… great big dirty world (quoting Randy Newman in this beautiful song). That’s why I’ve been posting somewhat less than usual.
But so what. I’m not blogging in order to share with you my distress that
globalization has allowed the capital and assets of the rich to travel more freely than those of everyone else. The result is rampant tax avoidance, labor offshoring and a class of elites that flies 35,000 feet over the problems of nations and their taxpayers. “The 1% can move anywhere they want and profit handsomely from the relocation,” says Peter Atwater, a behavioral economist. “But the 99% are left with the aftermath – the empty buildings of a deserted Detroit, the toxic waste from chemical plants in West Virginia or the unsustainable tax liabilities of Puerto Rico.”
Back in the mid-‘nineties, Christopher Lasch wrote a book whose title says it all: The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.
To an alarming extent the privileged classes – by an expansive definition, the top 20 percent – have made themselves independent not only of crumbling industrial cities but of public services in general. They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies by enrolling in company-supported plans, and hire private security guards…. In effect, they have removed themselves from the common life. It is not just that they see no point in paying for public services they no longer use. Many of them have ceased to think of themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America’s destiny for better or worse. Their ties to an international culture of work and leisure – of business entertainment, information, and ‘information retrieval’ – make many of them deeply indifferent to the prospect of American national decline.
Two decades later, it’s all much worse. Around $36 trillion has been taken from a world of suffering people. That’s almost as much as Harvard University’s endowment.
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And when UD thinks of little Delaware! Delaware, whose sweet flat little soybean fields she greets each summer on her way to Rehoboth Beach! Sweet flat little Delaware!
Mr Obama likes to cite Ugland House, a building in the Cayman Islands that is officially home to 18,000 companies, as the epitome of a rigged system. But Ugland House is not a patch on Delaware (population 917,092), which is home to 945,000 companies, many of which are dodgy shells.
Delaware, whose state tourism slogan, Endless Discoveries, is now Endless Justice Department Discoveries …
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No, no, she’s not blogging to burden you with her boohoohoo over this great big dirty world. She’s blogging to share magazine articles with titles like
ACADEMICALLY SKETCHY PROGRAM DEFEATS ACADEMICALLY SKETCHY PROGRAM, 83-66
She’s blogging to express admiration for the honesty about America’s universities that appears in this article:
To the NCAA, [academic fraud at the University of North Carolina is] a scandal, but to North Carolina and the athletes who took part, this was very obviously the right thing to do, a way of meeting scam requirements with scam action… By now, reasonable people see the NCAA’s insistence on the “college” side of college as a prerequisite for playing revenue sports as a mean-spirited scam — one bigger and more institutionalized than anything UNC is accused of doing. Academic fraud, in this case, is just what you call not keeping up appearances to the satisfaction of the people profiting off the scam….
The NCAA may well come down hard on North Carolina here, because that’s its role in this comic opera. UNC was playing their role to a T — the system as it is incentivizes exactly this behavior — until they went a little too far and made the “student-athlete” concept look the charade it is. In practice, the cheaters aren’t the programs that commit academic fraud. (Every major program does it to an extent, but one which keeps them from getting caught, which is what the NCAA prefers.) The cheaters are the programs that don’t even bother with the pretense that higher education is anything other than a cartel-imposed hoop to jump through.
Fuck the NCAA, and fuck anyone else who insists on forcing college upon kids who don’t want it just so their own paychecks can be bigger by dint of not paying the people who actually bring in the money. If UNC committed academic fraud, it was in the service of the reasonable, even noble, cause of letting athletes who wanted to do so focus on athletics. It’s merely an accident of history that college is in any way connected to amateur sports, and it’s time to start applauding the big-time programs that have found ways to take the academics out of college.
Damn straight. Whether it’s an international $36 trillion scam or a scam in the billions that’s turned some of our once-reputable universities into big fat jokes, we need to face up to it. We need to know absolutely everything we can about it. We need to be absolutely honest about it.
If we can’t do anything about it – and UD certainly thinks the trillion dollar one is unfixable – we need to figure out other ways to show the heavens slightly more just.
If we can do something about it – and we can definitely do something about the NCAA and the big-sport schools – we should fight. In particular, we should fight for the absolute decoupling of universities and big-money sports programs.
A model for so many other All-Male Sex Cult Universities up and down this great land.
This blog tries to chronicle life at these locales. It’s a big job.
… which is a start, but the story of Missouri State University’s long-term lies about its finances should be on the front page of the New York Times.
What seems a quiet story about a provincial public campus having lied to the state, the NCAA and its own university community about how much money it’s losing to sports, and about how it’s making up the difference by soaking students, is in fact not merely a national scandal in itself, but a story powerfully symbolic of the pourriture (for this degree of degeneracy, only the French word will do) big-time sports has brought to so many of America’s universities.
