The savior of FSU endures yet more mocking.

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Lesson for FSU? Gotta keep an eye on the I-could-puke factor. Eventually your university gets so disgusting that you can expect these public outbursts.

Yes. Looked at with a smidgeon of rationality – not to say self-respect – the situation for students at the University of Akron (as at so many universities) is less than optimal. They pay a lot of money every semester in athletics fees. Yet they are not told how much, because the university doesn’t itemize the general student fee number. Ms King up there – a current UA student – would like the school to disclose this information so that she can get a better grip on the strange situation in which she finds herself: She’s a student at a school where interest in athletics is “poor,” but the money she and her fellow students cough up every semester is making the athletics program “rich.”

So lookee here.

UA estimated that $400 of the $428 fee per semester goes for athletics.

Wow. That’s a lot. In fact, UD thinks UA should be honest and rename the UA “student fee” the “athletics fee” because who’s kidding who? Basically the whole thing goes to athletics. You pay close to a thousand dollars a year at UA to support a sports program about which you probably could care less.

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Now in Virginia things have gotten to the point where politicians are stepping in. Their effort to cap student fees will go nowhere, but it’s certainly suggestive that the House majority leader is at least giving the cap idea a try.

“In Virginia, only about 3 percent of college students will play intercollegiate athletics. But mandatory student fees account for, on average, 69 percent of athletic program expenditures,” [Kirk] Cox said. “In other words, we are asking non-athletes and their parents to cover two-thirds of the cost of college sports. In my view, we simply cannot ask students who will never play a minute of college sports to bear such a disproportionate share of the costs associated with these programs.”

I mean, it’s already so classy to subject examination students to camera surveillance…

You might as well also hire coaches who show them how to cheat the surveillance…

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Sure, I hear you. It’s expensive! Plus it’s absurd! The university is spending immense sums of money to install security cameras all over the place, plus it’s spending immense sums of money on athletics personnel who train athletes to cheat the cameras!

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It’s getting so you’ll be able to tick one of three boxes on your annual giving form.

Where would you like your donation to go?

____ the greatest need
____ surveillance cameras
____ cheating the surveillance cameras

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The most sacred phrase in the contemporary university athletics playbook is online independent study. Those three words will make the Lord’s face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you, and grant you peace.

[The fixer] wrote down the player’s online log-in and password, and completed [the player’s course] by himself.

The setup was so simple…

He made some students believe they were completing the classes, handing them packets of practice problems he had picked up from the math lab at his community college and making sure they logged time in study halls as if they had done the work. After they finished the packets, he would toss them in the trash. Then he would log in to BYU’s website to complete the real assignments.

Such compassion! Let the little ones believe they are going to college!

… Virology.

A local newspaper does an end of the year tip of the hat to one-hell-of-a-mess South Carolina State University. Although basically bankrupt – financially, intellectually, and certainly morally – it continues to spend money it doesn’t have on athletics.

I mean, SCSU has no money at all. It’s tens of millions of dollars in debt. It’s on probation. Its board chairman’s on his way to jail, and its chief counsel just got six months’ probation. The state’s going to give it some bail-out money, but it won’t be enough, and students are fleeing in droves.

But the games must go on.

And that’s the kind of decision-making that earns you one of the highest salaries in the state of Mississippi!

[Just-recruited quarterback Chad] Kelly faces charges including third-degree assault, second-degree harassment, second-degree menacing, resisting arrest, fourth-degree criminal mischief, third-degree criminal trespass and second-degree obstructing governmental administration…

Including might mean there are (or will be) more than seven, which, if I’m counting correctly, is the current number. UD‘s gonna guess that DUI will show up at some point… Maybe some other stuff. So make it ten charges.

Now of course you’re bringing this young scholar to your university to take classes and consort with other students, mainly. I mean, sure, football, but the main thing is, you know, scholar/athlete. Occasionally a few universities do decide – as Nebraska eventually did with the now-famous Richie Incognito – that some of their players aren’t really enriching student life as much as one might have hoped. Let’s put it like that. Ole Miss might decide that.

