… in which it’s vaguely noted that some university seems to have gotten itself into a bit of a fix money-wise… but oh well…
Southern Methodist University will lay off 100 employees by the end of February as the school attempts to cut up to $35 million in expenses.
SMU President R. Gerald Turner said in an email to SMU faculty and staff that the eliminations will allow more money to the university’s academic mission…
That’s right, just quote the man on that big ol’ academic mission at Southern Methodist University… Somehow (let’s not say how) Turner and others fucked up so badly that they’re firing people and they’re freezing hiring big-time… Texas-style big…
Perhaps an outsider’s perspective on SMU would help us get a grasp on things.
[SMU has] been notably vile ever since its long-ago death penalty, a signal distinction within a national landscape of dirty sports programs. SMU has not let the fact that the program remains moribund stop it from accumulating … a one hundred million dollar athletic deficit.
Nor has the fantastic campus culture of the sports factory faltered in the wake of SMU’s misfortune. Secrecy about the budget even as they soak the students for higher and higher athletics fees? Check. Sodden frat boys befouling all they touch? Check. Violent hazing? Check. I mean, that last one – hazing – hit the news today, but it got lost, since hazing and sexual assault and all that seem de rigueur, comme il faut and la chose normale at SMU.
How much more sordid can SMU and schools like it get? What can we expect in the next few years? Local journos will keep their traps shut, yes (here’s one local who tried gamely, as it were, to speak truth to the school’s booster-in-chief, but note how his questions keep provoking Soviet-era-style answers), but any significant newspaper outside Texas bothering to track SMU will easily expose yet another massive university scandal. Because keep in mind the context here. Even the local rag can’t help tacking this on to the very end of this article:
SMU in particular is feeling a squeeze from expenses including changing the school’s athletic conference, work to improve the school’s national presence and salary increases.
Those aren’t three different things. The fools think athletics is how you improve your national presence, and the crippling salary increases are largely about coaches.
So… in the new normal, which includes a deficit-ridden University of Texas athletic program, where’s SMU heading? A recent Chronicle of Higher Ed piece describes the now truly desperate financial situation for big-time university athletics, in which there’s a whole load of big new costs and
“States aren’t coming through with any more dollars, and student fees are largely tapped out,” [one observer] said. “It’s going to be a real challenge to figure this out.”
SMU isn’t going to figure it out. SMU is simply hopelessly stupid. It will keep doing what it’s always done – finance football games, throw tailgates, stagger about hazing people – until it runs out of money. Eventually its booster-in-chief (see above) will be forced to flee creditors. They will find him hiding out in a hole in the ground in his native village, à la Saddam Hussein.
January 16th, 2015 at 2:41PM
I expected better from SMU. Perhaps I was wrong.
January 16th, 2015 at 5:08PM
I am reviews editor for a journal. I have an SMU professor writing something for me and she contacted me to ask about formatting issues. She told me that SMU manages to spend plenty on football but the library cannot afford to subscribe to Taylor and Francis’ journals (for those of you not in academia, Taylor and Francis is a major, major publisher of scholarly journals).
January 17th, 2015 at 1:22PM
SMU has one more issue they need to deal with, namely their basketball team.
fansided.com/…larry-browns-smu…accused-ncaa-violations
The current bball coach, Larry Brown worked at Kansas and UCLA, and left before both those schools were hit with major penalties as a result of Brown’s cheating and infractions. SMU didn’t care about any of that, other than creating a theme park for debauched young men and sports, they don’t seem to care about much at all….