It’s gone way past Orwellian in Pullman Washington, where the most criminalized football team in the country, Washington State University, enjoys high praise from the police chief even as his officers keep arresting its players. The team’s coach, a big-mouth bully trailing accusations of player abuse from coaching job to coaching job, is loudly and persistently outraged that his guys, currently subjecting the WSU student body to torture and disfigurement, should be arrested at all, given that most of this stuff started during fights and other people were also fighting but his guys were picked up just because everyone knows who they are and just because they’re the biggest so they inflict the most damage.
Add humongous, ever-growing student athletic fees, and you’ve certainly got a creeping Ick Factor problem on that campus…
WSU is becoming a kind of laboratory for an emergent reality in American football schools. Until now, we’ve been told to regard player violence on many football campuses as a sometime thing – this domestic violence, that armed robbery, that melee, that beat-up freshman. The coach’s job was to be the wounded daddy, disappointed that junior had misbehaved. The player disappeared and we went on with the show.
WSU shows us how this picture has evolved. The coach has gone from disappointed daddy to belligerent defender of violent people. Sure, they’re violent! But so are a lot of other people, and if other violent people aren’t arrested, our guys shouldn’t be.
The violence itself has become less individualized and more team-centered: Attacks aren’t just one lunatic like Richie Incognito; they’re now liable to be three or four players working as a … team. Which is how schools like WSU rack up national most-arrested titles.
Everything’s getting more explicit: Under pressure from splashy New York Times exposés, police departments like Pullman’s are more likely to actually arrest players.
And though schools keep trying to fudge the numbers, huge spikes in student fees to pay for the glorious athletics department have not gone unnoticed.
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UD thinks Mike Leach, a very high-profile Donald Trump supporter, knows exactly what he’s doing. Once a man like Trump is elected, the sky’s the limit.
September 19th, 2016 at 10:23AM
You’ve not commented on the UNH bequest by a librarian, which was squandered on a football scoreboard.
September 19th, 2016 at 11:11AM
gasstation: Yes. I read the story shortly after it came out, and you’re one of a number of readers who have noted that I haven’t commented on it. It was indeed immediately attractive to me, and I started working on a post; but then I reviewed what I’ve written about UNH – overwhelmingly a jock/party school – and it occurred to me that the librarian, having worked there for decades, must have known that if he didn’t specify otherwise the school would definitely use much of his money for sports. He did designate a bit of it for academic purposes, and UNH honored this. But given the choice, given any significant funds, a school like UNH will devote much of the gift to athletics, and again this man must have known this. So I conclude that there’s not much of a story here really. They did what he must have known they would do, and it must not have bothered him.
This report seems to confirm my sense of this.
Everyone’s projecting like mad in the face of the poignant photo we’ve all seen of this pale solitary thready guy whose ghost must feel betrayed by the non-library-like destination of his hard-won million dollars. We are I think sentimentalizing things. He did exactly what he wanted.
September 19th, 2016 at 4:43PM
UD, I would not jump to the conclusion that simply because someone has worked somewhere for a long time means he or she actually understands or is willing to admit the nature of the place. We have a significant number of people here at the 30+ year mark, both faculty and staff, who seriously believe that academics is the #1 institutional priority. When confronted (these days, almost on a weekly basis) with clear evidence that athletics, other extracurricular activities, and administrative fantasies are in fact far ahead of academics, they either rationalize it as a special case or close their eyes. Lucy is eternally snatching the football away and our institutional Charlie Browns are equally eternally lying flat on their backs and thinking the next kick will be different.
September 19th, 2016 at 4:52PM
tp: I take your point. People in universities stubbornly believe that they are people in universities, and it takes a whole lot — you have to look like Auburn on steroids — for many people to “admit the nature of the place.” In this case, however, he seems to have both figured out the nature of his campus and to have rather embraced that nature.
September 20th, 2016 at 9:15AM
Whoops, this was for the thread on the librarian!
September 20th, 2016 at 10:45AM
tp: Yeah I saw that. Too late to change. We’ll just have to confuse people.