… to an American problem.
The frustration is all too evident in this editorial, written by the head of Youngstown State’s student government. Recent statements by the associate director of athletics about where and how athletic money is spent anger him. Scholarship money doesn’t come out of ticket sales, as the associate director implies; it comes from students:
All of the scholarship money is paid for out of the $810 per student (roughly 10 percent of overall tuition) that goes from our tuition through the general fund to athletics.
The associate director also talks as if the budget is in good enough shape to fund capital projects, etc. The SGA president notes:
Athletics brings in $2.9 million in revenue and spends $11.96 million, resulting in a deficit of more than $9 million.
Youngstown State athletics boasts a 300 percent deficit.
No, YSU athletics isn’t dramatically awful, like Rutgers. It’s just typically cheesy.
Division I Rutgers University gets the sort of attention about which other universities can only dream.
… on the subject of the Rutgers University basketball scandal – is now up at Inside Higher Education.
That didn’t take long. Plus:
According to a source, John B. Wolf, Rutgers’ interim senior vice president and general counsel who is believed to have recommended against firing Rice in December, was forced to resign from his position late Wednesday night and it’s not clear whether he will remain at the university in some capacity.
I guess the president of Rutgers figures that if he dumps a lot of people he can save his own ass by saying see how seriously I took this? I dismantled half the university!
Won’t work.
… for revealing the university’s disgusting corruption.
Of the thousands of articles that have appeared in the last two days about Mike Rice, Rutgers, and the imperiled president of Rutgers, this, UD reckons, is the best so far, since it stresses not so much the fate of one or two miscreants, but the fate of Rutgers University.
Repeatedly, expert observers are quoted comparing Rutgers to Penn State (“This is a minor league version of Penn State.” “Rice should’ve been gone right away, and especially in the context of [Joe] Paterno and Penn State, neglecting to act is stunning.”), and they are right to do so, because it will probably take around a decade for most Americans to stop thinking Paterno/Sandusky when they think of Penn State. Rutgers is in the same place now.
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It’s quite possible that instead of thinking those two names, they’ll think instead of the names associated with new scandals at Penn State that have overtaken the Paterno/Sandusky scandal. Look at Miami U and Auburn (“Lies, I tell you! It’s all been lies!”) and the University of Tennessee and Ohio State and all. There’s a reason UD has always called big-time university sports the gift that keeps on giving. You’re given a toy with many moving parts when you’re given a big multi million dollar sports enterprise on a small university campus. Your marching band can haze a band member to death. Criminals on your team can rape people. Fans can riot, or constantly trash your campus beyond recognition. Your sadistic coach can appear on film being sadistic. You can’t, like Penn State, replace an academic culture with a corrupt sports culture for decades and then turn around when that absurdity implodes – as it always will – and say no, no, no, we’re a university, we’re doing all these great things. You are doing great things. But it doesn’t matter.
Like Graham Spanier and the rest of the pathetic crew, Rutgers’ Robert Barchi will probably be forced out of a job soon. He has already been outed as an enabler of depravity — which is virtually the job description of a Division I university president.
Yes, Mike Rice U is now into bold type, garishly warring and litigating personalities, and the baying press in pursuit of the next hilarious unguarded statement. Penn State is still there, a tabloid whose faculty and administration desperately insist it’s back to being a … you know … quiet legitimate scholarly sort of thing (even though, as you read this, the only Penn-State-related word blasting through your brain is SANDUSKY SANDUSKY SANDUSKY). Penn State can give Rutgers pointers… As can the perennial yellow journalism schools, like Auburn, which is in the news for (get ready for it) absolutely total corruption.
We all know big-time sports is the front porch of the university. We’ve been told that by boosters again and again. And it’s true. Eventually, you can see everything. In big, bold type.
… that the only change in university sports wafting out of The Steamed Rice affair will be totally closed practices. Quite a few university coaches behave like Mike Rice – Rice simply got caught. So you have to keep coaches from getting caught.
