What can we say about Texas Tech University that hasn’t already been said? This is truly America’s university, with all of our, uh, more internationally notorious tendencies.
Violence? Wow. Yup. Look at their lineup of coaches over the last ten years or so. The ones whose contracts or lawsuits or whatever they’re still dealing with (UD assumes TTU’s huge legal expenses “related to football” are included in the $95 million). Some were dangerous drunks. Some liked to beat up on players. One even punched one of his assistant coaches. On camera.
Provincial? What other university in America would give a disgraced former attorney general/crony $100,000 a year to teach one course?
Un peu ivre? Sure. Tailgating is a bit of an issue.
Sports and nothing but sports? Well, it done got all that money (guess I should say it done spent all that money) plus all that big-time football and last time I looked it ranked #156. As a university, I mean! Ha ha. As an arena it’s doing great.
June 14th, 2015 at 1:47PM
What do you expect from a uni whose students decided they needed a water theme park to float away hangovers?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/fashion/college-recreation-now-includes-pool-parties-and-river-rides.html
Texas Tech, ranked #156 by USNWR, but top five in Lazy Rivers….
June 15th, 2015 at 3:22PM
I’m afraid I’m not sure the point of snarking on Tech’s ranking. I have some skin in the game — my wife comes from a very poor Mexican American family, busted her ass to get her BA, MA, and PhD, the latter of which she received from Tech, and she now is a tenured professor.
And so I guess I ask — is 156 bad? Compared to what? In one of the two national rankings (universities, liberal arts colleges) the fact that Tech gets a numerical ranking at all puts it head and shoulders above literally hundreds (and arguably thousands) of institutions of higher education (on the US News site, up to the 8th page of 25 schools per page get a numerical ranking, yet there are 25 pages total, just in the national university rankings — I’d say that puts Tech in pretty good company).
This tendency to shit on perfectly respectable universities that may not be elite strikes me as a slippery slope, not to mention as a fairly shallow, stupid argument. “Texas Tech has lousy priorities with regard to athletics and student life and it may be undermining its mission as a university.” Fair argument. “Look at those proles at #156 in the US News Rankings”? Not as strong as you think. Then again, I don’t teach in the rarefied air of the #54 ranked university in the same category. (Oooh la la, I guess? Is 54 good? Is it bad? Does one get to mock it if one is on a lower page on US News?)
dcat
June 15th, 2015 at 3:46PM
When did your wife get her BS, and how much debt did she have?
June 15th, 2015 at 4:55PM
Derek: The argument that Texas Tech and all big sports schools make is that the absolutely immense investment of university funds in athletics is somehow good for the university qua university. They’re doing all of it for the betterment of the school.
After all, TTU is not just a sports training facility. In fact, it is not that at all. It is a university.
So I take seriously their argument that decades of hundreds of millions of university dollars directed toward sports will improve a university. As a university rather than a sports training facility.
I have the right to note that the results in terms of this one school’s ranking are not very good at all. This school is not without resources – in fact, it behaves like a very rich school indeed. It has used those resources to build athletics facilities, etc. The result is that it is a great sports facility.
Now TTU has a choice – It can either be honest about the fact that it never really believed that spending most of your money on sports is a good way to make yourself a better academic institution, and it can continue on its merry way for the next century impoverishing its professors and enriching its coaches. Or it can keep lying.
I think GW’s ranking is pretty good. It reflects a huge effort to improve academics. But then GW doesn’t have a football team.
June 17th, 2015 at 3:36PM
Margaret —
You elide the only real point I made. You took a cheap shot at Tech’s rankings, and even in your comments you insist that Tech’s rankings are not good at all. And so I ask again — is 156 not good in a country with 4500 institutions of higher education? Even in Tech’s own category, national universities, they rank tied for 156th out of more than 600 qualifying institutions, and presumably ranking higher than almost every, say, regional Masters Comprehensive in the country, and standing higher in the pecking order than a good number of low-ranked liberal arts colleges. I’m not even sure what any of this means, but I’m afraid that simply asserting ipse dixit that a ranking of 156th represents failure isn’t enough. You haven’t engaged with anything I’ve said. Any ranking that places an institution in the top 450 puts an institution in the top 10% of American colleges and universities. You seem to think that’s bad. I don’t agree. I certainly don’t think it’s worthy of snark.
Charlie —
I have no idea the relevance of my household’s personal finances nor how it is possibly any of your damned business. If your implication is that she left Tech with a lot of debt it just reveals how very little you know about grad school and especially PhD financing.
dcat
June 17th, 2015 at 4:53PM
Derek: You ask: Is 156 not good in a country with 4500 institutions of higher education? First of all, if it is, then my own GW scores even better than I thought. But no – the fact that our vast rich country has thousands of institutions of higher ed doesn’t necessarily mean that ranking somewhere in the hundreds is automatically a good outcome. It could be that most of our colleges aren’t very good.
In fact, our rich country boasts states like Texas, which at the moment isn’t among the very wealthiest of our states, but which is always respectably ranked. Again, look at the resources Texas Tech has to spend! It is spending staggering sums. On sports.
Which to my mind makes the matter far worse. Thousands of more obscure schools don’t have anything like the money Texas Tech has. And look how Texas Tech squanders it.
