December 25th, 2013
Your Education Tax Dollars at Work

After the successful extra-point attempt went into the stands, the mostly-empty stadium provided its loudest ovation of the night in support of the fans who tried to keep the ball away from security by throwing it around the seats.

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UPDATE: The situation at this particular university event is drawing a lot of commentary. Read some of it here, and revel again, on this Christmas day, in the blessings of being an American taxpayer.

December 23rd, 2013
“[R]aising my eyebrows in the general direction of college football.”

Why is Forbes writer Josh Freedman raising his eyebrows at college football?

There are so many reasons. But the one he has in mind is ye olde charitable deduction:

T. Boone Pickens gave $165 million to a charitable foundation attached to Oklahoma State University for a new football stadium and new housing and dining options for OSU athletes. Whether that is worthy of charity is not even the issue here: Less than one hour later, the foundation invested all of Pickens’ donation money – plus another $37 million in other donations – into a hedge fund run by Pickens.

Ya follow?

After taking Pickens’ money and reinvesting it into Pickens’ hedge fund, the school borrowed money (tax-exempt) to build the stadium. By borrowing at this lower, tax-exempt rate while investing the original donation and keeping the gains of that investment, the school was attempting to earn money simply off of its tax-favored status.

Got that?

Be sure to read Freedman on luxury seats and executive salaries too.

It’s all a little hard to follow, but the main thing you need to know is that it’s your money paying for this – the seats, ol’ Boone’s largesse…

December 23rd, 2013
“[T]he rampant cut of nonrevenue sports at universities has become a disturbing trend.”

From the New York Times:

… Sports like rowing … are left to suffer.

Last year, the University of Maryland cut seven varsity sports. In 2006, Rutgers chopped six. The week that Temple announced its cuts, Robert Morris, a private university near Pittsburgh, announced that seven varsity teams were on their way out.

Obviously, none of the sports on the block were football or basketball…

What kind of a business case can you make for a sport like rowing, which is not even one conducive to spectators (because the course is 2,000 meters long), much less one that makes no money for the university? Well, a weak one, if any. But that’s the whole point of amateurism, the quality that is supposed to fuel college sports in the first place.

… But is this latest round of cuts the end at Temple? What if the football team doesn’t start generating big bucks, enough to sustain the smaller programs?

You have to wonder if we will wake up one day, glance at the sports offered at the Temples, the Marylands and the Rutgerses of the world and see two words left: Football. Basketball.

Keep the American university a lean mean money-losing machine. Without revenue, more and more courses will go online. Eventually the only non-virtual campus activities will be football games and post-game riots.

December 22nd, 2013
Football, the University of South Florida, and Mental Retardation.

“[Skip] Holtz and Jim Leavitt are the only coaches in USF history and both were fired,” a sports writer explains, blandly enough.

Hired, fired, big deal. The only two coaches you’ve ever had, both fired. So what. Sunrise, sunset. To everything there is a season. Know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.

But when you actually pursue the narrative behind this bland fact, the bland fact of having had two football coaches in your school’s history, and having fired both of them, you begin to grab hold of the de profundis primitivism of so many American university football programs as they pump out losers, bullies, thieves, and litigants, one after another… All welcomed with pomp and excitement and even love…

The second-in-the-series is particularly cherished, by contrast with the scurrilous cur first-in-the-series, the villain we so wanted to love, in whom we invested our deepest hopes.

Trying to compare Holtz and Leavitt is like trying to compare Auntie Em with Cruella de Vil or Flounder from The Little Mermaid to the shark from Jaws. It’s like the difference between Mom’s homecooking and prison food.

Jim Leavitt was fired for punching players.

Skip Holtz prefers hugging them.

Holtz, if you couldn’t tell, is my new favorite college football coach in the state. Why? Because he makes my job easy, that’s why. He’s friendly and fun. He’s accessible and approachable.

USF’s Holtz was Francis to Leavitt’s Benedict. Adenauer to Leavitt’s Hitler. Ford to Leavitt’s Nixon. Our long national nightmare is over. Morning in America. Hugs all around.

But then the head of the university’s board of trustees had his meltdown.

The one-line email was fired off at 3:26 p.m. Saturday, within a minute of the end of USF’s humbling 37-28 loss at Temple, and it was sent to the chief of staff of USF president Judy Genshaft.

“Disgusting and unacceptable,”
it read.

Always wondered what the board of trustees of a university does, didn’t you? Goes to football games, gets pissed when the team loses, orders the president to fire the coach. Uh, y-y-yessir! Right away! Only it’s gonna cost a shitload in buyouts… And uh don’t forgot how much the lawsuit from the scurrilous cur cost us…

Throw money at him! Whatever it takes! Lose the fucker!

