… which is a start, but the story of Missouri State University’s long-term lies about its finances should be on the front page of the New York Times.
What seems a quiet story about a provincial public campus having lied to the state, the NCAA and its own university community about how much money it’s losing to sports, and about how it’s making up the difference by soaking students, is in fact not merely a national scandal in itself, but a story powerfully symbolic of the pourriture (for this degree of degeneracy, only the French word will do) big-time sports has brought to so many of America’s universities.
Before I quote from the two stories – one local, one Associated Press – let me direct you to various posts on this blog starting in 2010, when a baffled UD (numbers not being her strong point) wrote to an economist on MSU’s faculty – Reed Olsen – who has been insisting on the financial corruption of his university for the last fifteen years, during which he has been ignored and reviled.
So here’s Olsen pointing out that MSU’s new stupid unaffordable basketball arena was not in the black (as the school was thrilled to announce), but deeply in the red. Among the tricks MSU played, Olsen singled out this one:
They [are] hiding costs by allocating costs to the old arena, whose costs more [than] doubled when it quit being used. So on net it seems that the arena [is] losing about 2 M.
In ’01, with the money hemorrhage on full boil, boosters proposed that “the accounting of the [new] arena be combined with Hammons Student Center and Plaster Sports Complex,” which would make things look ever so much better. But
Former State Auditor Susan Montee last year specifically warned against mixing the finances of JQH Arena with other university sports facilities.
“In that way, it would not be transparent and nobody would be able to tell,” she said then.
Fuck transparency! says desperate, desperately stupid Missouri State, which, it now turns out, has been for years sending bogus athletic spending numbers to the NCAA.
This is from the brief AP report:
[A] multimillion dollar discrepancy [between what MSU says it’s spending on sports and what it’s really spending] stems from sports-related expenses, mostly facilities and administrative support, that Missouri State didn’t include in the athletics department budget. For a decade, the university also left out those costs and related sources of revenue, such as various student fees, when filing annual reports with the NCAA.
And here’s the headline on the more detailed local report:
$16 million? Try $25 million: New Report Reveals True Scope of MSU Athletics Spending
If MSU hadn’t systematically shut down Reed Olsen year after year, this wouldn’t have been much of a revelation.
Anyway. Let’s look a bit closer.
In the reports [to the NCAA] covering the fiscal years from 2005 to 2013, the only facilities costs MSU reported to the NCAA were lease payments for baseball at Hammons Field, which averaged a little less than $200,000 a year.
For 2014, the university reported $0 — an error, according to [University president Clif] Smart, who said the baseball lease, about $210,000, was mistakenly lumped into the “other expenses” category on the report.
And:
Prior to the report for the 2015 fiscal year, the information reported to the NCAA was taken primarily from the athletics department’s operating budget, which does not include administrative support offered by other university departments, or — most significantly — the millions of dollars the university spends each year on bond payments, maintenance and utilities for athletics facilities.
Anyway. Ahem! Today is a new day:
[T]he new report from MSU makes clear just how much of the bill is being subsidized by students and the university. Of the $25.2 million spent last year, $15.9 million came from student fees and university general revenue.
The president of this quintessentially provincial, regional school, puts it all in perspective:
“The kind of university we see ourselves as plays Division I sports — we’re not Division II, we’re not a regional school.”
… through her wild garden/forest
turned up this honeycomb
at the foot of the tree where
last year at this time
she suddenly heard the thundering
sound of thousands of swarming
bees.
… but what they need to remember is that you’re never going to professionalize this country’s institutions of higher education until you hire, pay well, and retain people like John Blake.
UNC felt forced by the NCAA to fire Blake as its defensive coach simply because he tried to bring the ethos of the NFL to the school (if you want to be competitive, your coaches need to be getting money incentives from agents in exchange for putting them in touch with your players). Because of that decision, University of North Carolina football now looks like a rank amateur in the big-boy high-stakes world of university sports.
(Much more broadly and notoriously, of course, UNC couldn’t even run the bogus players’ curriculum all other seriously sporty universities have figured out to how run.)
The NFL, perceiving Blake’s talent, has now brought him in as defensive line coach for the Buffalo Bills. Blake tried to introduce professional standards to UNC, but UNC wimped out. Their loss. His gain.
