My latest Inside Higher Education post.
… showing up for games. It’s such becoming behavior for a university, harassing your undergraduates out of the library and into the stands.
As at Michigan State, where the little buggers persist in showing minds of their own. The basketball coach is really angry with them.
“I don’t want to hear about it being too cold,” [Tom] Izzo said. “If it is, we’ve got a bunch of wimpy students, you know?
“I love our students. I think students have got to hold students accountable… We’ve got to self-evaluate.”
HEY. WATCH ME EARN MY 3.5 MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR BY CALLING THE STUDENT BODY AT MSU WIMPS.
“The comparison is night and day,” Yarabeck said. “When I first got here, you’d almost see as many other school shirts as you did Sam Houston shirts. To be honest, everything was kind of revolving around people going to class — which they need to do — but there wasn’t that sense of pride that there certainly is now. Now you go and it’s hard not to see people in orange shirts.
“The whole school coming together and generating spirit feeds on everything. It’s like momentum, when you start winning games; the players learn how to win. When you start having spirit, like when the Kat Krazies were created about five years ago, that puts it up a notch too. Guys painted out in orange banging on a metal sign … that kind of unnerves the opposition.
“All these things worked together and generated positive feeling for our sports teams and a real pride in SHSU. What’s not to be proud of? Look at how the student body has grown – the word is getting out. It all fits together for the betterment of our university.”
The great thing about big-time university sports, we’re told, is how much excitement and esprit de corps it brings to campus…
Or, uh, to 750 miles from campus.
Once you get into the sort of sports debt the University of Southern Mississippi is in – they’re draining academics to deal with their majorly in the red program – you “need to think about solvency, rather than the fan base,” says the head of the faculty senate. Whatever the most lucrative venue for the game, you’ve got to go there, so forget about actual students and alumni attending.
Strange, ain’t it? UD doesn’t associate post-modernism with places like Hattiesburg, but the simulacrum’s alive and well in Dixie Land.
Really? UD spends quite a bit of time chronicling university coaches who hit people – players, staff – when they get angry. Those of us who follow campus football and basketball can easily reel off five or so names of coaches who keep getting fired because they’re verbally and/or physically abusive to students.
And hell, most of them come from the same school!
That would be good ol’ Texas Tech, a school so masochistic UD calls it America’s university as pain slut. The latest thing is that cameras have caught good ol’ Tommy Tuberville hitting one of his coaches. Like right out there sose everybody can see!
… with this rather baffling story about a high-ranking athletics adviser kept on staff for years and years although plenty of evidence of his sexual misconduct was apparently out there. Lots of news outlets are picking up the story as we speak, even though so far Paul Gray’s misbehavior doesn’t approach Jerry Sandusky’s. Among other things, “an unnamed UI student told investigators that Gray had exchanged money and football tickets in return for sexual favors from another person who was not affiliated with the university.” He made inappropriate sexual comments pretty routinely; he reportedly on occasion offered to perform oral sex on students.
All bad stuff; but without Penn State in the background, it wouldn’t get as much attention as it’s now getting.
This sounds hilarious.
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Okay. You can watch it on this site. It’s amazingly good.
… university athletics program in the United States, does it again. Scan some of these posts to remind yourself — no, to convince yourself, because it’s actually unbelievable — that the citizens of an American state have for decades allowed their money to subsidize criminal players; overpaid, rule-breaking coaches whose immense buyouts go on forever; endlessly litigious athletics staff employees; and an athletics department currently running – amid declining ticket sales – a four million dollar deficit. Wouldn’t you expect, at this point, at least a modest grassroots protest somewhere? We’d like to be paying for a real university that doesn’t embarrass us kind of thing? I mean… butt-chugging, anyone?
But with every new squalid story — this one about the recruitment of a thief (other schools didn’t want him; Tennessee was thrilled to take him) who has now apparently begun stealing on campus — the people of Tennessee sit there, as if they think the reason they pay tens of millions to university coaches is so that these people can make brilliant decisions like these…
Don’t Tennesseans ever wonder whether the University of Tennessee has a president? Don’t they ever wonder why this person never appears, never makes statements?
Or how ’bout those trustees?
The athletics director at scandal-mad University of North Carolina Chapel Hill is “speaking out,” reports a local news station. No more waffling, no more evasion!
He is now ready to announce that “the Carolina program is not perfect, and that he’s working to fix the problems.”
And that’s not all.
In response to allegations that football player Erik Highsmith plagiarized course papers from “blogs written by 11-year-olds” Cunningham announced “[W]e’ve got outstanding student athletes.”
Keep up the new fresh air policy, Bubba!
