[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.)

… the scummiest university in America. It isn’t there yet – there’s a good deal of competition from states like Hawaii and Alaska – but UD would be very pleased to see a winner from the mainland for a change, and ASU, as of now, is definitely the front-runner.

What pushed it over the top is its mandatory $150 a year student athletics fee, imposed (no student vote – why do that? – they’d only vote against it) on every student to pay for all the shitty games no one goes to, plus for all the overpaid loser coaches.

Add to this ASU’s mentally challenged regents, its charming student body, and its amazing frats, and you get an institution profoundly symbolic of twenty-first century higher education in America.

… that they really cannot think of anything besides athletics for their universities to do.

I know you have trouble believing this; you will point to the existence of professors and administrators on all public university campuses. You will point to the baseline definitional truth – unmissable even to the most doltish – of universities as places of learning.

But the mere existence of professors and administrators at any campus of, say, the University of Hawaii system, proves nothing. You need to look at the fact that schools like UH do virtually nothing, decade after decade, but throw money down a sports hole. It is clear that no one in the state can think of anything else a university might be for.

Except for kickbacks from contractors.

Those are the two things:

1. Staff makes money via bribes.

2. Football games are staged.

Here’s the latest:

[The chancellor] cleared the department of a nearly $15 million deficit last summer and gave the department three years to balance its $30 million budget or face cutting sports offerings.

Dat’s right. He just up and used funds, available to educate people, to erase the athletics department’s fifteen million dollar deficit.

Since then, they’ve lost all their games, no one attends the games, they already have another two million dollar deficit, and UH is going to raise the student athletics fee.

One observer, complaining about the ten million dollars in athletics bailout money from Hawaii taxpayers the university looks likely to get, notes that even in this grim situation there is something for which to be thankful:

[N]o one was present when the ceiling in a classroom on the third floor of Moore Hall collapsed inward due to a leaking pipe.

UD presumes no one was present because, well, physical campuswise… no one’s ever present… There’s no there there as ol’ Gertie put it…

Again, UD would suggest that states like Hawaii actually cannot conceptualize university. And there’s no cure for that.

… violent and prevaricating coach , direct your attention away from Rutgers for a moment and take a look at the University of Alaska.

The larger picture for Alaska involves spectacular statewide corruption. Our two far-flung states – Alaska and Hawaii – are among America’s most filthy, and their substandard universities, and corrupt university sports programs, reflect that. Of course one of the reasons these programs can be so corrupt is that no one outside Hawaii and Alaska pays any attention. We look at big urban states like New Jersey.

But UA has its own sports scandal going, and it precisely echoes the Rutgers story. College Hockey News reports:

Former Alaska-Anchorage forward Mickey Spencer alleges that former coach Dave Shyiak hit a player with his stick during a practice in 2011, then told players to keep quiet about it. Spencer made his allegations in a letter written to the school president and Board of Regents, it was reported in the Anchorage Daily News.

According to the letter, Shyiak violently struck forward Nick Haddad during a drill because the coach got angry that Haddad didn’t stop in front of the net as instructed.

The Daily News obtained the letter. In it, Spencer said, “He tomahawked, lumber-jacked — whatever you want to call it — him across the thigh on his (hockey) pants. We knew this wasn’t a small deal, it’s kind of a big deal. I’ve seen a coach break a stick over a goalpost or the glass because he’s pissed about something, but I’ve never seen one take out his anger on a player.”

You can understand why Shyiak was frustrated; he had eight losing seasons in a row at UAA. Anyone would have attacked a player.

As at Rutgers, after the violent coach went, the UAA athletic director who oversaw the coach was also forced out. There’s a suggestion that the university didn’t take the players’ report of the coach’s violence seriously; there’s also the fact that the university announced nothing of all of this to the media. And now, for unknown reasons, the search for a new hockey coach has been called off.

UAA athletics is also, by the way, under NCAA investigation for an undisclosed something or other.

The Sarah Palin appointees making up this university’s regents have called a special meeting to discuss all of this. That should help.

… life on campus becomes so degrading, that students take desperate measures. UD vividly remembers the American University students who, stuck with a president whose corruption had become a national disgrace, simply drove all day up and down AU’s main drag, honking their horns and calling out to people on the sidewalk to help them get rid of the pest. They emblazoned their cars with signs like PRESIDENT LADNER: WE’LL HELP YOU MOVE.

All of Washington laughed; the tactic worked. Ladner resigned.

Jake Mayfield’s similarly desperate online petition (I just signed it; if this blog’s long chronicle of the mind-wastage of big-time university sports has meant anything to you, you should consider signing it too) is unlikely to work. New Mexico State University (background here) is much too far gone for anyone to make much of a difference. Unlike AU, located in an intellectually ambitious state (well, district), NMSU is located in what UD calls one of our Right-Not-To-Think states. Imagine trying to explain – let alone get support for – an academic university in Nevada, Alaska, Hawaii, New Mexico. Not gonna happen.

Still, there’s nobility in what Mayfield (a recent NMSU grad) is doing; it’s an important gesture, and one worth supporting.

The University of Hawaii and South Carolina State University give UD an empty feeling. She doesn’t like this feeling any more than you do when you have it — as if existence is suddenly stripped of meaning and value and you’re inside a howling panorama of futility and anarchy.

Corrupt outposts of corrupt states, these two are always on UD‘s radar, not only for the commonplace (theft of funds, exploded athletics budgets), but for the baroque (Stevie Wonder concerts about which Stevie Wonder doesn’t know; just-completed federally funded research buildings turning into instant ruins).

These schools are the public non-profit twin of America’s private for-profit schools: Both surreal ruinations are fueled by the trapped, hapless, American taxpayer.

The benighted University of Hawaii – a bad school with a bad football team that’s always getting arrested (background here) – rigged up a Stevie Wonder concert to benefit athletics…

No one told Stevie Wonder, however.

The university spent $200,000 to organize the concert, however.

The university isn’t sure who it gave the money to, however.

It’s trying to get the money back. But it doesn’t remember who it gave it to.

The University of Hawaii. Isn’t she lovely?

A couple of updates:

1.) The University of New Mexico athletics will run a two million dollar deficit.

Reasons? All the classics: Gotta pay a vile ex-coach hundreds of thousands in buyout bucks. Nobody comes to the shitty games. Current coach costing almost a million.

Solutions? All the classics: Stick it to the students — up their fees. (Nothing says grow your fan base like the combination of a bad team, an overpaid coach, and ripped off students.) And take out a whopper of a loan.

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

2.) The University of Hawaii will run a two million dollar deficit. Same as UNM.

Reasons? Same as UNM.

Solutions? Same as UNM.