… is having trouble swallowing.

… I’m a big Tom Izzo fan, but the news that he has just received a $500,000 raise and use of the [university’s] private jet in severely economically depressed Michigan is a bit hard to swallow.

To put that in perspective, the university president makes roughly $570,000 per year and has use of a state car.

Izzo makes 3.5 million, plus winning incentives.

… about the new president’s salary at the University of Minnesota. But remember: This is the man who will go up before all the peoples of Minnesota and plead for alcohol sales at the university’s new football stadium! On his shoulders alone falls the responsibility of explaining to the politicians of the state the indispensability of beer and wine sales to the health of the state’s flagship. How much does the head lobbyist for the National Beer Wholesalers get? That’s what you’ve got to go by.

From an article in the Boston Globe titled DARK CLOUDS COVER AUBURN:

The buzz across the South, where college football is a religion, is that the [Cam] Newton story, because of its implications, is the biggest story ever in the SEC.

It may evolve into that, since the FBI is interested in the concept of football players being “shopped around’’ to schools.

That raises another question. Right now, Mississippi State is the only school that has been mentioned as a potential bidder — and, again, Mississippi State has not been accused of making an offer or accepting one, only of hearing about one.

But can we really believe in the high-stakes world of the SEC — which has had six of its 12 schools make off-the-field headlines this season, be it for recruiting violations, agent problems, or assorted crimes and misdemeanors — that Mississippi State was the only school in the conference contacted about Newton?

The Mississippi State article is titled: THE CLOUDS GATHER OVER A ONCE-BRIGHT SEASON.

From the University of Alabama newspaper.

[T]his Thursday, due to the [University of Alabama] football game against Georgia State University, classes are cancelled to accommodate the number of fans who will arrive on campus.

… [T]he University made adjustments to its fall break schedule to accommodate for the loss of class time.

… “I agree with moving [the date of the game] because it will give us extra time to prepare against Auburn,” [one student] said.

… He said he foresees students skipping Friday morning classes because the game will dip into the evening and induce people to celebrate into the night.

Matthew Bailey, a junior majoring in political science, said he is thrilled the scheduling of the game.

“I think it’s great because I have Friday classes off,” he said. “I have a four-day weekend.”

He also said he agrees that many students will ditch class Friday.

… for the SUNY system, you can see why one of its most important campuses has decided to dump degree programs in three languages (French, Russian, and Italian), as well as programs in classics and theater, rather than cut back on sports.

A SUNY professor points out in the local paper that Berkeley and Hofstra, among other schools, have cut back on athletics, and in some cases eliminated certain teams.

As at so many other schools, the state bails out Albany’s deadbeat sports program with millions of dollars every year:

[The] $4.27 million that athletics is receiving from the state [should be] redistributed to cover academic-related expenses.

If those savings do not sufficiently address future academic budgetary needs, athletics should be downsized before eliminating academic programs and compromising the educational mission of the university.

Another professor points out the exquisite uselessness of college sport to the well-being of the college:

[The] bump in applications from successful college sports teams is primarily seen from students who prefer “beer and circus.” They are not serious about their studies and, as a result, add little to the intellectual climate on campus. Likewise, while donations increase, they rarely benefit the university’s academic mission since they usually are targeted toward athletics.

SUNY Albany’s thought or sports decision, brazenly occurring mere months after SUNY Binghamton’s outrageous, expensive, basketball scandal, tells you all you need to know about the disintegration of this university system.

But hey. It’s not as if New York is an important state.

And SUNY Albany, a perennial Party School front-runner, has a reputation to maintain.

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A SUNY Albany student suggests another cutback:

[E]xercise some sense when admitting students. Stop wasting money on [campus] posters telling me that UA students don’t get drunk every weekend to the point that their brains become an etch-a-sketch. I’ve lived in the student ghetto. I’ve seen your students drunk at 3 a.m. in the middle of the road screaming at the top of their lungs because they think they have the right to walk drunk in a busy road. Your posters are full of lies. Stop admitting students who are going to drink themselves to death and you can save a lot of money in the budget on those stupid posters.

… university football team in the country.

… its $250 million remodeling of its on-campus football stadium, a project Business Week calls “the most expensive renovation of a sports facility in NCAA history.” (UW could instead use an already-existing stadium a few miles from campus.)

Without the new stadium, UW officials explain, “the tailgating experience would be compromised.”

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A recent article about tailgating, in the Duke University newspaper.

An opinion piece about tailgating in the Louisiana State University paper.

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A fourteen-year-old found, after the event, half-dead in a portable toilet.

Your campus running like a sewer.

You wouldn’t want to compromise the tailgating experience.

Make that hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Put aside the morality of people selling their children.

These sorts of stories are doing wonders for the university as an institution.

And they help Americans understand where their education taxes are going.

… and as UD now always says, I beg to dinner. I beg to dinner with the following Cam Newton commentary by Jake Simpson. My begging to dinner appears in brackets, and in blue.