… UD learns that Graham Spanier, once president of Penn State, has been charged with “obstruction of justice, perjury, conspiracy, endangering the welfare of children and failure to report allegations of child abuse.”
In the Jerry Sandusky sex scandal,
emails show that [Tim] Curley, [Gary] Schultz and Spanier at first agreed to report the allegations by [Mike] McQueary to child welfare authorities, but that Curley later changed his mind “after talking it over with Joe” — a reference to Paterno. They then developed a new plan to encourage Sandusky to seek professional help, according to the Freeh report. “This approach is acceptable to me,” Spanier wrote in a Feb. 27, 2001 email to Curley and Schultz. The only downside for us if the message isnt ‘heard’ and acted upon, and we then become vulnerable for not having reported it. But that can be assessed down the road. The approach you outline and a reasonable way to proceed.”
These new charges not only bring back the Penn State scandal; they remind us of its profound dimensions: The president of a major American university is now accused of a shocking list of crimes.
A Yale student alludes to the recent cheating scandal at Harvard, exactly the sort of thing that happens when you start caring more about sports than academics.
What has happened to Hollywood Mack Brown? Here you have a five million dollar a year football coach at your typical American university, a model for universities all over the world, with its own television network wholly dedicated to filming every waking moment of its football team. There are hundreds of millions of dollars at stake in this wall-to-wall coverage, and pretty much the entire attention of the university seems riveted to practice sessions, pre-game interviews, games, and post-game interviews. As coach, Mack is a media darling, constantly on camera at the University of Texas Longhorn Network.
But all that money and attention still isn’t making him happy. Mack feels overwhelmed, feels his team is overexposed… He’s getting paranoid about opponents being able to watch every little thing his guys do on the field. He resents having to spend hours every week getting interviewed.
If you’re the Longhorn coach, life is one long makeup session. Here are some tips for him.
From the student paper at the University of South Dakota (My comments are in parentheses.):
‘With a 10-3 lead over Western Illinois and a crowd of 10,200, the University of South Dakota football team had it all going for them heading into halftime of the Dakota Days game Oct. 6.
Little did they know that as they prepared for the second half, hundreds of USD student fans were filing out of the bleachers and walking out of the DakotaDome.
USD swiftly lost the lead, inevitably losing 24-17 to WIU. [Why inevitably? Does the writer instead mean ultimately, or eventually?]
The obvious lack of fan support as of late has left USD administrators scratching their heads, wondering, where exactly students are going? [Throughout the article, awkward use of commas and awkward word order contribute to a certain messiness. Plus you don’t need as of late. Maybe rewrite in this way: The obvious lack of fan support has USD administrators scratching their heads, wondering where students are going.]
For USD athletic director David Sayler the real question is: Why do the students leave?
“It has been a frustrating situation,” Sayler said. “Student support is essential to college teams, they bring the energy and the atmosphere teams use to thrive. We need them at home games.” [Semi-colon after teams.]
Assistant director of Student Life Lindsay Sparks said the issue needs to be addressed by both the university and its students. [Pause and think about “the issue.” Why is there a problem here? So some students leave an event early. If they’re bored or hungry or want a drink – no booze allowed at this stadium – that’s their business. Are you going to lock them in?]
“The university really does need to address it and figure out what’s going on,” Sparks said. “But I also think students need to make the commitment.” [Here we go. The glory of attending a big sports school is that the school is always after you to buy tickets and keep your butt in the stadium seat and shriek your head off with uncontrollable excitement over your team. It’s really a bit demeaning, isn’t it? To you and to the school? From the moment you arrive large amounts of money and staff time are devoted to making you “commit” to desperately caring about a football team.]
Sophomore Austin Johnson said he has been baffled by the lack of student fan support.
“(The students) represent this school and when we don’t stay at games, it reflects negatively on the university,” said Johnson. [No it doesn’t. It’s a university, see, not a boosters club. The fact that a lot of students are bored out of their gourd by football in general, or by your particular team, says nothing negative about your university. In fact, it might say something positive. What if they’re streaming out in order to go home and read their economics textbook?]
Sparks said in order to improve the lack of student support at athletic events, the question over why students are leaving must be answered. [See? Sparks is a salaried employee at a university. Lindsay’s job is to psychoanalyze students in order to discover the secret of their indifference to a game.]
“When I talk to students who regularly leave games, most of them tell me they leave because their friends are leaving,” Sparks said. “We are still puzzled over why exactly students don’t want to stay, and until we do know, we can’t give them what they want.” [Give them what they want. The customer is always right! Just find out what the buggers want and give it to them!]
