Yes, Mike Rice U is now into bold type, garishly warring and litigating personalities, and the baying press in pursuit of the next hilarious unguarded statement. Penn State is still there, a tabloid whose faculty and administration desperately insist it’s back to being a … you know … quiet legitimate scholarly sort of thing (even though, as you read this, the only Penn-State-related word blasting through your brain is SANDUSKY SANDUSKY SANDUSKY). Penn State can give Rutgers pointers… As can the perennial yellow journalism schools, like Auburn, which is in the news for (get ready for it) absolutely total corruption.

We all know big-time sports is the front porch of the university. We’ve been told that by boosters again and again. And it’s true. Eventually, you can see everything. In big, bold type.

Well, you’d expect a column called OutSports to get a bit miffed at Rutgers University’s psycho homophobe coach (watch this for scenes from the groves of contemporary academe). No one else seems to mind: The guy was suspended for three games and is now firmly back in his role as coach/mentor to teenagers.

A student of sadistic university coaches, UD finds Mike Rice’s technique intriguing, if a bit retrogressive. Unlike trailblazing Bobby Knight, he doesn’t throw chairs at his players; nor does he seem drawn to locking concussed students in sheds… Like Tommy Tuberville, Rice is a traditionalist, employing a mix of direct physical violence and verbal savagery.

Rice replace[d] Fred Hill, Jr. who resigned … following a lengthy separation process in the wake of a profanity-laced tirade at a university baseball game on April 1.

Hill had to resign, I guess, because he forgot to throw punches while calling his players cunts. Technique is everything.

Even so, Rice had better watch it. Somewhere out there is an ambitious basketball coach able to call his players cunts, punch their faces, and throw furniture.

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A basketball coach named Mike Rice
Treats his players not terribly nice.
“When their feet start to drag
They get punched and called fag.
Assault in defense of the game is no vice.”

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Update:

The airing of a videotape of Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice using gay slurs, shoving and grabbing his players and throwing balls at them in practice over the past three seasons has the university’s athletic director reconsidering his decision not to fire the coach.

Oh, come on! It was only his first two-year-long offense!

He writes an opinion piece in the school newspaper protesting the destruction of the university by athletics.

You’d think newspapers at Auburn and Clemson and Georgia and Montana and all of the other American universities degraded by big-time sports would feature similar professors – committed, responsible people capable of tracking and analyzing the deterioration and writing about it. Hell, many of these people have tenure, a level of job security unimaginable to most people. But – as UD discussed in what seems to have become her most famous column – for a variety of reasons, they don’t say anything.

Rutgers is an exception. William C. Dowling – a Rutgers English professor – wrote a 2007 book about how sports has long undone, and continues to undo, Rutgers. And now, with things far, far worse than when Dowling’s book came out, an economics professor there – Mark Killingworth – has described the ongoing (and, old UD will guess, ultimately failed) effort to “clean up” after its athletics mess.

A New York Times article about Dowling was written in 2007, when things looked way cool at Rutgers athletics. The author writes that “the number of undergraduate applications has risen along with Rutgers’s sporting fortunes, as have annual donations to the university.”

Really? Here’s Killingworth, 2012:

[B]ig-time University athletics hasn’t attracted more first-year students with high SAT scores, and hasn’t raised our “yield” (percentage of accepted applicants who actually attend), relative to peer institutions. Our academic rankings are sliding steadily downwards, and for two years running, our enormous athletic subsidies have landed us in the Wall Street Journal’s “football grid of shame.” This isn’t “building the brand” — it’s making us a punchline.

What happened to all them big donations and big smart students?

See, this is something sports factories don’t want to parse for you, but getting more jerks to apply to your school because they want to get pissed and join the fun is not a good trend. The state of Massachusetts has set up the University of Massachusetts Amherst to take those students.

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Killingworth touches on the Rutgers board of trustees. He is far too kind, merely asking them to “rethink their priorities.” No. They are the people who killed Rutgers. Like Penn State’s trustees (UD predicts all or most of them will resign in the coming months) they should be booted. Instead of holding the university in their trust and working toward its benefit, they shat on it and created the absolute failure Killingworth describes. Out they go.

Like most of Rutgers University’s almost 30,000 undergraduates, Matt Cordeiro has never put on shoulder pads and played football on a Saturday before a sea of scarlet-clad fans.

Yet Rutgers athletic teams cost him [and every other Rutgers student] almost $1,000 this year, the most among schools competing in the top category of college football. The total includes mandatory student fees and university funding of the money-losing sports program, both of which rose more than 40 percent in five years.

The vote was 174-3. Pretty decisive. UD‘s wondering about those three. One has to be the faculty representative to the athletics program – that’s always a jock in it for the free tickets. What about the other two?

Comments on the article in The Star-Ledger (“Eliminate philosophy and other essoteric non relivant majors that only keep the dorms full.”) point to the real problem at universities like Rutgers: scads of overpaid philosophy professors.