On the other hand, they really need a good quarterback. Hm. Hm.

Incoming quarterback for Ole Miss shows his stuff! Gets drunk, beats people up, threatens to kill everyone with his AK-47.

Throw the bastard out, you say!

Well hold on, Miss Ole Miss.

This guy fits right in, on the field and off.

He’s aggressive. Goes after people. You want that in a quarterback.

He reportedly drinks like a goddamn fish. That’s the Ole Miss Way.

Fight song and cheer (sing it with me):

Forward, Rebels, shoot to fame,
Hit those folks and win this game
We know that you’ll fight it through,
For your colors red and blue.
Rah, rah, rah!
Rebels you are the Southland’s pride,
Take that gun and hit your stride,
Don’t stop till the killing’s done
For your Ole Miss.
Fight, fight for your Ole Miss!

GOT YOUR 47???
Hell yes, damn right!!!
Gonna shoot y’all to heaven
Who in the hell are we…AK!
Flim flam, BAM! BAM!
OLE MISS BY DAMN!!!

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UD thanks Dave.

You are going to love this account of life at a modern American university.

The piece is a review of a documentary about the amateur sportsmen at the University of Miami, and it touches on many significant aspects of contemporary American higher education. Some highlights:

…There are four main periods of time (with some overlap between sections) that the documentary deals with: (1) the Pell Grant Scandal and rebuild under Butch Davis through the beginning of the Coker Era, (2) the decline under Coker post Fiesta Bowl, (3) the Nevin Shapiro Scandal, (4) the continued malaise under Shannon and Golden…

[T]here was foreshadowing of tragedy a decade in the future, when … one of [football coach] Butch Davis’ disciplinary measures was to force players to give up their guns…

[The team’s downfall] started on the field with multiple brawls, and tragically spread off the field, with the murder of Bryan Pata.

One of the more chilling moments was Randy Phillips recounting the Pata murder, where he nonchalantly says that if he was there, things would have gone differently because he was always armed, and would have engaged in a gun battle with the attacker. It’s a stark reminder for sheltered fans that these players came from a different place. They moved to Coral Gables, they became Canes, but their past often followed them. This discussion is in stark contrast to Butch Davis’ disciplined approach where he tried to disarm, literally, the Miami players…

The severity of the Pell Grant scandal, with players being arrested, and an administrator being sent to jail for three years, with the loss of scholarships amounting to 31 is put up against a scandal that was all hat and no cattle, ultimately resulting in a loss of only nine scholarships…

A local letter writer in Fort Collins Colorado rails against Colorado State University’s decision to build a new football stadium. Yet UD wonders whether moral revulsion will really be what brings the college game down.

People seem to like watching hulks hurt each other. The younger the better.

I think it’s more likely that a simple, irreversible shift in techno-preferences will do the trick. The whole “being there” thing just isn’t working for people anymore. Showing up isn’t in the cards; watching at home while fiddling with social media is the new deal. With social media you create your own big viewing party, down your own liquor, avoid driving in heavy traffic and negotiating foul drunks and sitting on hard bleachers (while gazing up at the assholes in the luxury boxes) and enduring long vast shrieking ads on Adzillatrons, etc., etc. Nothing can compete with the capacity to control your own environment.

The local paper and some faculty and students at the University of Nevada Las Vegas are trying to attract some general attention to the state’s latest education-related embarrassment:

[T]he agency that oversees higher education in the state lifted large parts of an early draft of a think tank’s report word-for-word…

Their complaint features the Nevada System of Higher Education chancellor because he’s the one who should have humbly acknowledged when the story broke that his organization acted hastily in using another person’s writing (the writing seems to have been circulated in a routine, not-for-quotation, preliminary way), especially in the context of competitive bidding for state funds.

