… cutting tree limbs overhead, trying to take down dead branches from the big snow storm.**
But that’s not important. Forget that. Forget that, in Stage One of its extensive lumber-liquidation chez UD, David Gregg’s Tree Removal Service is out there stripping our front oak. A grizzled man in a green tee sits in an open cab at the end of an Altec truck-mounted crane shaving and shaving…
But listen up. James saw this and sent it to UD. It’s written by a colleague of Mr UD’s at the University of Maryland. Read it all. Excerpts:
The culture of football worship [at universities] has gotten so out of control that I think the only solution is to get rid of it entirely…. [W]e need to eliminate football entirely from our universities if we want to maintain our pre-eminent position as the world’s scientific and technological leader.
He says everything UD‘s been saying ever since she opened shop. He gives a local example.
At the University of Maryland last year, the football coach fell out of favor with the athletic director, who wanted to replace him. (This despite the fact that the coach was very successful, with an overall winning record.) The problem was, he had one more year to go in his contract, and the university would have to pay him a cool $2 million if they fired him. U. Maryland doesn’t exactly have money to burn: for three years running, it has imposed furloughs on all employees and prohibited all raises, including cost-of-living increases. So you’d think that blowing $2 million to pay a coach to sit on the sidelines, and paying who-knows-how-much to hire a new coach, would be out of the question.
Nope. The brand-new President of the university, in office just one month, announced the hiring of a new coach, along with a $2 million payout to the old coach.
The author is afraid to write the thing. He’s scared. He says twice that he knows he’s going to get himself into trouble, attacking fabulous, fabulous football. Already he’s got commenters up the wazoo telling him he’s the Antichrist.
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** Inspiration for this post’s title here.
… just got even sicker.
I can’t tell you how much UD laughed when she realized that the going cliché among pushers of big time university sports is sports are the front porch of the American university. You want to see a big sports university’s front porch? Check out the piss-filled entryways of all the University of Georgia buildings after any tailgate.
This guy says the tree poisoning is symbolic of professional as well as university sports. True. But check it out: University sports get amazing tax subsidies. They take huge amounts of money away from academics and impoverish undergraduates through high athletic fees. They make the admissions and retention process a sick joke.
They play to ugly, invidious emotions, and generate endless sick behaviors.
You don’t think so? You think I’m overstating? Right, because no one says what I’m saying until the next, sicker thing happens. When the next, sicker thing happens, everybody says what I’m saying.
The about-to-retire president of the University of Kentucky done gone and increased the athletic director’s “base salary … from $475,000 to $600,000 annually and he is now under contract until 2019… Should the new president want to bring in his or her own athletics director, [the current AD’s] contract specifies that he would be paid $475,000 a year for up to five years, or up to $2.4 million.”
Hyuk! And he dint tell the trustees! Not a one of ’em. Har!
The University of Oregon alumni give virtually all their money to athletics.
“It’s called a donation or a contribution … when, in fact, as we have discovered in our research … it’s a transaction,” [Dennis] Howard said. “It has nothing to do with giving back to the University or a philanthropic motive. It is purely and simply a commercial transaction in which the individual is paying for tangible benefits: better seat location, access to the Autzen Club amenities. All of those things are driving those transactions.”
A UO student who has worked in the alumni office comments: “Supporting academics means supporting an idea, whereas an athletic donation is something a donor can see and enjoy.”
Me no like idea! BOO.
Them good ol’ boys at UK keep the good times rolling.
It’s certainly not being done out of respect for the sensitivities of faculty and staff, who have undergone years of low or no pay increases. Nor for the students who have seen hefty tuition increases during his tenure.
… 43%.
But WSU knows where to invest its resources: A stupendous salary for the basketball coach.
A letter writer to the Dayton Daily News ridicules the gotta pay market prices explanation coming from Wright State:
[C]ollege sport is not a market… If it were truly a market endeavor, there would have been no, or very limited, public monies or tax exemptions involved to set up and support the enterprise…
With college sports, there is a captive audience, subsidies through student fees and university overhead and questionable tax deductions and tax advantages through their association with a nonprofit education institution.
There is also the general issue the IRS is apparently addressing in an ongoing audit of college and universities for reporting (or not) related business income, including stadium advertising income for sports and athletics, and the tax deductions received by donors to college athletics.