“You have money sucked out of academics and huge subsidies going to athletics,” said Mark Killingsworth, an economics professor. “You wonder what is this place. Are we a university or what? …”

… Rutgers does not intend to diminish its ambitions. Last year, the university explored joining the Atlantic Coast Conference, and on Thursday [AD Tim] Pernetti said that the Rutgers program was “priced to move in every way.”

Schiano and his football program have pretty much cost Rutgers its intellectual reputation. Now that he’s gone, Rutgers will have to strain even more to pay for its pathetic fixation on games.

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UD thanks Dave.

— it’s the only school in America actively trying to transform itself from a university to a jockshop — has been chronicled, step by step on this blog.

And now, rather in the way San Diego State’s last president reduced it to shabby jockery and then retired from the mess he’d made, the president of Rutgers, having presided to his satisfaction over the reduction of his school to a sports whore, will soon take a well-deserved rest.

UD‘s friend Roy sends her the latest article detailing what Richard McCormick has done to a once-proud school.

… (which unfortunately also taught accounting to Gary Foster). It’s by Dave Matter, in the Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune:

Over the last five years, the Big East school has used more than $115 million to cover its athletic department’s spending. That’s almost twice as much as any other major conference athletic department received from its university coffers. And here’s where it gets ugly: State funding cuts have forced Rutgers to withhold $30 million in scheduled raises for its employees.

… Rutgers … is coming off a 4-8 football season and has the Big East’s highest-paid coach in Greg Schiano. At just over $2 million a year, he makes more than any public employee in the state of New Jersey…

… [S]ince 2006, Rutgers has spent more than $115 million to cover athletics spending, a USA TODAY analysis finds. In 2010, Rutgers University said it would withhold scheduled negotiated raises for its employees because of state funding cuts…

[N]o athletics program has matched Rutgers’ subsidies; $115 million is the highest for any public school and nearly twice the subsidy of the next highest school among the power conferences …

An economics professor at Rutgers writes one of those opinion pieces in the local paper that generate volcanic fury on the part of local football fans and…

But wait. Scroll down to the comment thread for the piece! Maybe there’s hope.

Excerpts:

[T]he football program has been a bust: 59 wins and 62 losses since the hiring of the current multimillion-dollar coach.

… [B]etween 2004 and 2009, the last year for which records are available, the university poured a total of $32.3 million in student fees and $75.8 million in direct institutional support into the athletic program. As of 2008-09, student fees and direct support — in other words, subsidies — provided more than 40 percent of the total cost of the program.

… Two years ago, the university committed itself to yet another stadium renovation and expansion, spending $102 million to increase the football stadium’s capacity. Another $12.5 million went for renovation and expansion of the building that houses the football program. The stadium rarely sells out, raising serious questions about how the university will be able to pay for it.

The student was a freshman.

It’s a pretty typical story, if you follow university sports the way UD does. Gruesomely-run state with way-past-dire economy features large public university run by jocksniffers. Pointless, cost-overrun new stadium, overpaid coaches, secret deals, academic mission shot to hell, blahblah.

But sometimes things get so shameless, so squalid, that a certain perverted integrity emerges. The people who run Rutgers will run it into the ground, and damned if anyone’s going to stop them.

It’s unseemly at best that as the Rutgers University Board of Governors was approving tuition and fee hikes this week, school officials were also exulting over a pair of large donations that will pay for a nearly $5 million luxury lounge for the new football stadium.

We know all the excuses. It’s free money. The wealthy donors — two of them — wanted the money used for this specific purpose. They have the right to attach whatever strings they want. And of course the lounge will be really nice and fancy and be a helpful recruiting tool for a program that aspires to greater glory, and since it’s all private money, who cares?

But here’s how officials could have — should have — responded to the donors. They should have graciously explained that given the current economic conditions and pressures it simply wouldn’t be appropriate to accept that much money for such a frivolous project. To pursue the lounge, some of the donated money would have to redirected to another worthy cause, either in academics or even to some of the more neglected sports. Some funds could even have gone to restoring the lost sports programs that a coalition of supporters is still fighting to bring back.

And if the donors refused, school officials could have politely declined the offer and moved on. Because that luxury lounge is hardly an urgent need, or a need at all.

… Let’s remember that the $100 [million]-plus expansion of the football stadium was a boondoggle from the beginning. After the football team threw together a couple of successful seasons officials started bending over backwards trying to grow the program. The expansion project was only part of it. The school also threw silly money at head football coach Greg Schiano, including secret, lucrative provisions that eventually prompted investigations and an overhaul of the entire athletic department…

…nothing to celibrate.

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Update: They fixed it.

Football coach Greg Schiano is well on his way to being hired again at Rutgers. Feast your eyes on his past there, and look forward to the fun Rutgers will have defending Penn State’s most blind, deaf, and dumb employee.

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His old buddy Jerry’s in the news again.