Seriously. This is insane to spend [$450 million to renovate a football stadium] that is used six times a year. Maybe eight. It [is] also completely consistent with the rest of the great state [of] Texas, and the United States.

… [Note that this] athletic [department is] associated with [Texas A & M, a school] of higher learning.

Well, yes… All of us with anything other than them itty bitty brains you see in the truly athletified recognize the Beckettian absurdity of big-time university sports. And it’s noble for Larry Bennett, a political science professor at DePaul, to go up against the surreal inevitability which is a new empty money-hemorrhaging basketball stadium there. But… you know…

There’s gonna be a university casino too! Bennett thinks

DePaul University should not be associated with it. […] By joining this project to DePaul we would be signaling that its institutional ethics are precariously situational.

But believe me, DePaul is so far past Bennett with this idea… I hear it’s looking into massage parlors too…

… sings Cinderella; and this year’s Cinderella university story has got to be Rutgers, whose dream to be the Auburn University of the east is coming true, one day at a time. Rutgers has done it all, with amazing focus and commitment:

*** It has moved decisively toward shutting down the academic component of the university for the sake of athletics. The school’s athletic budget is massive; its academic more and more paltry. Eventually Rutgers as “teaching” and “research” “university” will be exclusively online.

*** It has hired and fired presidents with an eye toward greater and greater haplessness and indifference. Its trustees may be close to firing its latest leader, his function of taking the fall for the most recent string of athletic scandals having been fulfilled. Watch for Rutgers’ next presidential offer to go out to Nick Saban.

*** It has decided to retain its latest in a line of allegedly abusive and/or mendacious athletic officials. She and her rhetoric of integrity and triumph will stay; the letter protesting her cruelty as coach – signed by the entire volleyball team she once led – will be ignored.

These, and too many other strategies and initiatives to mention, are the outward manifestations of an American university determined to root out any scholarly residue, and just as determined to compete with Auburn, Texas Tech, Southern Methodist, Kentucky, and LSU for sports supremacy. A bold move, indeed, to go up against the southern powerhouses. But so far, Rutgers is doing everything right.

Have faith in your dream and someday
Your rainbow will come smiling through.

And it’s Rutgers. At Rutgers, you bankrupt the school subsidizing athletics. At Rutgers, all that money you took from students buys coaches who abuse students. So that’s, uh, students buying their own abuse. Strange goings-on at a university.

At Rutgers, the new athletic director brought in to clean up the program after problems with abusive coaches turns out – allegedly – to have been an abusive coach.

In smaller ways, too, the new clean-up person at Rutgers already looks like an embarrassment.

[Julie] Hermann was also a central figure in a 1997 discrimination lawsuit filed against the University of Tennessee.

Former assistant volleyball coach Ginger Hineline claimed that she was discouraged from becoming pregnant while working under Hermann.

Hermann made remarks at Hineline’s June 1994 wedding that became central to the lawsuit, which ended with a jury siding with Hineline and awarding her $150,000.

Hermann denied the existence of the video at her introductory news conference at Rutgers on May 15.

“There’s a video? I’m sorry, did you say there’s a video? There’s no video, trust me,” Hermann said.

But The Star-Ledger posted a video on its website, showing Hermann at the nuptials joking that she hoped Hineline would not get pregnant any time soon.

I’m sorry, there’s a video, trust me.

All my checks and cash and fees,
To Charlie Weis we bend our knees.
All for coaches! All for coaches!’

You stay classy, FAU.

… Miami.

… like New Mexico, is that you’ve got to read shit like this.

Most people just lie there and read it and try not to feel so defiled by its stupid lies that they want to jump off a cliff (there are amazing cliffs in New Mexico). Others can’t help taking the words in and responding to them, as these two New Mexico State University students did.

Although their effort to introduce reason, decency and (you gotta be kidding) intellect to the state – and, more specifically, to the chair of the NMSU board of regents – is the very definition of noble futility, along the lines of, say, the Warsaw Uprising, they are to be admired for the effort. Attention, as they say, must be paid.

[The chair’s letter] is a strangely defensive account of the glories of our sports program and why it deserves the funding it currently receives, including a controversial $4.1 million annual transfer out of the academic fund.

