The unpleasant tendency of newspapers to cite statistics – and put them in high-profile editorials – has yet again reared its ugly head. The Boston Globe casts a rational eye at the U Mass football program and makes the obvious call: kill it.

So, you know, here’s the paper of record for that team’s city saying shut it down.

UMass had to assure many more football scholarships, meet minimum attendance requirements, and make facility improvements. But instead of leaping into glory, UMass hurled itself into a money pit. A program that cost the school $3.1 million in 2011 in direct support and student fees is projected to cost $8.6 million next year — even after projected revenues are taken into account — according a recently released faculty report. The school has precious little to show for it, with a 5-31 record in the last three years and a fan base in suspended animation. The Minutemen averaged 16,008 fans this season, barely more than last year’s home game average of 15,830.

Pushing athletes to enhance the university’s brand on the field often leads to problems in the classroom, and that pattern held true at UMass Amherst.

… Football losses are nearing $10 million a year… [T]axpayers can’t be expected to pay for an extravagant football program indefinitely, especially as the changing economics of college football make it even more expensive for UMass to stay competitive.

Franchement, here’s the worry on the part of the school. U Mass Amherst has arguably the most violent student body in America. The post-game riots there are terrifying. But if you take away that important emotional outlet for the large numbers of drunken bullies who go to school there, who knows what they’ll do instead? (Put amherst in my search engine for many posts about that school’s long history of riots.)

This time last year, the incredibly violent University of Massachusetts, Amherst – a university which seems to have a gang-legacy admissions category – was the scene of extensive back-to-school bloodshed.

It’s exactly the same thing this year, with party/riots so massive and attacks on police so vicious that the poor little town of Amherst, once host to gentle Emily Dickinson, now host to hordes of scary drunks, has begun considering its options.

It wants, to start with, to know just how seriously the university is disciplining its large numbers of remarkably vile students. UD isn’t sure what Amherst intends to do once it gets this information, but considering the long history of U Mass student riots (read that history here), the town has been astoundingly forbearing.

UD has proposed shutting the school down and making it an online institution. The negative here is obvious – Amherst currently enjoys a captive audience of thousands of thirsty alcoholics, and that’s got to be great for its bottom line. But gradually the whole Zoo Mass phenom is costing Amherst – and all Massachusetts taxpayers – more than it’s bringing in.

It’s humiliating enough that Massachusetts taxpayers subsidize absurdly overcrowded lectures; they also have to pay for the consequences of U Mass’s large number of violent drunks. These guys like to get together on a regular basis and destroy the campus and attack people and shit. So taxpayers pay for cleanup…

But now look. After a round of student arrests and expulsions in the wake of the last riot (I think it’s the last; I need to put a Google News Alert on this one), one of the expelled is suing for damages. If he can help just one other guy avoid the drunken mayhem to which he was driven by that school, it’ll be worth it.

But much as we can sympathize with this particular litigator, UD‘s main point is a hard-nosed financial one. Shouldn’t the state legislature be asking how much it’ll cost when all thirteen (there are only thirteen now, but the police are looking for many more) arrested students sue for damages? Time to put the school out of its misery. The glories of online education (we’re assured by many people that it’s better than face-to-face) stand ready to solve this problem.

… physical campus. It is one of her Online Makeover schools, schools so laptopped, over-crowded, and adjunctified that they should admit the obvious and fold as non-virtual locations.

But there’s a special additional reason for U Mass Amherst to cease operations. It is extremely violent and dangerous. It’s been a markedly nasty campus for years (UD has followed the riots), but now, just three weeks into the new school year, things have gotten totally out of hand.

The first weekend of school, police tried to disperse a large party, at a house on Meadow Street, and the students responded by throwing bottles at the cops.

The following weekend, one man was beaten and two students were stabbed at a party …

This weekend, police made 168 arrests and broke up a party of 500 to 700 people …

How long do you keep pretending you’re a university, when what you are, mainly, is a strain on police resources?

