Some headlines say it all, huh? And scummy WSU (feast your eyes) is playing all the tricks in the book on this one, like, I don’t know, let’s find some random year – 2023? – and promise that by that year everything’s going to be fine so Shut. Up.

*********************

Really, I just read over my last few years of WSU posts, and it’s … I have no words. Why would anyone have so little self-respect as to be a student there?

**********************

UD thanks Charlie.

… their massively overcompensated, violent, nutso football coach – the Roseanne Barr of the Gridiron – blasts out a hoax tweet, is informed it’s a hoax, and tells everyone who told him it was a hoax to fuck themselves.

[A doctored video] has been circulating for about four years among extreme right-wing conspiracy theorists; [it] splices elements of a speech [President] Obama gave in Belgium in 2014. The words are edited to make it seem like Obama told a European audience that “Ordinary men and women are too small-minded to govern their own affairs, that order and progress can only come when individuals surrender their rights to an all-powerful sovereign.”

In fact, as the unedited video and transcript of the speech shows, Obama was saying the exact opposite, discussing two visions of power in the world and arguing that authoritarianism was a threat to the international order.

Actually, the version where Obama’s saying the opposite is also doctored. Here is the actual original, from a speech Baylor president Ken Starr gave at Baylor when the rape scandal broke under coach Art Briles:

American universities are too intellectual to win football games; athletic victory can only come when professors surrender their rights to mentally retarded football coaches.

But giving the stupidest person in the state the state’s highest salary is only Step One.

The winning coach must also be a moral cretin, happy to recruit so many bad actors that WSU football boasts more arrests than any other team (here’s a loving defense of the goofy adorable lads).

He must be embroiled in endless expensive lawsuits against his former university football employers so that his current employer is afraid to fire him (lawsuits and buyouts and bad publicity oh my!).

Did I say afraid? Unable.

… Leach’s newly signed five-year, $20 million [WSU] contract means they have no power to coach up their head man on anything and have no financial resources to buy him out if push came to shove — which it most certainly would if they tried to rein in The Prickly One. Moreover … this episode ensures that no other Power 5 school would consider hiring Leach away.

He must contribute to the school’s already appalling overall deficit by adding a $67 million athletics deficit.

He must, ideally, be the foreman at so demoralized a football factory that students must lecture professors, at the end of every semester, on their responsibility to give them final exams.

He must coach at a school that responds to massive sports scandals by appointing new presidents who can say huh? Dunno. Just got here.

And if you’re Leach’s Washington State, which happily scooped up the notoriously mad bad Leach cuz it doesn’t give a shit about anything except football (even sportswhore Texas Tech fired Leach after he tortured a player), you’re going to show your keen sense of irony by hiring a new leader whose main life accomplishment is this:

President [Kirk] Schulz chaired the NCAA board of governors, the NCAA’s highest-ranking committee, from 2014-2016. The board ensures that each division of the NCAA operates consistently within the basic purposes, fundamental policies, and general principles of the association.

When UD read that, she almost peed herself laughing.

***************

Commentary coming in, and as usual Deadspin’s got some of the best:

[The] irony of a guy whose entire career has been spent at the public trough JAQing off about government power is a thing of beauty.

This one has a country music song twang to it:

[H]e’s every aging white moron …

(Mammas, don’t let your babies grow up to be…)

**************

Sing it, Carly.

The concussed player you left in your office
The sound of you tormenting the kids
The look in your eyes like a nutcase
Your moronic conspiracy vid

Guess it’s our fault what you brought us
Our reputation’s dead on the floor
Why does your ghost still haunt me?
Cuz I can’t get rid of you no more

****************

Another Deadspin winner.

I think we can all agree that tweeting racist memes about our first black President is an excellent way to recruit black athletes.

WSU’s athletic department’s deficit ballooned to more than $50 million the past several years [AD Bill Moos] was at the helm, and in 2018, it grew another $9 million…

This is in addition to the university’s $30 million deficit outside of athletics that has already led to budget cuts. Oh, and the school now needs to take on a $30 million project to install a computer system so employees can be paid on time, among other crucial university functions.

