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Any university president who says this should be fired.

“Do I think that salaries are too high nationwide? Yes, I certainly do, but we can’t control the marketplace,” Boren said.

Boren is David Boren, current president of the University of Oklahoma. And what he’s doing is called passing the buck.

Actually Boren can, to a remarkable extent, control the marketplace. Rich brainless schools like his (see also the University of Alabama), who care only about sports and therefore offer millions of dollars to coaches are the leading edge of the salaries problem. They’re setting the pace, see.

Boren should check to see whether he still has balls. If he does, he should take a stand on the issue.

The problem is not that abstraction, the marketplace. It is that very real entity, the greedy coach and the greedy coach’s agent.

Now y’all sit down with those people, see. You tell them you’re a university, not a football field, and you tell them what you think a reasonable salary for a coach – as opposed to your university’s president, or, say, the president of the United States – would be.

‘Course, here comes another non-abstraction: Your paralyzing fear of your student body and your alumni. You’ve let their moronic passions overrule your sense of what the university should represent. You say to them I’m gonna stop the madness right here right now.

They say to you You’re out on your ass.

So what? So what, Boren? So you take yourself out of the president’s office and you write a book about how you were sent packing from an institution of higher learning because you wouldn’t pay a football coach five million dollars. You give interviews. You make a little documentary. Whatever. You piss off a lot of stupid people who, because they’re both stupid and pissed off, unwittingly reveal all sorts of other scandals at the university, sports related and non sports related. A big ol’ mess, like the one going on at the University of Illinois right now.

See now, that’s a good thing. That’s changing the world for the better, Boren, and I seem to recall you used to be a politician with a modicum of self-respect and a desire to make the world better.

Margaret Soltan, June 26, 2009 8:06PM
Posted in: sport

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4 Responses to “Any university president who says this should be fired.”

  1. Bonzo Says:

    It really is sad these university presidents don’t have, as you so indelicately put it, cojones. The same arguments can be made about their own salaries. One Gordon Gee, a serial university president since infancy, makes considerably more than a mil at the Ohio State University.

    Our own CEO makes about 3/4 of a mil and claims that the Regents made him take it. Apparently they are under the illusion that if you pay a president a lot of money, he will then be a great president. His mouthpiece reported that OurCEO quite surprised to learn how much he made [sic].

    And so it goes.

  2. theprofessor Says:

    Boren has an incurable case of Oklahoma Derangement Syndrome, UD. This is one altar call that won’t be answered.

  3. Michael Says:

    John Wooden’s top salary at UCLA was $32,500. That’s about $125,000 in today’s dollars.

  4. University Diaries » Presidential Depravity Index Says:

    […] Spanier, Holden Thorpe, Gordon Gee, Donna Shalala, David Boren – As Chief Inspiration Officers of football factories, these leaders have taken whatever […]

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