… they recruit to their already arrest-ridden football team a person with a long and ugly police record, and then they finally suspend him after, er, let’s see…
The charges stem from the April 5 beating of two men, moments after they kissed at 5th Avenue and 9th Street in Huntington. Criminal complaints charge Butler witnessed the kiss, exited a passing vehicle and proceeded to shout derogatory words toward both men related to their sexual orientation. Butler then struck the face of both victims with a closed fist, the complaints charge.
Put Marshall University in this blog’s search engine to feast your eyes on one of the scummiest campuses in Christendom. I mean, it’s not just the sports-only nature of Marshall. Marshall is hideous all around. Pity its poor faculty.
… a West Virginia newspaper.
It begins with a July 6 letter from good ol’ Wade Gilley, president of Marshall University (background on Marshall here) in the ‘nineties. Wade went on to head the University of Tennessee but had to leave onaccounta he did a few things that seem like they didn’t sit well with other people there. Yeah, ol’ Wade had to scoot.
Now Wade’s letter is a model of its type. What you got here is the good ol’ boy reminiscing bout the good ol’ days when men was men and Marshall was a beautiful paradise of football, football, and football.
I … remember being invited to a national meeting of 20 university presidents and 20 Fortune 500 corporate CEOS in the late 1990s and hearing many positive remarks about Marshall. In fact, Father Malloy, the president of Notre Dame at that time, approached me at a reception and said, “Wade, some of us were just talking about the success of your football program and we were wondering just how it happened.”
And that’s just one story about rich important people flocking around me wanting to know my secret of success!
After sharing more stories about how fantastic football is for universities, Wade concludes:
And there is no doubt that football, which is largely self-supporting, has been and will be a positive factor in promoting Marshall’s national image.
A little nay-saying (“Self-supporting? Hardly.”) does pop up among the commenters, but a July 13 opinion piece from a Marshall finance professor really puts the kibosh on the thing. Dallas Brozik is a hard-nosed guy and he ain’t having any of it.
Despite the fact that one of his students, on Rate My Professors, says Dallas doesn’t like English majors, Dallas writes really well. Let’s see how he does it, step by step. Scathing Online Schoolmarm will interrupt his piece with comments in parenthesis.
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Wade Gilley’s recent letter concerning the ongoing discussion about the Marshall University budget was quite interesting. [Now usually SOS complains about the profoundly uninteresting word interesting. But Dallas here’s going to use it slyly, in the manner of Oscar Wilde…] Just as a magician uses sleight of hand to mislead the audience, those who wish to keep the university budget a black hole keep spreading misinformation.
I have no doubt [Brozik will repeat the formulation I have no doubt throughout his piece.] that Dr. Gilley met with folks at all levels who commented on our football team, which at the time had a winning record. Sports always makes good small talk. I have no doubt that we had the best athletes and coaches despite the legal and criminal records of some of these individuals. [Note how slyly Brozik has already gotten two points across: Gilley’s a maundering fool; and the teams he’s teary-eyed about were pretty smelly.]
I have no doubt that Dr. Gilley met a person whose daughter had chosen to go to law school at a certain university, supposedly because of the school’s athletic program. I also have no doubt that I would not want this person to represent me in a court of law unless it is about sports law. [Brozik’s calm, reiterated I have no doubt is wonderful. It signals a kind of elaborate emotional self-control, a determination to be gentlemanly and long-suffering about Gilley.]
Dr. Gilley has no doubt that the football program has been an important factor in the increase in enrollment at Marshall. Dr. Stephen Kopp became president on July 1, 2005. For the academic year 2005-2006, the official enrollment of the university was 13,920. The official enrollment for 2012-2013 was 13,708. This implies that the football program, or whatever, created negative enrollment growth. [Oh, don’t confuse me with numbers! And that or whatever is wonderful too – another sly polite little suggestion that Wade is somewhat whacked out.]
