The University of Kansas, one of America’s most notorious sports factories, shows you how it’s done. Pay your athletics director millions and millions and millions of dollars, and on top of that, encourage him to take private planes everywhere at a cost of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It’s not about ego or waste. “That’s just the price of doing business,” explains the AD. True. KU is in the business of delivering quality sports to its campus, and to the nation. Price is no object.

… the University of Florida.

Highlights:

… [Football coach Urban] Meyer is essentially a crook. For a head coach who prides himself on supposed discipline and intensity, it’s a joke that he is the leader of a team that has had over two dozen players arrested in his first four seasons at Florida.

… The NFL loves to sit back and wonder why it has had such a problem over the years with violence off the field. Players like Ray Lewis, Donte Stallworth, Adam “Pacman” Jones, Plaxico Burress and Matt Jones were all stellar college athletes given every chance to succeed.

… The NFL will continue to work hard on its end, but the problem really starts with these powerful college programs. The University of Florida obviously values football victories over morality…

… when funding university sports.

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Here’s an article along the same lines, about the University of Virginia.

… Bad publicity about the program also hurt, including football player arrests, basketball players leaving school, and the UVA lacrosse murder. [The athletics director] says the department is hoping to teach student athletes leadership skills to help avoid trouble off the field.

… at the University of Oregon, comments on the new, astoundingly expensive student athlete center there:

… The Jaqua Center, dubbed the “jock box” by critics, has spurred controversy because of its opulence and exclusivity. Although it sits at a prominent entrance to campus, most of the building is off limits to non-athletes.

“Forty million dollars buys a lot of new faculty, reduced class sizes, better facilities for the rest of campus,” UO senate president Nathan Tublitz said. “It is a travesty to spend so much money for the benefit of such a small subset of students who already receive enormous perks.”…

The university didn’t spend the money; Phil Knight of Nike did. Implicit in Nathan’s comment, though, is the point that this does not matter. Choices were made about how to spend immense sums of money on an important public university suffering from serious budget cutbacks.

A university spokesman says what they always say under circumstances like these: Universities have no sway over donors. If they want to donate only for athletics, what can we do?

Nonsense. Universities can turn down gifts. They can attempt to alter, expand, and differentiate, gifts… Where, after all, is UO’s president in stories like this? Did he attempt convey to Knight the symbolic significance of a serious university spending this sort of money on athletes, many of whom will not graduate?

… Professor James Gundlach and other university sports whistle blowers, Missouri State’s Reed Olsen, an economics professor, has had the guts to expose financial corruption in that school’s athletics program. Background here.

A state audit of MSU’s budget (its results will be released this fall) will presumably clarify how the school’s leadership dissembled in the matter of the profitability of a big new arena it pushed through over strong faculty objection. But without Olsen’s insistence on the truth (despite the president’s assurance that the arena was profitable, it was, and remains, a big loss), the attention of the MSU community, and the attention of far-flung people like UD, would not have been drawn to this all too typical university scandal.

In his dissenting minority report, presented to the faculty senate at about this time last year, Olsen pointed out that the administration was both inflating the revenue stream and hiding the operating costs of the new arena.

To make matters worse, but again totally predictably, arena ticket sales are down.

Any administrator who tells you that ticket sales will support a sports facility takes you for a fool. Ticket sales are madly volatile almost everywhere. Yet again and again administrators think that if you raise prices when the shit hits the fan, things will be fine.

Actually, when you do that, a lot of people drop the whole thing in disgust and stop going to games. I mean, they don’t do this at truly degenerate schools like Kentucky. You could make season tickets seven million dollars apiece at Kentucky, and there wouldn’t be a peep out of anyone. But at most schools you can expect a bit of a walkout.

