(Put football colorado in my search engine.)

But at least now it’s bankrupting the school.

Excerpts from editorial commentaries at the Daily Camera:

If we think of football as a business, as we should, we should expect the campus CEO to tender his resignation.

Interim Athletic Director Ceal Barry stated, “We need to look at efficiencies”. Current inefficiencies include $9.8 million in football coach’s severance packages, the $1.3 million overrun in “miscellaneous expenses” and the $1 million in renovation of football coaching offices! There are 23 football coaches and directors. Men and women’s basketball has six coaching posts each, skiing five and women’s tennis two.

The farcical University of Southern Mississippi is being helmed by a bunch of big strong men who know exactly what they’re doing. The school’s very president turns out to be a major jocksman who – now that he’s prez – is gonna jigger things so that that pesky ol’ million plus athletics deficit is gonna be gone with the wind just you wait and see. He’s hired a really expensive search firm (for the fourth athletic director) and he’s paying coach Vince Dooley to advise and … well, all this extra expenditure and personnel turnover is gonna make the deficit disappear!

… in America, gets its big ol’ stonewalling ass sued.

La vie en football factory.

How degrading is it to be a professor at West Virginia University?

Well two of the school’s, er, troubled coaches (the predecessor of one of them was Rick Rodriguez of sainted memory) are getting enormous raises on top of their enormous salaries, while because of “a $13 million cut in state funding to the school … tuition [will] be raised and no pay raises [will] be forthcoming for university employees.”

This writer suggests that these wildly overcompensated coaches (neither has won many games lately) “could donate [their raises] for pay raises to university employees,” but you know how that goes. Greed has no limit in the lovely world of big-time university athletics. Reread the Wikipedia page on Rodriguez if you’re in any doubt.

The writer concludes:

The point is, that we have reached a point in time where some independent outside panel should look into the finances of the school and the athletic department, a thorough and comprehensive study that includes all financial areas, including [AD Oliver] Luck’s travel and the dealings over the athletic department’s Tier 3 negotiations, the reseating within the Coliseum and the raise in the required donations for football seats, all of which has stirred up what had been a loyal public.

This entire mess has grown to such proportions and entangles both the university’s finances and the athletic department’s finances, creating a situation where a soccer coach finds a way to get a new locker room built, where a football coach gets a new weight room to go with a raise and a $300,000 retention bonus next year but a math professor can’t get a three percent raise that someone has to come in and work it out.

Well, but you have to keep in mind the nature of the institution. You’re talking about America’s number one party school. Number one! So who’s that someone gonna come in and work it out? A public university doesn’t get to the top of that list without a concerted, statewide effort.

No, as that ridiculous thing, a professor at West Virginia University, you’re in a hopeless situation. UD‘s advice: Seek respectable employment.

Yet another Pravda (this one The Coloradan) pumps out propaganda about a university’s athletic program. What a wonderful world it will be when the Colorado State University football team makes us an intellectually great, financially profitable institution! Comrade Jack (the article refers to the latest AD by his first name – ‘Under Jack’s Watch’ – because he is your friend, your buddy, one of you…) and his vast new $250 million stadium (that’s the cost estimate — we know how that goes) and plentiful new administrative assistants will make everything better. Although our attendance figures are pretty pathetic, he will make them perfect by increasing the number of available seats and raising ticket prices. He will bring a “new way of looking at college athletics,” in which athletics is the front porch of the university (you’ve never heard that one before!) and the AD spends the university’s money like a drunken sailor (also unprecedented!).

Mike MacIntyre doesn’t care that University of Colorado athletics has a $7.5 million deficit, much of it buyouts — buyouts, you know? totally totally wasted payments to former coaches who didn’t win enough games and pull in enough fans.

Mike’s heavily into interior design, so along with his own obscene salary (including buyouts for when he’s the next loser coach) he’s insisting — and the university’s fellatial president has said yesssssirrrr mr mac!!!! — on shiny new offices for him and the boys.

The interim athletic director (at Boulder you’re interim, fired, or making interior design demands before being fired) is on top of the situation.

“We need to look at efficiencies,” [she] said.

