No, I don’t suppose you’ll find this under Educational Mission on Washington State University’s welcome page, but students there are beginning to sense what’s up. Of course WSU’s athletics deficit is in the trillions, and of course they’re raising undergraduate student fees like mad and trying to fudge the numbers – that’s life in these here States.
But the question is whether WSU students will ever – in sufficient numbers – comprehend what’s being done to them. The grown-ups want to put on games. The young’uns don’t go to the games in great number. They have schoolwork. The grown-ups like to be invited to the president’s box during games, where they can get tipsy with him and talk money. The students wonder why they’re paying for the president’s box.
The sight of young people remonstrating with adults for the adults’ irresponsibility is strange and unseemly. But there you are.
As students and as an editorial board, we believe this proposed fee sets a precedent that students can be charged every time a university department goes into the red.
No matter how costly the fee, students should not have to pay extra due to poor budgeting by any department, let alone Athletics… [W]hy are students being asked to foot the bill for [the AD’s] budgeting decisions?… [W]hy is [he] spending money before he has cash in hand? … This fee does nothing to improve the education of WSU students, many of whom choose not to attend any sporting events and most of whom are not student athletes.
As an editorial board we believe imposing an athletic fee on the general student population is unfair to students and rewards financial irresponsibility. Schulz and Moos shouldn’t have to charge students to fix the Athletics deficit.
But sit tight, kiddies! We haven’t yet heard from the Cannabis and Liquor Board!
Other revenue sources included in the plan are doubled donations from the Cougar Athletic Fund by 2019, totaling $2 million in that year; beer sales in Martin Stadium, though the Liquor and Cannabis Board has yet to approve this; and increased single-game and season ticket sales for football and men’s basketball.
Once they approve beer sales (can marijuana be far behind?) you’ll forget about all your money worries.
In ten years or so, the university will be selling propofol at the games.
… eventually. Until that time, gutter-school University of Kentucky’s football coach Mark Stoops will have to content himself with a behemoth salary and a $12 million buyout – a buyout so obscene that this utter loser of a coach, playing to rapidly emptying stadiums, seems to have UK by the balls.
Stoops entered 2016 with a sense of security thanks to a whopping $12 million buyout that Kentucky, after dropping $126 million on a stadium renovation and $45 million on a new training facility, seemed unlikely to pony up and pay no matter how this season unfolded.
But one of America’s poorest states will pony up. (And it’s actually $18 million.) You know it will. When the only games going at your state university are football, basketball, bourbon, and coal, you’re going to spend what paltry resources you have on those games and nothing else. You have a proud legacy of filthy coaches, crime-ridden teams, blahblahblahblahblahblahblah to protect.
This local booster cannot believe it! One Washington State University football player after another is getting arrested!
Opened the paper this morning – the electronic version of it anyway – and saw a story by Jacob Thorpe about a Washington State football player being arrested for assault. A different Washington State football player. What the heck is going on? Let’s recap for those of you who haven’t been paying attention. There was a fight this summer in which some still-unidentified WSU players were allegedly involved. No one has been charged in that incident. Yet. Then starting safety Shalom Luani missed a week after an assault arrest. And now linebacker Logan Tago has been arrested, charged with assault and robbery in an incident that dates back to early June. Really? You thought Hangover II was bad, this is worse. And, in our version of Hangover III, we’ll also say the same thing we said when Luani was arrested. This has to stop. Again, we don’t have any idea of veracity of these charges. That has to be determined by the court system. But just the idea of high-profile athletes being even peripherally involved in such incidents makes us shudder.
Just the idea! Even peripherally!
********************
And when you’ve got those guys, and Mike Leach, and all, how can this be happening? Another shocker.
This University of North Carolina student (yes! UNC again – talk about scandal fatigue) – the student UD quotes up there – isn’t quite up on the M.O. of big football schools, so UD will help her. Listen up, oh latest victim.
Football schools are looking for big mean bruisers to play on their football team. Not all bruisers are nasty off the field, but some are, and football schools tend not to care much about off-field behavior. If Richie Incognito beats up a few Nebraska students, BFD. Put a guy like that on a campus full of wussses and they’re bound to irritate him at some point. As for coeds… are you kidding me? There are athlete dorms in this country which have been converted to whorehouses.
There are costs to winning, see. Students are of course obliged to pay the monetary costs. But there’s also surgery on that dislocated jaw (a player didn’t like the way you looked at him) and a lifetime of humiliation and rage because the school made fun of you when you claimed a player raped you.
Not that there aren’t costs for the school itself. Lawsuits galore from many injured parties. Ten million dollar buyouts to make foul sadistic cheating coaches go away. I could go on.
This latest UNC outrage will, UD reckons, be a big story. This blog will follow it every step of the way.
*********
UD thanks David and Ken.
[T]he deployment of Irish Naval vessels which began in May 2015 with the LE Eithne to be followed by the LE Niamh, LE Samuel Beckett, LE Roisin and LE James Joyce, was an important element in Ireland’s response to the migration crisis in the Mediterranean.
… and makes her wonder what Joyce and Beckett would have made of it.
Now you can do this on campus as well as off! Y’all come down.
****************
Our students’ safety and well-being are paramount at the University of Texas.
SWAT officers ordered the suspects to come down with their hands up.
“Seeing that in West Campus is really just alarming,” [a student] said. “I saw the guns on them and the shields, so I was pretty terrified.”
Well, hold onto your hat, UT student! Booze, frats, and guns galore: Life of the mind, Texas.
A fight broke out on a field between opposing local college football teams.
Big deal. Happens all the time.
One of the players punched a referee trying to break up the fight.
Rarer, I grant you. But in the lovely world of football/soccer, not all that rare.
