… its This Is Madness article and sticking it on Page 1A again. UD remains baffled as to why none of these articles (here’s a good one) (what the hell – go to town) tells you why this is going on — the degrading, bankrupting business of new stadiums, multimillionaire coaches, and expensive conferences.
As UD has pointed out before, it’s because the people who run these particular universities cannot think of anything else to do. They’ve already pretty much dismantled their universities as, say, teaching institutions… Everything’s online, or bogus… Their ideal student, their big man on campus, is Johnny Manziel, held up by Texas A&M’s chancellor as a model for us all. Or Richie Incognito, loved up as much by the University of Nebraska as Manziel was by Texas A&M. Did these universities help or hurt Manziel and Incognito, with their veneration and love and no classes and don’t bother graduating and feel free to beat up our students and sell merchandise and reel around being a drunk motherfucker? Have you followed these men’s subsequent careers in the NFL?
If these universities could think of anything to do with their money other than put on games and recruit criminals and destroy players’ lives, don’t you think they would? This is the only thing they can think of doing. This is what they think a university is.
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Since we’re all remembering David Bowie today, let’s remember what he told us.
On the whole, you know, this whole world is run by brutes for the common and the stupid. Frankly.
The highest profile, highest paid representative of the University of Louisville, the front man of that university’s front porch, the keeper of the keys to the UL whormitory, has now entered the moment in his long day’s journey when he wanders onstage and, like morphine-addled Mary Tyrone, speaks his delirium. It’s curtain-speech time for Rick Pitino.
As locker rooms full of guilty and embarrassed journalists look on, Pitino floats into – as the Chicago Trib puts it – “an alternate reality,” in which he confesses that he has had it with a world intent on sullying his purity. He has brought to university sports the same saintly ways of Joe Paterno, and, like Paterno, has been done in by Assistant Coach Iago Hitler.
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Bides there a university somewhere in this tumult? No. So editorials of this sort, which reference things like presidents and trustees, are a waste of time. The University of Louisville is an empty stage on which its coach struts his last.
… the art of argumentation.
Arguing in favor of increased taxpayer subsidy of the University of Hawaii’s pointless, corrupt, and wasteful football program is not going to be easy. Argumentation-wise, you’re going to have to lift your game as high as you possibly can. You’re going to have to stand on your tippy toes. You’re going to have to reach for reasons as you’ve never reached for reasons before.
It’s not surprising, then, that a local columnist fails to make the case that the governor was wrong when he recently denied the school three million additional athletics dollars. But the way he fails is instructive if you’re interested in how to write polemically.
The writer’s particular challenge is that he has absolutely no empirical evidence on his side. Almost no one goes to the games. Ever. The team is wretched. Consistently. The flagrant mismanagement of the program makes it a statewide embarrassment.
If he is going to get anywhere in making his case, he’s going to have to go straight and hard in the direction of total bullshit.
People disdain bs, but when you’ve got nowhere else to go, it can be very effective. If the subject is football, it means getting weepy and huffy and patriotic and mythic and misty-eyed as you recall past heroes on the field, the character-building power of teamwork, and the way your own university experience would have been hollow without crisp fall afternoons cheering on the lads. This approach will appeal to the typical reader’s sentimentality about football even as it allows you to sidestep the, uh, reality problem.
This particular writer opts against bs, which leaves him flailing. It leaves him to make the case against his argument. Let’s take a look.
Here’s his opening move:
[A]lmost every university athletics program in the country loses money. The debt is chronic, structural.
So … give your tax money to UH till it hurts? Because we won’t be on board with the national project of bankrupting schools via their big sports programs if we don’t? You wouldn’t want Hawaii to be left out of America’s ongoing chronic structural football indebtedness, would you?
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Next move: If you don’t stop refusing to attend UH football games, you’re going to force UH to shut down the program. Then where will you have not to go on Sunday afternoons? The writer describes this terrifying scenario in appropriately terrifying terms:
UH [might have] to disband all or parts of its intercollegiate sports, including of course, football. That is a university’s nuclear option. Whatever they think of football, no university administrators anywhere want to be the ones who drop this bomb.
