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.

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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.

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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.

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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…

… in the library. But at least they have a multimillion-dollar football coach whose games no one comes to see.

… UD noted the bad behavior of the University of Michigan’s athletics director.

An old friend of hers on the UM faculty writes:

Hey, Bill Martin is a good guy. He runs a clean athletic program, with relatively high and enforced academic standards. (For example, one of the better players on our football team, which sucks this year, got kicked off for a set of transgressions which included missing classes. More importantly, Martin fired the corrupt and awful basketball coach.) He takes as much pride in the successes of women’s sports as men’s (and devotes resources to them) and in non-football/basketball sports as much anything else (not just hockey and soccer, men’s and women’s, but also the even less traditionally popular ones).

He went through amazing hassles to rebuild the stadium where the incidents took place. He behaved badly when some [people] didn’t recognize him when going into a room that he himself had built in order to schmooze the regents, which is a big, big part of his job (and a real pain; all they really care about is the football team).

I agree that football controls too much of out lives here at Big-10 U (though in marked contrast to, for instance, the University of Minnesota, the athletic department is totally self-supporting), and that Martin acted in a petulant anger. But this is not the story you’re making it into–by a long shot.

There’s actually even more to say about Martin, who is a fascinating character, and a subtle, interesting well-read guy–studied with Gunnar Myrdal when fresh out of college, for example. But the point is, if you’re going to have college athletics at all, you want to have them the way they are here–and Bill Martin gets a lot of credit for keeping it that way.

[Having said all that, let me add that] the presence of big-time sports is a subtly corrupting influence on the university–I mean it’s ridiculous that our political support in the state and our (non-athletic department related) alumni contributions go way up when the football team does well. And of course when I say we’re clean I mean relatively clean: Our basketball team of the 1990s was run by a thoroughly corrupt coach in cahoots with a crooked booster who fed our players bucks on the side which came from a gambling ring in auto plants. The point is that Bill Martin cleaned that up…

At the end of the day, [comments Missouri athletic director Mike Arden,] is it still concerning for people to see expenses continue to go like this (he gestures upward)? Absolutely. But at least it’s being done in an open and transparent environment…

USA Today

#1:

… [W]hen I arrived at the University of Minnesota in the fall of 2005, I didn’t identify myself as a Gopher. I came to study and get my degree, not to frolic in the flamboyance of our college sports teams and most certainly not to fund a $288.5 million TCF Bank Stadium. Yet this was an identity that was forced upon me. It was built into my tuition. It was assumed, because I lived within the University community, that of course I was a Gophers football fan and that I would have no qualms about chipping in for the sake of sport. It is a ridiculous and insulting assumption … We should be fighting for the separation of university life from collegiate sports. … Yes, TCF Bank Stadium has already been built, but we still have time to rethink the future of university sports. The recession affords us the opportunity to look critically at the institutions we have designed, modify them and maybe even start over…

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#2

Look up Ashley Nord, the latest Rhodes Scholar from the University, one of only 32 such individuals selected from the United States and a former Gophers track athlete.

While you are at it, you could talk to Hassan Mead, a five-time All-American in only four seasons of competition. He has a fascinating story of coming to America knowing no English and is now thriving as an athlete and a student. Talk to the director of student-athlete welfare to see the multitude of community service programs Gophers athletes engage in.

The unavoidable truth — perhaps an inconvenient one for many writers — is that the majority of University student-athletes pursue their athletics with passion while simultaneously outperforming their non-athlete peers in the classroom. Please, writers, the next time you write about the University imposing crushing financial burdens to pay for the stadium, remember to give credit where credit is due.

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From a comment on #2:

Did you mean for this letter to be published on the same day as articles about basketball player and football player thuggery?

Hassan Mead is absolutely a great runner. How does that contribute to the academic success of this university? … This is a research university, and I’ve seen 15 articles about Eric Decker but can’t remember the last article about research. I know they have some, but it’s obviously not a priority of the administration or the MN Daily.

Athletics do nothing but take away from this university, financially and otherwise.

Five hundred dollars an hour — more than that, actually — is what medical school professors who whore for industry make; it is what doctors who whore for celebrities make; and it is what law firms who investigate filthy university sports programs make.

Does this seem a lot to you?

Put it in perspective. When the last president of Harvard University worked a one-day-a-week job for a hedge fund (while running Harvard), he made $20,000 a hour.

So the law firm investigating the SUNY Binghamton sports program and charging this public university $520 per hour is giving them a major break.

Not only that, but $520 an hour is “a 20 percent discount off the firm’s normal blended hourly rate.”

… and now this. Things are getting seriously weird at the University of New Mexico.

From the AP:

…Faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, on Thursday passed a resolution calling for an end to subsidies for the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics.

[Athletics consistently produces] deficits of millions of dollars. Critics say that’s a particular problem right now with budget cuts forcing class cutbacks and student fee hikes.

The resolution is nonbinding. But Chancellor Robert Birgeneau says officials will try to work out a plan to reduce the cost of the department.

Vision Statement.

… helped build Chicago’s image as a top destination for serious-minded graduate students and faculty. Over 80 Nobel Prize winners have studied, taught or researched at Chicago. “That’s part of the magic of Chicago,” says Robin Lester, who wrote a book about … Chicago football. “That’s their thing. It’s still a serious place for kids to get an education.”

… “We’re still being true to the notion that it’s not in the interest of universities to create mass-entertainment spectacles,” says John Boyer, dean of Chicago’s undergraduate college.