******************
Truly rare is the statement just released from the referee puncher’s junior college. Let’s have a look.
After closely reviewing video footage and interviewing those involved and outside witnesses, [Mt. San Antonio College] maintains that the student-athlete, Bernard Shirmer, unintentionally hit the referee. During a disagreement after a play, numerous people surrounded him and pulled him away from the opposing player. Out of frustration, Mr. Shirmer struck himself on the helmet, a habit he often does to calm himself down. In doing so, he inadvertently hit the referee and initially believed someone else had done so. Mr. Shirmer expressed deep remorse about the incident and any harm to the referee.
Talk about playing defense! When interrupted while fighting people, our lad calms himself down by hitting himself on the head. (Cue Monty Python.) Unable to find his own head, however, our player found himself hitting the referee, though in a strikingly dissociated moment, he was convinced someone else was hitting the referee. He’s really sorry about it now.
… and we go to poetry to make us feel and see it once more with its meanings intact.
It’s hard to write a poem about an atrocity. Many 9/11 poems are long personal narratives of the event: scenes witnessed in Lower Manhattan, the way the collapse looked from nearby windows. Some, like September Sonnet by Michael Salcman, are highly compressed lyrics in which physical descriptions also appear, but where the point is less to produce a verse record of one’s impressions than to capture, with small but heavily weighted lines, the larger fact of all of us having been immediately overwhelmed, and then permanently haunted, by the incommensurability and mystery of the battering.
Salcman begins by folding his poem into Auden’s 1st September 1939, which has emerged as the pre-9/11 poem, with its coincidence of month and theme as Auden assumes the full dread of war having broken out again in Europe.
********************
September Sonnet
Auden was right – our buildings grope
the sky for certainty but are dumb
and blind. In the fierce limbus of my eye
the plummeting birds burn still,
asbestos rains and twisted steel
falls in a broth of jet fuel,
cable wrap and mineral dust;
it bathes the snouts of corpse-hunting
dogs and spatters our helmeted Nimrods.
Who stoked these fires while we slept?
Who blew on the embers
Filling September with regret,
and who will be consoled if irony dies
a thousand deaths? Not you or I.
**********************
Buildings grope the sky, wrote Auden, and Salcman, struck by the same wretched irony of our high bright-edged monuments suddenly cringing as the sky goes blank and the world senseless, echoes the earlier poet. More broadly, importing Auden lends this poem historical resonance; and Salcman’s use throughout of simple beautifully balanced lyrical lines (Who stoked these fires while we slept?), lines that read like translations from Greek tragedies, sharpens our sense of the infinite profundity of events that can never be fully assimilated.
In the fierce limbus of my eye
the plummeting birds burn still,
asbestos rains and twisted steel
falls in a broth of jet fuel,
cable wrap and mineral dust;
Beautiful stuff here, conveying our inability to make memories of 9/11 stop. The falling objects persist on the edge of vision. The mind’s eye keeps seeing the “broth” (such a well-chosen word, with rich, witchy associations) of jet fuel, and the “mineral dust” (a great phrase, conjuring with horrific concision the organic particles in the air) also stays with us.
These lines remind me of a passage in James Merrill’s Santorini: Stopping the Leak, when the poet talks about what he calls his “psychic incontinence,” his uncontrollable tendency to summon to his mind, and somehow to have to account for, image after image after image:
… churning down the optic sluice
… Faces young, old
… all random, ravenous images
… avid for inwardness
… The warm spate bears me on, helpless…
The event comes back to us unbidden, iconic elements of the awful day that want us to take them in, to do something with them.
And notice Salcman’s fantastic use of a kind of loose assonance: limbus, plummeting; birds, burn; falls, broth. It gives the poem an elegance, a sheer verbal beauty, at obvious odds with its subject matter, and this you could say conveys a sly sort of human triumph over the deathliness of the event. We are still to be found on the edge of the scene, generating beauty and even meaning out of it.
The dust
bathes the snouts of corpse-hunting
dogs and spatters our helmeted Nimrods.
Nothing of the horror is avoided here; and yet once again the combination of sheer verbal beauty (bathes) and ancient reference (Nimrod – the Biblical precursor of the New York City Fire Department) heightens – aestheticizes – the horror in a way that lets us retain the horror and at the same time somewhat transcend it.
who will be consoled if irony dies
a thousand deaths?
These lines bring us back to Auden:
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages…
Ironic because almost comically at odds with, resistant to, the powerful darkness everywhere, our various points of light, our places of rebellion and affirmation in the face of atrocity, include things like poetry. Poetry brings harmony and form and powerful subjective utterance to a stuporous world.
Some university systems – Alaska’s, Hawaii’s, Nevada’s – are hopelessly mired in go-nowhereism and that’s for a lot of reasons and that’s not going to change.
The University of Nebraska system is like this, even though its chancellor insists the place trembles on the brink of being “a leading urban metropolitan institution.”
They don’t much cotton to academics in those parts, infinitely preferring sports. Sports gets gobs of money that other universities would use for instructors and classrooms and all.
****************
Consider the new cost-overrun and firmly in the red arena on the Omaha campus.
Although there’s a very nice, almost brand new, arena just down the road, and although wee Omaha already has too many arenas hemorrhaging money (one of them’s well on its way to bankrupting a town), UNO announced that building another new arena was imperative and we swear it’ll pay for itself right off the bat! Won’t need to use university funds, or soak students, or anything.
But stupid is as stupid does, and they’re covering their big losses on the thing with university funds, and that’s going to continue indefinitely. So you see how the sludge happens: Stupid sports-obsessed schools never get out from under their sports obsession.
But they don’t want to. Since they don’t see the point of intellectuality, what else would they do with their money?
