Sometimes a little phrase, a little sentence, slips by in the media stream and makes you sort of sit up a bit…
But anyway. Quarterback, sexual battery… Assault is of course a long UF tradition. Back in ’09, UD even wrote a song about it.
Let’s jump to how much the good people of Florida will now spend to get rid of the UF football coach!
Muschamp’s salary is nearly $3 million a year, but if he is fired without cause, his contract will net him $2 million for each year afterward through the 2017 season.
This blog has followed the ever-tanking fortunes of dropout factory Chicago State University forever. So scandalous is this joint that its faculty have begged for the entire board of trustees to be dumped.
Faculty members have also started a great blog, Crony State University, where the endless degradations of life under a North Korean style dictatorship are chronicled.
One of many similarities between CSU and the DPRK is their shared belief that their university/country is the best in the universe, that life there is glorious, that other universities/countries look enviously upon their magnificence and seek to emulate them, etc.
This attitude makes the troubling persistence of internal dissidents an unendurable insult to the Mothercampus. The dissidents (as one of the CSU blog writers – attempting to respond rationally to the charge of sullying – notes in my headline) must be publicly shamed. They cannot be allowed to continue making slanderous statements such as this:
[B]y the end of [CSU’s latest] disastrous presidency in 2016, the school’s enrollment should decline to around 4,000. Obviously, the question of how long the state will allow Chicago State to exist as it hemorrhages students is one that all of us should consider.
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Today’s Chronicle of Higher Ed (UD thanks a reader for forwarding this) (oh, and you need to have a subscription to read the article in full) takes note of the the latest hilarity at CSU: The trustees have closed the faculty senate.
That’s it. Out of business. Shut the fuck up forever.
Onward, brilliant peace-loving masses of CSU!
… you don’t want to look too closely at some of your biggest donors (Steve Cohen, Zygi Wilf).
UCLA‘s biggest donor is also kinda grody – but in a very Hollywood way [scroll down for Colbert Report segment]:
Best of all of these guys is California media mogul David Geffen… ‘These are designed to look like garage doors… But … they’re actually sealed shut.'”
All pretend! But law-abiding ordinary people, Geffen knows, assume they’re real. And therefore the dupes obey the… law…
Charlie Weis. The now-fired Kansas football coach didn’t do much winning on the field in Lawrence (6-22) — but has any coach ever benefited more financially from not winning?
Kansas buyout. According to published reports, Kansas will have to pay Weis $5.625 million to fulfill his contractual buyout.
Notre Dame buyout. The Fighting Irish canned Weis in 2009 after he went 35-27 in South Bend over five years. According to a USA Today report, the total price of Notre Dame’s buyout (which is ongoing) of Weis will be $19 million.
Almost $25 million. By my figures, that means Charlie Weis will make $24.625 million over the course of his life for not working/getting fired.
Scales fall from another hedgie’s eyes.
For the first time in my life, I’m having to question whether Michigan truly is different from all those other large, state universities that let their hugely profitable football programs pretty much do what they want.
David Westin, principal, Witherbee Holdings, LLC, burst with pride when his university was run by the team of corporate board slummer Mary Sue Coleman and her hugely expensive/shady businessman/ coach-crush, Rich Rodriguez. This was fine, fine, quite in keeping with the ethos of the greatest of academic institutions… Michigan under Rich – UM had to lose him as fast as they got him, what with all the bad publicity, and losing him cost them millions and millions too – was light years away from, say, Alabama and, you know, all those other sleaze schools …
But now! Westin is shocked – shocked – to find concussing going on in here.
There’s a reason UD could only find one reference on this blog to UL. It’s incapable of making its bad behavior interesting or original or even quirky.
Its corrupt engineering professor was corrupt according to every well-established rule of corruption. He brought absolutely nothing new to the table.
Likewise, one of its linebackers has just been arrested for – get this – domestic abuse battery.
And yes, in answer to your next question, a surveillance camera saw it all.
Beats the shit out of his girlfriend in front of a camera! Wow. Tell me another.
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This, however, is truly new, and UD is loving the way guys all over the place are doing it. This new confessional prose genre – Football Batters Me and Batters Me and I Still Keep Coming Back – is a brilliant thing, it’s a girl thing that boys do, it’s lighting up my life. I am so not yet tired of these essays. Bring ’em on.
