… asks readers who Notre Dame’s next football coach should be.

Here’s one of the answers the bloggers got.

Football is starting to harm ND.

… In general, college football at the highest level is now so corrupt that the NCAA cannot control it, and the universities, supposedly bastions of academic integrity and higher learning, exploit the labor of young adults, many with few options, for personal and institutional gain. A majority of teams that went to bowls last year graduated <50% of the players. Meanwhile the nature and frequency of injuries suggest that the kids are not viewed as much more than fodder, necessary casualties to keep the alumni happy and contributing. [T]he continuing effort to field a dominant football team in a fundamentally corrupt environment is eating away at the soul of the institution. ND should get out of football and focus on academics.

This, from January 2006, is the first of many posts (type Saluki Way into the search feature) University Diaries has featured on only one of the many benighted aspects of that most-benighted of American university campuses, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale — its ridiculous sports expenditure.

Here’s an update — a letter to the editor of the student paper, from an English professor there.

According to SIU President Glenn Poshard, SIU may probably [may probably is awkward] close in March or lay off large amounts [should be numbers] of people … He is quoted as stating, “This isn’t a panic situation; nobody is panicking here.”

This may be true for SIU’s higher administrators who will certainly not be laid off. But for the majority of faculty and staff in an already depressed economic region, this is a very worrying time. Should the worst happen, Carbondale would probably become a “ghost town” [no need for quotation marks] after losing its chief source of revenue.

In the light of the recent high-salaried appointment of a new chancellor (who may not even have a job to go to in June) despite a supposed hiring freeze, another solution is possible.

What about temporarily transferring the $35 million dollars allocated to the Saluki Way sports project to alleviate this urgent budget crisis?

This project is opposed by the majority of faculty and students on this campus, and in a time of economic recession, sports should be the lowest item on the agenda.

It would be one of a number of necessary efficiencies Trustee Bill Bonan II has urged. Should the economy recover, this project could then go ahead. The issue remains whether sports or education is the main priority on this campus at this particular time.

… Surely the economic well being of people is far more important in a time of economic depression …than an irrelevant sports stadium that has nothing to do with educational quality.

Mack Brown
Won’t back down
He wants five million now.

UT’s
Faculty
Is having one big cow.

“We thought we
Were a university!”

You really thought that?
Wow.

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

A resolution criticizing the $5 million pay package for University of Texas football coach Mack Brown as “unseemly and inappropriate” was approved in an unofficial vote at a Faculty Council meeting Monday despite an impassioned defense of the package by UT’s president.

… The resolution was approved 23-15, with four abstentions.

… “College sports is widely viewed as an out-of-control train on a collision course with academia,” said David Hillis , a professor of integrative biology. “Right now, UT is stoking this train to make it run ever faster.”…

… search for Anthony Galea at the University of Toronto. He says he’s on the medical faculty.

Galea’s in trouble with the law, here, there and everywhere.

… The F.B.I. investigation of Dr. Anthony Galea, a sports medicine specialist who has treated hundreds of professional athletes across many sports, follows his arrest on Oct. 15 in Toronto by the Canadian police. Human growth hormone and Actovegin, a drug extracted from calf’s blood, were found in his medical bag at the United States-Canada border in late September. Using, selling or importing Actovegin is illegal in the United States.

Dr. Galea is also being investigated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for smuggling, advertising and selling unapproved drugs as well as criminal conspiracy…

Some university coaches teach their students by beating them up.

The Financial Times reviews a new book.

… The excesses of college football have hit new levels of absurdity since the 1990s, writes Michael Oriard in his new book Bowled Over. Colleges throw money they don’t have into football. “From any reasonably objective perspective,” says Oriard, “the case for reform seems overwhelming. For a football coach to make several times as much as the university president is obviously crazy.” Oriard knows his stuff. He played football for Notre Dame University and in the NFL before becoming an English professor at Oregon State University…

He excels at identifying the sport’s abuses. Some players leave university illiterate, having played football nonstop. They are unpaid, and yet colleges still manage to blow fortunes on tuition centres, airfares around America, and sometimes on “recruiting hostesses” who entice promising youths to the right college. The great majority of colleges lose money on athletics, yet most football teams overshadow their universities. And the craziness worsens each year.

The boosters’ arguments for college football are probably bogus. Football doesn’t seem to persuade alumni to give to a university’s academic work, and doesn’t attract better students. Indeed, donors have recently given “to athletics at the expense of academics”, says Oriard….

From Fanhouse:

Texas’s Mack Brown became the highest-paid coach in college football this week when the university gave him a raise to at least $5.1 million annually.