… The university tried punching above its weight in the Pac-12 by building a shiny new football operations building and hiring expensive coaches.

… Many are still mourning the loss of the university’s performing arts program due to budget cuts.

They don’t come no dumber than WSU.

Somewhere in the distant inaccessible reaches of Washington State University lies the crashed alien spaceship from which the school will extract the $67 million they need to pay their athletics deficit.

Details here.

…

Student [game] attendance would likely drop off [without a new stadium] and the tailgating experience would be compromised.

Now the school’s in darkest deficit doodoo, game attendance is tanking, and the UW trustees, whose job it is to be trustees, are sniping at the ex-athletic director onaccounta he didn’t tell them how he was spending the students’ money.

UW trustees want to know: Who’s the steward of student and state money around here anyway?

At Florida State, salaries for non-coaching administrators rose from $7.7 million to $15 million. That’s the raise that Seminoles athletic staff gave themselves for running up a deficit of $2 million, while presiding over an academic fraud scandal involving 10 teams, and mishandling criminal allegations against football players.

Y’all know (if you know UD) how much she loves this kind of writing, with exfiltrated AIM forming ominous messages; and you know she reliably found it in university sports writing.

In the old days, she read gobs of this stuff, and was sure to share it with you; but now, though the sports biz is – uh – starker than ever, her gaze has wandered away from violent coaches, criminalized teams, empty stadiums etc etc.

Still, if the toothpaste is so stark that no one can look away (see Rutgers and WSU), she will read and report about the writing on the wall. Shockingly, because I was sure as shootin’ it was just a few bad apples, approximately “75% of male college students bet on sports and more than 25% .. are athletes.” And then there’s the coaches. Legal/NCAA compliance among our gridiron and b-ball court guys looks kind of like this.

But you owe it to yourself to put today’s national news about Washington State University in context. With its $120 million athletics debt, its beloved twisted (ex-)football coach, its strikingly violent athletes, its indifference to actual education, and a whole lot of other shit, WSU is arguably at the moment America’s most scandalous campus.

Add ineptitude/corruption in local law enforcement, and you get the scandal everyone’s covering today – not merely another death by alcohol/neglect of some poor teenager just trying to join a fraternity, but the fact that it took almost two years for criminal charges to be filed.

Which means the serious – amply justified – charge of hazing had to be dropped.

The kid’s family is not happy, and you also owe it to yourself to read their full statement, which reviews the long vicious history of this fraternity.

The family makes the reasonable suggestion that the butcher’s bill for each fraternity should be public knowledge before yet another family lets its clueless nineteen year old enter these abattoirs.

My headline comes from the comments section of an article about Washington State University’s projected (2022) athletics deficit of $102.7 million.

Ho hum.

Naturally, our attention at University Diaries has been riveted to WSU for years, and you can read why here – it’s a link to all of my posts about the dump.

WSU has been in profound athletics deficit for fucking ever, since it boasts a kind of Platonic perfection of sordid greedy litigious coaches, significant numbers of criminally violent players, corrupt administration, students who mostly don’t give a shit and don’t go to games and instead bitch about how their tuition increases go to the most disgusting man in the world (except for his revered Donald Trump), Mike Leach…

So blah bletch projectile vomit gag cough dry heave spew

It’s our beloved alma mater the one and only WSU

******************

UD thanks Seelye.

Da, is close to $85 million athletics debt at people’s university, but here is good news: Central Committee has just announced it is ‘implementing a budget management plan that will narrow annual deficits steadily until achieving slightly above break even in FY 2024′!

This is truly great news, and I cannot wait for totally deficits-free 2024!!

And remember, comrades – say it with me:

Success in athletics … is the biggest and best marketing tool a major university has at its disposal.

Well, you get what you ask for.

