“[The University of Hawaii athletics] program is trapped in an increasingly ineffectual infrastructure that threatens to capsize the whole university.”

A local columnist points out that scandalous, money-hemorrhaging University of Hawaii athletics is only part of the story at comprehensively unbelievable UH.

It’s truly worth your while to follow University of Hawaii Athletics.

I know you don’t think so. I know you’re content to think of that state rarely … as a vague jewel set off to the left of the left coast…

But if you type Hawaii Athletics into this blog’s search engine, you’ll be shaken out of your vagueness.

Hawaii is after all a startlingly corrupt state, so you’d expect its university system to be a mess. And it is; it is a mess. But within that mess, athletics is a doubleplusgood mess. The people of Hawaii just bailed it out of its thirteen million dollar debt so as to clear the way for more astounding debt accumulation…

How do they do it? Well, no one goes to their games. So that would mean no ticket sales. And then there’s constant expensive mischief. Not just stuff that hits the national news, like the Stevie Wonder concert scam; we’re also talking NCAA rules violations and having to pay for internal investigations, etc., etc.

Hawaii’s athletic director, by the way, sure knows how to make a public statement. He “acknowledges” the latest NCAA investigation (this one’s of the basketball team) and ends this way:

Thank you for your understanding, respect and your continued support of University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Athletics. GO BOWS!

GO BOWS! We love ya guys, and this is just the time to say it! In deep shit with the NCAA again: Huzzah!

Certain public university systems – Hawaii, Alaska, New Mexico – wallow.

They wallow. They simmer in their own juices. They don’t get nowhere.

To be sure, they’re corrupt. I don’t want you to think they aren’t corrupt, or that there isn’t a connection between their being corrupt and their wallowing. There’s a direct connection. People can certainly make money off of wallowing.

On this blog, we make a point of following the nothingness of these schools, with a particular eye on their sports programs, since here the futility, absurdity, and nihilism is at its most obvious.

Take New Mexico. Here’s a typical recent article about it in the local press.

First sentence:

Missed budget projections, lingering debt and low game attendance have all contributed to serious financial troubles at the University of New Mexico Athletics Department.

There’s no there there, see? No one’s at the games – UD is surprised the teams show up – nobody’s in budgeting … The schools I’m talking about, located in America’s nature wonderlands, are an extension of their magnificent silent mountains, their deep echoing oceans, their stretches of frozen tundra…

Crucial to this vast chasm is a really stupid and corrupt state legislature, and all three of these states have them. A certain dance is danced, to be sure… I mean, like clockwork, when a school like New Mexico is in such profound shit that it demands more money from the state, the state says whoa wait uh what’s up over there? What you guys been doing? Didn’t we, uh, give you some money…? Don’t we give you some money every year…? So the head of the House appropriations committee pledges to

take a “fine toothed comb” to the UNM Athletics budget before determining what additional funding looks like, if any.

“We are going to dive into these numbers very closely,” Rep. [Patty] Lundstrom said. “The questions I am going to ask are about compensation packages. I want to know what benefits these coaches and the athletic director have. I want to know how much over their base pay they are receiving of taxpayers’ dollars.”

Yeah cuz for the last hundred years or so while the school lies there on the ground dead all the money we send you goes to the athletic staff and NOW’S THE TIME WE MEAN IT THIS TIME WE’RE REALLY GONNA …

UNM’s Athletics administrators and coaches are among the highest paid state employees. While [AD Eddie] Nunez has made cuts to programs to save dollars, he hasn’t made any cuts that would personally affect his own personal finances or the personal finances of his staff. The high salaries and many benefits that UNM Athletics administrators and coaches are entitled to by their employment contracts have remained untouched…

…[S]everal salaries [are] above $300,000 per year with a variety of 13 different types of benefits ranging from free-use vehicles to media pay, promotional pay, incentive bonuses, season tickets to games, country club memberships, retention bonuses, free spouse travel to games and in one case a relocation expense totaling nearly $20,000.

[Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: a variety of 13 different types is redundant. Just write 13 different types. You could even write just 13 types. The high number jumps out more if you just go directly for it.]

The AD’s response to this fact is a beaut. In an entire culture of stupidity, it still manages to stand out.

“I am a supporter of incentives because to me, it incentivizes people to do something. If they achieve it, some great things are happening.”

