by faking their grades.

None of this is new, of course. Every one of the illegal,

anti-educational or unethical practices of college and university athletic

departments has been going on for at least a century. Nor is there any chance

that they will be curtailed or stopped. The first efforts to bring runaway

college athletics to heel date from the 1880's. They were unsuccessful then, as

Mr. Watterson lays out in careful detail in his book College Football-History, Spectacle, Controversy , and nothing has

happened in the succeeding 120 years to make a dispassionate student of

American higher education think that anything besides the cosmetics will change

in our lifetimes, or our children's. The indignant few who want reform are

pitted against the corrupt unfew who are making money and having fun running

this nice-sized industry. If John McCain thinks campaign reform is a tough nut,

let him try his nutcracker on the college sports racket.

That said, I have trouble

with the subtitle of Mr. Sperber's book. He has not demonstrated "How Big-Time

College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education." Undergraduate education

would be on its way to the sludge pits had basketball and football never found

their way onto campus. And while there is no doubt that big-time sports has

played its role in the lowered state of higher education, it is less the cause

of making "the college experience" a joke than it is an accidental

instrumentality.

In preparing his book, Mr. Sperber did extensive interviewing

and made wide use of questionnaires, so that he has given us quite a picture of

daily life on the campus. Parents, be advised your offspring are more likely to

come down with cirrhosis of the liver or an S.T.D. than anemia brought on by

overwork. What with the endemic binge-drinking, the drugging, the gambling, the

music, the dancing and the fucking, the college your son or daughter is

attending is more like a pleasure park than a place of study, for that activity

is only fitfully and occasionally pursued by the larger mass of college

students. You might say that for hundreds of thousands of students, college is

a four-year rave in which one element is the entertainment and excitement

provided by the institution's professional athletes.

The men and women who run these institutions know full well

what's happening inside them. That's why a few floors in the dorms are set

aside for quiet. The students who live on the quiet floors are in the honors

programs. Honors-program students are that fraction of the student body who

take courses with a limited enrollment, taught by faculty members and not by

teaching assistants. This is the small minority who are expected to become

scholars, researchers and members of real professions, as opposed to the

"communications" majors.

The other members of the undergraduate student body-the huge

majority-are allowed to zoo their way through four years. They party and they

party and they party some more-and in spite of it, they all get good grades.

Mr. Sperber writes that, "In 1969, only 7 percent of undergraduates ... earned

A range GPAs, whereas 25 percent possessed C range averages; in 1993 only 9

percent had C range GPAs, versus 26 percent with A range averages." Needless to

say, D and F scores are rarer than an extinct species of waterfowl. It's not

just athletes who get grades they don't deserve.

This comes, in part, because cheating is endemic. Elaborate

systems for getting the test questions beforehand have been developed.

Test-question answers are even delivered via silent pagers, surely an

encouraging thing for wireless Internet companies struggling to show a profit.

Some teachers give A's not only because it's easier, but out of fear that a

student with moneybag parents will sue. Go on the Internet and dial up

Schoolsucks.com and you will see one of many services that provide term papers

for every course and subject imaginable.

Non-honors students are often taught by cheap, part-time

faculty. Here in New York, the English department at St. John's University has

two part-time faculty members for every full-timer. The part-time faculty are

paid $1,800 a course without health or life insurance benefits. When you recall

how much time and work goes into teaching a course competently, an instructor

would be better off on welfare. Universities which pay those kinds of salaries

to teach classes of 50 or 100 students are going to clean up. The instructor,

of course, can only go through the motions, give the kids A's and get the hell

out of there. It's laughable. The kids pretend to study and the faculty

pretends to teach.

Only in a nation so rich that it doesn't feel the need to

care about such things could all this waste pass unnoticed.

So settle back, enjoy the Super Bowl, take note of the

famous "schools" the gladiators "attended," but don't serve beer and pretzels.

Chocolate truffles and champagne, please.