A commenter at the Duke University student newspaper calls for beefed up campus security services.
The incident that prompted the comment is recounted here.
A commenter at the Duke University student newspaper calls for beefed up campus security services.
The incident that prompted the comment is recounted here.
Who knew they didn’t already have one? Kentucky is one of our nation’s sleaziest sports factories, and UD‘s been assuming it comes equipped with everything sleazy, including the vast non-stop advertising machine that is the Adzillatron.
But no.
The existing video boards, which were installed in July 1999, use Cathode Ray Tube technology which proves difficult to maintain, according to a project summary on the council’s April 28 agenda. The boards “don’t provide the kind of sophisticated viewing experience that fans have come to expect across the country,” Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart said in a written statement.
The two new boards would use Light-Emitting Diode technology, along with “ribbon boards” — aimed at increasing ad revenue — on the upper deck sidelines and suite corners. Barnhart said that the new boards will offer fans more access to statistics, scoring updates from games, video replays and closed captioning.
“As importantly, the boards will generate increased revenue through the sales and marketing of video advertising,” he said.
The factory will spend millions and millions of dollars on fan ad-bombardment and, you know, the UK faculty is upset. No raises for years, what’s left of the educational side of things looking like a 1999 Cathode Ray Tube… Sad.
Four at once. Attention, Fulmer Cup!
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The Art of Recruitment
This one’s about Duke:
[Tyree] Glover is the fourth promising player from Duke coach David Cutcliffe’s first full [football] recruiting class that signed letters of intent in February 2009 to find himself in trouble with the law.
The other three — all from Georgia — were booted off the team in January 2010 after being arrested on firearms charges.
… is for sure the empty university stadium. The vast, cost-overrun arena with no one in it is clown school ground zero, the heart and soul of our you’ve-gotta-be-kidding higher ed enterprise.
Study Dada (“Everything happens in a completely idiotic way. That is why everything is alike. Simplicity is called Dada.”) and you’ll discover the European roots of this grand gratuitous gesture.
UD covers tons of dada arenas – like the University of New Mexico’s baseball stadium – on this her blog, and there’s always another one waiting to be built.
A professor at Towson University describes the uncomfortable feeling she gets when she looks at her university’s dada arenas.
When watching the sports report on the 11 p.m. TV news, it is embarrassing to see 200-300 people in the stands in the 5,000-seat Towson Center Arena (with the possible exception of a few games with local rivals).
Since the stadium opened, attendance has been negligible, rarely ever coming anywhere near the 5,000 capacity. And, as if that was not enough, it was determined that the stadium size needed to be increased. And so the theory that “BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME!” reared its ugly head once again, and now there are 11,000 seldom used seats at the stadium, another embarrassment on the sports report on the 11 p.m. TV news.
The university’s president has now decided to “build yet another 5,000-seat arena to the tune of $68 million.”
DADADADADADADADADADADADADADADADADADA
The school, ranked 151 and with a 58% graduation rate, just got a gift of $12 million to build a new football training facility!
Yes, yes, to be sure. Dave Zirin, writing in The Nation, is correct. But he goes on to make a mistake:
We have reached a clear public exhaustion with the injustice of it all and the steady monotony of [big-time university sports] scandals.
Calling athletes modern-day slaves, he insists that they be paid.
But Americans are neither exhausted nor outraged by this injustice. They like big-time university sports just the way they are. So do universities and the NCAA. If the situation were anything near what Zirin thinks it is, Auburn University’s doors would have been forcibly closed years ago.
[T]he Sugar Bowl paid its director $645,386 in 2009, a year in which it received a $1.4 million government grant yet still lost money. [The] Orange Bowl [spent] $756,546 on travel that same year, and another $100,000 or so on postage and shipping.
… It’s a shocking tale of greed, excess and entitlement in college sports. Almost enough to give the BCS and big-time college football a bad name.
As if that was possible.
… complete with wishful thinking …
[T]here is nothing wrong that can’t be fixed by 18 strong college presidents — that’s how many seats there are on the NCAA executive committee — acting in concert to curb their own worst excesses, and impose stiffer penalties.
… and the apparent belief that all university basketball and football players graduate from their universities:
They get a four-year ride free of the mountainous student loans that burden so many of their peers — a collective $900 billion worth. Ask any parent who is paying tuition what a scholarship is worth. Pay players? Please. We’re already paying them as much as a half-million dollars apiece over four years, maybe more.
And, pound for pound, there’s the insanest defense of playing football and basketball as an exercise in college-level intellectuality you’re ever going to see:
I don’t know that revenue-sports, basketball and football, are more valuable than any other performance-based learning experience, in which stakes are damn high and the audience brutally demanding. But they’re certainly not less valuable. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once praised sports as “high and dangerous action,” because, “in this snug, over-safe corner of the world we need it, that we may realize that our comfortable routine is no eternal necessity of things . . .”
Yeah. Take the game they’ve been playing since they were ten, put it on a big field with tv cameras, and watch it morph into a university subject. Jenkins wants football and basketball players to be able to major in I ran up and down a field today.
Much better, UD thinks, that they major in ethics, taking advantage of field work opportunities in cults of corruption at American universities.
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SOS loves the way Jenkins ends with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Reader: Make a note of it. To lend parting gravitas to your argument that football and basketball are university subjects, wheel out Holmes or Churchill or Lincoln saying they are high, and dangerous.
Dangerous, to be sure. They are full of danger.
What they bring to the university, however, is – so very often – unutterably low.
The Junker story (details here) invites general commentary on the filthy Bowl Championship Series.
Until he was fired, Junker “was paid $592,000 to stage either two or three football games a year.” In 2008, Sugar Bowl CEO Paul Hoolahan earned $645,386 “for staging one football game.”
This man, Bobby Lowder, remains on the board of trustees at Auburn University. Read all about him here.
The latest sex and money for Auburn players scandal is coming soon to a tv screen near you. Bobby Lowder has instructed Auburn to have no comment in response to the players’ allegations.
Auburn: The shame of the nation.
Just-fired Fiesta Bowl CEO John Junker explained to a group of investigators that the $1,241 he charged the bowl for “a visit to a high-end Phoenix strip club” was a legitimate business expense:
We are in the business where big strong athletes are known to attend these types of establishments… It was important for us to visit and we certainly conducted business.
Sports Illustrated lists Junker’s activities as CEO:
[F]unneling money to politicians through bowl employees; coaching witnesses, and altering documents during [an earlier] investigation … taking junkets to college football games with politicians and their families — all on the bowl’s dime. On page 210 is a charge that the bowl footed the $33,188 bill for Junker’s 50th birthday party, a four-day bacchanal in Pebble Beach that had, according to one attendee, “absolutely no business purpose.”
But they’re all like that: “The Sugar and Orange Bowls have also recently come under withering criticism for the excessive compensation of executives and extravagant expenditures.”
You gotta get up pretty early in the morning to follow all the sleaze in big-time university sports. Here at University Diaries, we do our best…