The local paper’s quoting Marilyn Flowers, an economics professor – and chair of the department – at Ball State who’s been going after campus athletics.
… Ball State has more than $14 million budgeted for its athletics programs. Approximately 80 percent of the budget is paid for from student fees – almost $9 million – and institutional support – almost $2.5 million.
“When it costs so much for kids to go to school, and you charge them $800 a year and most of them don’t go to any games, that I think is really unfortunate,” Flowers said.
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UD thanks a reader for linking her to this story.
Good article in the Spokesman Review about the majorly unprofitable football program at Eastern Washington University.
A veteran EWU professor comments:
“There are far more opportunities for students to represent their universities in sports at Central and Western than at Eastern, because they’re competing at a different level.”
Corkill backs his argument by noting his school has axed sports such as baseball, wrestling, swimming, men’s soccer and men’s golf during his tenure, basically for the sake of reducing expenditures.
“And they’ve done it in order to protect football and basketball and the Big Sky Conference,” he said. “I feel, in a way, that football distorts the intercollegiate athletics program at Eastern, and given the huge budget cuts we’re facing, I just think that maybe it’s time to rethink whether we should be in the Big Sky – or if we even need football.”
… is a benign dictator, in the way of football coaches. A well-meaning, emotional man of limited worldly understanding, he keeps his kingdom content with athletic spectacles and brooks no dissent. His players are worshipped by all.
On the fringes of Leipold’s domain lies a university, and though his players may not use the athletic equipment of this university without one of their fitness coaches present, three of the athletes did so anyway, refusing to show their student identification and behaving with the sense of entitlement that you would expect of the king’s pets.
A reporter from the university newspaper was present, took offense, and wrote a column about “spoiled athletes.”
Neither their demeanor, nor their language was respectful, but that’s OK, because they’re athletes. They’re allowed to play the system. Next time I’m in the Williams Center, I’ll keep my ID, wear my headphones on the bottom floor and bench press naked because I feel like it. …
The guilty party usually isn’t the typical student-athlete. It’s really not even the few who misbehave or accept preferential treatment. The villains are the “adults” – the coaches and administrators – who send the message it’s acceptable to behave how you want because you can run fast or jump high.
The writer concluded by noting one common endpoint of athlete-coddling:
[S]ometimes exceptional talent still isn’t enough to bail out someone who thinks he’s above the rules. Ask [Maurice] Clarett. You can reach him at the Toledo Correctional Institution.
When he read this, King Leipold flushed crimson and flew into a rage.
“This is fucking bullshit,” he thundered, and banned the newspaper from access to the football program. “The door is shut. Go cover soccer…. I’m sure that will be fun.”
So certain was Leipold of the right of kings that he wrote an email to the university’s chancellor boasting of having shut down the press: “If this is the type of journalism our paper is going to have. They can cover someone else — we will get along just fine,” Leipold wrote.
Imagine Leipold’s amazement when reprimands and sanctions rained down upon him from the chancellor! When he was made to apologize in public to this student and to the newspaper!
Moral of the story: Just as the concept of assault has now become clearer to Mississippi’s coach, so the concept of a free press is surely beginning to work its way into the brain of King Leipold.
An editorial in the University of Kansas newspaper:
The Olympic Village project is simply the latest in a long line of building projects that have dramatically changed the face of athletics at the University in the past six years…
… Athletics must strike a balance among providing reasonable facilities for its athletes, accommodating spectators and appealing to donors and recruits. But most importantly, it must contribute to the overall success of the University, which is ultimately measured in terms of academics. Keeping in mind the terms and constraints of the relationship of Athletics to the University, it is disconcerting to see the construction of yet another huge and costly athletics facility while the rest of the University literally crumbles around it. Deferred maintenance costs for older parts of campus have plagued the University for a decade and detrimentally affected academics. Now, with a full-blown recession, large budget cuts are projected for the next two years, and maintenance will no doubt be deferred once again, not to mention faculty layoffs and deep cuts in student services…
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Oh: And here’s a nice companion piece.
