You got a problem with that?

Good Christian school rejoice!
With heart and soul and voice.
Give ye heed to what we say:
News! News!
Settlement is reached today.
Lots of cash has been dispensed
Ukwuachu won’t play defense.
Settlement today! Settlement today!

Although he never played a game
He’s brought our school yet more infame
Than we endured with Elliott.
News! News!
We covered up as best we could
Til justice caught us up but good.
Smile, Smile and silent be!
Wait out this ignominy.

[Trevone] Boykin was so aggressive that officers had to threaten use of a stun gun for him to calm down.

Texas Christian’s quarterback is totally ready for the Alamo Bowl day after tomorrow!

UD‘s nephew Andrew sends her this John Oliver clip about the NCAA.

The clip ends with the March Sadness video game, which features not only players, but coaches and administrators (the title of this post comes from the administrators part of the game).

What’s the craziest school in the world?
Clemson U Clemson U
What’s the nuttiest nut in this wonderful world?
Clemson U

Captain of US News
Lord of the fifty-yard line
Flyer of private planes
To get football’s finest to sign

Who’s the slimiest rat in the pack?
Clemson U Clemson U
Who’s unthinkable
(U!)
Who’s unsinkable?
(U!)
Whose existence is totally stinkable?
(U!)

… 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?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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, 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.

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

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.

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

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?

FSU’s president John Thrasher looks forward to his, uh, troubled school getting far more publicity than it already has: A film about it – The Hunting Ground – has made the shortlist for the best documentary feature Oscar.

The hilarious details of the national student athletics fee scam can be found here. Most fun section:

[One University of Kansas student] wonder[ed] why the [athletics] department needed $50 from each student every year in addition to ticket payments.

In two years, Kansas athletics spent $9 million in severance on fired football coaches Mark Mangino and Turner Gill. When [the student] did not notice any corresponding layoffs or cutbacks, he decided to do some research.

He reviewed financial statements that showed Kansas athletics income rose from $50.8 million in 2005 to $93.6 million in 2013. In early 2014, [he] sent a 35-page report to the student senate, arguing that the fee, which produced about $1.1 million for athletics, should be eliminated.

“Students were seeing a rise in tuition, more student debt . . . and the athletics department was making more and more money every year. It just didn’t seem like they needed it,” [he] said in an interview.

[His] report was persuasive. Students voted to kill the fee.

Here’s a professor at UC Chapel Hill who thinks that his institution having wasted ten million dollars on its latest sports scandal is impressive.

Over $5 million went to Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. The folks at Skadden, Arps got a couple million more. We paid $1.3 million to Bond, Schoeneck & King; another million to Baker, Tilly. Almost double that amount went to Edelman, a giant PR outfit, offering expertise on “corporate reputation management.” FleishmanHillard raked in almost $400,000. You’d think the Old Well had relocated to Madison Avenue.

Yadda yadda. It’s like Dr Evil threatening to “hold the world ransom for… one MILLion dollars!” These are pathetic sums.

Penn State has so far paid out $93 million in its sports scandal. Talk to me when you’ve hit fifty mill.

**************
UD thanks John.

Some American universities have become little other than full football stadiums; others, like the University of Hawaii, take the opposite approach: empty.

Think of someone who buys a Hummer and spends tens of thousands of dollars a day filling its tank — only there’s something wrong with the tank, and no matter how much money the Hummer owner spends on fuel, the tank is always totally empty. At UH, the football stadium’s capacity is maintained at empty through vast punishing institutional expenditures (“dismal academic reputation”).

The school’s latest plan to keep the stadium doors open to no one is to double student athletic fees.

Although the fools in flower shirts who run UH see nothing wrong with this picture, students are upset. As this post’s headline, taken from the school newspaper, suggests, students have run the numbers and correctly concluded that the university cannot afford to field a team and therefore “UH needs to close the financial black hole that is football.”

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

The problem is that UH is one of those schools about which UD has written for years on this blog. The flower shirt people cannot think of anything else to do. A university is a football team or it is nothing. It doesn’t matter if its team is nothing – an entity that gathers at an empty stadium a few times a year to throw a ball. That thing – that empty team in an empty stadium – is the university.

Since nothing comes of nothing, students are forced to be the something that keeps paying to top up the tank.

America’s rapeabilliest campus prayed for a president able to deflect relentless incoming sexual assault claims, and God gave it the perfectly named Thrasher — a man willing to spend his twilight years (he’s in his seventies) thrashing back and forth like Bonnie and Clyde in their 1934 Ford Model 730 Deluxe Sedan as one sex-bullet after another smacks him pow right in the kisser.

As they pass the turkey, students, faculty, administration and alumni can reflect with gratitude on the way Thrasher’s long career as a Florida pol and lobbyist, er, seasoned him for the curious job of chief academic officer at a school with virtually no academics and virtually non-stop rape claims.

FSU is the star of a new film; it’s featured in big splashy New York Times articles; and just this morning, as FSU football fans begin to dig in to the bird, news outlets all the country are headlining the just-released content of court papers that detail special treatment for football players accused of rape, the fear of retaliation on the part of victims, and… you know … just the whole stinky stewpot of a school that wants everyone to shut the fuck up so it can watch men bash each others’ heads in.

And sure – things are closing in on FSU. Even the DOE is after them for mishandling the assault claims. But did Bonnie and Clyde give up? Did they run and hide and try to live respectable lives? No! They were what they were unto the breach! Sic Semper FSU and amen!