… do not, as this local opinion writer makes clear, add up to a strategic plan. He’s reviewing a just-released document from the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Here’s the document.

Here’s his comment.

How in the heck are they going to pay for all this?

A school that watched its athletic scholarship donations decrease by half from 2007-08 to 2008-09 has a lot of money to come up with. Paying for Buzz Peterson and his assistants. Don’t forget about Benny Moss, too. Another $600,000-plus to cover the rescinded out-of-state tuition waivers.

Yet, Mehrtens, DePaolo and everyone else at UNCW have been vague and evasive when it comes to the finances. This document continues that trend.

How are you going to increase season-ticket sales by 50 percent over a five-year period?

What incentives would you give prospective Seahawk Club members to increase its roster to 2,015 by 2015 (from 777 earlier this year)?

How do you target alumni to grow endowments by 10-15 percent year?

Are there truly “new sources of funds” to adjust coaches’ pay?

What does developing a three-year budget forecast for revenues and expenditures do to the next two years?

The gap between this chirpy document and the reporter commenting on it reminds UD of all the athletic gatherings she’s attended over the years. Whether NCAA or Knight Commission or any of the other organizations, the feel is that of a dressed for success pep rally.

Many of the people in university athletics don’t seem to know the difference between cheer leading and research, between WE WILL ROCK YOU and statistics. They’re in an orgasmic miasma, panting happily away on the field while their programs curl up and die.

This absurd disparity between self-satisfied DARE TO BE GREAT bullshit and the limp, sketchy reality of many university sports programs is currently captured by Coach Rick Pitino’s testimony at an extortion trial.

Author of multiple dress for success books, Pitino…

Eh. Read it for yourself.

UD spends her life reading novels about how complicated and vulnerable human beings are. She doesn’t hold it against Pitino that he fucked up. She’s attacking the sickening hypocrisy and unaccountability of an industry that’s killing universities.

Almost.

Western Kentucky University drew UD‘s attention years ago, when a brave faculty member, Robert Dietel, stood up at a regents’ meeting to try to stop the school from switching to Division I-A football. (The link takes you to an old post – 2006 – which doesn’t make clear that, except for the final paragraph, it’s taken from a local newspaper article.) He was shouted down by the idiots who run the school.

Now proudly I-A at enormous expense to the students, WKU is “the only winless team in the country in 2009.” As the local writer explained in 2006:

To stay in Division I-A, WKU will have to average 15,000 fans at its home games. But it hasn’t even been filling L. T. Smith Stadium, where attendance has been 10,279 so far this year and was 12,795 last year — despite all the interest built up as the school won the 2002 NCAA Division I-AA national championship and went on to complete 10 consecutive winning seasons.

Let’s see how ticket sales are going now.

[The team] sold about 7,300 season tickets this year. Last season they topped out at 7,506 — a significant drop from the 8,648 sold in 2008.

You shouldn’t let idiots run universities. An obvious truth, but it seems to need restating.

The Minnesota football team announced Tuesday night that its home-and-home series with Texas in 2015 and 2016 has been cancelled due to “a contract impasse concerning video rights.”

So reports the University of Minnesota paper.

And the bad news doesn’t stop there. The university just built, at amazing expense, a huge new football stadium. The president has spent most of his time since they built it trying to decide who gets to drink alcohol there — only rich people, or rich people plus students.

But no one has worried about ticket sales. After all the university justified the amazing expense by saying that football is so popular students and alumni demand a bigger stadium.

This morning, UD‘s friend Bill sends her this.

Student ticket sales slump, half unsold

The University of Minnesota has currently sold about 5,500 of the 10,000 student tickets available. That’s roughly 1,000 tickets behind last year’s sales at this time.

… For some students … excitement over the new stadium isn’t enough to overlook the team’s poor performance.

“I’ve just given up on this football team,” said University graduate student and former season ticket holder Carl Mullen-Schultz. “I’ve decided to focus on our basketball team.” …

You know what this means. The university will spend millions more on pr and advertising. They’ll increase student athletic fees by hundreds of dollars. The university’s president will dress up like a clown and invite people to throw water balloons in his face for a thousand dollars a pop.

Wanna know one very basic way in which UD decides whether a news article about universities will appear on University Diaries?

Okay, I’ll tell you.

If, while reading an article, UD laughs out loud, chances are she’ll run it. This isn’t always true, but it’s often the case.

Frinstance, here’s a story about the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee basketball team, plus some faithful retainers, going on a trip to Italy. Athletics has an eight million dollar deficit; students pay higher and higher athletics fees. But somehow the program has $160,000 to send the guys to Italy over the summer. The Student Association is pissed.

“The fact that the UWM Athletics Department continues to spend outside of its means is troubling. The department simply cannot afford to go on such an extravagant trip regardless of where the money is from.”

Yeah see the money for the trip is private, explains the university spokesman. So it’s okay! None of your beeswax! Shut up about it!

…. Uh, but if you have the capacity to raise that kind of money privately… and uh if you’re raising money not to pay down your debt but to take the boys to Rome… uh…

And here’s where UD started to laugh. She put the laugh line in her title. It’s from the same spokesman. We need this outing for cohesiveness, life experience, and personal growth!

Every effing cliché in the book!  If that guy doesn’t win Administrator of the Year,  something’s very wrong at the University of Wisconsin.

Inside Higher Education interviews Eva von Dassow about her recent powerful statement to the University of Minnesota’s clueless, condescending regents.

… [W]hile cuts are being ordered, she said [in her filmed presentation to the university’s leadership] that the new frugality “leaves undiminished the numbers of vice presidents not to mention the salaries of coaches. No, these highly paid positions are not to be reduced. Rather, the university must shed faculty,” she said.