Before I quote from the two stories – one local, one Associated Press – let me direct you to various posts on this blog starting in 2010, when a baffled UD (numbers not being her strong point) wrote to an economist on MSU’s faculty – Reed Olsen – who has been insisting on the financial corruption of his university for the last fifteen years, during which he has been ignored and reviled.
So here’s Olsen pointing out that MSU’s new stupid unaffordable basketball arena was not in the black (as the school was thrilled to announce), but deeply in the red. Among the tricks MSU played, Olsen singled out this one:
They [are] hiding costs by allocating costs to the old arena, whose costs more [than] doubled when it quit being used. So on net it seems that the arena [is] losing about 2 M.
In ’01, with the money hemorrhage on full boil, boosters proposed that “the accounting of the [new] arena be combined with Hammons Student Center and Plaster Sports Complex,” which would make things look ever so much better. But
Former State Auditor Susan Montee last year specifically warned against mixing the finances of JQH Arena with other university sports facilities.
“In that way, it would not be transparent and nobody would be able to tell,” she said then.
Fuck transparency! says desperate, desperately stupid Missouri State, which, it now turns out, has been for years sending bogus athletic spending numbers to the NCAA.
This is from the brief AP report:
[A] multimillion dollar discrepancy [between what MSU says it’s spending on sports and what it’s really spending] stems from sports-related expenses, mostly facilities and administrative support, that Missouri State didn’t include in the athletics department budget. For a decade, the university also left out those costs and related sources of revenue, such as various student fees, when filing annual reports with the NCAA.
And here’s the headline on the more detailed local report:
$16 million? Try $25 million: New Report Reveals True Scope of MSU Athletics Spending
If MSU hadn’t systematically shut down Reed Olsen year after year, this wouldn’t have been much of a revelation.
Anyway. Let’s look a bit closer.
In the reports [to the NCAA] covering the fiscal years from 2005 to 2013, the only facilities costs MSU reported to the NCAA were lease payments for baseball at Hammons Field, which averaged a little less than $200,000 a year.
For 2014, the university reported $0 — an error, according to [University president Clif] Smart, who said the baseball lease, about $210,000, was mistakenly lumped into the “other expenses” category on the report.
And:
Prior to the report for the 2015 fiscal year, the information reported to the NCAA was taken primarily from the athletics department’s operating budget, which does not include administrative support offered by other university departments, or — most significantly — the millions of dollars the university spends each year on bond payments, maintenance and utilities for athletics facilities.
Anyway. Ahem! Today is a new day:
[T]he new report from MSU makes clear just how much of the bill is being subsidized by students and the university. Of the $25.2 million spent last year, $15.9 million came from student fees and university general revenue.
The president of this quintessentially provincial, regional school, puts it all in perspective:
“The kind of university we see ourselves as plays Division I sports — we’re not Division II, we’re not a regional school.”
… but what they need to remember is that you’re never going to professionalize this country’s institutions of higher education until you hire, pay well, and retain people like John Blake.
UNC felt forced by the NCAA to fire Blake as its defensive coach simply because he tried to bring the ethos of the NFL to the school (if you want to be competitive, your coaches need to be getting money incentives from agents in exchange for putting them in touch with your players). Because of that decision, University of North Carolina football now looks like a rank amateur in the big-boy high-stakes world of university sports.
(Much more broadly and notoriously, of course, UNC couldn’t even run the bogus players’ curriculum all other seriously sporty universities have figured out to how run.)
The NFL, perceiving Blake’s talent, has now brought him in as defensive line coach for the Buffalo Bills. Blake tried to introduce professional standards to UNC, but UNC wimped out. Their loss. His gain.
Things have taken a sinister turn at Boston College, where despite raking in huge yearly sums simply by being in a big-time league, the entire university, starting with its president, is suffering from ACCedia – the dark night of the soul in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Unlike its sister affliction, acedia, which refers to a “gradual indifference to the faith,” ACCedia involves a gradual indifference to being a fan. The money’s still coming in, the games are still being staged, but no one cares, and almost no one shows up in the stands.
Allow UD to draw from her years of experience writing about university football and basketball in order to suggest some reasons for this strange turn of events.
The big glaring reason is this one: You’re either willing to give your full soul over to football, or you are not. You’re either fully committed to your completion percentage, or you are not. You’re either willing to spend most of your school’s money on athletics, admit academically unqualified players, and wrest all control over sports decisions from the school’s president, or you are not. Boston College languishes in a limbo of less than thorough football fervency.