Dr. Gilley has no doubt that the football program has been a very positive economic growth factor for Huntington. Since Dr. Gilley’s time, the population of Huntington has decreased and many businesses have closed. The 2012 State of Well-Being Report from Gallup-Healthways ranks Huntington as 188 out of 189. Check the want ads section of today’s paper to see how many job openings exist and at what levels. There has been no economic miracle in Huntington over the last several decades, football or not. [You can see ol’ Wade putting a hand over each ear at this point and saying LALALALALA I can’t hear you I can’t hear you…]
Wade Gilley left Marshall under his own cloud [We won’t even go into his University of Tennessee cloud.]; why he wants to get involved in this discussion is strange. He has no dog in this fight. He is old news. He admits he has little insight into the current budget situation, but he has no doubt that a football program which is not self-supporting promotes Marshall’s national image. Dr. Gilley is entitled to his opinion, but opinions are like bellybuttons; everybody has one but very few should be aired in public. [SOS would drop the way down-home belly button thing. Brozik doesn’t need it; and it breaks his terrific tone of restrained contempt.]
Dr. Kopp promised “transparency” in April. [Only in his last paragraph does Brozik turn to Marshall’s current football-concussed president. Nice move. It puts MU’s latest loser squarely in the company of Gilley.] He still has not opened the books for review, even though state law requires him to do so. The current problem is one of accountability for state funds and the tuition and fees paid by students. Those who try to frame this as an anti-sports question are either misled or trying to be misleading. The budget for Marshall University is important to the entire community, and that budget should be examined. The time for opinions is over. It is time for action. It is time for Dr. Kopp to live up to his promise of transparency and open the books.
If you’re Huntington West Virginia’s attorney, and you have to write a piece in the local press defending the city against charges that its inept appeals board let a pretty obvious criminal open a bar where a mass shooting gained national attention, you need to know how to write English. You need to know how to write what writing instructors like SOS call a persuasive essay.
In the case of this obviously botched process, you need to begin by conceding that the city could have done better; after that, you can go to town defending Huntington as having done not that badly, or whatever.
Huntington’s attorney has instead produced a miserable mess, a blahblah brew that (as comments on the article suggest) only confirms everyone’s prejudice that lawyers are people who produce double talk and bullshit on request. On the simplest level of word meaning, this writer fails.
The frightening prospect of a dispute resulting in the shooting of several people that occurred between the prosperous downtown area and Marshall University warrants our collective focus and resolution that no similar event can occur here again.
Put aside the indecipherable wordy weirdness of the sentence altogether – the redundancy of the passive, ugly “occur,” the bizarre placement of the shooting’s location not at the Kulture Hookah bar but I dunno somewhere between the prosperous (why is prosperous relevant?) downtown (you don’t need area, unless your goal is to lard and muddy and fog and vagueify and pass the buck and pretend what happened didn’t sorta actually happen), the tea party word dispute instead of fight… Seven people aren’t left crawling among broken beer bottles inside and bullet casings outside after a dispute. Put all of that aside and notice that the writer thinks prospect means fact.
This event wasn’t in some cloudy future, much as the writer clearly wants it to be; it happened. Hence the word he ‘s looking for is fact, or event, or episode, or incident.
Of course, if he knew how to write he would have avoided this problem altogether: The frightening shootout at Kulture Hookah can never happen again. That’s all the poor man needed, not all those other words. But writing like that communicates an open straightforward grounding in reality, which is the last thing this guy wants, has, or is capable of expressing.
The rest of the opinion piece dances around the failure of the city to check the bar owner’s heroin distribution background before granting her a permit.
The writer ends in this way:
Every person who had a hand in addressing the matter performed his or her job with competence. The shooting occurred because of unpredictable criminal behavior…
Nothing to see here! We concede nothing! Absolutely everyone who runs the second largest city in a state with the highest opioid death rate in the United States is doing a great job!
This blog has featured some less than ideal places to attend college or university, places that seem to UD not optimal if you’d like a little peace and quiet and not too much gun-play to go with your studies. Trigger-mad Waco, Texas, for instance, with its breastaurant-biker riots/mass killings, rape- friendly university (Baylor) and good ol’ boy judges (most of them Baylor grads) does not seem to UD to shout pursue a higher education here. Unless you already know you want to study American cults up close and personal (the Branch Davidians raped their children here) you might want to look elsewhere.