Michael Granof, an accounting professor at Texas, says that doesn’t make sense at a time when the university is making academic cutbacks to make ends meet.

“The major problem today is one of timing,” Granof said in an interview on ESPN’s Outside the Lines. “The University of Texas is facing a major budget crisis. We’ve had layoffs, we’ve had major changes in the curriculum, the faculty has been meeting for the last month trying to figure out how to save a few hundred thousand dollars here and there, and I’ve never in all my years at the University of Texas heard so much outrage.”…

— sends me this, from today’s New York Times.

Like Northeastern, Hofstra has dropped football.

… and nobody came?

This commenter — goes by the name of Godot — appears on a thread at the Austin American newspaper.

Godot is responding to an editorial in the paper which sheds a wistful tear or two over graduation rates for baseball (37%, lowest score in the Big Ten), basketball (47%, lowest score in the Big Ten) and football (49%, lowest in the Big Twelve ‘cept fer Oklahoma) players at the University of Texas.

It’s really too bad, writes the paper, that our flagship university seems unable to graduate these people… I mean… Sure would be nice if it could and all… But… well… you know…

Godot argues that it would be honest as well as economical for Texas to acknowledge that the state doesn’t give a shit about education. Texas could be our first state, says Godot, to experiment with shutting down all schools.

UD predicts that after five or so years of no formal schooling and zero education taxes, the state of Texas will look exactly the way it looks right now. Only richer.

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

Correction: GTWMA, a reader, notes that all the Big Ten stuff up there should say Big Twelve.

In a blog post about the latest sleaze under Florida coach Urban Meyer, Pete Thamel writes:

Coaches in college football have long histories of ignoring serious transactions for the sake of winning football games…

Interesting slip… Coaches in college football are of course very serious about one transaction: Their contract, with its millions of dollars in yearly compensation and its massive buy-out clauses and all. But when it comes to recruitment, the blogger’s correct: The transaction’s not serious at all. It’s this wild and crazy thing where you have the university admit people who aren’t going to be able to graduate, and who have significant criminal records, and then you just hope like hell they behave til you get some touchdowns out of them. It’s insane.

And then when they don’t behave – when they rob people or drive drunk or whatever – everybody rushes to sympathize with the coach, the same person who fucked up the university by admitting them… Poor Coach Meyer! How’s he holding up?

Coaches like Urban Meyer make Lawrence Summers look fiscally responsible.

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

Update: A commenter really gave Thamel hell about transactions. (Scroll down the comments a bit.)

Thamel thanked him and changed it to transgressions.

I’m less inclined to give bloggers hell about these things, because I know how easily mistakes get made when you’re blogging a lot.

On the other hand, you’re supposed to read over what you’ve written a lot, too.

And on the other other hand, if you write for the New York Times, don’t you have editors?

The writer’s talking – in an opinion piece in today’s New York Times – about the tax exemption on sports income at American universities.

Many booster clubs are recognized as charities under the federal tax code. At Florida and Georgia, to name just two universities, the athletic departments are set up as charities. Universities also have access to tax-exempt financing when building ever-larger stadiums and arenas. Boosters and donors benefit from generous tax deductions when they buy the best seats or endow an athletic scholarship. That’s right: colleges now endow their quarterbacks and linebackers the same way they do a distinguished chair of American literature.

If university presidents wanted to slow the corruption and waste of big time campus sports, they could, suggests the writer, “ask Congress to rescind the tax breaks on the commercial income earned by athletic programs.”

Then he laughs at the thought that any president would have the guts to do that.

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

Update: Mr Punch, a reader, offers a correction:

Actually, he’s not talking about “the tax exemption on sports income at American universities.” He’s talking about the tax deductions and exemptions for sports-related donations. As UD has often pointed out, there isn’t any net income at the vast majority of institutions.

He’s talking about Northeastern University’s recent decision to drop football.

[Northeastern University’s neighbor, Boston University,] appears to have invested well in its 12 years without football. Not having a Saturday tailgate does not seem to have hurt … its national and global rankings as an academic institution. The athletes in the remaining sports do remarkably well. Its male athletes have a graduation success rate of 89 percent, including 100 percent for its African-American male basketball players. Its female athletes have a 97 percent graduation success rate.

… Northeastern scored a touchdown by dropping football.

… Northeastern University ends its football program.

The athletic department at West Virginia University Institution of Technology has become a financial drain, partly because of bad spending decisions.

That’s the conclusion of an audit presented Thursday to lawmakers. Among other problems, the reports says WVU Tech has been awarding financial aid to student athletes who don’t stay long.

… The audit also faults the school for switching athletic conferences in 2006, and questions why it has had 14 different athletic directors in the last 19 years…