… jockshops, as this blog routinely does. It’s another thing to see the inner workings, to get an intimate sense from deep within (kind of like that film UD saw when she was a tyke… Raquel Welch was in it… Takes you inside the human body… Ah yes here it is: Fantastic Voyage, 1966… ), of how universities almost entirely about football actually work.
Drawing your president from team players is a popular first move. If you can’t make a jock president, find a political hack who graduated from your school. Make sure the bulk of your trustees are ex-players or peeing their pants with excitement boosters. Direct almost your entire budget to football.
A state-of-the-art football stadium set [the University of Akron] back $62 million and has yet to return a dime. Attendance is literally the worst in the nation in UA’s division. During the six seasons since InfoCision Stadium opened, the team has 16 wins. That’s $3.9 million per win.
For example.
Within these broad parameters there’s room for improvisation, for a nimble ability to as it were catch the toss when new opportunities arise.
Take Florida’s Jacksonville University. The president, who played baseball for the school, is dealing with the aftermath of the school’s recent decision to give virtually all of its campus-wide “leadership” scholarships to football players. Calling them “leadership” was a smart move, since that removed any pesky academic component; directing them almost entirely away from the non-football-playing student body — “football players accounted for nearly 70 percent of all leadership scholarships available, and 90 percent of the award’s total purse” — was pure genius, the sort of thing you need when “low enrollment numbers at the school [made it hard to] bring in enough athletes to fill out both varsity and junior varsity teams.”
I’m not sure what went wrong there, by the way. Everybody agrees that big sports programs guarantee big enrollment boosts.
So well it’s tragic. Punishments have been forthcoming, they have to come up with another way to pay football players to come to their school, and they’re not going to be able to compete in some playoffs. On the bright side, though, Jacksonville University remains a school exclusively committed to the well-being of its football team.
August 2nd, 2015 at 10:39AM
Long, long ago we had non-scholarship football, until in a moment of brilliantly cynical sanity, then-President Nutkicker abolished the program–or rather, “the faculty” did. “The faculty” decided that the program was not financially sustainable and had to go, so the administration knuckled under to the professors. In real life, of course, “the faculty’s” involvement in the decision was tangential, but this usefully deflected the blame away from Nutkicker and his posse.
As is the case with Jacksonville, when we did have non-scholarship football, we had a large number of players with mysteriously generous financial aid packages compared to non-athletes with similar academic credentials and family incomes.
August 3rd, 2015 at 11:50AM
Although I’m sure you also slander institutions on the regular, for the purposes of the blog, you libel them.
dcat
August 3rd, 2015 at 11:54AM
But the larger point holds: Stadia are almost never worth it. You may want them for a host of purposes, and maybe (though rarely) the team itself (pro or college, though almost never in the latter case) might benefit. But when universities/states/municipalities engage in the stadiums-will-make-use-rich Underwear Gnomes myth, it’s always a farce. Every serious independent economic study, including perhaps most crucially studies of studies, reveals this. How on Earth the University of Akron could think that the money train was ever around the corner is astounding to me, and bespeaks a nearly incomprehensible level of delusion.
dcat
August 3rd, 2015 at 1:07PM
Derek: You’re right. Libel, not slander.
August 3rd, 2015 at 6:00PM
Derek, our local Podunk Tech recently reported a figure for academic year campus visits that appears to be completely implausible. The cost of challenging an “incomprehensible level of delusion” is often way too high for most people, the benefits too uncertain. An implausible meme will go viral within the institution, will be used as the basis for decision-making, etc. You either cave and break out the Jim Beam, or walk, or something.
August 5th, 2015 at 10:28AM
Tell you what Derek, kinda of hard to slander/libel institutions which were busy defrauding their students. I would suggest very strongly that you become familiar with the New America Foundation’s 2007 report on university financial aide officials investments in student loan originators, specifically, University of Southern California, Columbia and Johns Hopkins, for starters. That’s just the start. Then come back and tell us all about slandering those yobbs….
August 5th, 2015 at 10:55AM
By the way, some of you might be interested in the mechanics of increasing student debt and university building projects…
http://www.cucfa.org/news/2009_oct11.php
UC Berkeley admins were claiming poverty, all the while, issuing public bonds for building projects of dubious academic value….