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.

… Cane.

(Mondo Cane.)

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Wow.

… Camera!

A retired professor from way down south testifies.

… the University of Tennessee staggers piteously along like O in her tiny mules and painfully cinched waist, America’s campus epicenter of sadomasochism.

Paralyzed by debt and despair –

Tennessee’s situation makes frighteningly clear the high cost of bad coaching hires, as the athletic department owes $7 million to recently fired coach Derek Dooley and his staff on top of $11.4 million paid out in buyouts to other football, baseball and basketball coaches. Declining attendance has also taken a toll on Tennessee’s financial situation as it has proven difficult for the school to fill the stadium when losses outnumber wins. Ironically, improvements to the stadium that sits partly empty helped drive the expansion of the debt.

– UT lashes out at others and itself in a perennial bacchanalia of desperate perversion. [Trigger warning goes here.] Its students inject themselves anally with alcohol. They lie still while fellow students pour hot sauce over their penises. They’re asking for it! If you won’t pour the Tabasco on the front, they’ll inject the Zinfandel in the back. One way or another, the University of Tennessee is going to punish itself for…

For what? O’s motives are notoriously obscure… Imagine trying to understand a drunk and masochistic institution that’s fucked itself over financially forever.

Maybe one good way to think about Tennessee’s current life of the mind is to recall another literary work – Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. Imagine that, instead of the reckless racing of cars, the Australians, as they await apocalypse, decide to fuck and suck themselves to oblivion.

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A reader sends in a limerick:

Does my penis go well with Tabasco?
Does this Zinfandel into my ass go?
Front porch or back door,
What college is for
Is much more than you learn in a class, bro.

We want our rights! And we don’t care how! We want our revolution… NOW.

Income inequality hits the American university! Sports slaves at Syracuse and Boise State are moving their slow thighs, and what rough beast slouches toward Alabam’ to be born?

Why do they have the friends at the top? Why do they have the jobs at the top?

Boise State’s president rages against the NCAA big boys muscling out mid-major programs like Boise State by making it more and more expensive for schools to compete. In a spectacular instance of the pot calling the kettle black, President Bob Kustra attacks “programs that look less and less like they bear any relationship to the university’s mission and role.”

Ah, mon Kustra! Here’s your school! Here’s your school! Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère! “It seems they are never satisfied with their bloated athletic budgets,” hisses Kustra, whose own budget bulges like an Idaho spud on steroids. Then he gets real high and mighty.

It is sometimes hard to believe that our finest universities and their presidents are behind this effort to fuel what the former NCAA President Myles Brand termed the “arms race” in Division 1 athletic budgets. You would think that the primacy of the academic mission and the long-held principles of amateur athletics would trump the drive toward commercialism and professionalism in the athletic department. You would think that university presidents would be up in arms at the way the NFL and the NBA use the universities’ athletic departments as training camps and minor league clubs for professional sports.

It is beyond me why university presidents are so quick to fall in line with powerful conference commissioners who seem to be calling the shots with these NCAA reforms. But I have no doubt why the power conferences are working to separate themselves from some Division 1 universities who still see the value of equity and fairness in athletic funding. Lately, those pesky mid-major programs such as Boise State and many others have showed up the big boys for what they are – wasteful models of athletic spending that cannot be justified.

Little late now to be moving them slow thighs, ain’t it, Kustra? You didn’t give a shit about evil commercialism until the big boys began making your school pay through the nose to stay in the big leagues. Now you sound like ol’ UD herself with all that excellent rhetoric about universities having something to do with academics.

Face it. You’re poor. And the poor stay poor. Accept your caste.

It’s a little late for Syracuse, too. Faculty there has finally decided to squawk about that school’s wasteful degrading ridiculous sports program. A local reporter talks to an economist who specializes in sports.

“Pay is up for coaches, pay is up for administrators,” [Andy] Schwarz said. “Athletic departments are hiring people, building new facilities. It doesn’t look like any losing business that I know of. But if you can say you’re losing money, there are a lot fewer questions. You don’t have people asking what you can do for them. The only people annoyed at you if you’re losing money is a few faculty members, and you can sort of manage that.”

At Syracuse four of the five highest-paid university employees are members of the athletic department, including athletic director Daryl Gross and women’s lacrosse coach Gary Gait. Gross, basketball coach Jim Boeheim and former football coach Doug Marrone all made at least $150,000 more in 2013 than they did in 2012, according to tax documents released by the school last week.

But the program’s losing money, see, so lay off, Little People of the Faculty.

Faculty of Syracuse University! You’re poor. And the poor stay poor. Accept your caste.

I know you don’t think so. I know you’re content to think of that state rarely … as a vague jewel set off to the left of the left coast…

But if you type Hawaii Athletics into this blog’s search engine, you’ll be shaken out of your vagueness.