Plus, news-cycle-wise, it’s less than optimal that only a few weeks ago the system’s highest-profile university – UNLV – barely managed to fire a highly esteemed and compensated professor who has been plagiarizing pretty much everything he writes for about thirty years. The plagiarism was pretty well known… pretty well documented… but until the Chronicle of Higher Education began using a yellow highlighter on this guy, UNLV dragged its ass.. And even then, a member of the reviewing committee argued that he shouldn’t be fired!

Throw into the Nevada higher education mix that the only thing you consistently hear about universities there is that some jerks want to build a billion dollar football stadium (‘Kim Sinatra, senior vice president and general counsel for Wynn Resorts, said, “A billion dollars is a lot of money. If we want to spend a billion dollars on UNLV, is it a stadium?”’), and, well, nuff said.

It has always been this blog’s privilege to highlight notable events at our nation’s front porch, university football. The Cal Poly scoreboard conundrum is quintessentially one such event, combining the glories of game day with ponzi schemes, claw back, money-hemorrhaging litigation, and institutional embarrassment.

A big ol’ Cal Poly booster, Al Moriarty, spent $650,000 of a bunch of suckers’ money (investors included professors at the school) to get his name plastered all over the school’s scoreboard. Now that big Al’s in jail for the kind of massive fraud you can only perpetrate if you were a hall of famer and everybody thinks you’re Jesus Christ reincarnate, Cal Poly desperately wants MORIARTY ENTERPRISES off the effing scoreboard pronto.

Well but hold on. The trustee in charge of getting some money back for the suckers says Cal Poly should pay him to take it off. And a judge agrees!

Cal Poly cannot cover or remove convicted felon Al Moriarty’s name from the scoreboard at its football stadium, a bankruptcy judge ruled Friday.

… The trustee has argued that since Moriarty used investor money to pay for the scoreboard, those investors are entitled to get that money back.

And, see, if you let Cal Poly cover up the name, it won’t have any incentive to cough up the cash.  Plus seven percent interest.

EXTORTION! screams Cal Poly.

Oh shush, says the trustee.  Pay up and shut up.

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Details of the original agreement are fun to read. In exchange for handing his dupes’ money over to Cal Poly, Moriarty got not merely the scoreboard thing, but a guaranteed “feature on Moriarty in Cal Poly’s alumni magazine.” Talk about editorial independence! But UD is sure you don’t see that sort of money whoring at other schools.

“Hawaii athletics is important to the university but it is essentially important to the Hawaii community itself,” Bley-Vroman said. “The university doesn’t itself have a solution. I think that’s important to make that clear. Athletics really is a state-level problem. Not problem, opportunity. It’s a cool thing. We like it.”

Chancellor Robert Bley-Vroman babbles in front of a legislative committee, whatever capacity for rational speech he once had totally broken down by the bedlam of his university sports program. Essentially reduced to a few crazed administrators staging pretend Stevie Wonder concerts in a desperate bid to get someone to sit in their stadium, University of Hawaii athletics has lost all dignity. It has lost all capacity to do that thing most other fucked up athletic programs do: lie.

Most other programs can still keep going the lies about ticket sales, sources of revenue, players’ academic progress, etc., etc. But Hawaii can’t even do that. Hawaii’s a madman muttering to the world about its cool games, so important to Hawaii that no one attends them…

I mean, okay, right, sure, no one attends them! That’s why we’re always millions and millions in deficit and why it’s not a cool thing but a problem!

But not OUR problem. Oh no. You did it. The state did it. You have to solve it because we can’t because we don’t have any money and you have money and you have to give us the money. And we promise if you do that you’ll see an immediate turnaround and all the people who don’t give a damn about our stupid corrupt program will pour onto the field!

Sweating in his flower shirt, the university chancellor breaks down in front of the Higher Education Committee. It has come to this.

Says it all.

Bo Pelini is headed our way! We got ‘im!

WOW.

JUST WOWWWWW.

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All hail to thee O Cuntstown,
Our Alma Mater fair;
In sunlight and starshine
We see thee in all thy glory…