University Diaries » “A half-empty stadium is unacceptable.”

UD loves to chronicle the intellectual life of her beloved country, as it plays out in our universities.

U President Vows to Push for Stadium Liquor Sales, for instance, is a headline that says so much about the preoccupations of our highest-ranked academic officers; and then there’s the University of Houston’s leader – Coach Herman – whose threatening language to UH students about their unwillingness to attend football games makes us all wonder what he plans to do if they continue to act like students rather than fans.

UD totally understands the coach’s desperate rhetoric: UH just spent $128 million on a new 40,000-seat stadium, and at best it’s half-filled on game day. Of that half, I’m figuring not many are students, and, well, the conceit here is that university football has something to do with university students. Like, the university is giving students this incredible experience – Adzillatrons shrieking ads at them, drunks with guns, I dunno, but IT’S TEXAS for god’s sake where up north a tad from Houston they spent sixty mill on a high school football stadium that has never been used because of structural flaws and no one seems to mind about that! Build another one!

So what’ll coach do? Bring in the Attorney General! But no – the AG’s a Baylor man, and anyways he’s gonna be (cough) a little too busy to deliver a spanking to the many thousands of Oppositional Defiant Disorder sufferers on the UH campus…

UD thinks the best idea is to perform pre-frontal lobotomies on the noncompliant students. Of course they would have to be sedated first because no one is going to want one. They’ve all read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But the lobes are coach’s main enemy here, and the medical school is just sitting there.

UD proposes this tag: A half-empty stadium: Unacceptable. A half-empty brain: Acceptable.

The reality is that UH would only have to perform one, maybe two, for students to get the message.

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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
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