“[S]tudent fees and direct university support of the [Marshall University] athletic department’s budget nearly doubled since 2006.” “[T]he athletic budget has increased by almost $13 million, or nearly 75 percent, since 2005… [F]rom 2006 to 2012, the biggest growth in money to shore up the [athletic] budget was in direct university support, going from about $3 million in 2006 to $7.44 million last year.”

The faculty – compensated way below market, and in some cases up to thirty percent below market – have made bold to complain a little. That complaint has revealed something about Marshall that UD‘s not seen before at any American university. For significant segments of the Marshall community, professors as such represent a politically offensive barrier to the school’s true, exclusively athletic, identity. One of the highest profile local columnists ridicules and excoriates the professors and concludes

The radicals … just want a raise.

Much of the commentary on his column (and related columns) similarly dismisses professors as liberal scum, etc.

Reading around in the local press on the issue, UD thinks she has for the first time identified an American university willing to be honest about itself: Marshall sees no reason to sustain a faculty. A close look at the place points to the possibility that West Virginians are not educable. They can, however, be kept comfortable at large sports events. We can see Marshall, year by year, acting more decisively on this knowledge.

A combination of sports events and rocket-shot-out-of-anus lawsuits will keep the Marshall University administration rolling along nicely.

… relentlessly unmasks that university’s sports lies (background here). Like Reed Olsen at Missouri State University, Killingsworth is part of a special breed of university professor: A smart economist able to detect all of the bs universities put out about how lucrative big-time sports on campus are (or will be; it’s almost always got to be will be). So for instance, in a recent opinion piece, Killingsworth writes:

Its report to the NCAA shows that the subsidy to [Rutgers] athletics is $28 million: $18.5 million from discretionary university funds and another $9.5 million from student fees. None of these funds are earmarked for athletics — the university is free to spend those dollars on anything it wants, or even hand them back to students and their families as tuition reductions. All told, the subsidy amounts to almost $1,000 for each undergraduate. The student fees alone work out to almost $330 per undergraduate.

Nevertheless, Rutgers officials from [President] Barchi on down repeatedly refer only to the $18.5 million in discretionary funds as a subsidy. They never mention student fees. Sayonara! $9.5 million in subsidies conveniently disappear.

Killingsworth barely touches on the reputational costs to Rutgers of its absolutely endless athletics scandal. He doesn’t need to.

I’m sure next season will be much, much better.

And if it’s not, fire the latest coach and coordinators and hire another new batch.

Keep doing this long enough, and you’re gonna start to win!

The school’s governing body for athletics, the University Athletics Committee, voted in favor of a $12.5 million budget increase from the $91.9 million in 2012-13, a number the department actually exceeded by $4.2 million due largely to capital projects such as new track, softball and soccer complexes. Most notable in the new budget: projected football expenses are up 32.6 percent, from about $9.5 million last year to $12.6 million for ’13-14.

Roughly $2.4 million of that $3.1 million increase is to cover the higher salaries of the new football staff. Just counting head coach Mark Stoops and his two coordinators, that trio makes a combined $874,000 a year more than predecessor Joker Phillips and his coordinators. At Tuesday’s meeting, athletic director Mitch Barnhart said those numbers reflect the school’s strong commitment to a football program that last year suffered through a 2-10 season before firing Phillips.

And wow. As always, a big-time athletics program benefits the university academically. UK’s US News and World Report ranking has gone from 112 in 2007 to 125 today. With those numbers, no wonder UK is devoting hugely increased resources to sports.

University of Richmond luminary and all-around first-rate researcher, teacher, and human being Rick Mayes has proposed that the university end its football program.

What? What? Are you fucking kidding me?

Well, you know, this sort of thing will happen when you choose a reflective, principled person to be your faculty athletics representative. That and that alone is where UR went wrong. The faculty athletics representative is supposed to be an old jock desperate for free game tickets and occasional face time with the players. Rick Mayes is all wrong for faculty athletics representative.

Gory details, from his recent email to faculty:

I have come to the conclusion that it’s hard-to-impossible to consistently make DI-level sports conform and submit to the primary institutional focus on academics, because there’s just too much money and ambition involved… [A]fter three years of watching and studying sports up close, I believe UR’s long-term academic interests lie with D3-level sports and football being phased out over time due to legal, liability, and safety reasons. [Given the likelihood of concussion lawsuits,] this big-team sport and significant financial commitment could conceivably become extinct within the next two to three decades. Might it not be desirable to get out ahead of that potential outcome for the sake of our student athletes’ health and our institution’s financial long-term interests, not to mention our consciences?