For the last few weeks, this blog has been following the tanking fortunes of jockshop Washington State University — as in, pretty bad school stays pretty bad because it’s a jockshop and jockshops are notoriously subject to the contingencies of the college sports industry and therefore keep suffering financial crises. Forget academics – little to see there. Forget student morale – low to vanishing. And why? Because the big money goes to greedy coaches and heavily indebted sports construction projects, and because the school keeps soaking its students for outrageous athletics fees.

And by the way forget reputation: Under Mad Dog Mike, the lads on the football team have really been pulling out all the stops student-assault-wise…

But then when you consciously appoint as president a major NCAA macher, what do you expect? The school is clearly being run for the pleasure of boosters (I guess; I really don’t know who’s happy about the sort of school WSU is, with the exception of the guy at the top who chairs the NCAA board of governors), and as the shit hits the fan we’re beginning to hear from oh I don’t know professors and students … They are not happy.

They might begin by asking who appointed as president of the university a person who could certainly be expected to pee his pants over sports and sports alone.

Administrators have asked students to consider paying an additional $50 per semester to help bring the athletics department into the black. The department has been operating at a $13 million deficit since 2014, partly because of higher coaching salaries, an expensive new football facility and lower-than-projected TV revenue.

The selfsame malsain Mike must be fed, or he’ll take his … curious… ways elsewhere…

One student pithily sums up the way WSU is being run:

“When was the last time you went to an expensive steakhouse, ordered more food than you needed and gave the bill to a stranger on the street?”

Mad Dog and Mr NCAA are certainly getting overfull meals every day. Let the students pay for it! Leach, that builder of young men’s characters, gets close to three million a year (with assorted perks thrown in), and as more players get arrested and pummel undergraduates we can expect that salary to rise like crazy. Five million in two years? Almost certainly. Let the students get pummeled and let the students pay for their pummeling.

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.

Why, asks this writer, is Temple University going to be the next school to screw itself over but good by building a new football stadium? Why? And why does no one ever ask why?

The question that we never seem to ask is why… What we won’t ask, what we never ask, is why a college such as Temple University – or any college, really – should care [so much about things like football and football stadiums]. We won’t ask how a Top 25 ranking or a visit from ESPN helps fulfill the mission of an institution of higher learning, or why such an institution should spend any of its resources pursuing them, particularly when those resources are financed in large part by taxpayer and student debt.

Take, for instance, the University of Akron’s stadium, “a $55 million project that would be funded exclusively by private donations and stadium revenues. When it hosted its first game in 2009, it was a $62 million project funded primarily by student tuition and fees… [This] year [Akron’s deeply indebted stadium] is attracting the lowest attendance in the MAC.”

David Murphy provides other examples. There are many.

**************

But okay. Let’s go there. Why? Big stadiums and big football programs have nothing to do with (indeed they erode) the academic mission which defines a university, and they will almost certainly do terrible damage to everyone at the school (via deficits and scandals) except for the athletic department and whatever trustees own companies doing sports-related business with the university.

Some people will claim that the mystery of the new stadium is essentially a religious mystery, having to do with the “unchurched” American’s evolution away from houses of worship and toward football fields.

Clemson University coach Dabo Swinney is aggressively Christian, even letting one of his players get baptized on the 50-yard-line during practice, never mind that Clemson is a state school.

A Georgia public school is looking into a mass baptism on its football field that was posted on YouTube but later taken down.

If your font is a fifty yard line, you’re stadium-building on faith, not reason. The economics of New Life Stadium are simple: The Lord will provide.

But there’s more to the stadium mystery, I think.

UD suggests that at some universities it’s a combination of not being able to think of anything else to do, plus sexual fantasy. The two things are related, because when people don’t have much to do, when their lives seem kind of drifty and pointless and empty, they’re liable to do a lot of fantasizing.

