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.

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.

… Rice.

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.

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.

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

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear…

[The University of Alabama’s] athletic department gave $6.8 million back to the school’s academic side for 2011-12, according to a university spokesperson. Len Elmore, an attorney, a basketball analyst and a member of the Knight Commission, scoffed at that number.

“What did Alabama generate in revenue with football — $60 million, $70 million, $80 million?” he asked. “So they gave back less than 10 percent?”

Thank God they’ve got broadcasting standards.

Just a little icing on the cake for the chair of African and Afro-American Studies at once-respectable University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. $12,000 for teaching a summer course that didn’t exist … A summer course for UNC athletes …

UD likes the way the campus paper puts it:

… Julius Nyang’oro has been indicted by a grand jury after a year-and-a-half-long State Bureau of Investigation probe found that he allegedly received $12,000 for teaching a class he never taught.

Yes, someone’s finally gotten around to indicting the guy for teaching a class he never taught. What can Chapel Hill say? The latest chancellor (last one resigned in disgrace) insists everything’s hunky-dory now and they’re back to being a real live university, but it sort of goes beyond embarrassing when a highly compensated chair of a high-profile department might go to jail for obtaining property by false pretenses.

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

This article lists all the current sports scandals at clown-school UNC.

Clown-school seem a little over the top? The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill offered “more than 200 confirmed or suspected no-show classes going as far back as the mid-1990s, plus more than 500 grade changes that are either confirmed or suspected to be unauthorized.”

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

Put Nyang’oro in my search engine for a walk down memory lane.

This sentence could come from a contemporary American commentary on the Kaplanization of our once-great universities; or it could come from a contemporary American commentary on the NFLization of our once-great universities.

This particular sentence happens to be about the sporty arm of the pincer movement; and coming as it does from Texas, of all places, it tells you something. It tells you something about why immense new Adzillatronned university football and basketball stadiums are full of gaping holes during even the biggest games… Why a growing branch of the digital and design industries is now devoted to making an empty silence look like a crowded blow-out on network tv…

The author of this commentary is telling you why people are leaving the American university stadium, but you don’t want to listen because you know that the problems are too basic to fix.

If college football is just entertainment, and entertainment is just a product, and products are created to make money, then I start to feel a little silly investing emotional energy in the A&M – LSU game. More and more the institution carries the distracting odor of a swindle. It’s hard to tell whether I’m the mark or whether I’m in on the grift.

… It’s hard to say what should happen with college football. Paying the players would certainly be fairer, but it would finish off whatever remains of an institution that once meant far more than money. The arcane rules put in place to protect college athletics from market forces have spawned a densely complex culture of cheating, a tradition almost as old as the sport. How long can Universities, bastions of enlightened rational values, continue this charade? What toll is it taking on the wider goals of those institutions?

College football may be a necessary casualty of a freer, more prosperous world. We are all likely to cling to the remains at least a little while longer. Maybe someday (next year?), when the Longhorns’ helmets are sporting a giant BestBuy logo and the program is playing two additional highly-paid exhibition games each year against the likes of Abilene Christian and the fighting Javelinas of A&M Kingsville we’ll finally have to give it up.

Try his first paragraph this way:

If a college education is just entertainment, and entertainment is just a product, and products are created to make money, then I start to feel a little silly investing emotional energy in the game. More and more the institution carries the distracting odor of a swindle. It’s hard to tell whether I’m the mark or whether I’m in on the grift.

Except that in the Kaplanization case, it’s not just emotional energy that’s lacking when the professor is a coached happy face on a jiggly screen full of funny little games. It’s also of course intellectual energy.

Stadium seats will go the same way as classroom seats: Eventually all university activity will jiggle on-screen. Imagine the University of Phoenix with a sports channel.

— the Marshall University football team manages to do it all: It gives an already intellectually-challenged state the gift of a high-profile jock-schlock university; it keeps the school barefoot and poor by extorting immense athletic fees from students; it refuses to allow anyone to examine its finances; and – of course – goes without saying – its team is in and out of jail.

UD likes the delicacy of this lede about the latest detainee:

An off-field incident has cast a bit of a pall over Marshall’s clinching of its first-ever Conference USA division title.

Oh teehee yes to be sure there was a wee incident wasn’t there? What was it… Oh yes one of our running backs beat the shit out of his girlfriend, burst a wine bottle on his bathroom floor with such force it broke the tiles, and then obstructed the police, didn’t he? My goodness. His second arrest in seven months. Dear me. But think of all the pressure he was under for the division title game! Ever heard of blowing off steam?

He’ll be back on the team in no time.

It’s deja vu all over again for NIU as police arrest a freshman storing in his dorm room the same make of weapon another student used five years ago to kill several students during a geology class.

Ah, the Glock, the Glock, gun of choice for campus paranoids…

Not that this guy only kept a Glock. Try body armor and an AR-15 rifle. A freshman can’t be too careful these days.

United States of America.

They lionize him at Brown (well, they lionize always-in-trouble-with-the-law trustee Steven Cohen at Brown too) (and… well…); they made him captain of the football team. A golden boy, an Aryan from Darien, Christian Garnett’s just one more big ol’ adorable football playing SUV driving violent drunk… The sort rife at our universities, and what a blessing to these settings of meditation and reason.

Having finished with Brown, Christian now plies his trade among high school football players, modeling for them the whole big car/big man/big thirst/big swing thing. It’s unusual, however, for these guys to beat up female police officers. That’s Christian’s own variation on the theme.

It all started [with] him driving his Jeep down Connecticut Avenue in Norwalk … A police officer, Michelle McSally, noticed that he was driving at a high rate and it seemed as though one of his tires were missing. She then spotted the tire on the side of the road. As she went over to the car, she noticed he was trying to conceal something in the back. Turns out he was hiding his drug [paraphernalia]. At this point, you would think you would just give up and go with the flow. After all, you’re screwed. Not our boy Christian. He told the officer that he knew his tire was gone, he was going to get it filled with air at the nearby gas station- (How do you fill up a tire that’s not connected to your car?) His bloodshot eyes and slurred speech alerted the officer to call for back up. After he failed the first two field sobriety tests, he told the officers he couldn’t perform the third… standing on one leg.

… When [an] officer… tried to cuff him, he used his 6’2”, 240 pound frame to kick her and resist arrest. As he continued to swing his arms around like a lunatic, another officer gave him a nice, quick two blows to the face … [Unable to subdue Garnett, police Tasered him – they had to do it twice.] [He] was so unruly at the hospital that they had to handcuff him to the bed. He tried to kick a camera out of [the hand of an officer] … documenting the injuries. He slightly calmed down after a doctor threatened to give him sedatives to chill him out. It was at this point that he turned his anger to the nurses- The male nurses. Whenever one would walk by he would yell out “You must be a real Tommy tough nuts”.

Is there any moment at which the University of Nebraska takes its hagiography of Richie Incognito off the web? Might Brown replace the photo of Garnett that accompanies its awed online account of him with his more recent police issued one?