Sayler said efforts to improve student involvement at athletic events has been attempting in the past. [Wake up. Rewrite.]
“We have tried to give things away during games and we are playing very student heavy music, but nothing seems to stick,” said Sayler. [The nanny state gives out free gifts and plays student heavy music, so why aren’t they happy? Why doesn’t that succeed in lulling them into a full-game trance?]
While Sayler and Spark’s guess as to why students are leaving are good as any ones, Johnson said it all boils down to one thing. Alcohol.
“A lot of (students) leave because there is no alcohol served at the DakotaDome,” Johnson said. “They lose their buzz and then leave to go drink again.” [For some people – let’s not use hurtful words in characterizing them – alcohol is more important than anything — even a University of South Dakota football game. When its effects wear off, they will search for more.]
Sparks said the university is aware that alcohol is a factor, but serving alcohol at games to solve retention is out of the question. [Why? Many, many American universities – more universities all the time – pour expensive beer down their students’ gullets in order to immobilize them in their seats. Those who aren’t immobilized get into fights and verbally abuse other fans and all, but that’s what hundreds of police are for. Time for USD to join the fun.]
“The DakotaDome is owned by the university,” Sparks said. “So, while we know some students say alcohol would help keep people there, our hands our tied.” [UD predicts the university will get the message and do what needs to be done.]
… Head coach Joe Glenn said legacy of a fan base lies on the shoulders of the students. [It’s your responsibility, now that we’ve accepted you at our university, to be a fan base.]
“If students get to know their players and learn to cheer them on, then the longevity of the fan base will extend,” Glenn said. [UD has spent years getting to know quite a few American university football players. She responds to some players with a hope that they will be able to overcome their illiteracy problem, and to others with a hope that their time in jail helps straighten them out. A few others inspire her with their brains and maturity, but for the most part she finds little to cheer about here. Why should students be any different?]
As far as the university is concerned, Sayler said in order to improve the current situation, honesty is key.
“We need the students to be completely honest with us,” Sayler said. “We want them to tell us what they want to see at football games. If they are leaving because our team loses, or because there isn’t enough interaction, we want to know. Once we have a clear understanding at what is driving students away at halftime, we will being to work towards improving the experience as much as we can.” ‘ [I think the university knows perfectly well why students leave. They’re basically bored. Being drunk, as we know, is an excellent way to tolerate boredom. They’re leaving because they don’t feel drunk anymore, and as result they’re bored.]
The solution seems to UD obvious. You’ve got everything else in place – presents, student heavy music. You’ve almost put them out. But without something like this –
– a personal at-will dispensing mechanism at every seat so they can suck on that teat the minute they start to feel sober – you’re going to lose clients.
She’s not sure why, but when she has lain abed contemplating all of our great states, she has had a tendency to overlook Missouri.
Thanks to the athletics department at the University of Missouri, however, the state has found a way to worm its way into her consciousness.
How can she forget the YouTube of Mizzou’s football coach trying to recite the alphabet? The salary and incentives the university gives this fantastic representative of the life of the mind? Their quarterback who made a sextuple play? The moving testimonials from MU’s professors about what it’s like to teach there?
No, UD will never forget Missouri again. It has burned itself into her consciousness, and she certainly doesn’t need to hear about Mizzou’s Michael Schumacher in order to jog her memory.
Director of [athletic department] video operations Michael Schumacher spent $7,605.50 [of university money] in a single night at Olympic Garden, a club conveniently located on the Strip that “feature[s] literally hundreds of the world’s most beautiful ladies (known as the Dreamgirls) in a relaxing and spacious setting.” One of those charges included a $2,000 tip on a $4,400 bill. Maybe I don’t understand how strip clubs work, but was Schumacher being extra generous, or is “tip” just how you say “blowjob” on a receipt?
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UD thanks Dave.
You can’t put a price tag on what big-time athletics does for America’s universities.
A video of [University of Wyoming football coach Dave] Christensen’s exchange with Air Force coach Troy Calhoun was posted online on Thursday. As of Monday afternoon, the video had more than 105,000 views.
The video starts with Christensen cursing in the direction of the Air Force team before meeting Calhoun for the post-game handshake. He accuses Calhoun of having quarterback Connor Dietz fake an injury to buy the Air Force staff extra time before the go-ahead touchdown. Christensen then continues his tirade by personally attacking Calhoun.
“I’d be f—— scared to death if I had a f—– like you defending me,” Christensen told Calhoun.
After being pulled away by his daughter toward the Wyoming locker room, Christensen finished by saying:
“Go get in your f—— press conference, fly boy.”
The comments came on Wyoming’s “Military Appreciation Day.”