Consciences the guy is talking about! And jeez – Watch his Last Lecture! He’s all about Dietrich Bonhoffer and shit! Who appointed this character??

Still – don’t sweat it. UR’s prez and athletic director and everybody else has come down on Mayes like a ton of offensive linemen. Of course we’re keepin’ football! Are you kidding me? Pay no attention to the man behind the conscience.

Veteran UD readers know of her fascination with nihilism nada nothingness (“Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”) (“No-one is anything.“). She is particularly fascinated by the very expensive nothingness of certain American universities.

In the comment I’ve quoted in the headline to this post, a citizen of North Carolina grapples with the fact that her taxes pay for the University of North Carolina, a location she’s watching shrink into nothing. Entire instructorless, contentless, and evaluationless departments! By definition nothing should cost nothing. It’s an unimpeachable tautology: Nothing comes from nothing. Yet here she’s dishing out dough to underwrite nada nada nada. She feels like an idiot, a fool, a dupe. Shouldn’t a university be… something? Yet here’s the fuck-up ex-chancellor of UNC proclaiming that the most important job of the school’s leader, the thing that takes up virtually all of his time, is sports — sports, which has nothing to do with academics, and the ceaseless scandals that sports generates – the nothingness classes, the $500,000 to coach university leaders in scandal-talk… Where, she wonders, did the university go?

Here it is.

Here’s her university – one
robed figure clinging to the
book that’s survived
the nothingness.

Expect, in a few years,
to see this image on the
cover of UNC’s course catalog.

Nice ambiguity there, huh? To what does “they,” in Joe Nocera’s sentence refer? The teams or the universities?

I guess he means it to refer to the teams; but, if so, should he not at least have reversed the order – between the universities and the teams, and stop pretending they have any ‘educational’ value (and why put educational in quotation marks?)? Nocera presumably believes some universities have either educational or ‘educational’ value…

Consider too the content of his claim. Nocera’s one of many writers who, faced with the superscummy world big-time athletics has brought to America’s universities, urges that we “create some real separation” between athletics and universities.

Easy to say, Joe. What the fuck, pray tell, might you mean? When two people who can’t stand each other but find themselves married decide to really deal with that, they separate. Real separation means you live in different places and have little to nothing to do with one another. But I doubt Joe has in mind this clean a break.

I mean, plenty of people are calling for universities whose campuses are routinely trashed — literally and figuratively — by their sports programs to spin them off, to have a merely symbolic association with a local professional team that continues to carry the name of the university. That’s one way to go. But there are many more people, like Nocera, who seem to think that universities and big-time sports can be separated and yet reconciled, can have broken up and still live together under the same roof.

There are many reasons why this is impossible, prominent among them the simple dynamism of the phenomenon itself: Every year, unstoppably, scandals get more lurid, more expensive, more absolutely disgusting. Every year, coaches and players get more out of control, gain more power. Every year, the shreds of academic integrity these schools have managed to maintain shred yet more. Every year, more and more classes are cancelled to make way for games and for the dictates of the media conglomerates that now run the university show. Etc. Nocera’s column happens to be about university presidents destroyed by their athletic programs, but that’s only one of countless corruptions intrinsic to the decision to import professional sports — whose even more repulsive scandals (the latest being baseball boys and their steroids) Americans really seem to get off on — to universities. So you can put the smell over there, as it were, but it’s always going to work its way deep into your nostrils.

And I’m afraid absolute separation won’t fly either. I mean the idea of spinning off the teams, professionalizing them, but keeping University of Georgia in their name. Let me explain why.

Think of alum fandom as a delicate and nuanced perfume. It has a note of nostalgia, a bouquet of beer, a hint of hazing… studded about with the scent of sorority and the fragrance of frat. Alum fans are connected to their team through memories of sadistic initiation rituals, drunken stumbles into lakes, and other cherished keepsakes. Pack up the team and send it across town and you rip those memories from their moorings. Won’t work.