Saint Patrick’s Day 2016.
After last year’s broad daylight beach rapes, confiscation of huge numbers of illegal fire arms, and mass shootings, Panama City Beach was finally shamed into enacting some liquor and crowd control laws.
“People are falling off balconies, going home dead, going home paraplegic. Is that the community we want to be?” [one resident] asked. “Panama City Beach had depended for decades on this revenue, and to [enact new laws] overnight, that’s a big thing to do. But how do you continue when people are getting raped, shot, killed?”
The obvious answer was for Panama City Beach to think of spring break in a new way… To think of it as like a demolition derby or like the climbing of Mount Everest: Of course there will be … some… unpleasantnesss… but no great and noble enterprise is without its risks.
******************
But no. PCB went ahead and outlawed drinking on the beach and lots of other stuff that makes crowds of people murderous. And this year spring break at PCB barely exists. Everyone’s gone somewhere else.
******************
And that’s the ecstasy part! If you’re Daytona Beach, take a bow!
Quite true, and this Tablet writer captures the real scandal at Oberlin, which is similar to the real scandal at Florida Atlantic University, and at the University of Colorado: How do hiring committees at American universities end up appointing vicious ideologues? What sort of hiring committee says We want to expose our students to sadists and knaves, and this is a sadist and a knave? How can we account for the regular emergence among the American professoriate of liars and moral idiots?
UD thinks the outcome only seldom has to do with what you might call fanatic affinity. It seems unlikely to her that there are other people on hiring committees who think the Sandy Hook massacre was a government-created charade intended to destroy our gun rights, or that the people killed on 9/11 deserved it, or that the 9/11 plotters were Jews. It seems far more likely to UD that colleges and universities end up with cretinous conspiracy theorists because their hiring committees, for some jobs, are lazy. They don’t read applicants’ writing (including blogs) with any care, or, if they do read, they don’t understand what they are reading.
At some universities, no one much cares who teaches the soft stuff – ethnic studies, communications, composition. Internal standards in these sorts of fields may be as low as they are in the courses designed for football and basketball players. Indeed, some of these are the fields into which the jocks are herded – especially communications. No one should be surprised when actually examining what some of these people write uncovers the political grotesque.
But what are you going to do? FAU and Colorado are big jock schools; it’s as important to them as it is to Auburn and the University of North Carolina to keep the course scam going one way or another. They’re not exactly going to start scrutinizing content and instructor.
As for Oberlin — damned if I know.
[Professor] Tom Ferguson met [Professor Lloyd] Shapley … through their mutual interest in Kriegsspiel, a variation of chess where a player only sees his or her pieces on the board, but not an opponent’s. Acting as a referee, a third person provides information about the legality of each move as the game progresses.
Christopher Hitchens, who wrote that sentence in an essay about Jerry Falwell, would have been fascinated by the brotherhood on view at Donald Trump’s latest rally, where Trump’s warm-up bigot, a loud-mouth diploma mill graduate (not Trump University; another diploma mill), shrieked that Bernie Sanders doesn’t believe in God and must be made to come to Jesus.
I wish Hitchens were here to describe this man.
We manage to stick them occasionally for insider trading.
FORMER GOLDMAN SACHS DIRECTOR [RAJAT GUPTA] COMPLETES PRISON SENTENCE
….
But the big boys at Goldman seem to have some sort of immunity.
…. ROBERT RUBIN WAS TARGETED FOR DOJ INVESTIGATION BY FINANCIAL CRISIS COMMISSION
Rajat Gupta’s Goldman Sachs crony was targeted… But nothing happened. Strangely, it didn’t go anywhere.
And you wonder why ol’ Bern is doing so well.
[Sing it.]
Free Harvard/Fair Harvard
Their innocent title is
We know how vital is
Beating them down!
They want to make Harvard
Completely tuition-free
Since it’s got $40b
Sitting around …
“These devilish horses
Diminish our resources!”
Warns the director
Of financial aid.
“Our 39 billion
Will tumble to 30
If we should succumb to this
This villainous raid.”
“Fair Harvard/Free Harvard!
You’re all just like Bernie!
Expect our attorney
To sue you but good.”
Er, I mean blood.
Spring Break is quite the American tradition. We bring to it our nation’s own very special way of celebrating the renewal of life.