From Newsday:
… I’m not … sure the word obscene is a gross enough word to describe what the University of Kentucky, a taxpayer-funded institution, is offering John Calipari to become its basketball coach. According to several reports, Calipari is mulling over an 8-year, $35 million offer. That contract would make him the highest paid coach in the history of the game, surpassing Florida’s Billy Donovan, who makes $3.5 million a year.
…The state of Kentucky is in so much fiscal trouble that Gov. Steve Beshear declared in December that he planned to take a 10 percent salary cut, dropping his annual pay down to $111,945.
Calipari will make more than that much per game with an annual salary of $4.3 million. What’s more, the University’s board of trustees just approved a five percent tuition hike for undergraduates. I guess they’re going to have to get the money from somewhere, and it’s clear that this is a school and a state with priorities.
Now, I know I am going to get inundated with comments and e-mail talking about just how much money the basketball program brings into the school. My question is this: Just how much of that money goes to the English department, or engineering department or education department? …
… Fatiguée, as Nigella Lawson notes, is what the French call greens that have lost their crispness, from sitting around too long, or from too much dressing.
Writing can be wilted in the same ways – from sitting around too long, or from being drizzled with too many words.
The problem of tired writing compounds when your subject is itself superannuated.
Yet most subjects are old. Not much crisp under the sun. The point of being a good writer is taking something new to the plate. Plumping things up so people see some aspect of the world fresh.
Consider, for instance, a seasonal problem.
Everyone knows big time university basketball is a rank enseamèd dish, stew’d in corruption. Every March sports writers get up on little ladders and scrounge in their pantries for the canned indignation.
But why? Why do that? Limp writing makes nothing happen. It’s mere ritual. It’s filing a story because you’ve got space to fill by Tuesday. Jim Calhoun has a job to do, and so do you.
But if you had the scruples whose lack you attack in Calhoun, you wouldn’t inflict this sort of futility on your readers.
… From showcase summer camps, to AAU tournaments, to street agents, to runners from professional agents, this is the landscape schools live in. This is the basketball culture, and for all of the NCAA’s attempts to control it, it always seems to get worse, a cesspool of inherent corruption. To the point where the NCAA recently ruled that a seventh-grader is now regarded as a “recruitable” athlete.
Think about that for a second.
Which is not to say that all schools break the rules.
It is to say, though, that this is the basketball world all schools operate in, to the point where virtually all big-time programs are fragile, a deck of cards that has the potential to crumble at any minute, whether it’s off-campus problems, allegations of recruiting violations, rumors of being carried academically, or other supposed atrocities that highlight the fact that players often are not like the other students on campus, regardless of the hype to try to convince people that there are.
Suffice it to say there are no virgins here.
Let’s scathe through that, shall we?
“From showcase summer camps, to AAU tournaments, to street agents, to runners from professional agents, this is the landscape schools live in. [The list’s okay, though all the tos are a bit awkward. Ending on in is weak; remember that you always want to end your sentence on a strong word. And keep an eye on that landscape metaphor.] This is the basketball culture, [This is. This is. Repetition can be effective, but in this case it feels weak, in part because the language is so blah. We begin to doubt the writer’s conviction.] and for all of the NCAA’s attempts to control it, it always seems to get worse, a cesspool of inherent corruption. [It gets worse because the NCAA doesn’t attempt to control it, so here the writer signals his refusal to take on the heavy labor of actual critique. Things get more tired by the minute. And a cesspool of inherent corruption tells you everything you need to know about l’écriture fatiguée. Forget the quick transmutation of a landscape into a cesspool, and think instead about the lazy effort to lend a lifeless salad some life by suddenly spicing it way up. Cesspool is a big ol’ word, way out there. You want to reserve it for something really big, like your suicide note (“Dear World,” wrote George Sanders, “I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.”), or for a piece of your best writing, in which you demonstrate conviction.]