What if we, uh, get audited? There are laws, you know…

The University of South Florida overpaid three top administrators — and committed $1.7 million too much in severance for former football coach Skip Holtz, according to a state audit released this month.

According to Florida law, the school is allowed to pay administrators $200,000 from state funds for salary, bonuses and cash-equivalent compensation. That rule was broken in three instances, the audit found…

Auditors … took issue with the $2.5 million over five years that Holtz is being paid after he was fired a year ago. University employees’ severance pay can’t exceed 20 weeks of compensation, according to state law.

However, USF has contended the money is for damages, as spelled out in Holtz’s contract — not severance. The millions are required because Holtz was fired without cause, USF replied.

The Auditor General disagreed and concluded simply that the university should “ensure that future severance payments comply” with Florida law.

Now the University of South Florida pees itself with excitement upon the advent of its third savior. Throttlings, hugs, audits all around.

December 19th, 2013
Well, if you put it that way…

Those who think [University of Alabama football coach Nick] Saban is overpaid should consider the Seattle Mariners’ recent deal with infielder Robinson Cano for $240 million over 10 years. Does anyone think Cano is three times more valuable than Saban? Hardly.

And Cano is just one measly position. Saban’s coach. Right now he gets (when you throw in everything) something approaching ten million a year from the university. Which is too low when you consider the context.

[We] are nearing the point when top-level college coaching is a more lucrative gig than coaching the pros. That is astounding, in a sense — pro teams play more games, they get higher TV ratings, and they don’t have to support academic advisors or pay for volleyball scholarships.

In another sense, though, this is perfectly reasonable. Pro teams have so many tools they can use to improve. They can sign free agents, acquire draft choices or pour money into scouting. Some pro teams see coaches more as an extension of the front office, charged with implementing the philosophy (and following the advanced stats) preferred by the general manager.

College athletic departments, as currently constructed, don’t have as many tools. They can build new facilities to attract recruits, but that is way more expensive than hiring a coach like Saban (who would demand new facilities anyway). They can pay recruits under the table, but there is some risk involved, and some are reluctant to do it because it is against the rules. Besides, the mechanics of under-the-table payments are complicated. You can’t really write a check from a university account, make it out to a defensive end, and hope nobody finds out.

The whole university… conceit… puts special burdens on football programs, for which coaches should expect hardship pay. And now that, moneywise, there’s no difference between professional and non-professional, we’ve removed barriers to fair compensation. In the case of Saban, then, if we use the Cano standard of comparison, one billion over ten years seems appropriate.

*****************
UD thanks Andre.

December 17th, 2013
Where’d all the money go?

If you’re the faculty at Western Michigan University, you’d really like to know.

Or, I mean, you do know.

“Every department is hurting — bleeding faculty,” said [history professor Lewis] Pyenson. “We’re not going to be able to hire brilliant young professors. Older professors who know how to teach are going to retire. There likely will be shotgun marriages for departments.”

Pyenson contrasted the cuts in the College of Arts and Sciences with the amount spent on men’s football, saying that in a time of financial crisis, “what goes on in the classroom is clearly more important than what is going on at the 50-yard line. We should be fostering the mind instead of knocking kids senseless on the football field.”

December 14th, 2013
“[At] some big-time sports institutions, the academic mission has nearly vanished beneath this never-ebbing wave of sports mania.”

What’s nice about this rather typical appraisal of America’s many football schools is that the writer names names. I mean, he doesn’t say this school and that school are no longer schools. He simply provides the data and lets you arrive at the obvious conclusion.

So the standouts, the almost-entirely-without-discernable-academic-missions, are:

University of Arkansas
University of Nebraska
University of Oklahoma
Auburn University

These are the Big Four, the prime nullities, that this particular author highlights – schools that spend huge sums on games and stadiums and all, and vanishingly little on education. So little that their academic mission is pretty much gone. There are plenty of other such places, including almost every school in West Virginia.

These four schools naturally take up a lot of air time on University Diaries, each of them a massive military industrial academic fraud violence against women drunk driving plus all them other naughty big boy thangs complex. Nebraska loved to death two of America’s current high-profile bad boys – Richie Incognito and Dominic Raiola – so that place (along with the University of Florida ’cause of loved-up Aaron Hernandez) is at the top of Google News lately. But Auburn, with its long tradition of massive cheating, and its board of trustees packed with former Auburn athletes, is perennially in the news, as are vastly corrupt Arkansas and Oklahoma…

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Speaking of tradition — that whole tradition thing, so important to all of these schools, can really backfire. Just like Penn State, all four schools on this guy’s list seem to think they have these glorious traditions…

When things go wrong in nullity schools, when the essential scumminess of what they’re about becomes too public, they often try to play this tradition card, as if the act of reminding people of the essential glory of what they’ve always been about will make people’s backs straighten… Yet these places forget that although they might have won many games over a long period of time, the scumminess was always there and everyone knows it…

So – here’s an example of the problem.