Caught by the normal world. The cynical, twisted world of universities dominated, as Rutgers is, by sports, will let the behavior go with a handslap. Too much money at stake. You want the coach to make each player as much of an asshole as he is so they’ll win games. Rutgers didn’t fire Rice until the normal world responded normally to his disgusting behavior. Disgusting in any setting, but really disgusting in a university. Rutgers has no shame.
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So. Lesson? George writes:
Lock the gym doors. Hang a notice declaring that practice is closed. Tape brown paper over the windows if necessary.
But that strategy is clunky and risky in its obviousness. Not only will locked gym doors attract attention; your university’s coach is likely to feel free to be even more violent if he knows he’s truly alone with the players.
No, the solution, as is so often the case in university education these days, lies in synchronous interactive online pedagogy. The only way to keep the coach’s fingers away from the players’ necks is to separate coach and player, placing the players in the gym and the coach well away from them. A reasonably simple bit of software (SafeCoach) will allow practices to proceed nicely, coach watching and screaming from the comfort of his home or office. Players can turn the sound down when coaches enter into their most acute psychotic episodes.
Out he goes, his “rehabilitation” having failed, explains the sainted Rutgers AD who attempted the on-court conversion.
Tim Pernetti now tries to save his own ass. Good luck.
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UD thanks Wendy.
“Mike has undergone some pretty intensive sensitivity training as part of this whole deal and has dealt with, or continues to deal with a lot of those issues. This is not the kind of thing that once the basketball season is over, penance is paid,” Pernetti said. “I’ve had a sports psychologist working 60-to-80 hours with him since the suspension took place. He’s going to be involved in all those communities that he may have or will offend on the going-forward basis.”
He’s … troubled. Five minutes with the about-to-be-released DSM-V and you’ll come up with a list of disorders as long as one of Mike’s you-faggot-piece-of-shit tirades. They’ve got him in with a head man 60-80 hours so far and counting.
Who’s paying, by the way? That sounds expensive, and Mike is already real expensive – not only in sheer dollars (Rutgers pays him hundreds and hundreds of thousands each year) but in terms of what tatters of reputation the always shit-besmirched Rutgers (sports at Rutgers is the gift that keeps on giving) has left. Not to mention the lawsuits from parents of the players he’s…
Hey, wait! What about the players? Is Rutgers going to hire psychologists to spend 60-80 hours with traumatized eighteen-year-olds who came to college figuring yeah college… College. Where The Dark Knight drills balls at your head and calls you a fucking cunt.
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UD thanks Phil.
Well, you’d expect a column called OutSports to get a bit miffed at Rutgers University’s psycho homophobe coach (watch this for scenes from the groves of contemporary academe). No one else seems to mind: The guy was suspended for three games and is now firmly back in his role as coach/mentor to teenagers.
A student of sadistic university coaches, UD finds Mike Rice’s technique intriguing, if a bit retrogressive. Unlike trailblazing Bobby Knight, he doesn’t throw chairs at his players; nor does he seem drawn to locking concussed students in sheds… Like Tommy Tuberville, Rice is a traditionalist, employing a mix of direct physical violence and verbal savagery.
Rice replace[d] Fred Hill, Jr. who resigned … following a lengthy separation process in the wake of a profanity-laced tirade at a university baseball game on April 1.
Hill had to resign, I guess, because he forgot to throw punches while calling his players cunts. Technique is everything.
Even so, Rice had better watch it. Somewhere out there is an ambitious basketball coach able to call his players cunts, punch their faces, and throw furniture.
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A basketball coach named Mike Rice
Treats his players not terribly nice.
“When their feet start to drag
They get punched and called fag.
Assault in defense of the game is no vice.”
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Update:
The airing of a videotape of Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice using gay slurs, shoving and grabbing his players and throwing balls at them in practice over the past three seasons has the university’s athletic director reconsidering his decision not to fire the coach.
Oh, come on! It was only his first two-year-long offense!