SOS will not attempt to parse this, because she is old and fragile; she will merely remind you that the athletic program at New Mexico is a debacle.

The University of Hawaii Goes Off the Rails.

“Hawaii athletics is important to the university but it is essentially important to the Hawaii community itself,” Bley-Vroman said. “The university doesn’t itself have a solution. I think that’s important to make that clear. Athletics really is a state-level problem. Not problem, opportunity. It’s a cool thing. We like it.”

Chancellor Robert Bley-Vroman babbles in front of a legislative committee, whatever capacity for rational speech he once had totally broken down by the bedlam of his university sports program. Essentially reduced to a few crazed administrators staging pretend Stevie Wonder concerts in a desperate bid to get someone to sit in their stadium, University of Hawaii athletics has lost all dignity. It has lost all capacity to do that thing most other fucked up athletic programs do: lie.

Most other programs can still keep going the lies about ticket sales, sources of revenue, players’ academic progress, etc., etc. But Hawaii can’t even do that. Hawaii’s a madman muttering to the world about its cool games, so important to Hawaii that no one attends them…

I mean, okay, right, sure, no one attends them! That’s why we’re always millions and millions in deficit and why it’s not a cool thing but a problem!

But not OUR problem. Oh no. You did it. The state did it. You have to solve it because we can’t because we don’t have any money and you have money and you have to give us the money. And we promise if you do that you’ll see an immediate turnaround and all the people who don’t give a damn about our stupid corrupt program will pour onto the field!

Sweating in his flower shirt, the university chancellor breaks down in front of the Higher Education Committee. It has come to this.

The University of Hawaii Maintains a Dignified Silence…

… over the death of its football program.

The University of Hawaii Athletics Department won’t reveal ticket sales numbers for the upcoming football season, which starts in two weeks.

[A spokesperson said] it was still too early to estimate ticket sales, even though season tickets are sold well in advance.

Rumor has it that we’re talking about a little over 12,000 sold. The stadium seats 50,000.

The Hawaiian Senate Looks at UH Sports.

The Senate is not impressed with the deficits the University of Hawaii sports programs have racked up. [Resolution] SCR 38 urges the university not to raise student fees to balance that budget, noting that students already pay $50 apiece for athletics fees each semester and generally aren’t stoked enough about football to actually attend games.

Just a little nudge from hapless Hawaiian lawmakers to hopeless UH. Even though it’s just a nudge, it won’t go anywhere. No one cares.

“Despite the recent negative events, UH athletics officials refuse to give up.”

Well ain’t that great. What a fucking profile in courage. Hawaii runs the scummiest losingest football program out there, but look out world here we come!

On Thursday afternoon, former UH quarterback Colt Brennan was released from jail. And in separate incidents, three current football players were arrested for DUI’s. The school is also investigating the canceled Stevie Wonder benefit concert.

Take Hawaii.

Hawaii’s athletics department had been trying to rely on the $23 million a year it generated from ticket sales, donations, television and marketing, plus an additional $10 million in direct and indirect support from the university. But by this summer, the department had accumulated about $10 million in debt and was adding to that at a rate of $1.5 million to $2 million a year. Over the objections of undergraduate and graduate student organizations, the state board of regents voted in July to impose an athletics fee for the first time.

An article in USA Today features Hawaii, and lots of other universities, soaking their students with athletics fees.

Lots of universities don’t disclose the fees. Why disclose them? You know that if you do, students are likely to vote against raising them. Just sneak them into unitemized tuition bills.

***************************************

At the rate they’re going, Hawaii will accumulate $20 million in athletic debt in not too long a time. Students will to have to take care of that.

Fantasy Island

A regent here, an athletic director there, has hold of the reality of the University of Hawaii football program.

The University of Hawaii Athletics Department’s budget, which is projected to lose as much as $3 million in [2014], may not be big enough to support a Division I program, a member of the university’s Board of Regents said Thursday.

****************

The University of Hawaii’s football program may shut down as a result of tough financial conditions, athletic director Ben Jay said at a [2014] Board of Regents meeting Monday afternoon.

The AD was fired (at UH, they’re always getting fired) not long after he said this, and we haven’t heard a peep out of the trustee since he uttered those discouraging words.

Got to keep up the fantasy, even as UH’s last game (58-7 home loss) was played in a close to empty stadium and has issued in the expensive firing of yet another coach (at UH, they’re always getting fired).

Got to build a new stadium.