University administrators everywhere dream nightly of shutting down their football programs, so this wasn’t a good place for the writer to go. Again, the principle here is do not try to make your argument reality-based if you don’t have any reality-based arguments.
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The writer’s next move reminds us that within the category bullshit, there is good bullshit and bad bullshit. By the middle of his essay the writer has commendably turned to bullshit, but he has chosen bad. Let us see if we can follow his serpentine reasoning here.
“It is a matter of setting priorities,” [the governor] told the newspaper, as if we are talking about Political Science Department office supplies. “If UH wants athletics to be a priority, then it needs to come up with the money.”
Very tough-lovish and totally misguided. [The governor] sees the problem as a budgetary issue — a cut here, a paste there, get off your okole and do your job.
Because athletics is completely different from anything else at UH, different rules should apply.
Solving the deficit should not be on UH’s priority list at all because the deficit is the community’s and by extension the Legislature’s problem, not UH’s.
Working her way through this extraordinary set of claims, SOS concludes that the writer is saying the following.
The University of Hawaii is a conduit, a vector, a vessel, through which the football-demanding citizens of the state are granted football. The citizens demand it and the state uses their tax dollar to provide it; UH just sits there fielding a team. Therefore money must come from the legislature, not from, say, UH ticket revenue ($0).
This argument combines the reality-based mistake (no one in the state demands football) with bad bullshit (football is a public good like the railroads – the writer compares university football to Amtrak).
SOS did find one good use of bs in this piece.
Is UH football one of these valuable endeavors worth subsidizing? If the politicians think so, then they should step up, allocate the money, and defend their choice.
Be accountable for your decisions and don’t make the university do the dirty work for you.
If the Legislature or the governor does not want to take the heat for bailing out athletics in this way, fine. But don’t pass the buck and blame UH for your lack of will.
This is great because it is both emotive (government pussies!) and totally madly insanely unreality-based (martyred UH is forced to take the fall for being a faithful public servant in the provision of football). Wow.
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In concluding his essay, the writer brings out the big guns.
[The governor is] putting a nail in the coffin of the university.
And why? Because he is allowing UH autonomy, the bastard.
On the surface, [the governor’s] comments support the university’s flexibility. But what he is actually doing is stressing its flexibility to do things it really does not want to do.
… “I think the university should take responsibility and make a decision about what is important,” [the governor] said to the Star-Advertiser. “If they are unable to do that, I’ll take back all the authority to line item the budget. I’d do it in a second … I’d love to do that.”
… Overall, the governor’s views have a patronizing, dismissive dad-to-teen quality.
He makes it appear that UH may not have the courage to make hard choices.
Anyone who has followed the story of the University of Hawaii for the last ten or so years (put University Hawaii in this blog’s search engine) knows that on every level it is among America’s most dysfunctional public university systems, with scandalous ever-shifting leadership, endless financial and athletic misdeeds, supine trustees, and put-upon students. The evidence is overwhelming that what the governor hints at is right: UH lacks the intelligence and the will to govern itself.
It is bad bullshit for this writer to complain that a university which deserves to patronized is being patronized. It is positively Orwellian for him to say that a university which lacks the capacity and the courage to make even easy choices has the courage and capacity to make hard choices. Where is the chorus of Hawaiians outraged by the governor’s actions and comments in regard to the state’s university? If you took Amtrak away, I think you’d hear about it from a lot of Americans.
Rather than struggle against his absence of all grounded argument, this writer would have done better to focus relentlessly upon the transcendent glory of football, adding here and there some abstract anti-government references.
University coaches have now determined the precise series of plays that will put them in good football position. You start conventionally, coaching your scholar/athletes in aggression and speed.
Gradually, though, you start phoning it in, creating panic among the trustees as the team loses a game here and a game there.
When it becomes clear that the team might not make some playoff, the trustees begin pissing their pants. Despite the fact that they owe you millions and millions on your contract, they tell you to walk away.
Bloodied but unbowed, “proud of all we did here,” you graciously withdraw.
The endgame’s the most fun of all. Your staff of financial advisers and attorneys now milks the clock on your contract, threatening lawsuits, threatening to disclose things about the program that would cost it more than Jerry Sandusky’s Penn State if they were known, threatening, threatening, threatening. So the university trustees, who were figuring maybe they could (with their own advisory team) stiff you here and there on a payout/settlement and halt the bankrupting of the school, totally cave and give you a huge fortune.
