Not Matthew Rouch’s best week.

Between 2003 and 2008, Rutgers’ overall athletic budget increased at double the rate of the university budget. This was made possible in part by the university, which, through student fees and its general fund, heavily subsidized the athletic department, sometimes to the tune of 40 percent of its budget. Worse, some of the athletic department’s budget wasn’t even accounted for, since it was kept hidden in off-the-books spending deals and secret contracts that were discovered by the Star-Ledger in 2008.

The New York magazine article from which I’ve quoted ends with this way-ringing endorsement:

Rutgers’ [ongoing] pursuit of athletic glory won’t be any more ignominious than anyone else’s.

A commenter adds:

Omitted by the author is the exceedingly discouraging fact that Rutgers Athletics amassed a deficit of $28 million last year, the second largest deficit in all of college athletics. All at time when state support to the academic enterprises of this once highly regarded public institution have been reduced significantly.

And a major portion of the athletics budget comes from a mandatory “student activity fee” supposedly instituted to fund things like student organizations, concerts, etc. Instead most of the fee is directed towards 84 athletes, 15 highly paid coaches, and massive athletics facilities.

This once highly regarded etc. says it all.

… performs at Maryland’s
Renaissance Festival last weekend.

Her husband is behind her, waving.

Click on the image for more detail.

Many Oklahoma State University fans are shocked by allegations that OSU football players were paid, their grades were changed and that recruits received sexual favors.

According to the university, a series of articles in Sports Illustrated will allege that misconduct in the OSU football program occurred between 2001 and 2007.

OSU Vice President of Athletics Mike Holder said, ” We are shocked by the allegations raised about our football program…”

… USA!!

Yeah, passing out in piles of beer cans – that’s college students everywhere, not just at tailgates down south.

… Peter Berkowitz messes everything up by writing this:

[G]reater participation of the ultra-Orthodox in the economic life and defense of the country can contribute to the emancipation of enlightened Israelis from their reflexive contempt for a community whose passionate religious observance provides a counterweight to those dangerous tendencies — aimless drift, restless materialism, and indiscriminate leveling — to which free and democratic societies are prone.

Fraid not. Fanaticism is not a counterweight; it is a deadweight. Hatred of the state, hatred of free thought, hatred of empiricism, hatred of anyone on your neighborhood streets who doesn’t dress like a member of your sect, ridicule of the Holocaust, and of course thoroughgoing disgusting denigration of women – these are not sacred commitments saving Israel from becoming profane. They are direct threats to equality, communal life, enlightenment, tolerance and – ask the schoolgirl spat on and called a whore by a group of haredim because she wore modern orthodox dress – to simple humanity. There is nothing reflexive about contempt for people who are truly cruel, and whose commitment to the most toxic anti-democratic values is damaging Israel terribly.

UD has found the quintessential university football sentence for the 2013 season.

She doubts she will find a better one, but she’ll keep looking.

… Derek Bok’s Higher Education in America.

If you clicked on its dullsville title, you saw the cover of this hard, thick tome, done up in a style UD calls INSTANT VENERABLE.

UD has read a bit of it — she has not yet brought it home from her office because she has other big books (Ulysses, by James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, for starters) to bring home — but she can report that it is judicious, thorough, and (well, read the intro yourself) dull.

If UD had been president of Harvard, and she were writing a book about universities that she wanted a lot of people to read, she wouldn’t put sentences like this in her introduction:

Parents feel that tuitions are too high and that too little is done to hold down costs.

Parents feel… They feel… They don’t think, or believe, or argue… Even though we all know that …

Well, as I say, if I were the king of the forest… I’d write something like this:

Imagine my shock on taking the presidency of Harvard to discover that while our endowment has so many billions of dollars in it we can afford to charge zero tuition to students until the sun collapses into a white dwarf, we still charge almost everyone hundreds of thousands of dollars for a Harvard education. Since I left the school’s presidency, I’ve watched in horror as its endowment has grown to close to forty billion dollars. FORTY FUCKING BILLION DOLLARS! The moral discomfort I felt then must be as nothing to what Harvard’s current president feels as she surveys the state of the world and wonders why she and her small university have simply planted their asses on all that money.

… communications can’t even figure out that you don’t communicate like this.

… for its typically disgraceful behavior in regard to the depravity of some of its rabbis. Marci Hamilton excoriates Yeshiva for issuing only the thinnest of reports about its decades-long sex scandal and cover-up. She rightly compares Yeshiva with the Catholic church and its shameful efforts to deny the depravity of some its priests.

YU reportedly spent millions paying [a law firm] to produce a “Report” that anyone with knowledge of child-protection policies could have written after receiving YU’s policies and reading [newspaper accounts of the abuse]. … I would not have permitted my name to be on such a deficient and embarrassing document. A document that was truly a “Report” would have included an actual report of the facts that prompted the need to review those policies.

As with Yeshiva trustees Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, the point all along has been to ignore, delay, and then – to the extent possible – deny.

Hamilton’s response would be a significant blow to most universities. But this is Yeshiva, and she is a woman. That means she does not exist.

But so par for the course at America’s greatest pretender to academic seriousness.

… has been strutting his stuff at Michigan State, saying stupid shit and getting in trouble for it. What Ward, a professor at the University of Colorado, said was far worse (little Eichmanns, etc.), but William Penn’s arrogant rant is just as powerful an insult to his university. To any university.

And, you know, just after everything that has made and continues to make West Virginia University a national laughingstock, it only makes sense for students at an equally risible school like Texas State University to urge university leaders to make WVU their model and liquor up the games.

One may argue the [Texas State] football team has not given fans something to cheer about in recent years, but part of the problem may be that a major aspect of sporting events has been absent at Bobcat Stadium — alcohol… If alcohol was sold at Bobcat Stadium, the university would surely see an increase in attendance and revenue. According to the West Virginia Gazette, West Virginia University first sold alcohol at its football games during the 2011-2012 season. The school made $520,000 from alcohol sales alone, and a total of $1.26 million in concession sales that year. Considering those figures, imagine selling alcohol at Texas State football games to a fan base and culture that embraces drinking.

A culture that embraces drinking. Such a dainty way to put it.