To be sure, BC is doing some things right: It has appointed as the highest-paid person at a Catholic college a man whose every other word, on national television, is fuck. “[The football coach’s] profane sideline behavior [was] most damaging [during] a nationally televised loss to Notre Dame at Fenway Park, first when a camera focused on Addazio shouting the F-word, then when he received an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty for berating the officials.” You want a Christian role model at the very top, a signal lesson in how to behave if you want to earn the lord’s rewards, and Steve Addazio fits the bill.
And you want to schedule hard-hitting games.
In one of BC’s most embarrassing episodes last season, the Eagles defeated a stunningly inferior team from Howard University, 76-0, the game shortened by 10 minutes because of the mismatch.
That’s the kind of gladiatorial combat that puts butts in seats. Another way Addazio is earning his money.
But utter spiritual alignment with football does not end here. “God does not want you for a fair-weather friend,” as Marilla says to Anne at Green Gables farm, and the Boston College community has not yet learned this lesson. Being a fan is not merely about cheering on wins; it is about cheering on losses as well. If you cannot maintain enthusiastic faith in a team that loses most of its games, you are demonstrating a fundamental incapacity to perceive the divinity of sport.
The solution must begin in the soul – the collective soul of Boston College. UD suspects, for instance, an insufficiency of gridiron liturgy during public worship at BC. At every possible point during the mass and other sacred occasions, football (and basketball, if there’s time) should be invoked. BC has much to learn from Notre Dame here. And from Florida State.
The reporter tells the story straight, without a hint of irony: Football and basketball success has created a $1.2 million deficit for the obscure, already-struggling, school. SOU didn’t figure their teams would actually win games; it has no reserve fund; it overlooked the fact that almost no one buys tickets to its games; and it seems to have forgotten to budget for team travel. SOU also forgot that the school is located in a state whose constant economic turmoil means constant cutbacks at its public universities. Whoops!
No, no irony detectable in this article about it from a local booster rag; and certainly no derision, which is abundantly deserved…
Paging Bernie: How are you planning to sell America on your free public university tuition plan when this is the way public universities spend our money?
How much more explicitly, how much more eloquently, can you say football school?
And we do mean “bend” – as in, at the University of Tennessee, bend over and take it. If Peyton Manning wants to sit “on the face of a female athletic trainer, bare-assed, spread wide,” the job of the female trainer is to lean back and take it, and the job of the university is to destroy her reputation for failing to take it.
It’s simply not possible to overstate the scumminess of the University of Tennessee – an entire university which bends to it.
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UD to Tennessee: Enjoy your lawsuit.
The Pitino dynasty is at it again.
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A father and son named Pitino
Ran two basketball teams molto fino
A whorehouse, sex tapes
And assorted odd scrapes —
It’s a screenplay by Q. Tarantino
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UD thanks John.
A handy cheat sheet. But even if you follow this stuff closely, like ol’ UD, it’s impossible to keep up.
Bravo, Theresa Hayden. She teaches Human Trafficking at the U of Smell, and since a form of HT is happening right under her nose (one of many smells emanating from the U of Smell), she has decided to add to her syllabus the book chronicling the provision of women for campus basketball players and recruits and the recruits’ fathers in the players’ now-notorious dorm.
The book’s co-author is the madam who, in association with an assistant basketball coach no longer (ahem) at UL, coordinated the buying and selling.
Because it’s a required class text, Breaking Cardinal Rules: Basketball and the Escort Queen does not appear as one slender singular upright copy among many other texts in the store; multiple copies loll sideways in the course stacks, making a striking statement…
From lemons Hayden has made intellectual lemonade; within a culture of smutty conspiratorial silence (similar to the silence that hushed up Peyton Manning‘s university past and the more recent rapes at Baylor University) she has taken a principled stand that will help her students absorb with dispassion the enormity of what the president of their university has allowed the institution to become. She has done what professors do.
But then the New York Post is a mean old tabloid… It headlines a story about the latest woman puncher at the University of Tennessee
TENNESSEE FOOTBALL CESSPOOL
YIELDS ANOTHER SHOCKING ARREST
But if the University of Tennessee and what its scholar/athletes do amounts to a cesspool – and it does; we’ve followed UT for years on this blog – how can the latest thing, which isn’t even all that violent by UT standards, be, as the Post goes on to say, “shocking”?
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Peyton Manning shoving his anus and testicles in a woman’s face – now that’s shocking. That’s UT-grade shock. This latest thing is just a lil ol hiccup. By UT standards.
Absent proof of “willful misconduct” by Pitino, forcing him out could leave U of L on the hook for the balance of a contract that runs through the 2025-26 season at a cost of roughly $50 million…
Having accumulated enough wealth to market two Florida homes for a combined asking price exceeding $30 million, [Pitino] can probably afford to negotiate an exit package without hardball haggling…
Thus does the argument that football builds character again come under fire.