As 2011 begins, pending 2010 financial reports show the largest deficit exists in Athletics.

GPSA president Lissa Knudsen said that is unacceptable.

“It’s very disturbing, and we want to know what the plan is,” she said. “How are they going to stop this hemorrhaging of resources, especially in times like these … We need to be focused on academics.”

A “consolidated financial report” for the first one-third of the year, July-October, lists an Athletics deficit of more than $3.1 million. The report says Athletics’ “unfavorable net margin” is the result from the timing of football expense versus football revenue, and expected football revenue will not meet the budgeted level.

… plus incentives.’

Ah the good old days, when a public university – the University of South Florida – decided to dedicate huge sums of scarce money to its first football coach, Jim Leavitt.

So what if Leavitt motivated his players by slapping them around? Drain a university of money to win games; spend millions on bullies who win games.

I mean, it’s just done. It’s just the sort of thing that’s done at American universities:

[USF Coach] Leavitt’s 12-day old apology [for hitting the player] came one day after [University of] Kansas coach Mark Mangino resigned amid an investigation into his treatment of his players, including verbal abuse or having inappropriate physical contact with his players.

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To be sure, sometimes the behavior is so – well – out there that people do complain. Then you have to fire the coach. It wouldn’t do to have the richest, most powerful, highest profile person on campus constantly referred to in the nation’s press as vicious. I mean, somewhere, deep down, you still think of yourself as a university… rather than a bloody scrimmage…

And that’s when the real dollars start flying. You fire, they sue.

“USF agreed to pay Leavitt $2.75 million.” To go away.

The University of South Florida: WE PAY YOU TO BEAT UP OUR STUDENTS.

[Jim Harbaugh, Stanford’s football coach, showed that] winning at football didn’t come by sacrificing honor, losing players on the Pac-10 All-Academic team, getting player[s] on the police blotter or incurring NCAA ire related to recruiting violations, impermissible benefits, improper agent contact, academic fraud or other controversies common to our BCS title contenders.

I like the or other controversies. Sentence was getting too long.

… max.

… never lets up.

The University of New Mexico’s David Schmidly’s a ball o’ fire, leaping from nepotism to bid rigging allegations to faculty no confidence votes to the retention of violent football coaches to athletic directors who were allegedly in on the alleged bid rig to… nepotism again. (UD‘s Schmidly posts are plentiful. Go to it.)

President Schmidly tried to give his son Brian a $90,000 job at UNM, but public outrage made it impossible. Then – a lawsuit claims – he got him a job at the grateful company that got the rigged bid for UNM’s basketball arena renovation.

I used to predict that Schmidly would be pushed out, pretty soon, at UNM. He’s so supremely, comprehensively, bad. But just as UNM won’t get rid of Coach Locksley, it won’t get rid of Schmidly. Why? Got me.

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Update: Schmidly rides again.

… the highest salaries on campus, remember that their job includes handling the press.

Verbal skills like Gene Chizik’s don’t come cheap.

… Auburn’s top-ranked football team, which is preparing to play Oregon in Glendale, Ariz., for the national title on Monday, has tumbled in the N.C.A.A.’s most important academic measurement to No. 85 from No. 4 among the 120 major college football programs.

The decline came after the university closed several academic loopholes following a New York Times article in 2006 that showed numerous football players padded their grade-point averages and remained eligible through independent-study-style courses that required little or no work.

… Among all the bowl teams this season, Auburn has the highest disparity in the graduation rates between white players (100 percent) and black players (49 percent)…

When pressed on the issue of graduating black players, [football coach Gene] Chizik said, “Those are circumstances; there’s all kinds of different things.” …

[D]onations [to university sports programs] are subject to the same tax subsidy we reserve for charitable and educational institutions like hospitals, food pantries, arts organizations and universities. When a taxpayer at the 35 percent tax rate makes a donation of $10,000, he ends up shouldering only $6,500 of the cost, since his tax bill is trimmed by $3,500. That savings to the taxpayer amounts to reduced tax collections by the Treasury. Considering that the top college athletic programs collected a total of more than a billion dollars in 2008, the revenue hit from making these gifts tax deductible is not inconsequential… With the nation facing gigantic federal deficits for years to come, isn’t it time for major college sports programs to get by without this subsidy?

Charles Clotfelter – like many wise men and women before him – takes note of the college sports tax subsidy… But, you know… Put his limp rhetorical question (isn’t it time…??) up against the strapping lads of the US Congress and tell me how likely you think it is that the subsidy will be removed.

At Dagblog, Doctor Cleveland makes some rather remarkable forecasts about big time sports at American universities.

[W]e’re getting to the point where commitment to education at public universities and commitment to football at public universities don’t coexist easily. Spending tens of millions on football (and $3-7 million just on a coach’s salary) always annoyed some professors, but not in any way that rocked the boat. But when state budget cuts lead even a great public system like the University of California to cut back its course offerings and shrink its faculty while raising the tuition to three times what it was in 2000 and then raising it again, raiding Berkeley’s academic budget for six or seven million dollars a year on top of the official athletics budget starts to be a very tough sell.