I think some leaders of universities – presidents, trustees – don’t know what to do with themselves. A very high-profile professor, a leader, at the University of North Carolina spends years negotiating pretend grades for pretend student papers and thinks nothing of committing the grade-haggling to writing in an email. What was Jan Boxill thinking? asks the Chronicle of Higher Ed. The answer is absolutely nothing, just like her colleague Julius Nyang’oro; they were just sort of drifting along, lost in erotic reverie about their beautiful athletes for whom they would do anything, including destroy themselves and their university. An assistant coach at the University of Louisville comes up with the idea of turning an athletes’ dorm into a brothel. Why? Popped into his head one day during a sexual reverie. Popped into his head while he was thinking hard about how to make his beautiful athletes’ lives even more beautiful.

****************

You have to have a high threshold of embarrassment to read people describe their feelings about football.

I loved football. I loved it desperately. Even now, four decades later, I remember endlessly damning myself for being too small to play it at a big-time college. I ached for it, for the violence of it…

Look at the shirtless boys with faces and torsos painted in the school colors; look at the cheerleaders on the fields, the ‘waves’ surging through the stands.

These men, either of whom could have written “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” represent countless sports-factory denizens spending their days in a haze of university-hatred and hormones.

Is hatred too strong? What sort of emotion allows you to seek and destroy any vestige of intellectual seriousness?

*******************

One key here is hiring retired politicians as university presidents, good old boys who don’t give a shit about “academia,” whatever that is. The sort of men currently running, for instance, Florida State and Oklahoma University.

[The university’s academic unit can go, but] the football team must be saved because the intense tribal loyalty generated by big-time sports is one of the chief mechanisms employed by universities to create the illusion that they exist. I’ve lived in Chapel Hill and experienced the closest thing to full-scale Dionysian revelry one is likely to find in modern America, on Franklin Street after the men’s basketball team won it all. It was thrilling. It felt like we were one people, all of us, conquerors. But it was also an illusion (I wasn’t a student at the time), a false consciousness manufactured by the university to conceal its non-existence as an academic institution.

*************

Listen to this song. It also asks why. Listen to its lyrics, and imagine them sung by a university president as he or she thinks about one of the school’s football players. You just tiptoe into all my dreams…. It’s the kind of passion that will not be denied, no matter how many hearts are broken.

*************
UD thanks Ian.

Tenured American university professors have a kind of built-in public relations problem. Many people view them as rather unpleasant entitled sorts — they’ve got permanent jobs with enviable conditions, they’ve got a remarkable amount of time to themselves (including paid sabbaticals), they are highly respected and pretty well-compensated, and they don’t seem to have bosses or supervision of any kind, etc., etc.

We can quibble about how accurate this description is, but there’s no denying that a lot of people think it’s accurate. And there’s some truth in it.

Given this problem, it seems to ol’ UD that tenured professors should make at least teensy efforts not to play right into the stereotype.

Among the academic units at her own George Washington University, there’s one that seems to your blogger to engage in this play — and with reckless abandon.

The business school.

There’s the reckless abandon of its last dean having overspent his budget. By thirteen million dollars.

How shall it be repaid?

Robert Van Order, the chair of the school’s finance department, said the about 60 faculty members at the meeting discussed where the burden should fall. Some faculty thought the University should forgive the $13 million budget deficit altogether because it was incurred two years ago.

UD understands that this was some faculty. She’s just saying that it’s real unfortunate any faculty at all said Hey ancient history fuck it. Make someone else pay.

********************

You’ve got a dean who just spent the school into the ground. You’ve got some faculty there who think the school shouldn’t have to pay anything back. So far, so bad.

It gets worse. Tenured professors who teach in the business school’s masters in finance program have now refused to teach in it (it’s not clear whether all, or many, have refused) because, as part of paying back the money the last dean overspent, they’re taking a pay cut. Here’s how it works, as the new b-school dean explains.

[The full time] professors who teach [masters in finance] courses were paid “a rate substantially higher than their counterparts” in other masters programs. She said faculty, who were teaching two-credit courses for the program, were compensated the same amount as faculty who are paid for three-credit courses.

