It’s a far less interesting place without the legendary Schmidly/Locksley partnership (read these posts if you haven’t just eaten); but, you know…
The shadow of your smile
When you are gone
Will color all my dreams…
The Locksley buyout and various Schmidly initiatives are gifts that keep giving… And of course when it comes to athletics in particular UNM continues really, really sordid, and things get worse and worse. Let’s quote a bit from a recent article:
In one of the poorest states in the nation, can UNM, which has only one of its 21 intercollegiate sports teams (men’s basketball) turning a profit each fiscal year, justify receiving well more than $2 million per year in state subsidies for athletics? Can it justify student fees totaling $4 million, a figure that has more than doubled in the past two years despite the objections of student representatives on campus?
The new Schmidly says uh I dunno… bad situation I guess but can’t do nuthin…
“The debt service continues to be a challenge for us,” [the athletic director] said, referring to paying down the $60 million renovation of the Pit four years ago. “The financial model was predicated on a naming gift…”
The perfectly named Pit is the basketball stadium. The morons who run UNM promised up and down they’d get some bank or pizza parlor to buy naming rights, only it didn’t happen…
I mean, the financial model?? What a great way to put it. This might be more accurate: I and the idiots with whom I play golf figured we might get the funding if we told everyone…
UNM students paid $1.9 million in fees for athletics in 2011-12, with a majority earmarked at covering the costs of student admission to sporting events.
Then, despite the objections of undergraduate and graduate student representatives, came significant increases in those fees. In 2012-13 the students paid $3.2 million and that figure was right at $4 million this past year (2013-14).
“Student fees have been a godsend for us the last couple years. But we, historically, have been on the real low end, and now we’re probably right in the middle,” Krebs said. “But I think there’s a limit to what you can put on the backs of the students.”
In 2012-13, six of the 10 other schools in the Mountain West Conference received more money from student fees than did UNM, as did nearby regional schools New Mexico State University and UTEP.
“I don’t see a huge increase in the student participation around fees, but I do think some nominal increases are probably in their future,” Frank said. “How fast and how much is something we’ll talk to the students about.”
The last fees went up without any talking to anyone. Students objected to them and the school said fuck you. Clearly student fees in years to come will be predicated on the same financial model.
“She might have thought it was ordinary practice, judging from what I heard, that some lecturers at other places also exchange grades for some beer,” Mr Nopporn said.
… Rediscovering Fuller: Essays on Implicit Law and Institutional Design, one of whose editors died on Flight 17. In his introduction to the book on Lon Fuller (Mr UD is one of the contributors), Willem J. Witteveen writes
[Lon Fuller] raised issues that are highly relevant to our own times – think, for instance, of the difficulties involved in designing institutions which are acutely felt in Eastern Europe; or, to mention another example, the difficulty of saying just what moral stance is appropriate and fitting for jurists who perform a social role as legislators or adjudicators, questions which are issues of contemporary debate in the Netherlands and the United States respectively… Especially at a time when too much attention in legal theory is addressed to problems of interpretation of law – to the point of assuming that all of law is in some way interpretation – Fuller deserves to be read for his pioneering work on legislation, the social basis of law, institutional design, and the moral responsibilities of lawyers.
Julie Brown, a UO spokeswoman, also notes the list included innocuous and generic items, including SpongeBob SquarePants, mayonnaise and the state of New Jersey.
… but in a world of cameras and tracking software, one does kind of wonder. As in the most recent high-profile … er, sign of the times, it’s just too easy to mount a camera. Cameras have caught students and professors hate-criming themselves; they’ve caught professors hauling all manner of university-owned high-tech equipment out of their offices… In the just-reported case of a University of New Orleans employee, tracking technology located a computer in his house, and then in a subsequent police search all sorts of other university goodies turned up there. Apparently the guy had just been laid off, and he decided to give himself the contents of his office as a going-away present.
Actually, this one was a two-fer: tracking and cameras.
Police said surveillance video captured [Walter] Brannon asking a custodian, who was not aware the man was no longer a UNO employee, to unlock his former office.
Brannon was able to remove two “large storage containers” before his presence was noticed, at which time he took a third storage container to his car, NOPD said.
After putting the third container in his car, police allege, Brannon told a UNO officer that he wanted to file a police report about property stolen from his office.
The property included two laptop computers, a cellphone, two tablets and a projector, police said.
Brannon refused to let another university police officer search the containers in his car for the missing property, saying he was “late for an appointment,” according to police.
