A letter to the University of Minnesota paper from a Minnesota graduate:

Those who care more about education at the University of Minnesota than how its sports teams do will want to check out a report on athletes’ graduation rates and related topics from the March 18 PBS NewsHour.

Only The Minnesota Daily had the courage to prepare a comprehensive report on the University athletics department. The gutless Star Tribune and Pioneer Press took a pass, since they revere intercollegiate athletics and apparently are willing to tolerate failure in the classroom and misbehavior off the field as the price a school pays for hiring “student-athletes.”

If you are fed up with embarrassing, costly, anti-education intercollegiate sports at the University, now is the time to express your thoughts to Gov. Tim Pawlenty and your elected state senators and representatives. Demand a halt to the misuse of your taxpayer dollars and a public investigation by the Legislature into the future of big-time sports at the University.

Will Shapira, University alumnus

Will needs to get his head out of the clouds and start caring about what really counts: Should rich people be allowed to get blasted at the new stadium?

Lost amidst the news that NCAA rejected Memphis’ appeal regarding 38 vacated wins from the 2007-08 season is that the university is now looking into the possibility of suing John Calipari.

The school was punished for having used an ineligible player — Derrick Rose — after it was determined that his SAT was invalidated.

… During the 2007-08 season, Calipari was awarded $200,000 for reaching the Final Four and another $160,000 for winning 81% of his games. With 38 wins being taken off the books, including off of Calipari’s overall record with the school, those bonus levels would no longer be met…

Local attorneys review university coaches’ busy legal dockets and issue dissenting opinions.

Like Simon Liebling, Tyler Rosenbaum is a precocious social critic. Both Liebling and Rosenbaum are undergrads at Brown, and both, in the pages of the university newspaper, go after aspects of the school they find unpalatable. They do so with confidence, clarity, and charm.

Someone on the Brown admissions committee knows good writing when she sees it.

Rosenbaum has an easier task than Liebling, since Liebling took on the complex matter of the relationship between Brown’s president and Goldman Sachs; but Rosenbaum does beautifully with his more modest target: the university’s student fees.

… Last month… The Herald reported that the Organizational Review Committee, which President Simmons appointed to look for ways to cut $14 million from the University’s budget, would be recommending the creation of a $65 fee which would go to the Department of Athletics. … Perhaps sensing that $65 was excessive, the Corporation cut the final version to $64.

But why would a committee charged with cutting the budget recommend the creation of a new fee? Evidently, of the 12 subcommittees that investigated various areas of the University to trim down in light of the recession, the athletics subcommittee was “the only one that did not meet its savings goal.”

This strikes me as quite unfair. Apparently, every area of the University has to make its fair share of sacrifice — except the athletics department. This is despite the fact that a poll conducted by The Herald at the end of last semester found that half of students had not gone to a single sports game that semester, and in total nearly four-fifths had attended two or fewer such games.

Brown is not a “sports school” [Scathing Online Schoolmarm would remove the quotation marks.] like Duke, or even Cornell for that matter. Most students here don’t care about athletics — universities are for higher education, after all, not athletic endeavors…

But, as this new fee aptly demonstrates, athletics at Brown are a financial drain on the University’s budget. The question, then, is why in these tough times the Corporation decided essentially to exempt the athletics department from the shared sacrifice in which every other facet of this University was expected to take part…

I laud the Corporation and the administration for making this subsidy to athletics readily visible as a separate fee and not hiding it in the general tuition increase. This should spur a campus-wide debate about the place of athletics at our institution.

Should a financially non-self-sustaining program that is completely extraneous to the purpose of a university, and about which the vast majority of Brown students are apathetic at best, be sheltered from the tough decisions the rest of us have to make? …

Completely extraneous. Universities are not for athletic endeavors. UD admires this writer’s outrageously contrarian ways.

Shouldn’t Republicans or Democrats or somebody be outraged that “between 2001 and 2005, seven tax-exempt bowls received $21.6 million in government aid,” and that “like any government revenue stream, the one flowing to the bowl committees is guarded by an army of high-paid lobbyists?”

From a review in the Boston Globe of Varsity Green: A Behind the Scenes Look at Culture and Corruption in College Athletics, by Mark Yost.

In this post, UD noted that Seton Hall University employs, at an enormous salary, a borderline psychotic basketball coach.

This doesn’t distinguish Seton Hall, of course, from many other mad-dog-affirmative universities UD‘s covered on this blog. But Seton Hall understands itself to be a serious Catholic institution, featuring, for instance, faculty retreats devoted to quiet thought about values, and this did seem to UD a notable contradiction.

Under pressure of a big New York Times article last week about its filthy program, Seton Hall has fired this man.

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Remarking on his unemployment, the New York Times now writes:

[Coach] Gonzalez is originally from Binghamton, N.Y., the site of the state university whose foray into Division I basketball has caused shame to all university officials who are capable of shame. If Binghamton is still on the make, it might want to consider Gonzo.

… is just the sort of headline to make UD‘s heart leap up.

How good it is to know that “Revenues from big-time athletics at Clemson University have soared by more than $20 million since 2005, yet the program last year operated at a slight loss even as income from ticket sales jumped 59 percent.”

