Well, you get what you ask for.
For the last few weeks, this blog has been following the tanking fortunes of jockshop Washington State University — as in, pretty bad school stays pretty bad because it’s a jockshop and jockshops are notoriously subject to the contingencies of the college sports industry and therefore keep suffering financial crises. Forget academics – little to see there. Forget student morale – low to vanishing. And why? Because the big money goes to greedy coaches and heavily indebted sports construction projects, and because the school keeps soaking its students for outrageous athletics fees.
And by the way forget reputation: Under Mad Dog Mike, the lads on the football team have really been pulling out all the stops student-assault-wise…
But then when you consciously appoint as president a major NCAA macher, what do you expect? The school is clearly being run for the pleasure of boosters (I guess; I really don’t know who’s happy about the sort of school WSU is, with the exception of the guy at the top who chairs the NCAA board of governors), and as the shit hits the fan we’re beginning to hear from oh I don’t know professors and students … They are not happy.
They might begin by asking who appointed as president of the university a person who could certainly be expected to pee his pants over sports and sports alone.
Administrators have asked students to consider paying an additional $50 per semester to help bring the athletics department into the black. The department has been operating at a $13 million deficit since 2014, partly because of higher coaching salaries, an expensive new football facility and lower-than-projected TV revenue.
The selfsame malsain Mike must be fed, or he’ll take his … curious… ways elsewhere…
One student pithily sums up the way WSU is being run:
“When was the last time you went to an expensive steakhouse, ordered more food than you needed and gave the bill to a stranger on the street?”
Mad Dog and Mr NCAA are certainly getting overfull meals every day. Let the students pay for it! Leach, that builder of young men’s characters, gets close to three million a year (with assorted perks thrown in), and as more players get arrested and pummel undergraduates we can expect that salary to rise like crazy. Five million in two years? Almost certainly. Let the students get pummeled and let the students pay for their pummeling.