America’s most violent university campus (details over many years here) does its thing after yesterday’s football game, and a student writes in defense of systemic rioting at U Mass Amherst because, after all, what else is there? High tea at the Emily Dickinson Museum?

[T]here is nothing funny about playing [University of Massachusetts] home games in sprawling but nearly vacant Gillette Stadium …

Au contraire, the situation at U Mass, with its new law school (LOLOLOLOL) and way gussied up football program and ongoing tradition of student rioting, etc., etc., is hilarious.

Those who criticized the [football program’s] upgrade were ridiculed in 2011 as small-minded, anti-football or lacking in school spirit. Nearly five years later, everything they warned about has come true: low attendance, a nomadic existence that includes games at a cavernous stadium too distant for students to attend, spiraling costs…

A university composed of nomads wandering to cavernous stadiums. That’s funny.

As another uncertain offseason begins … the questions about the expanded, much more expensive UMass football program continue to be less about where they should play FBS football, but why.

Why? Let me help you with that one. I quote an earlier University Diaries post:

U Mass Amherst has arguably the most violent student body in America. The post-game riots there are terrifying. But if you take away that important emotional outlet for the large numbers of drunken bullies who go to school there, who knows what they’ll do instead?

You wouldn’t want the mobs going after the (shudder) professors, would you? Who’d teach the courses?

… her gentleman callers.

“The UMass/Amherst campus has a game plan for this and I think we should see how it plays out,” said [president Marty] Meehan when we asked him about [the university’s football program] in an interview …

Does that game plan include continuing to play games at Gillette [Stadium] in front of tens of thousands of fans disguised as empty seats?

“Some have been attended pretty well,” claimed Meehan, but the record shows only two UMass games at the stadium have drawn more than 30,000 fans…” [The stadium holds 70,000.]

Disbursing about 5 percent a year from an endowment ensures its principal will not shrink over time. At 5 percent, Harvard’s endowment would generate $1.8 billion annually in perpetuity. So how can Harvard possibly need more? That sum equates to $2.6 million per undergraduate per year — almost 50 times the school’s sticker price. Harvard already has ample endowment for every undergraduate to attend free, with vast reserves remaining for other purposes. Yet Harvard is in the midst of a capital campaign, demanding another $6.5 billion.

At least, however, struggling taxpayers get to help generous Harvard donors:

The deductibility of donations to higher education means [Robert Griffin, who just gave Harvard $150 million,] really gave Harvard about $100 million, with taxpayers covering the balance. Ordinary people whose children are buried under student loans, and can only dream of attending Harvard, will be taxed to fund the transfer of another $50 million to the Crimson elite.

The same occurs any time donations from those in the top bracket go to the Ivy League, Stanford, Williams, Amherst — average people are taxed to pamper the children of affluence. Grant Hill just gave $1.25 million to Duke University, his alma mater. Good for him! After the deduction, Hill pays about two-thirds of the announced total. The rest comes from average taxpayers who can only dream of a child attending Duke.

Easterbrook’s recommendation:

[E]nd the deductibility of donations to colleges or universities whose endowments exceed $1 million per enrolled student.

[T]he special treatment for the top conferences raises important questions for state taxpayers and UMass Amherst. The Minutemen moved up two seasons ago to the Football Bowl Subdivision, the same level as Ohio State, Alabama, and Texas. But with the team still drawing only 15,000 fans a game to Gillette Stadium, the Globe reported last December that the university will have to cover $5.1 million of the team’s $7.8 million budget this season, much more than originally anticipated. Now that the sand has shifted once again under the foundation of college sports, with new incentives for top players to go elsewhere, it would be prudent for UMass to reassess. Without further changes by the NCAA, there is no chance UMass will be able to stand on an equal playing field with the Ohio States, Alabamas, and Texases of the college sports world.

Er, it seems to mean that U Mass should end its farcical, bankrupting football program. As at the University of Hawaii, there’s no there there, but the nothingness still costs a fortune, and that means soaking taxpayers, students, and students’ families.

