… down by the Riverside.

A UC Riverside professor looks at the very simple, very stark numbers and comes to the obvious conclusion. Time to lay your burdens down.

… UCR’s athletic program is costing students $3.3 million dollars (2011), and the university $8.4 million dollars.

Ticket sales? $96,322, or well under 1% of the program’s cost.

Contributions? $623,561, or about 5% of the program’s cost.

In the last five years, UCR has seen large academic budget cuts, furloughs, on-and-off freezes on hiring, a huge rise in temporary faculty, and ongoing cuts in staff. Student advisors, for example, handle 400 to 600, or even more, students each. Yet athletic spending never stopped growing, and the university is now spending over $11m annually of state and student funds, according to the NCAA’s figures, on athletics — and that’s before the costs constructing and operating a new facility.

… [T]he NCAA as a whole is mired in scandal at a time when most universities don’t make back more than a fraction of what they spend on Division I (see Rutgers for examples of both), and big-ticket athletics is getting more and more costly every year. When staff has to ration their services to students, when faculty have to pay for their own office telephone lines, and when students have to pay more and more every year, the ever-rising additional cost of participating in Division I rather than Division II seems like a luxury we simply can’t afford.

That scandal thing is important. It’s rarely mentioned when people talk about what big-time sports are doing to this university or that, when they talk about specific dollar costs here and particular academic frauds there. This professor reminds us that we should never forget, as we focus upon the latest Penn State, that the largest picture here involves a lucrative, fully corrupt, and fully cynical industry centered in the NCAA.

Indeed, Americans are well on their way to fashioning some of their universities after the even more cynical and corrupt professional sports organizations.

Look at the University of Georgia, which will almost certainly choose a new president with the same total-insider commitment to the NCAA as the last one had. The University of Georgia, whose post-tailgate filth routinely destroys the campus and really who gives a shit.

I mean, few people on campus give a shit; when sports is all you care about, the despoiling of an academic institution by gallons of piss left after thousands of drunks careen back into their cars after games is nothing. So what.

Yet there is a larger world out there, watching this; and, of course, every year, as the stakes get higher and things get more corrupt, the scandal-factor grows. UD has predicted that in not too many years coaches will on some campuses be promoted to university president – an obvious move, an obvious acknowledgement of their financial, institutional, and political power. Academics at such places will become even more laughable than they already are; coaching salaries will soar; violent players – now treated not as demi-gods but as gods – will get even more difficult to handle.

Mild warning shots of the sort we’re getting from people like this UCR professor will be ignored, ridiculed, dismissed. It will be interesting to see, as universities sustain far more serious fusillades, whether attention will eventually be paid.