The university [recently] unveiled … renderings of a proposed 30,000-seat multi-purpose stadium to be built at an unnamed site at an estimated cost of $165 million and $190 million.

With the latest loss and the latest firing, UH’s football program, argues one observer, has hit “truly rock bottom.” But UH’s ability to dig deeper into deficit and depravity every year (watch that new stadium project take off) tells us that there are still plenty of moveable rocks above the bottom. UH can dig much, much farther before it actually encounters the abyss.

If, in the world of university football, one can even talk of an abyss.

“I think that a university with a Division I sports program cannot, by definition, be considered ‘great.’ In such a place too much time, energy, attention and resources are given to big-time entertainment that is essentially meaningless.”

A writer for the Auburn Citizen wrote this last year, and ever since then UD‘s been chewing on it. In particular, when UD reads about big-time football schools like the University of Hawaii, Western Michigan U., and Eastern Michigan U. — all of them perennially in the news for bankrupting their students and keeping their schools down in order to subsidize shitty coaches and put on games no one attends — UD ponders that “meaningless” thing.

The pathetic state of EMU in particular has attracted the attention of the national media. Singling out that school, an HBO show called The Arms Race featured the following facts:

At Eastern Michigan, the sports program lost $52 million over the past two years according to Howard Bunsis, an accounting professor at that school. Plus the school football team has not a winning season in nearly a couple of decades and regularly posts the smallest attendance figures in all college football.

(That amount by the way is nothing next to national joke Rutgers, where “in the last 12 years, the school’s athletics department has lost $312 million.”)

The leadership of all of these universities — president, trustees — goes ape-shit whenever anyone suggests that the all-consuming activity that has basically killed their school is meaningless. (Faculty and students, two groups immiserated by athletics, feel differently, but who listens to them?) The ferocity of their unanimous response to suggestions that they lead their university in a more meaningful as well as fiscally responsible direction tells you that for these people taking down a university through the removal of all revenues via football is obviously patently totally on the face of it worth it.

So what is the transcendent meaning they attach to what looks to the rest of us like suicide via sports?

UD thinks a hint can be found here:

It is as though they see a successful sports program as a winning multi-million dollar lottery ticket. Never mind that millions of lottery ticket holders lose.

UD thinks a more vivid and valuable analogy would be to the cargo cult phenomenon. Long ago in our ancestral past, godlike men appeared and won games and there was jubilation among the people. Then the big men went away.

Ever since, we have built gleaming stadiums and training facilities to induce them to reappear.

They will reappear.

We will never give up.

This is the meaning of our life.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm Talks About …

… the art of argumentation.

Arguing in favor of increased taxpayer subsidy of the University of Hawaii’s pointless, corrupt, and wasteful football program is not going to be easy. Argumentation-wise, you’re going to have to lift your game as high as you possibly can. You’re going to have to stand on your tippy toes. You’re going to have to reach for reasons as you’ve never reached for reasons before.

It’s not surprising, then, that a local columnist fails to make the case that the governor was wrong when he recently denied the school three million additional athletics dollars. But the way he fails is instructive if you’re interested in how to write polemically.

The writer’s particular challenge is that he has absolutely no empirical evidence on his side. Almost no one goes to the games. Ever. The team is wretched. Consistently. The flagrant mismanagement of the program makes it a statewide embarrassment.

If he is going to get anywhere in making his case, he’s going to have to go straight and hard in the direction of total bullshit.

People disdain bs, but when you’ve got nowhere else to go, it can be very effective. If the subject is football, it means getting weepy and huffy and patriotic and mythic and misty-eyed as you recall past heroes on the field, the character-building power of teamwork, and the way your own university experience would have been hollow without crisp fall afternoons cheering on the lads. This approach will appeal to the typical reader’s sentimentality about football even as it allows you to sidestep the, uh, reality problem.

This particular writer opts against bs, which leaves him flailing. It leaves him to make the case against his argument. Let’s take a look.

Here’s his opening move:

[A]lmost every university athletics program in the country loses money. The debt is chronic, structural.

So … give your tax money to UH till it hurts? Because we won’t be on board with the national project of bankrupting schools via their big sports programs if we don’t? You wouldn’t want Hawaii to be left out of America’s ongoing chronic structural football indebtedness, would you?