Louisiana State University is trying to get its students to stop commanding their game day opponents, in unison, on national television, to suck their dicks. How to go about this?

LSU decided to initiate something called Tradition Matters, which is essentially a series of notices all over campus, signed by the president of the school, asking students to stop saying suck my dick in unison on national television.

An LSU student journalist writes:

I didn’t realize how sleazy [the cheer] made my university look until I sat in a press box last season and watched my professional colleagues shake their heads in disgust.

Yet in what way will an appeal to LSU’s traditions help the matter? LSU qua football school has always been pretty sleazy… Indeed sleaziness is kind of a point of pride for the entire state of Louisiana... traditionally… It seems fully in keeping with Louisiana’s traditions that the president of an academic institution there would devote his time and the institution’s money to plastering campus with a plea that its scholars not get drunk and invite a national television audience to suck their dicks…

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So you see the problem. Nullity schools cannot make an appeal to their academic traditions, to the ethos of reason and moral reflection at the heart of non-null universities; they are forced to make an appeal to their athletic traditions. But athletic traditions at schools like these are as much about decades of publicly pleading for people to fellate you as they are about clean-limbed sportsmanship.

December 13th, 2013
“They weeded out the intellectuals from the University Of Kampuchea. Did not help athletics one bit.”

Barry Petschesky at Deadspin reminds us that you can identify everyone at your university who wears glasses and take them out to the public square and shoot them through the head, but that won’t necessarily help your football stats or put more butts in the seats on game day.

His caution is prompted by the panic and confusion at the University of Kentucky, a school that has sacrificed everything for football, but isn’t able to fill its stadium. Seeking a cause, one fan tells a local radio host that the problem is that the school’s too intellectual. There are professors and students there. Professors are hostile to football. A lot of the students are from foreign countries, and they don’t even understand football, much less watch it.

Cosmopolitans and intellectuals will have to go if UK wants to bring its football program back.

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UD says this guy is jumping the gun. The picture is not as urgent as he would have you believe. UK has succeeded in making its academic ranking plunge, and there’s every reason to assume this trend will continue.

And do you really have to purge the university of its students and professors? UK hasn’t even begun looking into, for instance, the system of threats, retaliations, and incentives many other university ticket offices have adopted in order to get people to attend their football games. Let’s exhaust moderate measures before we go nuclear.

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UD thanks Derek.

December 13th, 2013
There are many absurd, shambling, deluded university football programs in the United States.

Programs that bleed money schools could use to educate their students; programs that feature games in huge expensive stadiums full of nobody in the stands; programs that have brought academic shame, ridicule, and corruption to their universities; programs that…

You know the drill.

Among several such freak shows in this country, some stand out as truly pathological in their drive to debase themselves. One of these is the University of Massachusetts, haunt of hopeless teams, gaping stadiums, and marauding students.

Now most professors, as I’ve noted before, cultivate a studied indifference toward the loud non-stop foulness big-time sports brings to their campus; but at places like U Mass things have a tendency to get so repulsive that eventually, for a few professors, repression fails. Like take for instance Max Page (here’s his cool website). Page is a real misfit at U Mass – a seriously educated, reflective, activist intellectual. He’ll surely leave the campus soon. But meanwhile he is making one hell of a fuss about the sports program there. He co-chaired a faculty committee on football, and made a little speech about the game to his colleagues.

Page … said “There are far, far better uses for these millions of dollars.”

He went on to describe the current state of UMass football as a “failure of epic proportions” …

“I want to have everyone be aware about promises about the future costs, given that none of the promises have been realized, in terms of the costs,” Page said. “Attendance is far below what was promised. The revenues are much lower than expected. The team has not performed well, and the coach, some have argued, has behaved even worse. And the move to Gillette (Stadium) – the ace in the hole of this effort – has been a resounding disappointment, to say the least.

“How much of our precious resources and our tax dollars and our student tuition dollars should we waste on the enterprise?” he continued. “Is it $10 million? Is it $20 million? It’s it $50 million? You should ask yourself ‘What is the point at which you say enough is enough?'”