Hawaii is after all a startlingly corrupt state, so you’d expect its university system to be a mess. And it is; it is a mess. But within that mess, athletics is a doubleplusgood mess. The people of Hawaii just bailed it out of its thirteen million dollar debt so as to clear the way for more astounding debt accumulation…

How do they do it? Well, no one goes to their games. So that would mean no ticket sales. And then there’s constant expensive mischief. Not just stuff that hits the national news, like the Stevie Wonder concert scam; we’re also talking NCAA rules violations and having to pay for internal investigations, etc., etc.

Hawaii’s athletic director, by the way, sure knows how to make a public statement. He “acknowledges” the latest NCAA investigation (this one’s of the basketball team) and ends this way:

Thank you for your understanding, respect and your continued support of University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Athletics. GO BOWS!

GO BOWS! We love ya guys, and this is just the time to say it! In deep shit with the NCAA again: Huzzah!

Tragedy in Texas as a brand new taxpayer funded sixty million dollar high school football stadium which “rivals college facilities in grandeur” is shut down because of structural flaws.

It’s impossible to know when the local lads will be able to concuss themselves grandeurly, since we’re talking years of complex litigation plus massive repair payments, some of which will almost certainly have to come from taxpayers.

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

Not that UD is really worried about whether local taxpayers will pay millions more to fix the stadium. Of course they will. Either you’re willing to pay through the nose to watch your kid get the shit kicked out of him or you’re not. In Texas they’re willing.

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

UD thanks JND.

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

More in the God Hates Football thread.

… on all counts of fraud. He’s a former football coach at the University of Georgia.

… that a particular sport makes you more likely to murder? Who said football makes you likelier to murder? UD chronicles the notable violence of the game and the off-field violence of some of the players… And since her blog is about universities, she regularly registers her incredulity that many American universities all but define themselves in terms of a game that notoriously damages the brain; but she has never suggested a link between football and murder.

Why then, in the context of Aaron Hernandez (who graced the University of Florida), does the Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins feel compelled to write the following:

Initially, Hernandez’s arrest provoked a number of commentators to associate his violence with NFL. But it doesn’t follow; if there was a real association between football and murder, there would be more Hernandezes. There is a huge difference between men who are talented at a violent game, and a man who is simply, viciously, senselessly violent. If Hernandez is guilty of these additional murders, all it proves is that NFL executives were as fooled as the rest of us by the blankness of his face.

I think this paragraph is worthy of a Scathing Online Schoolmarm scathe. Let’s see how Jenkins does what she does.

Initially, Hernandez’s arrest provoked a number of commentators to associate his violence with NFL. But it doesn’t follow; if there was a real association between football and murder, [Uh, hold on. Note how Jenkins subtly shifts from violence in her first sentence to murder in her second. I’m not aware of people saying football makes you a murderer. I’m aware of plenty of people pointing out the obvious, whether it’s boxing or hockey or football: Sports that put an amazing premium on brutality are likelier to attract and cultivate violent people.] there would be more Hernandezes. There is a huge difference between men who are talented at a violent game, and a man who is simply, viciously, senselessly violent. If Hernandez is guilty of these additional murders, all it proves is that NFL executives were as fooled as the rest of us by the blankness of his face. [This is a version of what SOS calls coacha inconsolata. Poor naive NFL executives! Can’t read faces! Because what you’re looking for in an NFL player is a warm vulnerable approachable sort of face.]

In a subsequent couple of paragraph, Jenkins attempts to refine her argument. Let’s scathe that one too.

Given football’s savage nature it’s tempting to draw a correlation between the NFL and violent crime. Throw in the fact that a lot of high-profile athletes have an undeniable romance with guns. Reuben Fischer Baum, a data cruncher who posts on Deadspin.com, found that NFLers are twice as likely as their male peers to be arrested on weapons charges.

But football by itself is not the culprit. In fact all of the rules of the game are oriented around preventing harm, and penalizing willful injuries. It’s a game of controlled violence, not uncontrolled. As Grossman has written, “the purpose of play is to learn not to hurt members of your society and members of your own species. In a basketball game, or a football game, when one of the players is hurt, the play stops.” A far more likely culprit is the sustained desensitization of video games and other forms of glorified media violence. Grossman argues these are “murder simulators” that actually award points for killing.

SOS loves this. Jenkins cannot avoid stating the empirical obvious truth at some point. Yeah, NFL’ers (and college football players) tend toward really incredible rates of violence. (It’s been a constant argument on this blog that the professional leagues are free to deal with the gun shit, etc., as they would like; but it’s obscene for universities to recruit it, valorize it, and expose their students to it.) But it ain’t the game! It ain’t that these players have been systematically rewarded – with incredible money and acclaim – for their bulk, their menace, their violence, as football becomes more and more violent. No. It’s… video games!

After all, football is fine; football has way non-violent rules.

This point reminds me of something Mr UD routinely does at the beginning of his Comparative Constitutional Law course. He reads to the students a truly inspiring Constitution. Beautifully written, guaranteeing all of the country’s citizens all sorts of excellent rights. Mr UD then asks his students to guess which country’s Constitution this is. They guess various advanced European democracies.

“Sorry, no. North Korea.”