How comely in thy sight, O Lord, that “These figures come at a time when an analysis by USA TODAY shows that the nation’s top sports colleges are propping up their athletic departments to the tune of more than $800 million, while many are cutting faculty salaries and raising student fees and tuition.”

And amen to this: “At Clemson, nine assistant football coaches will earn a total of more than $1.8 million this year, and the board of trustees last week approved raises for them, bumping the total to $2.3 million. In addition to that, head coach Dabo Swinney got a $900,000 raise. That brings the total payroll for Clemson’s 10 football coaches to $4 million – up from $2.6 million in 2009.”

New York Times:

This season, 19 percent of the [NCAA basketball] tournament teams have graduation rates below 40 percent, according to The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports at the University of Central Florida. Across all 36 sports monitored by the N.C.A.A., men’s basketball has the lowest graduation rates, with fewer than two-thirds of players earning degrees. The Central Florida study released Monday highlighted a vast disparity between white basketball players, with an 84 percent graduation rate, and African-American ones, with a 56 percent rate.

… has gotten so bad that newspapers are beginning to report just the tiniest, slightest bit of complaint from UO’s fan base.

Nothing to worry about, of course — there’s no such thing as too low for university football fans — but…

… [F]ans and [the] university community [are] exasperated by a head-spinning series of transgressions from the football team they usually pack Autzen Stadium to cheer on.

“I want to apologize to the fans of the University of Oregon,” [coach Chip] Kelly said. “I want to apologize to the faculty of the University of Oregon. This is not what our football program is all about. We feel that we’ve taken the steps necessary to make sure that this doesn’t happen with these young men again.”…

Sure it’s what it’s about! You recruited these guys!

Can there be a university stupider than Texas Tech? It gives millions of dollars to that master of BDSM, Mike Leach, and then when his psycho coaching style becomes a national scandal and TTU fires him, Leach sues TTU – a lawsuit that will end up costing them millions and millions more.

And all for what?

So that Texas Tech can show the world what really goes on at this university.

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UD thanks Brad.

From a letter signed by eighteen faculty:

Lois B. DeFleur’s two-decades-long tenure as president of Binghamton University has ended in real harm to the university’s reputation and pride… Withdrawal from membership in Division I is in the interest of this university that aspires to be a ‘premier’ public research institution… It will send a strong message to Chancellor Zimpher, our students and alumni that we intend to end the spirit of cover-up that was encouraged from the top, raise our academic standards, and restore BU’s reputation.

For the last ten years, Dennis Lasser, a finance professor, has been faculty representative to the NCAA. So he’s done a terrific job of monitoring things at his institution… I guess that’s why the New York Times reporter thinks it’s worth his while to interview Lasser about a situation he did a good deal to help bring about.

Lasser’s comment is contemptible.

The basketball program is a disaster, but if you look at the regular sports and look at the performance before this change in regime, we were doing things the right way… The only reason I would say leave Division I is if we didn’t learn our lesson. If we self-assess properly, I think we can get back on the right track.

… Brittney Griner takes the pressure off of New Mexico’s Elizabeth Lambert.

The Oregonian:

Despite winning football seasons in recent years, sports finances for Oregon State University and the University of Oregon both fell in the red by the end of the last fiscal year, according to a report the State Board of Higher Education’s finance committee will review Friday.

Oregon State intercollegiate athletics’ ending balance, what the board calls working capital, was $5.9 million in the hole as of June 30, 2009, and the University of Oregon’s sports programs posted a $642,000 deficit.

State Board policy requires universities to keep their ending balances positive. The board probably will ask administrators from each university to come up with a plan to bring working capital, current assets minus liabilities, into the black.

It’s a very unorthodox play, so pay attention:

The Sporting Blog:

CITADEL QUARTERBACK CHARGED WITH
ROBBERY OF ONE OF HIS OWN COACHES

Among the four people charged Saturday in a Charleston, S.C., armed robbery was Miguel Starks, who was being considered as the possible starting quarterback next season at The Citadel, and Reginald Anthony Rice, a former linebacker for the military academy, as well as two College of Charleston students.

The victim in the case is one of Starks’ own coaches at The Citadel, assistant coach Joshua Harpe of West Ashley.

A police affidavit states Starks pointed “a handgun (semiauto) at the victim, struck him once in the head with the handgun and ordered him back into (the) apartment … The defendant … then bound the victim with black duct tape around his legs, mouth and eyes and threw him face down on the living room floor.”…

UD thanks David.

An Ohio State University football fan, Van Ness is converting his firetruck into an enormous Buckeyes helmet.

From The Lantern, OSU’s newspaper:

The fire engine, a Ford C-8000 Sanford Pumper, most recently belonged to a landscaping company that used it to transport water…

He … had to keep the project a secret from his family.

“It was classified because I didn’t want my mother to find out I spent money on a fire truck,” he said. “She wouldn’t have been happy.”

Van Ness said the Fire Buck will feature two flat-screen televisions, high-definition satellite coverage of Buckeye football games, a video game system, propane grill, and removable seating on the rear deck.

… The OSU Fire Buck is stationed at Street Creations Body Shop in Groveport, Ohio, for body and paint work, and then will be on its way to Auto Additions in Westerville, Ohio, for graphics. Once finished, the engine will resemble an OSU football helmet…