Too much of nothing, or too much of less than nothing: However you slice it, intellectual life at your basic jockshop is, er, a bit off.
Courtesy of Charlie, a reader, there’s this local yokel update on Oklahoma University, long ruled by Gotta Love Em! David Boren, and absolutely drowning in sports revenue..
But now they’ve got a new president, and he seems to have decided that the next step is to move toward creating an actual university on the campus, where “OU is bleeding money while Sooner athletics swims in it.”
Bleeding how much, you ask? After all, the more successful the front porch of the American university, the more successful the university, and it doesn’t come more successful than OU’s athletic programs, so OU must be…
One billion dollars in debt.
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The yokel struggles with this. How can it be? His final line says it all:
We will wait and see what [this spectacular disparity] means, but it would seem to mean something.
I think we can do better than that. I think we can specify quite precisely what it means. It means OU is a football team with some sort of shabby deadbeat school attached to it somewhere. It means that, as a witty long-ago OU president once said of his school, “We want to build a university our football team can be proud of.”
But we don’t really want to, or at least David Boren didn’t want to. He wanted to soak his students for higher and higher tuition, and deny raises to his faculty, while paying top dollar – over the top – to coaches and their minions. Even as OU’s new president began making noises about how this wasn’t a great way to run a university, OU announced they’d just given the football coach a $1.7 million raise.
The only word for it is surrealistic: “[A]s the academic side of the institution finds itself in dire straits, Sooner sports sits pretty.” Academically, although OU designates itself a university, there’s no there there. The whole place is football. And if you think you can reverse that winning, nothing-but-football record, you’re nuts. The new president is about to discover what the word “culture” — make that cult – means.
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And then there’s also massively indebted Rutgers – though here the debt in question is athletics itself. Rutgers economics professor Mark Killingsworth, after immense efforts to uncover the actual numbers from a most unforthcoming university, concludes that
the real deficit for 2016-17 … comes to a total of $35.4 million plus $11.9 million, or $47.3 million — the largest deficit in the history of Rutgers athletics. Despite [President Robert] Barchi’s oft-expressed pious hopes for athletics self-sufficiency, the program has now blown through a grand total of $193.1 million in deficit spending since he arrived in New Brunswick.
Killingsworth concludes by stating the obvious – obvious to everyone but the president and trustees of Rutgers:
[A]thletics deficits take money that could have been spent on academics, and shamelessly raise fees and costs for students.
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Rich jockshop; poor jockshop. Don’t make no never mind.
June 26th, 2018 at 11:55AM
Yes, and in the case of Rutgers, to go from being a crash-test dummy for Penn State as an independent, to being a crash-test dummy for Penn State and Ohio State and Michigan and Wisconsin and … Minnesota?
June 26th, 2018 at 1:20PM
UD, it simply isn’t true the OU is ALL about football! The softball team is nationally ranked. In order to maintain that prominence, OU’s Board of Regents approved spending $22 million for a new softball stadium. They’re claiming it will be finest in the nation, doncha know. So , there….
June 26th, 2018 at 1:25PM
Charlie: You’re right: There is SO much more to OU.