You take all the money (if this series of plays has been performed at a very high level, you’re trailing tens of millions of additional dollars from previous firings) and spend the rest of your life working on your chip shot.
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Let’s have no resentment of this free market course of affairs. You’re a student bartending in a bad neighborhood late at night to pay your tuition, and taking an overload of courses during the day to graduate faster and more cheaply, and it turns out that one of the main things your grueling and dangerous labor pays for is a deadbeat coach. But your university is run by rational people who have the best interests of people like you in mind!
Changing coaches has minimal, if any, impact on team success. Among the worst teams …those that changed coaches won about the same amount over five years as those that didn’t. For mediocre teams, those that changed coaches actually fared worse.
Beautiful front porch, wake unto me,
Look how you’ve beautified old USC.
Major corruption since 2010
And now a lawsuit from Sarkisian.
Beautiful front porch, millions to pay
To get Sarkisian out of the way.
Salary, bonus, settlement too
Then the same story with somebody new.
Beautiful front porch, how you do shine!
Making me proud of this great school of mine.
Millions for coaches, nothing for me
Beautiful front porch of old USC.
But why save academics? When you live in an appallingly apathetic state, a state actively hostile to the mind, why have public universities? America is a big rich country crawling with universities – I’m pretty sure almost everyone in Louisiana has the means to get in a car and drive to a neighboring state. Almost everyone in Nevada or Montana or New Mexico can do the same. Designate certain states university-free zones and have states near them extend in-state tuition arrangements to people from those states who want to attend a university.
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No, no, UD isn’t proposing doing away with the football teams in the no-go states. Keep the teams, and keep “university” in their names. Since football is the only university thing state residents like, maintain state subsidies for it. No one will complain, especially since whatever state funds designated for universities still exist could now in their entirety be given over to the football team.
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If you fail to adopt this approach, you risk the circularity exhibited in this amusing Times-Picayune opinion piece, which calls for Louisiana State University football players to threaten a strike in order to save the university as an academic institution.
If star players could be persuaded to demand greater funding for our school, the public would listen and respond. Better yet, if … the football team [would] threaten a strike until the governor and legislators fully fund the university, we could achieve transformational change.
After all:
Many fans don’t care about the quality of LSU’s academic programs. They don’t care if the school cannot attract and retain top professors. They don’t care that many young people are leaving Louisiana for schools in other states because of uncertainty about our higher education system.
What people do care about – and deeply – is college football. In fact, many people support LSU’s academic mission only because they know that hiring a few hundred professors and instructors is the price they must pay to field a football team. As you and I know, many fans regard our institution as a sports enterprise with History and English departments on the side.
Which begs a question. Why be compelled to order with your meal sides you don’t like? I’ll have a football team with… Do I have to order sides? Yes, you must order two sides. Let’s see… English… History… Do you have any non-academic sides? No. Okay… Give me English and History but just a little bit …
Time to change Louisiana’s menu to cheeseburger cheeseburger cheeseburger.
[T]here is nothing funny about playing [University of Massachusetts] home games in sprawling but nearly vacant Gillette Stadium …
Au contraire, the situation at U Mass, with its new law school (LOLOLOLOL) and way gussied up football program and ongoing tradition of student rioting, etc., etc., is hilarious.
Those who criticized the [football program’s] upgrade were ridiculed in 2011 as small-minded, anti-football or lacking in school spirit. Nearly five years later, everything they warned about has come true: low attendance, a nomadic existence that includes games at a cavernous stadium too distant for students to attend, spiraling costs…
A university composed of nomads wandering to cavernous stadiums. That’s funny.
As another uncertain offseason begins … the questions about the expanded, much more expensive UMass football program continue to be less about where they should play FBS football, but why.
Why? Let me help you with that one. I quote an earlier University Diaries post:
U Mass Amherst has arguably the most violent student body in America. The post-game riots there are terrifying. But if you take away that important emotional outlet for the large numbers of drunken bullies who go to school there, who knows what they’ll do instead?
You wouldn’t want the mobs going after the (shudder) professors, would you? Who’d teach the courses?