… has always been a problem for American universities, especially in the heartland. The University of Iowa’s amber waves of grain alcohol (UI, the nation’s number one party school, has an enthusiastic promotional relationship with Anheuser Busch) are getting ruffled lately by folks who think using your university as a promotional arm of the gambling industry as well as the alcohol industry is unseemly. The university points out that it’s all very nuanced:
Iowa … is paid to advertise Riverside Casino & Golf Resort, but removes the word “casino” in signs at Kinnick Stadium.
So what’s your problem?
And as for all the scratch-ticket game deals between the Iowa Lottery and UI … hello? Have we heard of ca-pi-tal-ism? UI’s got a brand new Adzillatron, and the only naughty thing college students love that isn’t being shriekingly massively constantly hawked on that screen is sex.
UD understands, however, that UI is in negotiations with Roxxxie’s Iowa State Fairest of Them All Bawdy House even as we speak. The plan is to drop the word “bawdy.”
November 18th, 2013 at 10:27AM
A few years back, I had the opportunity to interview Robert Goodman, author of the book, “The Luck Business.” It chronicled the methods states used to promote lotteries and casinos, but ignored the massive economic and social costs of state sponsored gambling.
Goodman’s contention was that a state cannot concomitantly promote and regulate a vice, as states were attempting to do with public gambling. The profits would override any real regulation. The only way it works is if the social and economic costs are ignored, or pushed onto the municipalities.
So now comes U of Iowa, with its alcoholic legacy, and the opportunity to exploit that student debauchery. Choice is pretty clear, money from vice, or acting as stewards of the young adults in their care. Anyone who thinks it would be anything but the filthy lucre is an idiot, getting laid, loaded and drunk is the “college experience” promoted by almost all universities, UI being no different. The admins are pimping their student bodies in order to live the Mack Daddy life. All they’ll do is push the social and economic costs of a degraded life onto the backs of their student body, leaving them to deal with debt and a degraded education. Not at all any different than what Goodman chronicled….
November 18th, 2013 at 12:16PM
Sorry, I should have written that states ignored the massive economic and social costs of state sponsored gambling, rather than what I wrote, which implied that the author did so.