Von Dassow is part of a new organization at the university – Faculty for the Renewal of Public Education. These people have figured out the contents of the strategic initiative.

1. Put the kiddies online.
2. Invest most of our money in sports.
3. Support only vocational, money-making programs.

“[R]unning a multimillion-dollar enterprise of de facto minor league football and basketball teams that essentially serve as uniformed billboards has exceedingly little to do with the curation and advancement of human knowledge.”

I’m with this guy, but would go further. Along with the bogosity of amateurism, dispense with the bogosity of studentism. Universities would continue to have teams, but the teams would be autonomous of the university, made up of full-time professional athletes not yet old enough to enter the major leagues.

Institutional history is different at different institutions. For some institutions, it means memories of beloved professors or emotional alumni reunions …

For Florida State, it means fond recollections of cheating scandals, and the millions of dollars the university spent unsuccessfully appealing associated NCAA sanctions. It means reflecting on years of corrupt trustees, and bringing to mind those local firms that specialize in declaring almost all of the athletes FSU sends to them learning disabled. And, as the title of this post suggests (it’s a comment made by an FSU booster), institutional memory at FSU means remembering how the university deals with its generations of criminal athletes.

This FSU person, for instance, can’t remember a first arrest being enough to throw anyone off the team; so although Nigel Carr has just been hauled in for having committed many illegal acts in the space of a few hours the other night, FSU sports fans seem pretty sure he’ll still be able to play.

Many of the players seem to cluster in the rather mysterious Humanities and General Studies field (UD has clicked around on the Drexel site, and can’t find a simple listing of courses for this major). These two guys, for instance, are HGS majors.

Whatever these two are learning, their major is clearly not educating them in some important basics.

Security cameras, for instance. They don’t seem to know about security cameras. Where cameras tend to be located. How they work.

The University of Louisiana at Monroe is about to lose its sports-mad president, and people like this woman, speaking at a public meeting about the school’s future, worry that ULM’s tendency, even under the current president, to spend more on academics than athletics will continue. It might even grow! You might get a new president who spends distinctly more on academics than athletics.

… Donna Cathey made an impassioned plea for support of the Warhawks’ sports programs. “The next president needs to understand the importance athletics plays in the role of the university. We spend a disproportionate amount of money on academics.”

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UD finds a sentence from this university’s welcome page strange.

Increased student enrollment, campus revitalization, avocation of online degree programs, and the expansion of the state’s only publicly supported College of Pharmacy, are just a few of the areas in which President Cofer has provided leadership during his tenure.

How do they mean avocation? They avocate online learning.

Avocate, essentially an obsolete word, means to “call off or away; to withdraw.”

Which is great, IMO, since online is a shitty way to learn.

But I suspect the University of Louisiana does not mean to say this.

… about the syndicates that run football and basketball at American universities, defenders of the racket have been fighting back.

In this opinion piece, the writer argues that university football should break free of the NCAA altogether:

… Now before you think they will set up a wild, wild west operation, remember that university presidents will be figuring this out. They lose their jobs when the football program is out of control and brings harm to the school’s reputation.

Presidents lose their jobs (for which they are paid, say, $600,000, while the football coach is paid four million) when their team loses games because the president puts the school at a competitive disadvantage by trying to introduce financial and academic reforms. (“All this ugliness is allowed to happen, in part, because university presidents, so-called educators, have ceded control to coaches who are treated as deities and are accountable to no one.”)

Without the NCAA, this writer argues, each school will handle rule-breaking its own way. For instance:

[W]hen a backup offensive lineman on a championship team cheats on an online course, gets caught and is declared ineligible after the fact, that single player [won’t] cost his school numerous scholarships, years of rebuilding and possibly a national title… [It’s all just a] a few wayward teens and a couple unscrupulous agents…

Have to take issue with one, too.

Cheating, bar fights, football titles – it’s about teamwork. It’s not going to be just one guy. A university football player doesn’t walk into a bar by himself and beat the shit out of someone. His teammates are there to kick in the guy’s balls once he’s down.

The same principle applies to cheating, a group effort involving academic tutors distributing tests in advance or calling out answers to the players while they’re in the exam room together. Often the faculty is in on it. It takes a village.

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Despite our differences, I share the opinion writer’s contempt for the NCAA.

I just think the writer needs to give more thought to the perennial question of order vs anarchy.

Right now you’ve essentially got the Myanmar junta reining in the syndicates. State-sponsored violence, as well as corruption and repression are rampant, to be sure, but blood isn’t absolutely flowing in the streets.

Once you lose central control, rival gangs will go at it very hard for dominance, and UD fears that the university’s ethos of quiet deliberative thought may be imperilled.

UD wonders – if your whole career is the college sports beat, do you ever get to write anything that’s not sarcastic?

… It was a bit priceless — pun intended — that Alabama Coach Nick Saban (annual salary: $4 million) went on the offensive Wednesday, bemoaning how money is ruining this quaint little sport.

Saban was joined in this particular rant by Florida Coach Urban Meyer (annual salary: $4 million).

… [I]t’s almost professional college football season…

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Update: More sarcasm.

The professionalization of university sports proceeds (here’s a recent defense of agents on campus, for instance) as quickly as the onlining of higher education.

It’s now possible to see a future in which the only actual human activity on university campuses will be the buzz of sports: agents in negotiation with about-to-be-drop-outs; training sessions; games. Classrooms will be used for press interviews and police investigations.

“College football is my favorite sport, and I’d rather not be ashamed of that fact.”

That’s because there aren’t any. Especially not at the University of Florida.

… At a time when LSU’s academic budget is being slashed, the fortunate athletic administrators received pay raises of better than 15 percent.

… [T]he scenario is nothing new in Louisiana. Sports and politics rule…