You’re about to get a pious jock for your president. Your school is so horribly in debt that it’s laying off tons of people. Your job, as student, is to pay
$810 per student (roughly 10 percent of overall tuition), [which] goes from our tuition through the general fund to athletics.
This is from a 2012 article titled AS YSU CUTS ITS BUDGET, ATHLETICS GETS MORE.
The general fund of the university transferred nearly $8.8 million in 2012 to the athletics department, 5.5% more than in 2011, and in 2013 the general fund will transfer $9.06 million, an increase of 5.8% above 2012.
So YSU is set up nicely. A coach for a president. Students whose main function is to feed the sports program. Good set up for an athletics facility.
If on the other hand you’re talking university, nothing could be shabbier.
… A&M!
[Texas] A&M’s offseason transgressions are many. Starting senior defensive lineman Gavin Stansbury was arrested this spring on charges of assault on the Rice [University] campus. He’s fighting the charges. Two of Stansbury’s teammates, safety Howard Matthews and receiver Edward Pope, were in a vehicle with him when they were pulled over by College Station police, and Matthews and Pope each were arrested at the same time as Stansbury for prior failure to appear in court.
Receiver Ricky Seals-Jones was arrested this offseason on charges of disorderly conduct, but he’s also fighting the charges. Quarterback Kenny Hill, who’s vying for the starting job, was arrested on charges of public intoxication. Touted safety Kameron Miles was dismissed from the program in early March for what has been reported as theft.
Last year, about half of [Coach] Sumlin’s starting defense was suspended for the Aggies’ season-opening victory over Rice after various misdeeds in the previous offseason.
And hell we’re just getting started!
[Darian] Claiborne and [Isaiah] Golden [were] arrested Tuesday on three charges each of aggravated robbery stemming from a drug-related incident on May 23.
“An Investigation at the scene found that the three victims had entered into an agreement to purchase a quantity of marijuana from the suspects (identified as Claiborne and Golden),” according to a release from the police. “When the suspects arrived at the apartment to complete the transaction, one of the suspects produced a handgun, pointed it at one of the victims while the other suspect took the money that was present to purchase the marijuana.
“While this was occurring, one of the victims stood up from the couch and was struck in the face by the suspect with the handgun. The suspects then fled the area on foot and the victims notified police.”
SING IT WITH ME!
We are the Aggies – the Aggies are we
True to each other as Aggies can be
We’ve got to FIGHT boys
We’ve got to fight!
We’ve got to fight for Maroon and White!
After we’ve strapped on our bulletproof vests
We’ll strut around campus to show we’re the best!
For we are the Aggies – the Aggies are we
We’re from Texas AMC!
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UD thanks a reader.
Does it make sense for your university to have a president who doesn’t know anything? Who thinks that academics and athletics rise together? Who’s putting your school into deeper and deeper deficit because of this belief?
Fresno State’s president keeps the athletics program in deficit and continues borrowing – taking? – at higher and higher rates from the university. Sounds like a formula for academic advancement, doesn’t it?
An entire university as a temple of unreason.
… has been a particular problem at risible University of South Florida, where anyone trying to follow the huge initial salaries, huge buyouts, and hugely expensive new hires is liable to get whiplash. Between enraged trustees yelling off with their heads when coaches don’t deliver enough wins, and shit-faced coaches piling into their black SUV’s (“Car & Driver magazine’s official vehicle for the inebriated“) and weaving all over town, USF just can’t catch a break. Don’t even mention the coach dumped immediately before the drunk driver coach – the one that sent that naughty tweet.
USF is a sandbox full of hyper boys. Strange, for a university.
Veteran University Diaries readers know about what Scathing Online Schoolmarm calls coacha inconsolata – that form of local booster journalism that involves portraying football coaches who knowingly recruit dangerous criminals to our universities as suffering saintlike beings whose only motivation in these recruitments is a deep belief in The Ultimate Goodness of Man. When the dangerous recruits start doing what dangerous recruits tend to do – break the law and put everyone in danger – the local booster press doesn’t say the obvious, which is Why do we pay the highest-paid person on campus to cynically, with arrant disregard for the safety of our community, go to a lot of trouble to bring a very dangerous man into our midst? No, no. It always goes something like this:
Coaches like to believe … that they can rescue troubled kids, even save them. It’s a noble premise.
Far from being assholes who don’t care that they are exposing young and vulnerable people to hardened criminals (not to mention admitting people unlikely to take even one course with any academic legitimacy – but that’s a trifle here), these coaches are noblemen, pure of heart, so sure of the glorious transformative power of university football that they are willing to take risks other people won’t – they are willing to say Under the rap sheet of this running back beats the heart of a true gentleman, and though it won’t be easy I’m going to dedicate myself to finding that heart. Because that’s what Oklahoma State’s football team is all about – turning young men around.
And when the entire divinely-kissed scheme fails to work out, what then?
Why, coacha inconsolata, of course. His heart is absolutely broken. He is suffering.
