… its This Is Madness article and sticking it on Page 1A again. UD remains baffled as to why none of these articles (here’s a good one) (what the hell – go to town) tells you why this is going on — the degrading, bankrupting business of new stadiums, multimillionaire coaches, and expensive conferences.
As UD has pointed out before, it’s because the people who run these particular universities cannot think of anything else to do. They’ve already pretty much dismantled their universities as, say, teaching institutions… Everything’s online, or bogus… Their ideal student, their big man on campus, is Johnny Manziel, held up by Texas A&M’s chancellor as a model for us all. Or Richie Incognito, loved up as much by the University of Nebraska as Manziel was by Texas A&M. Did these universities help or hurt Manziel and Incognito, with their veneration and love and no classes and don’t bother graduating and feel free to beat up our students and sell merchandise and reel around being a drunk motherfucker? Have you followed these men’s subsequent careers in the NFL?
If these universities could think of anything to do with their money other than put on games and recruit criminals and destroy players’ lives, don’t you think they would? This is the only thing they can think of doing. This is what they think a university is.
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Since we’re all remembering David Bowie today, let’s remember what he told us.
On the whole, you know, this whole world is run by brutes for the common and the stupid. Frankly.
January 11th, 2016 at 4:38PM
UD, without doubt, the bulk of this nonsense is primarily the fault of admins/BOT. But their customers are FAR from a discerning lot.
https://youtu.be/g2QJ8F2QwVU
If students want the I’m Schmacked producers to feature their school, they have to prove they’re fully capable of being a Top 20 laid, loaded and drunk institution. Admins have no problem with the Utube series because it’s an outstanding advertising tool. The reason I featured San Diego State is that more than a few of my Oregon hs students knew of SDSU’s party reputation and were willing to pay nearly 3x more tuition to attend a CA public uni unremarkable for academic rigor.
I’m not a blue nosed biddie intent on maintaining my notion of behavior. I wasn’t much different than any of these kids. But my generation knew you didn’t need to take on massive, unmitigated debt in order to become a demigod of debauchery. Find a job, move in with friends, get faded as much as you want, with no loans. Thing is, unis cannot promote outstanding scholarship in order to attract the bulk of their undergrads. All that’s left is the current strategy of demanding little to no hard academic work in order to facilitate what is featured in the vid. And if any 20 year old is too jacked up to understand how they’re being scammed, then it’s not too difficult to understand why they would celebrate emotionally unstable athletes adorning their campuses. This is what they wanted, and this is what they’re getting….
January 11th, 2016 at 4:42PM
Here is part of the issue, UD — at the very upper echelons these football programs are effectively private endeavors. I suppose technically any money that comes into the University of Texas football program, say, is kinda sorta technically “public,” but it is such its own entity that it neither uses nor needs state resources as we commonly understand them. The same is the case for Alabama and a handful of others. So that leaves other schools scrambling to compete in a context within which they DO need those state resources, those student fees, those publicly funded stadia. Texas A&M almost surely uses minimal to no state money, and so forth. In other words, at the very upper end these places are so disconnected from the universities to which they are supposedly attached that they really might as well just go private. It’s maddening, but also seems unlikely to change, even if Clemson’s students saying “thanks but no thanks” to an athletics fee — and having the AD recognize it — was a modest coup for the good guys.
dcat
January 11th, 2016 at 5:02PM
but Derek ask yourself where does this necessity/imperative to keep up with the evil empires come from?
the sad truth is that too many of the land-grant schools strayed from their founding missions and quickly turned into diploma mills, part of the why can’t we have nice things phenomena with public goods in the US, just look what they are fighting to do with national park lands out west…
January 11th, 2016 at 5:55PM
http://www.omaha.com/huskers/blogs/the-husker-football-team-is-worth-how-much-a-whole/article_4455eb96-b8a3-11e5-bcb1-139c08bf66c2.html
January 11th, 2016 at 6:18PM
dmf — I’m not agreeing with the arms race, just recognizing that it exists.
January 13th, 2016 at 8:19PM
Of course, you have to wonder whether any of these almost private football teams would actually be making money if they had to pay their players, could not get tax deductible donations, take advantage of subsidized loans, free ride on other university departments, etc…