To the point where the NCAA recently ruled that a seventh-grader is now regarded as a “recruitable” athlete. [Dump the quotation marks.]
Think about that for a second.
Which is not to say that all schools break the rules.
It is to say, though, that this is the basketball world all schools operate in, [Note the clumsy wordiness, the overuse of the to be verb, the ineffective repetition.] to the point where virtually all big-time programs are fragile, a deck of cards [Dead metaphor.] that has the potential to crumble at any minute, whether it’s off-campus problems, allegations of recruiting violations, rumors of being carried academically, or other supposed atrocities [Tone problem. What does he mean by calling these things supposed atrocities? I don’t get it.] that highlight the fact that players often are not like the other students on campus, regardless of the hype to try to convince people that there are. [There instead of they. Mistakes will occur when you’re doing automatic writing.]
Suffice it to say there are no virgins here. [Off we go to another dead metaphor.]”
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Update: UD is grateful to James, a reader, for pointing out that both of her fatiguées take an extra e.
No, James. You are not a pest.
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Another Update: This is more like it. The guy actually cares.
… What must KU faculty members think about the steady and successful efforts by the sports side of the university to raise millions of dollars while about all the academic side of the university can talk about is cuts in state support and the harmful consequences those cuts have on the university, its students, faculty and the state?
… [Current candidates for chancellor] must wonder about the relationship or level of emphasis and importance at KU between athletics and academics. Who or what runs the institution and what is the indebtedness of the athletic department?….
Lawrence Journal-World
… Most athletes at NCAA Division I-A schools receive unlimited free tutoring. More and more schools require mandatory class attendance for athletes. Athletes generally are ushered into classes where their chances to succeed are, shall we say, outstanding.
It takes more work by an athlete to fail these days than to succeed. Eric Hyman, [University of South Carolina’s] athletics director, says time and again that mandatory class attendance has a direct correlation to success in the classroom. How can they not graduate?…
Boyce Watkins, in Black Athlete:
The NCAA needs to redefine its mission and be honest with the world. Right now, it is an elephant with bunny ears, swearing that it’s nothing but a harmless little rabbit. The truth is that the NCAA is exactly what it appears to be: a professional sports league. So, rather than allowing me to become the head of the NCAA, I would rather be the head of the House Ways and Means Committee, which initiated an investigation into the NCAA and began to question its non-profit status. A bureaucratic beast that has grown so deformed with contradictions needs to be deconstructed and rebuilt in a model of fairness. As it stands, the NCAA exists in stark contrast to the values most of us embrace as Americans. I’ve seen it up close over the past 15 years and it bothers the heck out of me.
That the NCAA remains non-profit is an absolute amazement. If you can believe the NCAA is a non-profit organization, you can believe anything.
The Lawrence Journal-World wonders…
[Kansas University] athletic teams obviously attract many financial contributions that help support non-revenue sports, but it’s not clear exactly how much those contributions add to the academic excellence of the university or the well-being of the state. At some point, it seems that the money being spent on athletics could actually detract from a university’s academic mission.
… [T]he size of the investment [KU] and other U.S. colleges are making in athletic programs could make some observers wonder just what those schools see as their primary mission.
Selena Roberts, SI.com.
… As Florida State’s faculty frets over looming budget cuts that could push 200 staffers out the door, [FSU president] Wetherell is throwing money at lawyers to preserve football victories.
“Florida has been very hard hit by the mortgage crisis and recession — surely that impacts on the state funding that FSU receives for education,” says Murray Sperber, a professor emeritus at Indiana, who wrote Beer & Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education. “Shouldn’t the FSU president be working on solving that problem? Now, he might argue that Bowden’s victory total is what keeps legislators and taxpayers happy, and so he has to get that up front. If he is right, why call it a university, especially when you overlook egregious cheating?”…
Why call it anything? It’s nothing, really.