But in both cases – U Mass and Hawaii – there’s no way they’re going to shut down the football programs. That would be prudent, and prudence is not what these two places are about. (Follow all their shenanigans on this blog by putting their names into my search engine.)

I hope most of us can agree that these two outcomes would be less than optimal.

Yet the hard-headed report just issued by the Education Trust suggests that we’re certainly headed there. Fancy schmancy schools don’t take in enough Pell Grant people and risk becoming gilded ghettos. Why should the American taxpayer subsidize that? Trailer park techs take in little besides poor people, many of whom never graduate. The students default on their big government grants. Why should we subsidize that?

So, reasonably enough, the authors of this report argue that if after a certain number of years a university can’t graduate anyone, or a university graduates only the sort of people who need little help from us to pay for their education, we should withdraw tax support from those places.

I’ll have more to say about this in a few moments. Ne quittez pas.

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Hokay. Here’s the deal. It’s a great report – clearly written, tough-minded. The authors are correct that – since accreditation agencies won’t do their bit and shut down drop-out factories like Texas Southern University, a school the Education Trust report features – the federal government needs to shut them down via refusal of tax subsidies. Certainly the free market is doing its bit – enrollment at schools like Texas Southern is tanking – but, hard as this is to believe, it’s true that Texas Southern University and the many schools like it will continue to exist until the heat death of the universe. They will continue to function with only faculty, administrators, and football players. They will mutter vaguely about online programs or something.

And why will they continue to exist?

Look no further than Garnet F. Coleman. There’s a Garnet in every crowd, the local pol who believes in the “strong status of our proud institution, Texas Southern University” and makes sure hapless taxpayers keep throwing their money down a hole. Garnet thinks it’s fine that TSU is incredibly ineptly (and sometimes corruptly) run; fine that its athletic program (why does a school like this have athletics at all?) is deeply in debt, blahblahblah… Because TSU does so much good by failing to graduate students whom it burdens with lifelong debt…

In one of its more shameful editorial decisions, the New York Times two years ago agreed to play along with this madness. Sent a reporter down there who, without comment, quoted TSU’s president saying this:

He said his administration is taking a more hands-on, student-centric approach that should improve academic achievement, which he said had not previously received sufficient attention. Despite what the graduation rates suggest, Mr. Rudley said the campus is in the midst of a renaissance.

The reporter also gushed about new campus buildings, better maintenance of public spaces, etc. Yes, a renaissance was happening right now.

Or in a minute or two. Be patient, be patient.

The Education Trust people now introduce the startling proposal that we no longer wait, that we acknowledge the wasteful scandal of schools like TSU and shut them down.

Texas Southern University … fell in the bottom 5 percent of all institutions on graduation rates in 2011, graduating only 11.8 percent of its full-time freshmen within six years of initial enrollment. Some 80 percent of Texas Southern’s freshmen are from low-income families (i.e., Pell Grant recipients); 90 percent are from underrepresented minority grants and many are weakly prepared for college, with a median SAT score of 800 out of 1600 and an average high school GPA of 2.7. But so too are the students at Tennessee State University and North Carolina Central University, yet they graduate at rates more than three times as high (35.5 percent and 38.4 percent, respectively). In fact, Texas Southern performs at the very bottom of its closest 15 peer institutions and has for many years.

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Then there’s the other end of the problem: Rich kid schools.

Middlebury College in Vermont, for example, in 2011 fell in the bottom 5 percent of all colleges in its enrollment of low-income students: 10 percent. Yet equally selective institutions like Amherst College and Vassar College enrolled more than twice as many low-income students, 23 and 27 percent respectively. We see the same variation in the public sector. The University of Virginia, which ranks in the bottom 5 percent on service to low-income students, enrolled only 13 percent Pell students in 2011, whereas the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill and the State University of New York at Binghamton enrolled 20 and 26 percent Pell students…

And here’s a fascinating mystery:

There are high-achieving, low-income students whose academic credentials place them well within the band of elite colleges’ current admission standards but who for a variety of reasons do not apply to or enroll in these selective institutions. Nearly two-thirds of low-income students with high grades and SAT scores do not attend the most selective institutions for which they are qualified, compared with just over one-quarter of high-income students with similar academic credentials.