… are one of life’s great comforts, a way for millions of readers to feel reconciled to their own, more obscure, resentments. France has Valerie Trierweiler, England had Diana Spencer… and Canada currently has a former university leader, Arthur Porter, playing this important social role…
Arthur Porter? You remember. Once head of the entire McGill University hospital system, Porter will go on trial (as soon as he loses his extradition fight) for having stolen zillions of dollars from said university (massive construction project; kickbacks). He has spent his prison time in Panama profitably, penning The Man Behind the Bow Tie (Gordon Gee’s going to have to find another title for his tell-all), an attack on the cynical mercenary world which has consistently misconstrued his idealism.
UD‘s keeping an eye on Porter because she is beyond excited at the prospect of his trial, and she is truly, well, resentful that his lawyers keep unextraditing him. But…
All in good time, my little pretty — all in good time….
Talk about going cosmic. UD, loyal readers know, uses a phrase – going cosmic – to describe the polemical move in which you escape doing anything about a given problem by moving to so vast a level of abstraction about it as to allow pointless, perpetual, dithering.
Of course, pointless perpetual dithering is the Knight Commission’s middle name (UD has attended her share of Knight Commission gatherings, featuring pep talks by such luminaries as Penn State’s Tim Curley), so you’d expect the person who runs the show to say something like University coaches make so much money at a time of dire financial problems at universities that it makes you want to… to… to pose the question Why does college athletics exist?
… They got so many good things! Got Gonul Colak.
(Well, his name don’t show up on their finance page, so I guess they ain’t got him anymore.)
Almost got a chiropractic school – the same good ol’ boy who now runs the place backed it big time (he was then a trustee) – but outraged actual scientists on the faculty managed to shut down the idea. Bet it gets a second life, now that the good ol’ boy who backed it runs the whole joint.
On top of all that good stuff, they got the wonderfully named Sanford Lovingood (see his sun-kissed, kinda-ashamed mug shot here), FSU booster club comptroller who has been stealing hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars from fan donations.
Oh, but don’t call it stealing. Lovingood had in mind to pay every penny back:
He told investigators [he] planned to repay the money by willing property that he owned back to the Boosters.
See now once he died and all he was gonna give FSU his, like, his houses and all..
Robert Maynard Hutchins, founder of the University of Chicago, … famously said: “The present primacy of public relations in the management of universities, the view that they must ingratiate themselves with the public, and in particular with the most wealthy and influential portions of it, the doctrine that a university may properly frame its policies in order to get money and that it may properly teach or study whatever it can get financed — these notions are ruinous to a university in any rational conception of it.”
She found it in a solid presentation of the Steven Salaita debacle at the University of Illinois.
Well, China has Hong Kong… I guess this is what social unrest looks like in postmodern America…
UD will admit she’d enjoy seeing a vast street demonstration made up of No Beach Access billionaires…
Meanwhile, UM’s Potemkin president – some random dude with a PhD – does nothing. He’s still trying to absorb the fact that this is the way his academic institution treats the brains of its students:
[Concussed Michigan student] Shane Morris didn’t need a hero coming to his rescue. He needed someone who cared about him as a person, cared enough to pay attention to the damage he was suffering on the field. Shane Morris needed a Michigan Man on the sideline, but all he had was Brady Hoke and the stooges on Hoke’s staff.
… at one of this country’s highest-profile universities:
…[Discontents] consider his inability to formulate coherent thoughts a sign of a lack of intelligence and competence. Interpreting [University of Michigan football coach Brady] Hoke’s intentions … circles back to a Chauncey Gardner–esque mystery that has always surrounded him. Stupidity, which used to be the main charge against Hoke, now turns out to be his best defense…
This is how you measure what big time sports has done to the American university. Once-proud University of Michigan, of all places, is ruled by an idiot.
Fewer and fewer Michigan students attend football games, and when they do, they boo their WAY expensive coach as he puts a concussed player back on the field…
Strange, the business of being a University of Michigan student. For your own good, because you’re so enthusiastic about the experience, the place hits you up for athletic fees galore and pays its coaches three million dollars a year…
Yet you are either withdrawing from the game day experience altogether, or booing the coach when you attend.
Strange.
