… with a three-year, half a million dollar salary, contract extension.

Not that they’re going to tell you that.

… comes out in favor of a university-wide laptop in the classroom ban. If you’ve been reading this blog for any time at all, you know that UD has confidently awaited such a day, and that she trusts something similar will happen at other self-respecting campuses (Def. of self-respecting campuses: Places whose football stadium isn’t named after a prison). That is, UD has anticipated that the real energy in favor of serious bans will come not from professors, many of whom do ban them, but from students.

This is for obvious I’m all right, Jack, pull up the ladder reasons: What careth I, Professor X, if Professor Y’s students have a shitty classroom experience? I’ve worked out something good for my group.

But – as UD has told you repeatedly – this is a treacherously short-sighted POV. As the Duke editorial writers ask:

Why convene class if students are half-present, constantly disturbed by text messages, games and Facebook? … What is the point of holding class if people are not paying attention? This is not just about respect; it is also about the necessity of a physical college campus. The more time we spend on computers, the less important the on-campus college experience — which universities tout as a major benefit of an elite education — becomes.

If it helps you to think about this in terms of sports: Note current plummeting attendance at many university and professional stadiums. Why, why, why? Well, lots of traditional reasons (obscene drunks, long runs of losing games, outrageous ticket prices, passels of bad boys on the teams) PLUS a new one: The addition to many stadiums of vast Adzillatrons — screens that show you the game as it’s happening, and add constant massive shrieking advertisements. Fun! You’ve spent hundreds of dollars to be treated to a computer-generated as-it’s-happening rendition of the game while being held captive to wall to wall commercials. Where do I sign up for my $2,000 season tickets?… But it’s so much less fun with every game, ’cause I notice all the other people who used to sit with me and make it exciting to cheer are gone. They’re watching on their big screen in the respectable privacy of their own home…

And see it’s the same thing at universities. Why go there? It’s nicer to lie in bed and stare at your very own screen. And you get to that place, mentally, as a result of staring at screens in classrooms, just the way people get themselves home from the football game by staring at screens in the stadium.

Really dum-dum states, like Nevada, our very dumbest state, are planning more and bigger Adzillatrons at stadiums. A proposed $800 million new facility for UNLV features an Adzillatron that spans the entire stadium. Imagine sitting in your seat and being forced to watch the world’s biggest moving image of a three-tier McDonald’s burger oozing white sauce! Slurp!

… he will now attempt once more to move among us, a man.

… but I will do my damnedest to post – want to write, for instance, about the failing fortunes of that big ol’ University of Nevada Las Vegas stadium the boys have in mind to build once they get hold of hundreds of millions of tax dollars… The current UNLV stadium isn’t empty enough for them — they want one that will be bigger, cost more, and attract even fewer people. But I’ll just post this for the moment, since I’m worried about losing my connection….

When first I saw you
And your shining prison
I felt the sun had
Only just arisen

O CEO!
CEO of GEO!
Pray go away!
Pray GOOOOOOOoooo awayyyyyy!

… deal to name its stadium after a company that runs prisons.

Was a prison company our first choice? No. But let’s face it, for a $6 million donation we probably would have sold the stadium naming rights to Massengill and called the stadium The Douche Dome.

We were desperate. We built a $70 million facility that’s nearly empty year-round, even during home football games, and for two years, nobody was biting on the naming rights.

Most scandal-befouled sports factories – North Carolina, Penn State – are embarrassed by how far they’ve let themselves go. They seem to retain a sense of what they once were, or could have been, before they dissolved.

But UD will give this to Auburn University: It is what it is — the sports and leisure sewer of the American collegiate landscape — and it’s proud of it. No hiding its head in shame for Auburn after its countless athletic scandals; it has a belligerent insistence on total squalor, total contempt for the concept “university,” that one can’t help but admire.

Now it’s building an amusement park for everyone there, featuring

a 50-foot rock climbing wall with an auto-belaying system, four bordering caves for lateral climbing, a a 20-foot wet rock climbing wall in the 20,000 gallon leisure activity pool, a 45-person hot tub in the shape of a tiger paw and a third of a mile indoor track with a corkscrew formation and 10 feet of altitude.