Counterintuitive, huh? You’re a genius from Missoula but you don’t go to Harvard, which is desperate for you. Why not?

Well, begin by reading this essay by Walter Kirn, a kid from Minnesota who accepted an offer of admission from Princeton. Although UD has difficulty believing the story Kirn tells about being kidnapped by a castle-dweller, she finds the rest of his account of being middle-class at Princeton credible. Not only were these four years of social hell – of being made to feel poor and outcast – they were intellectual hell as well, as Kirn tells it.

We laughed at the notion of “authorial intention” and concluded, before reading even a hundredth of it, that the Western canon was illegitimate, an expression of powerful group interests that it was our sacred duty to transcend — or, failing that, to systematically subvert. In this rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors … we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.

That’s a nice gentlemanly way to put it. A member of America’s most homicidal university fraternity (its body count puts even FAMU’s Merry Manslaughterers to shame) fails, in his comment in this post’s headline, to register the difference between bad things happening to you (adversity) and bad people killing you (murder, manslaughter, via hazing). Maybe this …. I dunno… call it moral aphasia… accounts for the fact that despite the truckload of bodies Sigma Alpha Epsilon has racked up, its members continue to perceive it as a fashioner of gentlemen… They’re constantly using the word gentlemen in talking about the place…

UD‘s take on this is what you’d expect. She understands that men in certain sorts of groups will always want to torture and kill each other. She fails to see why this activity should take place at universities, on campus or off. Attaching the word “gentlemen” to this activity has a nice rough irony to it, and UD is alive to this fun use of language. But it doesn’t really take you very far, again, in the direction of universities.

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Now, as universities become desperate about declining enrollments and that big ol’ loan to pay back on the new stadium, they will certainly be tempted, like the University of Massachusetts Amherst, to specialize in admitting all the violent gentlemen no other university wants. Big ol’ gangs of them, year after year, to bond and riot and haze. Like Zoo Mass (update on its AMAZING football team, football conference, game attendance, and stadium choices, here), these schools will get a reputation, and all the gentlemen in the vicinity will make a point of attending them.

In the not too distant future, Richie Incognito will be the president of a university.

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But back to Sigma whatever. Talk about adversity. Even a bank as astoundingly scummy as Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase finds this frat too scummy to do business with.

Early this month, JPMorgan Chase stopped managing an investment account for a prominent client: the charitable foundation of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, one of the nation’s largest fraternities.

The bank was concerned about SAE’s bad publicity, according to Anthony Alberico, a JPMorgan vice president who dealt with the foundation. SAE has had 10 deaths linked to drinking, drugs and hazing since 2006, more than any other fraternity.

“If JPMorgan is going to turn us down, who’s next?” said Bradley Cohen, SAE’s national president. “What if universities start saying SAE’s not welcome?”

Well. There’s always Goldman Sachs.

Rape, rape, rape, go the fraternities; and now some of the complainants are coming out from anonymity, naming themselves (Wesleyan’s latest allegedly raped student is Cabri Chamberlin) and speaking directly to the media. That can be very compelling. A young woman telling her story can be very difficult for a frat to go up against in the court of public opinion.

And there have been two recent frat rapes at Wesleyan! Plus one almost-rape!! (Scroll down to this long article’s next to last paragraph.) This definitely goes against the school’s rep as a sylvan progressive civilized sort of place… People are saying that Wesleyan’s going to go the way of some other schools and shut down its fraternity system.

To which UD says: ATTENTION Dartmouth College Admissions Committee: HOLD ONTO YOUR HATS. For those east coasters for whom Zoo Mass simply won’t do – class-wise – you are kind of it now, if you know what I mean… The other Ivies either don’t feature your famous “intoxicating nihilism,” or they try and fail. No one does it like Dartmouth, and word’s getting out, especially after that Rolling Stone piece and all. An avalanche of applications for admission is on its way!