June 17th, 2015 at 5:39PM
But again, that’s a DIFFERENT argument. Yes, Tech squanders resources on athletics. No doubting that. But that’s different from shitting on a school with actual students and actual faculties, and actual alums who maybe deserve a bit better than simply to say: They waste money on athletics, therefore, ha ha, your school is a joke!
I just don’t even know what to do with an argument as condescending as “most of our colleges aren’t very good.” Again, just enormously insulting to those of us working out in the hinterlands at schools significantly lower on the scale than Tech or GW but that really work hard to educate our students, with faculties with PhD’s and everything. You know, some of us even write, like, books and shit.
Your tendency toward flippancy is all well and good, makes the blog amusing, sometimes trenchant. But you’re digging your heels in on a patently stupid argument. Tech is not a bad school or a joke of a school. It just isn’t. It could do better. So many could. But you shitting on a place is more than just shitting on its institutional culture. It’s shitting on its students and faculty and alums and in this case undeservedly so. You might make the case that 95% of American colleges and universities are awful, or a joke, or what have you. That says a great deal more about you than it does about those schools.
You are making two arguments. One a very good one. The other a very shoddy one. And when confronted with the fact that it’s not just an institution you’re shitting on, but real people, smart people, like my wife, you continue to punch downward. At least there is the possibility that the assistant coach may have deserved it.
dcat
June 17th, 2015 at 6:55PM
@Derek, you stated that your wife came from a poor family, and since you brought your wife into the discussion in order to make a point, then you shouldn’t be surprised that I reference her. And you seemed to have missed something, I specifically asked when she received her BS, not her PH.d, and how much debt did she amass in order to get said Bachelors. Try to stick with what I ask, if you can. The reason I ask is that student financial aid has changed dramatically over the last four decades, where debt has replaced scholarships and grants as the means of financing a degree.
www2.ed.gov/offices/OPE/PPI/FinPostSecEd/gladieux.html
Specifically, from that link;
“A half century after the initial GI Bill, three decades since the establishment of federally guaranteed student loans, and more than two decades following the creation of a national basic grant program, both the central commitment to federal support for higher education and the mechanisms of such support are under attack. This is an important time to take stock of government policies, how they have evolved over time, and what they have accomplished.
What has changed since the principal federal aid programs of today were first legislated? In one sense, not a great deal. The student-based strategy Congress adopted in the 1960s and 1970s–granting and lending to students rather than institutions–has become the system’s hallmark. Today more than 90 percent of U.S. Department of Education funds for postsecondary education are provided in the form of student financial aid. With additions and elaborations, in fact, the same programs are in place as were established a quarter century ago.
Underlying policies, however, have shifted. On many counts, today’s aid system looks much different from what the early legislative framers envisioned.
Growing Reliance on Loans. Above all, the drift toward a system that relies primarily on student debt to finance higher tuition has turned the original commitment to equal opportunity on its head. The legislation of the 1960s and early 1970s established a commitment to help disadvantaged students through need-based grant programs, while helping middle-class families through government-guaranteed (but minimally subsidized) private bank loans.
Today, loans are far and away the largest source of aid, even for the lowest-income students. Since the mid-1970s, when student borrowing began to grow, loans have increased from about one-fifth to nearly two-fifths of all available student aid. Federal student loans provided over $26 billion in 1994-95, almost five times the size of the Pell Grant program that was meant to be the system’s foundation. (See Table 1.)”
Point being, depending on when your wife graduated, she may have been the recipient of government policy which allowed poor students, such as her, to graduate from college without massive debt. That’s why I ask, because unis, such as Texas Tech, have been jacking up tuition, in order to fund athletic venues, Lazy Rivers, spa like recreation centers, and the attendant administrative overhead. Your wife, if she were to attempt to replicate what she accomplished earlier, wouldn’t be able to do it without massive debt, even if she were to attend public unis. Colleges are no longer in the business of serving the public, but to serve shareholders and investors, which is why it’s called the corporate model. Poor, but motivated, students, who neither have the ability, nor the stomach, for massive debt, would be excluded from attending even public unis, precisely because schools such as TTU have decided that serving the football Moloch is far more important than serving people. And it isn’t even making them any better academically.
June 18th, 2015 at 4:07PM
I know a bit about Tech; I have a couple of friends who taught there. My impression is that it is a university on the upswing. By the standards under which most of us labor, TTU is a very wealthy university, and should have more to show for its wealth than a ranking of #156 (the folks at Tech, however, don’t see themselves as wealthy because their points of comparison are UT and A&M, which are just *filthy* rich). As best as I can tell from my friends, Tech’s main problem was years of small minded administration (something which I believe is now vastly improved) and the fact that it’s just hard to keep top-flight faculty in Lubbock. Lubbock has its charms, but it also has its limits.
As for the sports side, I don’t know. Good and bad schools alike prostitute themselves at the altar of athletics. If they have money, they can still be very solid academically even as they embarrass themselves through their athletic programs (e.g., Michigan, Ohio State, etc.). Obviously, it can also spill over, with disastrous consequences (UNC, most recently). But there are plenty of faculty doing first rate work at these schools, including Tech (and Alabama and Auburn, for that matter).
Also, Charlie, FYI, for many years it was very inexpensive for in-state students to attend Texas universities.
June 18th, 2015 at 4:45PM
Imposter: Many thanks for those details. I appreciate it. UD
February 28th, 2024 at 7:25AM
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