*******************

Next move: If you don’t stop refusing to attend UH football games, you’re going to force UH to shut down the program. Then where will you have not to go on Sunday afternoons? The writer describes this terrifying scenario in appropriately terrifying terms:

UH [might have] to disband all or parts of its intercollegiate sports, including of course, football. That is a university’s nuclear option. Whatever they think of football, no university administrators anywhere want to be the ones who drop this bomb.

University administrators everywhere dream nightly of shutting down their football programs, so this wasn’t a good place for the writer to go. Again, the principle here is do not try to make your argument reality-based if you don’t have any reality-based arguments.

**************

The writer’s next move reminds us that within the category bullshit, there is good bullshit and bad bullshit. By the middle of his essay the writer has commendably turned to bullshit, but he has chosen bad. Let us see if we can follow his serpentine reasoning here.

“It is a matter of setting priorities,” [the governor] told the newspaper, as if we are talking about Political Science Department office supplies. “If UH wants athletics to be a priority, then it needs to come up with the money.”

Very tough-lovish and totally misguided. [The governor] sees the problem as a budgetary issue — a cut here, a paste there, get off your okole and do your job.

Because athletics is completely different from anything else at UH, different rules should apply.

Solving the deficit should not be on UH’s priority list at all because the deficit is the community’s and by extension the Legislature’s problem, not UH’s.

Working her way through this extraordinary set of claims, SOS concludes that the writer is saying the following.

The University of Hawaii is a conduit, a vector, a vessel, through which the football-demanding citizens of the state are granted football. The citizens demand it and the state uses their tax dollar to provide it; UH just sits there fielding a team. Therefore money must come from the legislature, not from, say, UH ticket revenue ($0).

This argument combines the reality-based mistake (no one in the state demands football) with bad bullshit (football is a public good like the railroads – the writer compares university football to Amtrak).

SOS did find one good use of bs in this piece.

Is UH football one of these valuable endeavors worth subsidizing? If the politicians think so, then they should step up, allocate the money, and defend their choice.

Be accountable for your decisions and don’t make the university do the dirty work for you.

If the Legislature or the governor does not want to take the heat for bailing out athletics in this way, fine. But don’t pass the buck and blame UH for your lack of will.

This is great because it is both emotive (government pussies!) and totally madly insanely unreality-based (martyred UH is forced to take the fall for being a faithful public servant in the provision of football). Wow.

*****************

In concluding his essay, the writer brings out the big guns.

[The governor is] putting a nail in the coffin of the university.

And why? Because he is allowing UH autonomy, the bastard.

On the surface, [the governor’s] comments support the university’s flexibility. But what he is actually doing is stressing its flexibility to do things it really does not want to do.

… “I think the university should take responsibility and make a decision about what is important,” [the governor] said to the Star-Advertiser. “If they are unable to do that, I’ll take back all the authority to line item the budget. I’d do it in a second … I’d love to do that.”

… Overall, the governor’s views have a patronizing, dismissive dad-to-teen quality.

He makes it appear that UH may not have the courage to make hard choices.

Anyone who has followed the story of the University of Hawaii for the last ten or so years (put University Hawaii in this blog’s search engine) knows that on every level it is among America’s most dysfunctional public university systems, with scandalous ever-shifting leadership, endless financial and athletic misdeeds, supine trustees, and put-upon students. The evidence is overwhelming that what the governor hints at is right: UH lacks the intelligence and the will to govern itself.

It is bad bullshit for this writer to complain that a university which deserves to patronized is being patronized. It is positively Orwellian for him to say that a university which lacks the capacity and the courage to make even easy choices has the courage and capacity to make hard choices. Where is the chorus of Hawaiians outraged by the governor’s actions and comments in regard to the state’s university? If you took Amtrak away, I think you’d hear about it from a lot of Americans.

Rather than struggle against his absence of all grounded argument, this writer would have done better to focus relentlessly upon the transcendent glory of football, adding here and there some abstract anti-government references.

“The fact that the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa would turn to financially strapped students to pay for it is outrageous, unfair and contributes to UH Mānoa’s dismal academic reputation.”

Some American universities have become little other than full football stadiums; others, like the University of Hawaii, take the opposite approach: empty.

Think of someone who buys a Hummer and spends tens of thousands of dollars a day filling its tank — only there’s something wrong with the tank, and no matter how much money the Hummer owner spends on fuel, the tank is always totally empty. At UH, the football stadium’s capacity is maintained at empty through vast punishing institutional expenditures (“dismal academic reputation”).

