You’ll find them at all sports factories, periodically emerging from the stygian gloom to express their concern that – as Youngstown State’s professors put it recently – “the university’s athletic budget is increasing while everything else is decreasing.”
When you realize that YSU’s professors put this concern to their new president, who is a football coach, it’s easy to see why, like cicadas, they spend most of their lives underground. Why go there? Why bother? To get screwed over and die?
They’re just as concerned at the University of Hawaii.
Most UHM students look to us for their classes, yet we are being brutally defunded to pay for embarrassing mistakes, poor management, and ill-conceived growth within the Cancer Center and the large athletic programs.
For years we’ve made a point, on this blog, of covering UH’s amazing athletic programs… It’s not that those programs are different in kind from lots of other university revenue sports programs; it’s the total emptiness for ever (to quote Philip Larkin) that UH has attained which sets it apart.
August 18th, 2014 at 6:22PM
Onetime coach and now YSU president Tressell was formally installed today. Ohio’s governor, often disparaged as anti-education, was the keynote speaker. Tressell’s been working about six weeks. The faculty union settled its contract on Friday. No major missteps on Tressell’s part. I’m still a wait ‘n’ see guy. I hope he does okay.
Is non-trad the way to go for university presidents? No, except in the most exceptional circumstances. The non-trad guy has emotional roots and career experiences elsewhere. There are mischievous, slippery-slope possibilities. Will the president be a prisoner of a strong provost or aggressive, territorial trustee? Will a coach as president open the door to say, regional food service managers being considered as presidents?