Tiger paw because that’s the mascot, dummy. Here’s a photograph of forty-five people or so (doing something they’d never be caught dead doing at Auburn), in case you want to start picturing the hot tub.

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UD thanks a reader from Auburn.

FAU, also known as Find Another University, is enjoying the kind of global publicity you can’t put a price on. Its new stadium, named after a notorious prison, has been inaugurated by none other than Stephen Colbert:

http://www.sbnation.com/college-football/2013/2/22/4017374/stephen-colbert-fau-football-stadium-geo-group

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UD thanks Daniel.

When you’re a dying jock school, the last thing to go is your sports program.

South Carolina State will probably be shut down or absorbed into another institution in a few years. Few people enroll. It’s totally corrupt. It has almost no money. It’s such a boringly absolute fiasco that people don’t even pay attention to it anymore.

Its sports teams are also in the toilet; but in a recent interview the school’s athletics director put it all in perspective:

[The AD] said it is important to the athletics department and to the university for the football and men’s basketball programs to experience success. At a school in financial crisis with dwindling enrollment, athletics accomplishments can provide a morale boost for the student body.

Let’s spend the few dollars we were able to free from the grip of thieving trustees and administrators on games! Let’s go out with a smile.

This article about Boise State University captures – in a truly unsettling way – the sordid, delusional nature of the American jock school.

The main point of the piece is the financial hemorrhaging of the sports program. No surprise there. Fewer and fewer people go to university games, so ticket sales at many schools are in the toilet.

But along the way, the writer notes that Boise – a not very impressive university, which might want to spend a bit on its educational offerings – is building a $22 million dollar football stadium. That the stadium will be named after a coach who presided over a program so filthy that even the NCAA noticed is in no way awkward, assures Boise’s president. The people who gave the money liked the guy (now coaching for another school), and they get to call the shots.

In fact the article is full of blithe reassurances from the Blanche DuBois running Boise: The fans will be back; the stadium’s name, honoring a miscreant, is way cool; athletics is going to be a big moneymaker any day now. So it goes.

… down to a science.

… Southern Methodist University today, shall we? There are scads of colleges and universities in this country, but only a few – Florida A&M, Penn State, University of Miami, University of North Carolina – get to hog the spotlight. So profound is our ‘radically present’ orientation (to quote the theorists of postmodernity) that we tend to miss precisely those schools with the deepest histories of squalor.

In the case of SMU, which adds piquancy to its sordidness by including a religious denomination in its name, it’s been notably vile ever since its long-ago death penalty, a signal distinction within a national landscape of dirty sports programs. SMU has not let the fact that the program remains moribund stop it from accumulating – last year – a one hundred million dollar athletic deficit.

Nor has the fantastic campus culture of the sports factory faltered in the wake of SMU’s misfortune. Secrecy about the budget even as they soak the students for higher and higher athletics fees? Check. Sodden frat boys befouling all they touch? Check. Violent hazing? Check. I mean, that last one – hazing – hit the news today, but it got lost, since hazing and sexual assault and all that seem de rigueur, comme il faut and la chose normale at SMU. I just thought I’d draw your attention to it for a moment.

The University of Central Florida is full of students like Jackie Fulco, who think academics is more important than athletics. That just isn’t right. It’s “crazy,” it’s pitiful, “it just doesn’t add up,” writes a UCF reporter in the school newspaper. Why is the football stadium half empty?

It must be bad marketing. Word’s not getting out about the games. The student looks forward to a full stadium once word gets out. That will set things right, and UCF will start to look like a real university.

When the name of the game in big-time American university football is thug-management, it’s all about comparisons. Who recruits the most criminals? How bad – man to man offense speaking – are they? Do they steal laptops, or do they, like national champ Alabama’s crew, beat people senseless and pack heat?

Then there’s all the chatter about consequences. Ignore it? Suspend them for awhile? Suspend them indefinitely? Dismiss them?

These guys – these Alabama guys – are second stringers, so we’re being spared long articles ignoring what they’ve done and agonizing instead about how their being in jail is going to hurt the defensive line…

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UD thanks several readers for linking her to this story.

A scurrilous voice of dissent in South Carolina dares to suggest that university coaches using state planes for recruitment may not be an appropriate use of taxes!