Well, let’s see. What has, say, another big public university, Penn State, had to pay out lately because of its football program? There’s a running tally. UD has been following it. The latest reports have put it at $171 million.… But no, that’s not fair. That’s just the scandal. The scandal has cost that much so far. The football program’s a whole other thing.

I’m sure U Mass football will never generate any scandals. The only, uh, outside cost U Mass football consistently produces is post-riot clean-up bills.

December 11th, 2013
“A fire set from trees ripped out of the landscape.”

It’s the details that get to you. That university students riot after football games and fuck up the neighborhoods unfortunate enough to lie near campus is obvious, routine. But that university students rip trees out of the ground – that Michigan State University students hacked trees to death and then jumped up and down on their limbs while burning them (enjoy the positively medieval imagery here) is, UD will admit, shocking. She’s been covering, for years, drunk students rioting after football games; but this new form of barbarism truly rivets her attention.

December 10th, 2013
Thrice Fried …

Rice.

December 7th, 2013
Ooch. Ouch. Eech.

It was just a matter of time before Time put this in a headline.

If you didn’t click on the link, here ’tis:

FOOTBALL: A WASTE OF TAXPAYERS’ MONEY

Lordy, lordy. When it hits the headlines of Time!

You, dear taxpayer, are footing the bill for football through an outrageous series of giveaways to billionaire team owners and public universities that put pigskin before sheepskin.

Billionaire team owners like Yeshiva University trustee/convicted fraudster Zygi Wilf… What American could object to handing her taxes over to the likes of Zygi??

Okay, so let’s see what the Time guy has to say.

… Rutgers’ athletics programs get a subsidy from the university of about $29 million a year, the lion’s share of which goes to the Scarlet Knights football team. As the flagship state university of New Jersey, that money is not only coming out of tuition and fees paid by students but out of the pockets of Garden State taxpayers.

As with NFL stadium deals, such lavish, publicly financed gifts are the norm for college football. With the exception of a tiny handful of programs – Ohio State, University of Texas, LSU, and perhaps three or four more – virtually every athletic program at every public NCAA Division I school is subsidized even as administrators plead poverty when it comes to resources for faculty and, as you know, education. Especially in an age of busted government budgets, even the most rabid sports fan should agree that it’s an outrage that the highest-paid public employee in a majority of states is a college football coach (in another 13, it’s a basketball coach). It’s far better to be broke and have a cellar-dwelling NFL franchise, right?

If you watch football this weekend, recognize that most of the drama and meaning is taking place off the field. The way the college and pro games are built on subsidies and giveaways neatly encapsulates crony capitalism at its worst – and helps to explain why taxes go up even as it seems there’s never enough money for basic government functions.

Killjoy. Why not pile it on? Why not talk about Temple? Here’s Deadspin on the subject.

Temple University announced today that it will drop seven intercollegiate sports: baseball, softball, men’s crew, women’s rowing, men’s gymnastics, and men’s track and field, both indoor and outdoor. This is a cautionary tale about trying become a football school.

The cuts will save just $3 million of Temple athletics’ $44 million annual budget, or not much more than it costs to run one of the FBS’s worst football teams (and run it at a loss). About 150 athletes students are out of luck, though the school announced it will honor their scholarships until they graduate or transfer. The nine full-time coaches aren’t so lucky… Rather than drop out of Division 1A, as seemed likely and logical, Temple stayed independent and decided to spend. They moved into an NFL stadium, paying more than $265,000 per home game in rent. They clambered into the MAC, but kept their eyes on a bigger prize. Moderate on-field success spurred further budget inflation. Finally, they made the leap back to the Big East—just as the Big East fell apart… The chase for bigtime football is a pyramid scheme, and the Owls remain afloat at the expense of those sports on the bottom. What happens when the con man runs out of suckers?

They needn’t worry. When it comes to the American taxpayer, there’s a sucker born every minute.

December 6th, 2013
Talk about a perfect, positively cosmic, convergence:

Gordon Gee and West Virginia University!

This seasoned sports slave (who can forget “I just hope the coach doesn’t dismiss me.“?), the man who just missed several mandated sensitivity sessions by the skin of his teeth, will be the next leader of America’s number one party school, a school for whom the term sports-factory really doesn’t go far enough. (Put West Virginia University in my search engine.) A marriage made in hog heaven.

December 5th, 2013
“I would go back to the game, but I wouldn’t want to sit in the student section again,” he said. “A little too nuts.. wouldn’t want to get hit with a right hook or anything.”

Violence on-field and off. What more could you ask for from a university?

December 5th, 2013
Rape Calendar

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear…

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