When the latest technology collides with dawn-of-homo-sapiens intelligence, the results are not pretty.
… for another Sandusky go-round, this one focused on ex-president Graham Spanier, “charged with eight criminal counts, including child endangerment, perjury and conspiring to cover up Sandusky’s crimes.”
Penn State is awash in lawsuits and rancor, with no end in sight…
Like that of almost all of the big college football powers, its identity, to an unhealthy extent, is wrapped up in its [football] team…
Lawsuits, rancor, a board of trustees beginning to look like a mad tea party, and the re-deification of Joe Paterno…
So if you’re a Virginia Tech student, this is how it goes: Your money helped pay for the brand new multimillion dollar Adzillatron in the football stadium. But the Adzillatron (as this blog has for years noted) is an Adzillatron, and has as its function the relentless shrieking of commercials at you. For some reason, you don’t like relentless shrieking commercials, so you’ve stopped going to games to get away from them.
Now your highly compensated ADs and coaches have a problem. Either they lose a lot of ad revenue by cutting back on the shrieking, or they lose you.
Remember: They used your money to buy the Adzillatron last year. For years it’s been known that fans hate Adzillatrons. Even if it weren’t widely known, what does it say about your school’s attitude toward you that it’s sure you’ll be fine with relentless shrieking advertisements on immense unignorable screens?
I think it says that your school thinks you’re an idiot, ripe for any form of exploitation.
Oh, but now! Now, within months of its installation, it’s clear that you hate the Adzillatron so much you are fleeing the premises. What does that say about you? What is your university learning about you? That you’re not a sucker willing to endure any frequency and intensity of huckstering? So now, wisely and graciously, your new athletic director announces his discovery that you don’t like Adzillatron ads and he’s going to go easy on them… I mean, somewhat easy… Because after all he’s pretty trapped – you aren’t; you can flee – but he’s trapped. The school has bought the thing on the projection of certain ad revenues…
The lumbering mammoths are so desperate, they’re asking soccer consultants what to do.
Of course, consultants don’t come cheap. Expect your student athletic fees to go up to pay for them.
Teach naked, steal shit, and steal signs:
Why behavior so outside the lines?
Are you jumbled and jivey
‘Cause you teach at an Ivy?
Does the league make you out of your mind?
UD just scored “Solid Liberal” on the Pew Political Typology quiz, and she’ll certainly vote for Hillary Clinton (unless Elizabeth Warren runs); but let her say again that Clinton should stop taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from American universities in exchange for giving speeches on their campuses.
It doesn’t matter that she takes their money and puts it in her charitable foundation; it doesn’t matter that the universities get the money they give her from ticket sales and booster organizations. It matters that
1. large sums of money that might have been used for education – and, at places like SUNY Buffalo, public education – are being syphoned off for the use of a politician; and that
2. the outrageously inflated amounts – in exchange for Clinton standing up for thirty minutes or so and reading a speech someone wrote for her – make Clinton look as money-grubbing as Eric Cantor.
Tom Herrion was fired after four seasons as College of Charleston basketball coach with a 80-38 mark that included a downward slide (from 25-8 in 2003 to 17-11 in 2006)…
Herrion did, however, get a $787,000 contract buyout when the C of C fired him eight years ago. He got another $550,000 or so parting stash when Marshall University fired him months ago.
And if (make that when) the College of Charleston fires current coach Doug Wojcik for serial verbal abuse of players and others, he’ll get a major chunk of change (he’s owed $1.2 million on the last three years of his deal).
… is another term for political history in America’s most corrupt state, Florida. A kind University Diaries reader (UD thanks you) sends an update on the distress of faculty and students at Florida State University over having a political hack shoved down their throat for president (that would be the perfectly named John Thrasher, who as chair of FSU’s trustees presided over the school almost having a chiropractic school shoved down its throat).
So UD does a search on Thrasher and Infinite Rascal Regression begins… Thrasher’s predecessor as head of the Florida Republican Party done went to state prison, while Thrasher himself seems to have thrashed out, before that happened, a real interesting severance agreement for his buddy… Among the signatures on that agreement was that of Mike Haridopolos, featured on this blog years ago for his own impressive academic career … Yes, infinite rascality… wheels within rascally wheels…
It’s an old Southern tradition. If universities aren’t dumping grounds for used up politicians, what are they?
Taiwan’s education minister, co-author on a number of fraudulent papers that appeared in Vibration and Control (background here), has resigned.