… 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.

… Phil Knight. (The Nike guy.)

Or T. Boone Pickens or something.

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.

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.

***************************************

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.