Football brings so many obvious gifts to universities – broken budgets, academic fraud, a chance to become intimate on a daily basis not only with the local police, but often with the FBI… But there’s a more nuanced sort of gift football offers academic institutions, and this has to do with the atmosphere, the ethos, the gestalt, of these intellectual settings. It involves bringing coaches to campus and giving them the highest salary in the state and allowing them and their staff to impose Stalinist standards on student journalists.
Here are two of many examples of authoritarian coaches trying to shut down a free press at American universities. I mean, of course we know that virtually all university football programs refuse to discuss – or only very selectively discuss – their budgets (Penn State, before it was forced by circumstance to disclose all sorts of things to the world, was notoriously paranoid about any form of disclosure); but here we’re talking about the actual bullying of a free press.
The latest case of this activity – ever so slightly at odds with the nature of universities – has occurred at the University of Kansas, whose football coach is touchy about the fact that he’s doing a wretched job, and who considers campus journalists the functional equivalent of cheerleaders. This post’s title quotes a commenter on an article about the coach’s efforts to intimidate a staffer on the KU newspaper, and indeed the situation is very simple and very familiar from other big-time sports schools: You bully people on the field, you bully people off the field. Name of the game.
The coach tweets his incredulity:
Team slammed by our own school newspaper. Amazing!
Whoever heard of a university newspaper criticizing its own football team?? Amazing! So the coach had his staff tell the reporter he’d better shut up if he wants continued access.
As Deadspin puts it:
Weis is off to a 1-4 start in his first season at KU. Here’s a change in tone, Kansas: The shitty, incompetent coach of your shitty, incompetent football program had his pwecious fweewings hurt by the fucking school newspaper, and in response, your idiot factotum—instead of telling Weis to shut the fuck up and to concentrate on not losing by 40 to State next time—decided to be a smarmy, bullying little PR shit. Way to go, assholes.
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UD thanks Dave.