The school’s latest plan to keep the stadium doors open to no one is to double student athletic fees.

Although the fools in flower shirts who run UH see nothing wrong with this picture, students are upset. As this post’s headline, taken from the school newspaper, suggests, students have run the numbers and correctly concluded that the university cannot afford to field a team and therefore “UH needs to close the financial black hole that is football.”

***********************

The problem is that UH is one of those schools about which UD has written for years on this blog. The flower shirt people cannot think of anything else to do. A university is a football team or it is nothing. It doesn’t matter if its team is nothing – an entity that gathers at an empty stadium a few times a year to throw a ball. That thing – that empty team in an empty stadium – is the university.

Since nothing comes of nothing, students are forced to be the something that keeps paying to top up the tank.

The Madness of King Mark

You’ll never get anywhere with university football until you focus with laser-like clarity upon the Major Kongs riding their schools to oblivion; and the Chronicle of Higher Education knew it had a winner when it decided to feature in particular the head of Georgia State University. This frenetic delusional man will go on bleeding his indifferent-to-football students for more and more sports fees until they all decide to drop out and attend schools run by sane people.

Meanwhile, though, Mark Becker will build the world’s largest empty football stadium.

Mr. Becker’s bold idea to reduce the [escalating student] subsidy: Spend even more on athletics. He wants to build a football stadium for his team about a mile from the campus. He envisions a modern, 25,000- to 30,000-seat facility that offers a lively game-day environment. He also wants a baseball field and a soccer field, retail shops, and student housing.

Don’t imagine anything can be done to stop the madness. GSU’s trustees no doubt consider the man a genius, and no one else is in a position to do anything about him.

********************

With this win Fresno State solidifies Hawaii’s last place position in the West Division Standings.

A school like Hawaii is an even more interesting case. Hawaii proves that even a team with no fans, a virtually unblemished loss record, and a school-bankrupting budget, will keep playing.

Cheaters Staging Games in Empty Stadiums…

… is where we’ve gotten at a lot of our institutions of higher learning in this country, and it’s a way-strange situation.

Of course we pay much more attention to cheaters staging games in full stadiums. Everyone’s gassing on about the University of North Carolina what a shocker a fine institution bites the dust blahblah… But you could argue that it’s the critical mass of shitkickers like the University of Hawaii and Ball State, with their own scandals, their massive sports budgets, and their microscopic bleacher sections that should draw a bit of attention.

But then Ball State doesn’t even pay attention to itself. It’s in the business of hiding how much it makes students pay to subsidize the empty stadiums.

Even with income from concession sales; NCAA allocations; $1,050,000 in guarantees paid out by Army and Iowa for road football games; private gifts; paid parking; school general funds and other sources, there remains an $11.6 million budget shortfall.

Hidden fees collected from students will make up that deficit, funding 65 percent of the budget adopted this summer by the board of trustees.

UD loves the wizened philosophical approach the Ball State spokesperson takes:

“Human fascination with organized sports reaches back centuries to the days of the Coliseum and the first Olympics,” Ball State spokeswoman Joan Todd said. “It is not a situation we created…”

UD loves that – the profound informed approach, so characteristic of a university setting… It’s like… I don’t know, put pornography in that sentence and it’ll work too – Our university didn’t create the age-old human fascination with pornography, but robbing our students blind in its pursuit is an obvious academic imperative…

As always, though, you have to go to Hawaii for the shittiest shitkicking out there. Truly no one attends their games; every week brings a new coach (hell, a new university president), a new buyout, a new scandal, a bigger deficit. Why aren’t people noticing Hawaii? It’s a far ickier story than UNC, even by university athletics standards.

Going Cosmic on Manoa

The University of Hawaii-Manoa has a $31 million deficit and growing. Its big athletics program is a morgue, a wasteland, a joke. Its latest interim chancellor (you haven’t seen administrative turnover until you’ve seen Hawaii) has a statement to make:

Some have suggested cuts to the athletic budget and system administrators’ salaries, but [Robert] Bley-Vroman said the deficit requires more structural solutions. “There are big forces here, and they have to do with the society’s view of education and who’s going to pay for it.”

Yes, it’s a big, big… cosmic problem, and until we as a nation reconceptualize the entire ground of university education as such, cutting the athletics budget is pointless.

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