Okay, so that’s already pretty amazing. Three-credit compensation for two-credit courses. That’s a lot more money.

But look again at my headline. The chair of finance explains that, first of all, faculty have to teach on Fridays. And Saturdays! No self-respecting professor will teach on those days without extreme compensation…

But wait. Let’s look at the program’s website.

In the first year, classes are held all day on Saturday; and in the second year, classes are held on Thursday and Friday from 6 to 10 p.m.

Okay, so the chair of finance forgot about the Thursday classes. And in the second year there’s no Saturday teaching at all.

Does this seem to you hardship duty? I mean, virtually all Americans work a full week, including Fridays. Millions and millions of Americans work on Saturdays.

And then there’s the chair’s “more technical and time-consuming” argument. What does this mean? Are some of these on-line courses (more technical)?

UD has trouble following the chair’s reasoning about these courses, as reported. (It’s possible that the journalist got some of this wrong.)

“From the standpoint of just thinking about the market, from the standpoint of faculty, for the same credits and the same credit hours, it’s easier to teach a core course than to teach an MSF course,” he said. “And so a lot of what’s been the debate over the past few years is how much extra should people get for teaching it.”

He added that the program was originally created to give faculty in the finance department more time and pay to do research – which officials have historically said is key to boost the school’s reputation. But without the original benefits from the program, there’s no motivator for those faculty to participate.

So these courses are harder to teach than core courses – though the chair doesn’t really say why this would be true… But okay. In all departments, some courses are harder and some easier to teach. UD has never heard of faculty getting paid more for harder courses. Perhaps it is a common practice, and UD didn’t know about it.

But if these are harder and more time-consuming courses, why does the dean go on to say that the program (she assumes he means here the masters in finance program itself rather than the financial incentive ‘program’ set up to attract tenured professors to the program) they’re in was created to “give faculty … more time and pay to do research”?

I mean, put aside whether it’s a bit tone-deaf to say a program was created to give faculty more time and pay to do research…

I mean… UD doesn’t see this in the program’s mission statement… We created this program in order to free up our staff for more research and pay them more…

Ask in any case why a program whose courses are more difficult and time-consuming to teach was designed to give faculty more time for their research…

*****************************

So to pay back some of what’s due back from the b-school to the university, the decision’s been made to start paying faculty at the two-credit rate.

“We have now aligned the credit hours compensated for with the actual number of credit hours taken by students in the MSF program,” [the dean] said. “This alignment matches the MSF faculty compensation with that of our other specialized master’s programs in a reasonable and equitable manner.”

At this, virtually the entire tenured faculty (it appears) resigned from teaching in the program, leaving it in the hands of less qualified adjuncts, and the quality is apparently going down the tubes.

Keep in mind that these programs charge students a fortune. If you start taking the program now, taught by adjuncts, some of whom have never taught in the program before, you are paying $77,280 for the privilege.

*********************

And oh yeah. If you design an expensive degree and you can’t get your own faculty to teach its courses without amazing incentives, a degree program your faculty dump in seconds if you take any component of those incentives away, you need new degree designers.

That was Washington State University’s athletic director, doing a little damage control in 2012. It’s now 2015, and the school lucky enough to hire Mr “lock [his] fucking pussy ass in a place so dark that the only way he knows he has a dick is to reach down and touch it” Mike Leach to coach its football team now has not a 6.6 million dollar athletic program deficit, but … let’s see… how profitable have they become…

Oh. They’ve now got a thirteen million dollar deficit.

But Bill Moos is still at it, promising the suckers at WSU that if they’ll just sit tight for another two or three years…

Moos said all Pac-12 schools will see significant increases in television money …

Just hold on, dammit! Another couple of years! I swear it’ll be zillions from tv!

Well, a little over a million. Maybe.

******************************

But… wait a minute!

“We expected a sizable deficit as we put our numbers together and then we decided to make it even larger to take care of some things that we felt needed to happen…”

You expected? But you told me back in 2012…