Yet Doctor Cleveland concludes that crushingly expensive, academically irrelevant, big time sports will survive nonetheless because they fit the new corporate, anti-intellectual university model. The emergent university’s indifference to the student athlete’s education is merely an intensified case of its general indifference to all of its students’ educations.

There will still be some superb colleges in this country, a few of them likely better than American universities have ever been. A select few students will continue getting fabulous educations. But that number will be smaller, and many of their peers in less privileged colleges will get very, very different educations… College football will survive the conditions that allowed it to become what it is. In the end it’s more suited for what American education is becoming than it was for what American education was in the last half of the 20th century… Big College Football is entirely unconcerned about the vast majority of its athletes who will never be able to land the only job that college has prepared them for. Students will be allowed to drop out and drift away when the program has used them up; the model is enrollment, not retention. Developing the student as a whole person is entirely out of the question. And the rewards of the students’ hard work and effort are only for the fortunate few, while everyone else (no matter how hard they have worked) is labeled a failure. And a small group of privileged people will stand to make a massive profit. There’s a reason that people who agitate for “modernizing” our colleges and universities don’t complain about big time, pro in all but name college football. It already looks exactly the way they want college to look.

The writer is describing – with meticulous exactitude – America’s burgeoning for-profit university sector. Enrollment, not retention. Etc. As public universities put themselves online and in other ways cheapen themselves in emulation of the for-profits, we will see once respectable universities become, as Doctor Cleveland anticipates, the same pointless, damaging interlude in the lives of naive people that the for-profits already are.

An interlude with football games.

… from a collegiate embarrassment?

Serious universities don’t feature events like this one.

… Bracing for a $15 million deficit, the university released $14.8 million in budget cuts for Fiscal Year 2012[.] $5.4 million came from academics and academic support, while $136,000 came from athletics.

Since then, Southern Miss also has announced a $35,000 salary increase for head football coach Larry Fedora from $650,000 to $685,000 yearly.

Meanwhile, 29 faculty members stand to lose their jobs next year…

Hattiesburg American

My alma mater, the University of Memphis, paid its coach Larry Porter about $750,000 for one win – one.

David Hampton, Mississippi Clarion Ledger

… as only the most bourbon-soaked university in the world can do it.

Notice that degeneracy levels at the University of Kentucky have gotten to the point where no one talks anymore about problems or investigations or commissions; the liquored up folk of Lexington have become, as it were, mere visuals for the rest of us. People with cameras follow local sports heroes around and wait for the good stuff.

He’s the economics professor who last summer insistently pointed out that, despite lies from the administration about it, MSU’s new stadium was hemorrhaging money. Continues to hemorrhage money.

Olsen took a lot of grief for this, but he continues swinging, especially in light of a state audit that reveals just how corruptly MSU has been run.

Now that MSU has a new president (wouldn’t want the old president in place anymore, to be held accountable for having fucked up the school), and a new, damning audit, the school tries to figure out what to do…

While MSU dithers, old Reed pops up again.

… Missouri State needs to find ways to better fund and operate the facility, said [the new president], who has formed a task force to look into this matter.

Olsen, who last year disputed a university claim that the arena was paying for itself, questioned the makeup of the committee, saying it consists of people who were part of the problem.

Olsen wants the university to be honest with JQH’s accounting.

As MSU digs deeper and deeper holes, Reed Olsen will be there, trying to tell it what to do to get out of the holes. MSU will certainly not listen.

An economics professor at Rutgers writes one of those opinion pieces in the local paper that generate volcanic fury on the part of local football fans and…

But wait. Scroll down to the comment thread for the piece! Maybe there’s hope.

Excerpts:

[T]he football program has been a bust: 59 wins and 62 losses since the hiring of the current multimillion-dollar coach.

… [B]etween 2004 and 2009, the last year for which records are available, the university poured a total of $32.3 million in student fees and $75.8 million in direct institutional support into the athletic program. As of 2008-09, student fees and direct support — in other words, subsidies — provided more than 40 percent of the total cost of the program.

… Two years ago, the university committed itself to yet another stadium renovation and expansion, spending $102 million to increase the football stadium’s capacity. Another $12.5 million went for renovation and expansion of the building that houses the football program. The stadium rarely sells out, raising serious questions about how the university will be able to pay for it.

If that’s what your school always has been (see Auburn University), no sweat. But say you’re the University of Michigan, a school that has a distinguished past. What do people know about you now?

They know that your football coach is a strange and desperate man who gets way too choked up on the rubber chicken circuit.

They know that your athlete-mad professors get all expense paid junkets to the big games, even though those same professors are supposed to be policing the program.

In January 2009, the full faculty senate voted 19-11 to approve a resolution calling for the free trips to end.

President Mary Sue Coleman to the faculty senate: Fuck you!

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These and many more embarrassments have made the University of Michigan look like Gary, Indiana — a kooky, corrupt, dot on the map.