“I think every campus has faculty members who are cheap dates when it comes to academic matters related to athletes.”
He said it; I didn’t.
Note that the author of this piece goes from calling professors who’ll do anything for campus athletes “friendly faculty” to “cheap dates.”
UD proposes that we take the matter one step further, from the euphemistic friendly faculty to the almost-there cheap date to the fully honest sports whore. (Functional equivalent of the much better known pharma whore.)
Plenty of sports factories have a well-established corps of comfort women among their undergraduates, students whose job it is to … entertain hotly sought-after football and basketball prospects. Not only should it not be difficult for us to acknowledge that there are faculty members similarly willing to do almost anything for the team; UD thinks that schools like Auburn and Chapel Hill should sponsor self-studies (these could be carried out by sociology professors, for instance, or psychology professors) aimed at illuminating the background and character type of faculty liable to corrupt the school by the irresistible force of their attraction to athletes. Once we know more about this segment of the faculty, we can institute some reforms. Like barring them from being faculty liaisons to the sports program. And keeping an eye on that curious course (Sociology of Communications Studies of General Studies of Sports Marketing) they keep offering.
Nah! The latest arrest was only for armed robbery and attempted murder! Wait til he actually kills someone!
Oklahoma State, which so avidly recruited the running back to its freshman class, has this to say:
An OSU athletic department spokesperson said a press release concerning the arrest would be posted as a general statement but is not expecting one to be issued at this time.
A general statement regarding the arrest… Hm… We see that one of our freshmen has been arrested for attempted murder… Hm…
But not at this time! No, not yet! Let’s wait until all the facts are in. Otherwise, we’re rushing to judgment, like those guys on our recruiting staff who said Whoa, maybe not this guy… Only eighteen and look at his priors…
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Sportsprose-wise, there’s some great shit here:
The accusations levied against Thomas are significant, and one can only assume that Oklahoma State might have second thoughts about him if he is ultimately charged.
Thomas has a ton of talent, but OSU can’t afford much bad publicity in the wake of an extensive expose released by SI.com regarding the football program last year. [Oy, don’t make me read all five parts again! Short version: OSU football stinks to high heaven.]
There is no question that Thomas deserves his day in court, however, he is faced with an uphill battle. This looks bad for him regardless, but perhaps he will be able to learn from it and become a better person moving forward.
What’s not to like in this prose, Scathing Online Schoolmarm would like to know? The last paragraph puts four cliches in two sentences and leaves us feeling warm and runny at the thought of how much OSU’s man is going to learn from having tried to murder someone.
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Only for those who think they can handle it: UD‘s chronicle of the last few years of sports life at one of America’s largest toxic dumps, Oklahoma State University.
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“For more on your favorite athletes and their troubles with the law, visit us at thefumble.com.”
“The large, well-funded universities have hired large compliance staffs who literally escort athletes to class each day to meet the increased requirements,” complains the latest president (before him there was Patricia Slade) of Texas Southern University, one of America’s most notorious dropout factories. TSU’s president fails to see why schools which happen not to be able to afford escorts should be punished by the NCAA for low grades among their athletes. This outraged columnist agrees that just because some schools can’t afford to service their athletes fully, that doesn’t make them lesser schools.
Oh wow, you’re right! I guess I wasn’t looking closely. A ‘student success’ fee forty percent of which went to the athletics program? My mistake. I’ll fix that right away.
Not real democratic, either – the fee was imposed without a student vote (for background on the fee in particular and yucky Arizona State in general, go here, here, and here), since they’d only vote against it… And as for its constitutionality, here’s the argument:
The state Constitution says that university “instruction …shall be as nearly free as possible.” The state Supreme Court has shied away from second-guessing the composition and cost of a college education, and how the costs should be allocated. But this fee is a clear-cut violation.
The athletic fee has nothing to do with the “instruction” a student will receive. Requiring that it be paid to gain access to that instruction, ipso facto, means that the instruction is not “as nearly free as possible.” It could be $150 closer to free.
Nor can ASU credibly argue that the athletic fee is a user charge, even though a certain number of seats at events will be set aside for students free of additional charges. After all, the fee replaces the ultimate user charge: If you want to see a game, buy a ticket.
The heart of this argument’s problem, of course, lies here: The athletic fee has nothing to do with the “instruction” a student will receive. The chair of the regents begs to differ:
There are no plans to end the athletic tuition waivers, he said. Sports is part of the universities, he said, just as the arts and the medical school are. ASU had 517 student athletes compete in nine men’s sports and 12 women’s sports in 2011.
“To think of sports as something that isn’t an integral part of the university is inappropriate,” he said. “Sports is part of the life experience we want people to have.”
Get it? The Dear Leader says thinking of university sports as in any way different from liberal arts or medical school courses is inappropriate and that sort of thinking had better be stopped right now. The Dear Leader wants you to have certain experiences and goddammit you’re going to have them, whether they’re only about coughing up money for other people to attend football games. Watching football games is part of your instruction at ASU, with the same status as watching a physicist lecture about the beginning of the universe. That’s just the way we roll in America’s stupidest state.
