… is that many American universities routinely give millions of dollars every year to totally anti-intellectual coaches and athletic directors.

The university foundation of California State University, Stanislaus, is under fire for hiring Sarah Palin to speak at a $500 per ticket, gala black-tie fundraising event in June, to celebrate the university’s 50th anniversary. The foundation is refusing to disclose Palin’s fee. And students, professors and even a state lawmaker, point to the former half-term governor of Alaska’s vitriol, divisiveness and her hefty speaking fees of at least $100,000, as not appropriate for a University celebration. Her lack of intellectual curiosity is cited by Zoology Professor Patrick Kelly, who started an anti-Palin Facebook page, pointing out her distinct lack of academic accomplishments. In other woods, the academic community of CSU is outraged and embarrassed to have their school’s 50th anniversary celebration represented by a know-nothing, polarizing woman, whose major contribution to the public discourse has been inflammatory rhetoric…

Most coaches don’t give a shit about academics — they pressure their universities to admit students bound to fail and drop out; they have the highest salaries on campus (sometimes the highest salaries in the state) because they don’t see why they shouldn’t drain resources from students.

Palin’s populist tirades against professors and universities differ in no way from the contempt lots of coaches routinely express for these things. When you reward the coach with four million dollars a year, and then get upset when a university gives Palin – What? She’s probably getting a paltry $100,000 – you’re being a mite hypocritical.

University of Oregon athletics doesn’t like to do contracts.

As all criminal syndicates know, if you write down what you’re doing, other people can figure out… what you’re doing.

Do you remember any scenes of Al Pacino signing contracts in The Godfather?

So when the school’s athletic director left the other day to take a tv job, and the school just, you know, gave him $2.3 million dollars even though he wasn’t fired – he quit – and even though it was all done via secret handshakes, the state Justice Department decided to investigate.

The UO says it had no signed agreement with Bellotti on the terms of his employment or departure when he took over the job of athletic director last summer, yet the university said it will pay the former football coach the $2.3 million to fulfill unspecified “commitments” that were never put on paper.

Bellotti negotiated the terms of his employment orally with UO President Richard Lariviere in July, when both of them were beginning their new jobs, a UO spokeswoman said last week. The UO is not making those terms public. Less than nine months later, the two settled on the details of a deal allowing Bellotti to leave for the television job with the multimillion-dollar payout.

Nobody at the university has any comment to make to reporters.

Reporters want to know how a once-respectable university became such a cheesy outfit.

From the student newspaper, University of Maine:

… [T]he athletic department is losing millions of dollars annually. Other financial documents indicate the university is spending less of its budget on educational instruction now than it was in previous decades.

In the current fiscal year — which runs July 1, 2009 to June 30, 2010 — athletics is projected to cost the university $7.3 million more than the revenue it brings in.

Athletic Director Blake James said the athletic department is subsidized by the university, but that the projected loss of $7 million sounded high. James said he thought the actual loss would be closer to $5 million.

… The budget for fiscal 2010 projected the athletics department would generate about $4.5 million in revenue, falling far short of its expected $12.2 million in expenditures. This discrepancy would be covered by revenue in the general university budget, the vast majority of which comes from tuition and state appropriations.

… The bulk of sports teams’ operating costs comes from coaches’ salaries and benefits.

… There appears to be a historical trend in the financial documents from decennial accreditation reports indicating student education has been slipping on the university’s priority list…

Well, where would you put student education on a university’s priority list? Tenth? Twelfth?

… strong on detail.

This Boston Globe opinion piece tells you the reason.

From the moment she clapped eyes on him at a Knight Commission gathering a few years ago, UD knew Michael Adams, president of the University of Georgia, would be the NCAA’s next president. Unlike Myles Brand, who entered the job with a sense of morality as well as a sense of what universities are (he started his career as a philosophy professor), UGA’s man is a backroom politician all the way down.

His departure from UGA will be good news for that university. Otherwise, it’s barf bag city.

Via UD‘s buddy Dave Stone.

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.

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

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!