Seriousness and tax exemption – the two essentials of our universities – are closely aligned. If the first (the philosophical foundation) vanishes, the second (the financial foundation) will be imperiled. If any particular enterprise with university in its name loses its seriousness, as expressed in a scholarly atmosphere, a liberal arts curriculum, and the training of students for higher study and for jobs, state legislatures and citizens will begin to question the special forms of financial support (there are many besides tax exemption, of course; tax exemption is shorthand for them all) they are providing. Politicians will appropriate less and less money; alumni will offer fewer and fewer donations. Eventually, for the worst among our universities, students will stop applying, which is already happening at South Carolina State University and elsewhere.

Simply put, if it’s impossible to detect more than a token amount of academic activity on a university campus – if the place is not serious – people are eventually going to withhold the designation university from that campus, and the money benefits that sustain it are also going to be withheld.

Thus when Holden Thorp, sports-battered ex-chancellor of the University of North Carolina, says

“Either we put the ADs back in charge and hold them accountable if things don’t work […] or let’s be honest and tell everyone when we select (presidents) to run institutions that run big-time sports that athletics is the most important part of their job.”

he is warning American universities that they are running out of seriousness. He is signalling to all of our schools that the management of sports events – and the management of their attendant activities (crimes committed by athletes; destruction caused by drunken tailgaters; constant buyout and other lawsuits running into the hundreds of millions of dollars; endemic cheating; deals with distilleries for the sale of alcohol to students; ceaseless scandals costing the school millions in damage control and personnel replacement, etc.) – has become virtually the entire job of the university president. But this group of activities does not describe a university president. It describes an athletic director. The person who manages the dispensing of fifty million dollars – the amount of money the Sandusky scandal has so far cost Penn State – to lawyers and public relations people is not – and, as Thorp makes clear, should not be – a university president.

This person should, of course, be an athletic director. Eventually, many American universities will have athletic director presidents – people who manage sports, and also manage, in their spare time, whatever few academic issues crop up.

Having athletic directors as university presidents makes all kind of sense. The UNC scandal wouldn’t have happened at all if an AD had been president, since academic misconduct from the point of view of an AD is… what? What is that? The AD doesn’t even know what it is, so whatever happened in the Afro-American Studies department at Chapel Hill is … whatever. Price of doing business. Way to stay in the game. Once the AD has real control over what goes on in the school, scandals won’t surface because they won’t be scandals.

Under the President Athletic Director regime everyone will be happy.

But this bliss cannot last. Eventually more and more people will realize you’re not a university, and you’ll have to take that word out of your name and get your funding from ticket sales.

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

Meanwhile more and more schools at the moment have a Gordon Gee situation on their hands. Gee was a puppet intellectual (bow ties, spectacles) trotted out to mouth serious things, to keep the seriousness ball in the air.

Ever wonder why Gordon says such crazy shit? Babe, you don’t need a Freudian to know which way the wind blows. This is an angry puppet, a self-hating hypocrite, a man who used to have intellectual self-respect and now trades it every day for football money. Gordon Gee is a stage in the devolution of the American university president, a halfway point between mind and body, seriousness and play. His extinction will pave the way for President Nick Saban.

Ah, once again all good flows from big-time university athletics. Here it’s the University of Montana, some of whose professors wonder why the school has a devastating $8.6 million deficit.

The deficit may have something to do with all the rape in Missoula, some of it apparently committed by football players. When your city is known as the Rape Capital of America, people might be reluctant to spend much time there; and indeed the main reason for UM’s deficit involves a sharp downturn in enrolled students.

The UM professors who signed the opinion piece note a looming event sure to make UM as unattractive to new faculty as it is to new students.

Most recently, the university attempted to put a positive spin on the investigation conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice into how the university handled allegations of sexual assault. The administration claimed it had achieved a great victory by reaching an agreement with this federal agency. A closer look, however, reveals that UM, in a desperate effort to avoid another embarrassment, negotiated a legal settlement that forced it to accept all the recommendations and demands made by the federal government. Among these were a series of mandatory training programs which the administration promised to implement across campus. UM leadership must understand that training of faculty should be limited to procedural matters and cannot be used as a pretext to alter the curriculum, impose ideological positions, and threaten the fundamental academic freedoms of the faculty.

You see, because athletes at the university were sexually abusive, faculty will be forced to take Don’t Rape Your Students training sessions.

As I say, great and manifold is the goodness flowing from big-time university athletics.