She concludes by calling sports at universities like Wright State an “ongoing corruption of the college mission by incompetent administrators and compliant businesses and politicians.”
Southern Illinois University’s massive Saluki Way project has mainly involved building or upgrading sports facilities, at a huge cost to students through increased fees. But the basketball team sucks, and no one goes to the shiny new stadium; the buy-out of the bad coach will cost the students even more; three of the players beat some guy up and are suspended; and, oh yeah, no one wants to go to school there.
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In a 2006 article in the campus newspaper about the Saluki Way, the reporter makes a prescient spelling error:
[SIU’s president] said he hopes current students will understand why they must pay for facilities they will not use.
“We all have a responsibility to each seceding generation,” he said.
… fees go?
UD‘s friend David Ridpath, along with Matthew Denhart, asks Ohio University students how much they pay in mandatory student fees; he asks them if they know how much of that money goes to athletics; and he asks them how many campus sports events they attend.
They know the answer to the third question — they attend very few, if any — but they’re wobbly on the others.
“On average, how many Ohio University intercollegiate athletic events do you attend per year?” In exchange for receiving student fee money, Ohio’s athletics department allows students to attend home games for free. The average response was 5.8 events attended per year; the median was two, and 35% of respondents reported they attend none. USA TODAY, in a figure cited in the survey’s case study, reported in September that Ohio is allocating $765 of each full-time student’s general fees for the 2010-11 school year to athletics… The survey also asked respondents to rate “how important a factor was Ohio University’s intercollegiate athletics reputation in influencing your decision to enroll at this institution.” More than 78% of the respondents said it was either “unimportant” (24.8%) or “extremely unimportant” (53.7%).
A study much like this one took place at the University of Toledo and had similar results.
Conclusion: Keep ’em ignorant. As long as they don’t know how much they pay in fees, where the fees go, that the fees primarily support athletic events they don’t attend, and that most of the things universities say by way of defending high sports fees are bullshit, all will be well.
… brings its best minds to bear on the most important problem in the world:
How can we continue tailgating jest the way we like it?
Recall that in recent years at the University of Georgia (Our Library: Your Pissoir) the drunken mayhem, and the filth left behind on campus after the mayhem, has gotten to to the point where the administration has begun to notice. Given how much money the school makes on tailgaters, it needs to strike a delicate balance between encouraging alcoholics to play on campus, and keeping library personnel, the day after, from finding oceans of piss in the entryways.
Here are some thoughts about the problem, from a comment thread to this article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
… but, to be fair, there’s one place in the university where direct contact between student and instructor still thrives — and will always thrive.
It will thrive as long as the mythic name of Bobby Knight continues to be part of our national lexicon. University coaches from Kansas to Iowa to Texas to Oregon to Florida to your state! will always be out there demonstrating how nothing motivates a player like a direct kick in the ass, or a workout so sadistic it puts everyone in the hospital.
The University of Michigan goes down the tubes.
From the Minnesota Star-Tribune:
“It’s a disaster over there,” said Phil Ebner, once a captain of Minnesota’s golf team and a former board member of the “M” Club of former Gophers athletes. “The leadership just isn’t there, and it boggles the mind that they allow this guy to make mistake after mistake. It costs a lot of money.”
Specifically, [University of Minnesota Athletic Director Joel] Maturi’s critics say he has looked the other way while the men’s hockey and women’s basketball programs wither into irrelevance. The Gophers don’t sell out their new football stadium, costing the school critical revenue.
… Minnesota’s Legislature might consider reducing higher-education funding, which would force the 25-sport athletic department to sustain itself without the $2.3 million subsidy the university provides, a 3 percent contribution toward the $78 million athletic budget.
… A lawsuit brought by Jimmy Williams, a basketball assistant whom Smith tried to hire and Maturi rejected, cost the university a $1 million judgment last May. Katie Brenny, an associate golf coach, filed suit last week alleging she was marginalized because she is a lesbian, an allegation that risks another large payout. And speaking of payouts, firing basketball coach Dan Monson and two football coaches, Brewster and Glen Mason, meant paying buyouts totaling roughly $6 million.