Like any multibillion-dollar enterprise (or political machine), college athletics doesn’t just rely on its core constituency. It needs the support of its undecided voters — casual sports fans who follow their alma mater religiously and tune in to games when they’re bored on Saturday afternoons. Diehard college football fans are almost necessarily jaded (hello, BCS) and will probably accept Newton’s crimes (if proven true) the same way they accepted the news that Bush had accepted $290,000 in gifts from sports marketers while at the University of Southern California. But if an athlete is accused of flouting the rules of college football by multiple sources, doesn’t address the allegations, wins the Heisman and the national championship while the NCAA investigation plods along, and then escapes to the NFL a couple months ahead of news that yes, he did demand “pay-to-play” deals from prospective colleges, well… let’s just say a lot of casual fans may care whether the game has even a veneer of integrity.  [No they won’t.  I mean, they’ll care a little, but they won’t change their behavior.  Know why?  Because mayhem and rule-breaking are part of the charisma of sports, college and professional.  Men who worship sports are, among other things, worshipping the shits they themselves can no longer be.  These men used to be bad.  Now they’re in the grip of domesticity and corporate employment.  Aggression and loutishness aren’t in the picture for them anymore.  But they remain guys, and they miss those things.  They are not anxiously eyeing the game for veneers of integrity; they’re leaning back in their easy chair and reassuring themselves that even a very advanced culture reserves its highest rewards for the most basic male behavior…. Read Civilization and Its Discontents, for goodness sake.]  [And what does this mean?  It means Simpson’s not only wrong.  He’s exactly wrong.  What he argues is the opposite of the true deal.]

And like any corrupt political machine, the NCAA needs to avoid the wrath of big government. Congress may have infinitely better ways to spend its time, but if California Congressman Darrell Issa really follows through on his pledge to have seven House investigations a week, 40 weeks a year, don’t you think a look at the inherent corruption in college athletics could be among the 280? The NCAA is already facing a potential legal challenge from Utah’s attorney general over the BCS, and it cannot afford to get in any more Congressional hot water.  [Even wronger.  Congress is almost all men.  The new Congress has more yahoos than ever.   Representatives represent the guys I just told you about.   Congress has never gotten anywhere near sanctioning the NCAA on anything, including the notorious absurdity of its tax exemptions…. Same principle here as in my first point:  The idea is to maintain a cultural preserve within which bad guys get away with things.  Until people realize that the moron who stood up during that speech the President gave to Congress and shrieked YOU LIE is a hero to millions of people, they will never understand university football and basketball.]

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UPDATE: These views may be a tad controversial. Let me add a couple of things to clarify.

1. The philosophy of gender underlying these remarks is perhaps best exemplified by the work of Dina Martina, here. Note the expression first of female, and then male (starting at 2:11), behavior.

2. I do not call for an end to football and basketball and other aggressive sports. Not at all. I just don’t think they belong, in their present incarnation, in self-respecting universities.

[What happened during] Reggie Bush’s stay at USC … goes on to some degree or other at just about every school that’s running a football factory. Constructing a minor-league system for the NFL has turned out to be a profitable sideline, even if it sometimes means having to hold your nose.

Jim Litke on America’s Number One Smelliest Football Factory, Auburn.

And there’s no better field for play in this regard than big time university sports.

Here’s some wonderful writing from Deadspin’s Barry Petchesky, about Auburn’s rapidly-tarnishing Saint Cam Newton:

We expect a certain level of stupidity from our athletes. We accept that they’re going to have tons of personal tutoring help, up-to-and-including people writing their papers for them. Hell, it’s college; we expect kids of all kinds to cheat. But to get caught [as Newton did] indicates a stupidity that we just can’t accept. This, and nothing else, is sullying our notion of the student-athlete!

It’s a joke, of course. There’s an All-SEC Academic Team, and being on it doesn’t tend to improve a player’s draft stock. ESPN College GameDay doesn’t go to Knoxville or Baton Rouge or Tuscaloosa for finals week to cover the due date for term papers. We all know these kids are there to play football, and we’re there to watch them, and all we ask them is to make the slightest effort in preserving the illusion of academia mattering. We know they don’t care, but we’re all content to live in our giant happy Moon Bounce, oblivious to anything beyond the bizarre artificial creation that is college athletics. And we get mad when someone pops it.

I like Petschesky’s evocation of the surreality of big time college athletics, since that is what has struck me the most in my years of covering it. I like just as much his point about the fragility of this giant creation, the way it can suddenly be made to explode in our faces, and the way this reality-explosion angers us. Humankind cannot stand very much reality, says Eliot; and indeed fewer sights are more intense, and intensely strange, than university sports figures and fans forced to reckon with the reality of their false and sordid world.

Burst their bubble at your peril.

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[UD thanks Dave for the link.]

… of how puke-on-the-floor sickening some universities have become.

Now I’ve heard everything. You mean to tell me that people are pointing fingers at a school one-fourth of whose trustees are former football players for the school? That has a total of two women on the board? Among whose trustees sits the Amazing!!!! Bobby Lowder? A school that has the longest record of sports scandals in the history of the universe?

Puh-leeze.

… as University of Washington president. Like Emmert – now running the NCAA – she’s a jocksniffer. She has also, like Emmert, never seen a corporate board seat she didn’t like.

One of Wise’s first acts as president is to fuck up all sorts of classes on campus because of a football game.

But it’s worth it because a huge national audience will see how important academics are to UW.

Yes. That’s her argument. UW will be able to showcase nationally how it doesn’t give a shit about holding classes, and this will persuade thousands of the most brilliant potential applicants that they should apply to the University of Washington.

The game is expected to snarl traffic through Montlake, disrupt afternoon and evening classes at the university, close clinics at the University of Washington Medical Center and play havoc with the workday schedules of thousands of fans.

… [Wise and other] university officials say the game is an opportunity to showcase the school’s athletics and academics to a national audience.

It’s much more than that. It’s also an opportunity to showcase UW’s commitment to keeping its clinics’ doors open, and its commitment to the quality of life in the larger metropolitan region.

… “You can’t put a price on the loyalty a successful football program breeds.”