Similarly, Huntington, West Virginia, home of appalling Marshall University, might not be the best place for you to study. Folks there saw in 2020 by shooting everybody up at a bar that calls itself Kulture Hookah and has a very strange, uh, provenance.
Back in July the city approved the place because its owner was a fine lass struggling to raise drug-free kids and she was fervently opposed to alcohol and any form of acting up in the joint. This would be a quiet, strictly private refuge full of oldies. Profits from the place, she told the unanimously-impressed Board of Zoning Appeals, would go toward the eradication of the town’s well-known drug problem.
One sharp-eyed commenter on the story about this in a local paper asked
Is the owner the same person convicted of operating a heroin distribution house in Huntington in 2016?
but the Huntington zoners got all choked up at her sob story and didn’t see any need to check newspaper articles or court records about how the hookah bar owner
pleaded guilty in 2016 to maintaining a residence for the purpose of distributing heroin.
[She] was sentenced to 15 months in prison.
They musta been mighty surprised to find out, day after the mass shooting, that
The bar advertised their New Year’s Eve party via social media and left an aftermath of drinks, party favors, and blood on the floor.
I mean. How can UD say this politely? Some places are just too stupid for you to go to school there.
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Update. When asked if [the bar owner] would have been given a business permit given her criminal history, [Huntington’s mayor] said it’s important to have all the information when making those decisions.
Yeah, it’s important but we’re too dumb to have it… I mean, we’re too high to have it… And yeah, I hear you: The state with the nation’s highest overdose death rate should maybe keep a bit of an eye on heroin distributors and maybe not give them permits to open bars, but … uh… (nods off)…
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Second Update: Getting better and better.
The flier for Wednesday morning’s party included a picture of a woman holding an assault weapon.
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Third Update: Just before she was given her certificate of occupancy for the retail shop, court papers reveal [Kulture Hookah’s owner] was cited for shoplifting at Walmart.
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Dunno. At this point there are two distinct possibilities: Huntington West Virginia is actually this stupid; or everyone in the government is getting huge sums of money to coordinate running the city with the best interests of the well-established Huntington/Detroit drug cartel in mind.
… and – look out – he’s at it again, stirring up hornets in Huntington. A local Marshall University basketball booster is outraged that Brozik, a professor there, made a student attend class.
Brozik … wouldn’t give Yous Mbao, a 7-foot-2 senior center on MU’s basketball team, an excused absence to play in the Herd’s 119-77 win over Rio Grande at the Henderson Center.
Had Mbao played, the win might have been 199-77!
[I]nformed sources say Brozik allegedly told Mbao his grade would be dropped two letters if he weren’t in attendance for a group presentation that Tuesday evening.
… What an injustice.
… If his name sounds familiar it’s because Brozik is the same professor that was outspoken in his criticism of Marshall’s financial support of the school’s athletic department. His rhetoric created a controversy and notable media attention.
The unfortunate part is when a few dissidents, such as Brozik, achieve notoriety while the silent majority of Marshall’s faculty is supportive of MU’s athletics.
The faculty at-large deserves better.
It’s also unfortunate that Marshall’s athletic department didn’t stand up to Brozik in Mbao’s behalf. It should have. It’s time to stop the nonsense.
(Yeah, ol’ Dallas outspoke for sure on Marshall University’s sports-fucked finances and general mental debility. We covered this notorious dissidence here.)
Marshall professors deserve to be at a university where coaches tell them when students can and cannot attend class. Why then do they not rise up as one and break their silence? Why should they get the short end of the stick, when professors at plenty of other schools have the right to plead with coaches for permission to have athletes attend class?
The athletics department itself fell down on this one, passively allowing a professor to apply attendance policies to athletes.
The article is clearly a call to arms. Expect professors and coaches to rally at Marshall’s central quad on behalf of their rights.