… grass. … They also apparently smoke it.
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“[I]f Weis is fired after this season, he will get paid around $24 million not to coach two football teams.”
Make it three, Charlie! Go for three!
In a rousing letter to the editor of the local newspaper (“If we aspire to be known as one of America’s great universities, we are going to need to act like we are one of those universities today! That is what is called vision! When we believe in our vision; when we support our faculty; when we support our staff; when we support our administration; when we support our coaches and athletic director; and yes, when we support our board of regents; success will be ours! It takes courage to stand tall in the face of criticism. It takes heart to support our student-athletes who are giving it their all, each time that enter a competition. It takes special people to take NMSU to a new place, and I believe we are in a place in our history, with people of passion, who can help us get there!”) the chair of perennial loser New Mexico State University’s board of trustees reminds his indifferent, pissed off community (i.e., no one goes to the football games, and everyone’s pissed that people like this trustee are bleeding them financially in order to subsidize an athletic program about which no one cares) about our old friend, Athletics as the Front Porch of the University. Nothing else has the capacity to receive the amount of media coverage athletics does! If you understood anything about marketing brands, you’d know that!
Chairman Mike overlooks – fails to mention? – what all anti-intellectuals who somehow end up running American universities overlook. See, branding goes both ways. All that attention sports gives you goes both ways. Don’t get it yet? Let me make it as simple as possible for you. When you’re like New Mexico State, and your sports program is profoundly, repeatedly, embarrassing, the embarrassment always goes way-national. Ask Keith Olbermann, who’s gotten incredible mileage out of NMSU’s pathetic attempts to get anyone – anyone – to sit through one of its games. Ask the ESPN anchors who covered a recent NMSU basketball game where the team and a group of fans responded to having lost (NMSU almost always loses) by rioting.
Ask anyone who has followed NMSU’s efforts to hire an offensive line coach (UD‘s not sure what this position’s salary is, but let’s guess around $200,000. In 2013, NMSU’s head football coach made $363,000.):
[Chris] Symington replaced Steve Marshall, and was the third offensive line coach over the past year for the Aggies. Symington departs as the second offensive line coach over the past year to never coach a game with the program.
Marshall, who replaced Bart Miller in January, departed the program for an assistant offensive line coaching position with the Green Bay Packers of the NFL.
The Aggies have had a revolving door at the offensive line post for a number of years. Prior to Marshall, there was Jason Lenzmeier (who was hired by the University of New Mexico following the 2011 season), Brad Bedell (hired by Arkansas State following the 2012 campaign) and Miller (hired by Florida Atlantic following this past season).
Considering Marshall’s sudden departure — he arrived in January, coached spring football with the program and then left — Symington’s hire appeared to be a good one.
Imagine all the money and administrative time that’s been taken up at NMSU with the saga of the vanishing coaches. I wonder why they all keep vanishing? And now everyone’s talking about the latest one, Symington, who looked so good…
Las Cruces police cited Chris Symington twice in a four-day span for huffing compressed air, the second incident unfolding Tuesday morning inside the bathroom of a Las Cruces drug store… Sunday night, Symington received his first criminal citation after a different LCPD officer found him “slumped over sitting in his vehicle and apparently having seizures,” a police report states.
That officer reported he saw Symington inhale compressed air from a canister.
Yes, when your university is so desperate to find yet another coach that you’re willing to scrape the bottom of the canister, nothing else going on at your university will receive the amount of media coverage the fall-out will.
Keep it up, NMSU! Go Aggies!
… or people will think that your institution’s tendency toward ignoring – enabling? – academic corruption continues.
So the new faculty chair at sports-fucked University of North Carolina Chapel Hill says the following:
“First and foremost, no one, there is not a single person in this University that thinks that what has happened is defensible or acceptable,” Dr. Cairns says. “It’s happened over a long period of time and all of the investigations that have been done have demonstrated that.”
This short statement includes an obvious untruth and a muddled attempt to say something good… But because it’s muddled it ends up sounding bad.
There are plenty of people at Chapel Hill who think it’s perfectly acceptable to suspend academic integrity for the sake of keeping big-time athletes eligible. UD is absolutely certain similar – but less outrageous – class activities are going on at Chapel Hill among coaches, professors, academic advisors, and players. So why should Cairns say otherwise? It’s obviously, on the face of it, wrong to say that absolutely everyone on that campus thinks bogus classes are unacceptable. Since all readers know this, Cairns’ comment is insulting to our intelligence.
His second comment is insulting to his intelligence. “It’s happened over a long period of time and all of the investigations that have been done have demonstrated that.” Yes. Right. Your university, where, you proclaim, there is not a single person who thinks bogus classes are acceptable, kept an elaborate system of bogus classes going for years and years; the professor running the bogus show was handsomely rewarded for years and years. Yes. So, uh, hurray? So God forbid the situation was just a fleeting anomaly?
Cairns needs a little pr training.