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Bottom line at MSU? Olsen writes (in an email to UD):

… Let’s say that we are looking at a $2M ongoing loss in the arena. This is slightly more than 1% of the operating budget of the university. The university, because of a new state law, cannot raise in-state tuition more than [the] increase in the CPI. And for the last 2 years all universities in the state have agreed to not raise tuition at all in return for mostly stable state funding. So that means that most of this $2M must come out of cuts from other parts of the budget or the small increases in student fees from increased out of state tuition or other types of student fees. Students are assessed a fee for [the arena] which supposedly pays for free student seats at BB games. However, that revenue is included in the accounting, still leaving $2M left to pay. Faculty concern is that it comes out of our pocket …

Indeed Olsen concluded his minority report last year by affirming that the new arena has plenty of “negative impact on the academic mission” of MSU. He reminds the administration that the university’s faculty warned that “the university would [end up paying] for the costs incurred by building a new arena.”

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Why do I call this a typical athletic scandal?

Because again and again on this blog I watch jocksniffer presidents and mindless boosters lie and bluster their way to what they want and then make students and faculty – and taxpayers – pay when their pathetic fantasies evaporate.

Universities desperately need rational, informed, steadfast, and ethical professors like Olsen to act as a counterweight to the moronic grandiosity of their sports-mad leaders.

… confused. And in the case of Missouri State’s new basketball arena, she just does not get it.

Unfortunately, after studying the numbers with care, Mr UD, a math whiz, doesn’t get it either.

This seems to be a story about a university president who fell somewhat short of the truth when claiming that in its first year the arena was in the black. An economics professor at MSU, Reed Olsen, ran the numbers and came to the conclusion that it was in the red – hundreds of thousands in the red.

Part of what makes this story difficult to understand — beyond the whirling numbers — is the odd way the Springfield News-Leader has chosen to present it.

One half of its page features the news that the university is now reviewing the arena’s finances. Oh, and there’s a new president. The old one suddenly left. Didn’t say why.

Check out the other half of the page for the hard numbers.

You don’t have to read Andrew Zimbalist to know that many university athletic programs … is cook the books too strong? There’s obviously lots of numbers-shifting going on here as the university now seems to acknowledge that it was wrong to claim a profit… But I really don’t know. I’ve emailed Professor Olsen about it.

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Update: Professor Olsen responds:

After my report to the senate and a subsequent followup with the president, the newspaper dug up more information that showed that the arena was doing even worse than I had originally thought. They were hiding costs by allocating costs to the old arena, whose costs more [than] doubled when it quit being used. So on net it seems that the arena was losing about 2 M.

I’ve gone on to ask him several more questions. I’ll report some of his answers when I hear back from him.

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From the News-Leader’s comment thread:

I and many others told you so. Now, the admission – this thing ain’t paid for.

And, the News Leader buries the story as a sideline.

What many of us said when this boondoggle was announced, what the students reported in their paper when it was learned their academic fees were being stolen, and what the faculty found by analyzing the accounting is all true – this ego pacifier for boosters who want to be like Mizzou is a financial lie.

This is not the end of the scandal. This “2 million” from athletics is a shell game. Athletics already operates with about $5-7 million (admitted) in state funds to make up the yearly deficit, so this is STATE MONEY. Once again the state and students are made to pay for the sports fantasies of wannabe boosters.

I’m pressing this story on University Diaries because, like the scandal at Western Kentucky, it’s shaping up to be the paradigmatic corrupt university sports story — it’s turning into a classic case of the destruction of a university via its sports program. Its apparent elements, shared with virtually all other death-by-sports university stories:

1. Corrupt, sports-mad leaders who cannot think about the improvement of their university in terms other than athletic. (Jealousy of a higher-profile neighboring university also seems at work in these stories.)

2. Toadying faculty willing to lie along with the president and the athletic director about the sports budget.

3. Students who sense what’s happening but don’t have sufficient power and knowledge to fight it.

4. One or two brave faculty members willing to fight against the lies.

5. An inept local press whose boosterism allows it to be manipulated by the leadership of the university.

… 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.