“Western Kentucky University’s board ran roughshod over faculty regent Robert Dietel last week, as it rushed to embrace Division I-A football…. WKU’s board told Dietel to shut up. Contempt dripped from [one board member]: ‘People on this board dedicate their time for free. They have better things to do than let some university professor just keep talking.'”

Dietel can take no pleasure in what has ensued over the last few years, though I’m sure he’s not surprised. He told the idiots at WKU what would happen. They didn’t listen. The school is now a money-hemorrhaging laughingstock.

Here’s our most recent information on WKU:

There will be a lot of empty seats at LP Field in Nashville tonight when the University of Kentucky and Western Kentucky open the 2011 football season at 9:15 p.m.

At 3 p.m. Wednesday, 40,262 tickets were available at Ticketmaster.com, including nearly 10,000 in the lower level. The stadium, where the NFL’s Tennessee Titans play their home games, holds 68,798 fans.

They’re desperately handing out free tickets so the stadium won’t look like a funeral home.

The Ballad of the Sad Bowtie

You knew we’d check in on Western Kentucky University again, right? We’ve been following the fortunes of that school ever since Professor Robert Dietel, way back in 2006, excited intense ridicule and hatred from the school’s trustees for warning that going Division I would destroy the school’s finances.

Now ruined, and a laughingstock, WKU does what they all do: It hires a new deer-in-the-headlights president, a guy who looks the part cuz he wears bowties, and they send him out to shut down what’s left of the school’s academic side. Enjoy his picture. Note the deer-in-the-headlights look. And the This is a Real University; I’m a Real President bowtie. The copyright holder on the bowtie thing is sports-whore supreme Gordon Gee.

The trustees insisted that Dietel was an asshole and that classy coaches like Bobby Petrino and an incredibly expensively recruited (but less carefully vetted) football team would make enrollments skyrocket…

That rocket went flaccid and now Bowtie Bambi meets the glare of national news cameras head-on…

Ever since 2006…

… (see last three paragraphs), UD has followed the predictable – predicted – demise of Western Kentucky University as it embraces big-time football. As object-of-ridicule-and-contempt Professor Robert Dietel tried to tell the WKU idiots more than ten years ago, it’ll bring expensive slimy coaches and violent players to campus. It’ll drain the already paltry funds available for academics, and the steady march of player arrests will associate WKU’s name with criminality. The latest big roundup of players – for beating the shit out of a fraternity guy – on camera – is getting the national publicity it deserves.

I hope the WKU trustees who attacked Dietel are proud of themselves.

It’s been a small but distinct pleasure over many years for UD to watch…

whoa-woo-woo-way-whacked-out Western Kentucky University go totally trailer trash via its decision in ’06 to join Division I-A football. One of their professors, Robert Dietel, begged them at the time to reconsider, and got shat on thusly by the board of trustees:

Western Kentucky University’s board ran roughshod over faculty regent Robert Dietel last week, as it rushed to embrace Division I-A football…. WKU’s board told Dietel to shut up. Contempt dripped from [one board member]: ‘People on this board dedicate their time for free. They have better things to do than let some university professor just keep talking.’

In 2009, WKU was the only winless team in the country. Moving briskly to 2011, things looked just as bleak. 2012 was all about hiring major gross-out Bobby Petrino as coach, a move hailed as “slime time” by the nation’s sports journalists.

Can you top that???

Yes. For 2013, I give you…

FIVE TOPPERS HAVE BEEN ARRESTED THIS OFFSEASON

And that’s just offseason! Damn season hasn’t even started yet!

And who’s the good ol’ boy gets to talk to the press ’bout how serious he takes moral and legal hoohaw?

Yeah! Billy Bob Bobby!

Div I-A.  SCORE!

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

UPDATE: Bobby Petrino makes a small appearance in this helpful pre-season rundown of notable plays on SEC teams. UD knows we can expect more of the same this year!

“Bobby Petrino is slime.”

Western Kentucky University basks in the academic splendor of the most important person on campus, Coach Bobby Petrino.

Petrino may well be the least ethically whole man in the, ahem, ethically whole-deprived world of Division I collegiate sports… Western Kentucky, a school with mediocre athletics and apparently, sub-mediocre standards, has turned to a person who lied to his last employer about the nature of an accident involving the mistress he allegedly hired to a university position she was unqualified to hold. Please, if you must, take a second to read that again. And again. And again.

Bobby Petrino, holder of a Ph.D. in the Deceptive Arts (he also ditched the University of Louisville shortly after signing a long-term extension in 2007, and quit as coach of the Atlanta Falcons 13 game into his first season later that year. He informed his players via a note atop their lockers), will be the one charged with teaching the 17- and 18-year-old boys who decide to come to Bowling Green about not merely football, but life. He will be their guide. Their compass. Their role model.

UD’s heart goes out to Robert Dietel. Though here’s hoping that in the years since he tried to stop WKU from turning into a sewer he’s found a respectable place to work.

Sometimes, pity almost keeps me from covering certain universities.

Almost.

Western Kentucky University drew UD‘s attention years ago, when a brave faculty member, Robert Dietel, stood up at a regents’ meeting to try to stop the school from switching to Division I-A football. (The link takes you to an old post – 2006 – which doesn’t make clear that, except for the final paragraph, it’s taken from a local newspaper article.) He was shouted down by the idiots who run the school.

Now proudly I-A at enormous expense to the students, WKU is “the only winless team in the country in 2009.” As the local writer explained in 2006:

To stay in Division I-A, WKU will have to average 15,000 fans at its home games. But it hasn’t even been filling L. T. Smith Stadium, where attendance has been 10,279 so far this year and was 12,795 last year — despite all the interest built up as the school won the 2002 NCAA Division I-AA national championship and went on to complete 10 consecutive winning seasons.

Let’s see how ticket sales are going now.

[The team] sold about 7,300 season tickets this year. Last season they topped out at 7,506 — a significant drop from the 8,648 sold in 2008.

You shouldn’t let idiots run universities. An obvious truth, but it seems to need restating.

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