The Cheney letter may have largely been prompted by the “firestorm” created when then-presidential candidate Garrey Carruthers stated that dropping football to a lower division or even eliminating it entirely were options on the table.

Carruthers nearly immediately retracted that statement, but Cheney seems to still feel the need to rally against the critics. “Like it or not,” the chairman of the board tells us, “we must live in the reality that is collegiate sports today.” We have to keep doing what we’re doing, because everyone else is doing it. We have to pay our football coach more than the entire philosophy department combined, because that’s just the reality of the market…

… [It is impossible to] justify the robbing of academic funds to cover the athletic program’s debts at a time when professorships are being reduced and money for research and public service continues to decrease. The Aggie-pride factor doesn’t take away from the fact that many student-athletes leave NMSU with a subpar education and a host of physical and financial problems. Wins don’t justify the overblown importance of big-time sports on college campuses. Instead of blindly going along with the “reality that is collegiate sports today” — the reality of the NCAA’s perverted money-making machine, of rape cover-ups, of steroid abuse — why don’t we put our foot down, be different, recognize that they’re just games and act accordingly? Why not do groundbreaking work to redefine the role of collegiate athletics rather than just trying to keep up with the big schools?

Bravo. You lose.

… (the big three here are Hawaii, Alaska, and Nevada) has a farcical public university system.

HEADLINE #1:

UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII AT MANOA
ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT DEBT
EXPECTED TO REACH $13M

HEADLINE #2:

BUILDING ENROLLMENT, FOOTBALL TEAM,
PART OF PLAN FOR NEW UNIVERSITY OF
HAWAII WEST OAHU CHANCELLOR

And what a chancellor!

[With Rockne] Freitas’ background as a [football] star at Oregon State University and his many years in the NFL, as well as being instrumental in bumping up UH football to the Mountain West Conference, anything is possible.

… the University of Colorado. They’ve had years of absolutely fascinating violence, rape, alcohol, and spending scandals, and it just keeps coming! One of their players went out the other night and drank, by his estimation, “six glasses of wine, 10 beers and six shots of various other alcohols,” and got into a big ol’ fight with some random guy on the street and practically killed him. Haha! More great shit for the team; plus for the … … … university? I think there’s a university somewhere in these stories…!

UD thinks all the people who want to end the alcohol ban at CU’s Folsom Field should use this guy in their ads. LOL.

… Mike Rice.

If you want to be among the top twenty most highly compensated public university presidents in the United States, it helps to preside over spectacular crimes. Penn State’s Graham Spanier, “awaiting trial on criminal charges of perjury, obstruction, endangering the welfare of children, failure to properly report suspected child abuse and conspiracy,” took the number one spot for 2011-2012; coming in at #11 was Florida A&M’s James Ammons, who had the beating to death of one of his marching band members at the hands of other members of the band on his watch. Even if your sports factory doesn’t manage to produce child rape or manslaughter, the simple expedience of being an eager slave of your coaches may do the trick: Auburn’s president made the list, as did Gordon Gee of Ohio State.

… as Neil Young would say.

Helpless schools like the University of Charleston will never be anything but sports factories and arrest generators. They’ll take anyone tall for their basketball teams, including people with arrest records for very serious crimes. When their players team up and get arrested together, the schools haul out their presidents to say we feel helpless.

Someone needs to step in and help America’s sports factories/arrest generators. Alone, they are helpless.

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

UPDATE: And now: Three from each team!

This is the second mass arrest of University of Charleston athletes in the last few weeks.

Three University of Charleston football players have just been kicked off the team for drug dealing. You’ve got to acknowledge the remarkable degree of teamwork in both Charleston sports – three-man strategy in each case.

She lives for stuff like this.

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

We always lose lose lose

but we take solace in our booze.

Free market, baby. When students don’t give a shit about your professional football team located on a university campus, they will buy and sell and buy and sell their student tickets to make a buck.

You taught them how the game’s played, with your trillionaire coach and athletes/pretend students and all. Bit late in the day to complain that you get to make a fortune but your players and the student fans get nothing but massive student fees to pay for your fortune.

Sure, the students will show up for the big games. They want to get drunk and excited and maybe win something. But they don’t give a shit about the team, and they’re certainly not showing up for blow-off games. Why should they? What’s your problem?