… the art of argumentation.

Arguing in favor of increased taxpayer subsidy of the University of Hawaii’s pointless, corrupt, and wasteful football program is not going to be easy. Argumentation-wise, you’re going to have to lift your game as high as you possibly can. You’re going to have to stand on your tippy toes. You’re going to have to reach for reasons as you’ve never reached for reasons before.

It’s not surprising, then, that a local columnist fails to make the case that the governor was wrong when he recently denied the school three million additional athletics dollars. But the way he fails is instructive if you’re interested in how to write polemically.

The writer’s particular challenge is that he has absolutely no empirical evidence on his side. Almost no one goes to the games. Ever. The team is wretched. Consistently. The flagrant mismanagement of the program makes it a statewide embarrassment.

If he is going to get anywhere in making his case, he’s going to have to go straight and hard in the direction of total bullshit.

People disdain bs, but when you’ve got nowhere else to go, it can be very effective. If the subject is football, it means getting weepy and huffy and patriotic and mythic and misty-eyed as you recall past heroes on the field, the character-building power of teamwork, and the way your own university experience would have been hollow without crisp fall afternoons cheering on the lads. This approach will appeal to the typical reader’s sentimentality about football even as it allows you to sidestep the, uh, reality problem.

This particular writer opts against bs, which leaves him flailing. It leaves him to make the case against his argument. Let’s take a look.

Here’s his opening move:

[A]lmost every university athletics program in the country loses money. The debt is chronic, structural.

So … give your tax money to UH till it hurts? Because we won’t be on board with the national project of bankrupting schools via their big sports programs if we don’t? You wouldn’t want Hawaii to be left out of America’s ongoing chronic structural football indebtedness, would you?

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Next move: If you don’t stop refusing to attend UH football games, you’re going to force UH to shut down the program. Then where will you have not to go on Sunday afternoons? The writer describes this terrifying scenario in appropriately terrifying terms:

UH [might have] to disband all or parts of its intercollegiate sports, including of course, football. That is a university’s nuclear option. Whatever they think of football, no university administrators anywhere want to be the ones who drop this bomb.

University administrators everywhere dream nightly of shutting down their football programs, so this wasn’t a good place for the writer to go. Again, the principle here is do not try to make your argument reality-based if you don’t have any reality-based arguments.

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The writer’s next move reminds us that within the category bullshit, there is good bullshit and bad bullshit. By the middle of his essay the writer has commendably turned to bullshit, but he has chosen bad. Let us see if we can follow his serpentine reasoning here.

“It is a matter of setting priorities,” [the governor] told the newspaper, as if we are talking about Political Science Department office supplies. “If UH wants athletics to be a priority, then it needs to come up with the money.”

Very tough-lovish and totally misguided. [The governor] sees the problem as a budgetary issue — a cut here, a paste there, get off your okole and do your job.

Because athletics is completely different from anything else at UH, different rules should apply.

Solving the deficit should not be on UH’s priority list at all because the deficit is the community’s and by extension the Legislature’s problem, not UH’s.

Working her way through this extraordinary set of claims, SOS concludes that the writer is saying the following.

The University of Hawaii is a conduit, a vector, a vessel, through which the football-demanding citizens of the state are granted football. The citizens demand it and the state uses their tax dollar to provide it; UH just sits there fielding a team. Therefore money must come from the legislature, not from, say, UH ticket revenue ($0).

This argument combines the reality-based mistake (no one in the state demands football) with bad bullshit (football is a public good like the railroads – the writer compares university football to Amtrak).

SOS did find one good use of bs in this piece.

Is UH football one of these valuable endeavors worth subsidizing? If the politicians think so, then they should step up, allocate the money, and defend their choice.

Be accountable for your decisions and don’t make the university do the dirty work for you.

If the Legislature or the governor does not want to take the heat for bailing out athletics in this way, fine. But don’t pass the buck and blame UH for your lack of will.

This is great because it is both emotive (government pussies!) and totally madly insanely unreality-based (martyred UH is forced to take the fall for being a faithful public servant in the provision of football). Wow.

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In concluding his essay, the writer brings out the big guns.