… is sort of like being Oscar Pistorius’s defense lawyer over and over again. For years, Blaguszewski’s role as spokesperson for the University of Massachusetts Amherst has been to, uh, yes, acknowledge that some of the lads at the school are a mite violent. They riot; they throw beer cans at the police; they assault and batter with dangerous weapons; they pick spectacular fights.

And they have for years; vicious drunken rioting is a long tradition at the school, and things are getting worse. The latest riot – today’s riot – has so far produced 46 arrests.

And poor Ed Blaguszewski keeps getting wheeled out to say the school is appalled at these bad apples but most of the students are great and hey I’ll bet a bunch of the troublemakers aren’t even really U Mass students …

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UPDATE: There’s Got to Be a Morning After…

Arrests are now up to 73.

Collecting bottles and cans around the scene of the mayhem Saturday night, Amherst resident Raul Colon told the Gazette that the day’s events looked like “a revolution, like in the countries that have revolutions between the students and the government.”

And there’s this intriguing tidbit about what you pay for in Pennsylvania when your taxes pay for public universities:

Other colleges across the country have gone on high alert around St. Patrick’s Day to deal with alcohol-fueled students. At Penn State, the school paid licensed liquor establishments to stay closed this month during the unofficial drinking holiday known as State Patty’s Day for the second year in a row.

Your higher education taxes at work!

Well, at Penn State they’ve been paying for (cough) all manner of things for a couple of years now.

UD sometimes feels as though she should issue warnings:

WARNING: THIS UNIVERSITY IS HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH

U Mass Amherst, Chico State, University of Rhode Island: Certain schools feature violent people – often violent drunks – and should be avoided.

Virginia State, where only a few months ago two students were hazed to death, should definitely come with a warning. At a recent event celebrating its athletic conference, its football team beat an opposing quarterback so badly the game that had been scheduled for the day after the banquet has been called off.

The guy “was allegedly beaten by a group of Virginia State football players in a bathroom of a WSSU campus building during the CIAA football banquet.”

Winston-Salem State Chancellor Donald Reaves said in a statement Friday night, “I am saddened to report that at today’s CIAA pre-championship game luncheon held at the Anderson Center of the WSSU campus that our starting quarterback, Rudy Johnson, was viciously beaten by one or more members of the Virginia State football team.

“There is no excuse for the behavior of the Virginia State players. One suspect has admitted to his role in the attack and has been arrest on criminal assault charges. The University Police Department is attempting to identify the other VSU players who were involved. Today’s event was supposed to be a celebration for both teams and for all the players who were being recognized for an outstanding season. The actions from the Virginia State players certainly changed the outcome for everyone.”

Most teams wait until they’re on the field before beating the crap out of the quarterback. VSU can’t wait.

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Wow. Yet more violence at Virginia State University.

… tradition; the university itself is clearly proud of it, since after decades of totally pissed vileness it continues to respond with soft words… Continues to set things up on campus to achieve optimal pillaging. They riot when they’ve been sleeping; they riot when they’re awake; they riot when they’ve been bad or good — so let them RIOT for goodness’ sake!

U Mass Amherst is one of those schools which (let’s be honest) knows it would have to shut down if it didn’t admit its cohort, and the U Mass cohort happens to be gangs of alcoholic bullies from the eastern seaboard. Similarly, if Ole Miss systematically shunned Confederacy loyalists with a big thirst, they’d lose a significant chunk of their incoming class. Most universities are dominated by a representative slice of the American pie; U Mass Amherst, Ole Miss, LSU, Clemson, Auburn, Alabama, Cal State Chico … these schools are not. They play the role of the freaks of this blog, the frenzied teetering muttering mad uncles of the American university family. When you give their students guns, as at Oklahoma State, you witness all manner of amazing things.