[The governor is] putting a nail in the coffin of the university.

And why? Because he is allowing UH autonomy, the bastard.

On the surface, [the governor’s] comments support the university’s flexibility. But what he is actually doing is stressing its flexibility to do things it really does not want to do.

… “I think the university should take responsibility and make a decision about what is important,” [the governor] said to the Star-Advertiser. “If they are unable to do that, I’ll take back all the authority to line item the budget. I’d do it in a second … I’d love to do that.”

… Overall, the governor’s views have a patronizing, dismissive dad-to-teen quality.

He makes it appear that UH may not have the courage to make hard choices.

Anyone who has followed the story of the University of Hawaii for the last ten or so years (put University Hawaii in this blog’s search engine) knows that on every level it is among America’s most dysfunctional public university systems, with scandalous ever-shifting leadership, endless financial and athletic misdeeds, supine trustees, and put-upon students. The evidence is overwhelming that what the governor hints at is right: UH lacks the intelligence and the will to govern itself.

It is bad bullshit for this writer to complain that a university which deserves to patronized is being patronized. It is positively Orwellian for him to say that a university which lacks the capacity and the courage to make even easy choices has the courage and capacity to make hard choices. Where is the chorus of Hawaiians outraged by the governor’s actions and comments in regard to the state’s university? If you took Amtrak away, I think you’d hear about it from a lot of Americans.

Rather than struggle against his absence of all grounded argument, this writer would have done better to focus relentlessly upon the transcendent glory of football, adding here and there some abstract anti-government references.

… who cynically and with arrant disregard recruit violent and troubled men to their campuses and then make them sports heroes until they kill someone… UD is fascinated by the ways these universities do damage control. It’s especially intriguing to watch, er, repeat offenders deal with the body count.

Take nice little University of Maine. A pleasant inoffensive sort of place, except that their coaches are really unlucky in love. Jovan Belcher, and now “[Zedric] Joseph is the second former UMaine football player in just over a year to be linked to a murder.” Yes, two in a row, and of course in both cases there was evidence – in their pre-college past, and in their college behavior – that they were dangerous people. But, you know, exposing your undergraduates to people like Belcher and Joseph is all part of the game. Students at the University of Nebraska knew that risking standing in a line behind Richie Incognito was the price you paid for winning games. It’s all part of winning games.

But okay let’s see how you mop up the mess if you’re U Maine. First, as Deadspin’s Sean Newell points out, you take a page from Joseph Stalin’s book and unperson him. You just rub him out. You literally – as Yeshiva did with trustee Bernard Madoff – erase him from all real and virtual university surfaces. What… Belcher? Who…?

Almost one year to the day after he shot and killed his girlfriend before driving to the Kansas City Chiefs’ facility where he shot and killed himself in front of his coach and general manager, Jovan Belcher is no longer on the banner.

You know, the banner. The BIG banner that hangs in U Maine stadium boasting about their guys now in the NFL.

Newell then notes some of the guys still on the banner:

… Maine and Steelers lineman Justin Strzelczyk … drove 15 miles of a 40-mile high speed chase on three wheels, flipping off and throwing beer bottles at state troopers along the way. The chase, which began because of a hit and run, ended when he sped into oncoming traffic and collided head-on with a tanker, killing him instantly.

Strzelczyk, 6 feet 6 inches and 300 pounds, was a monstrous presence on the Steelers’ offensive line from 1990-98. He was known for his friendly, banjo-playing spirit and gluttony for combat. He spiraled downward after retirement, however, enduring a divorce and dabbling with steroid-like substances, and soon before his death complained of depression and hearing voices from what he called “the evil ones.”

It was later determined Strzelczyk’s showed signs of CTE.

Among the less-troubled on the banner are Stephen Cooper, Lofa Tatupu and Daren Stone. Cooper, a former San Diego Charger, was found holding 1,000 anabolic steroid pills during a traffic stop while at UMaine. He was later suspended four games by the NFL when he tested positive for ephedra. Both Lofa Tatupu and Daren Stone had their own minor scrapes with the law and were charged with DUIs.

The other classic response ingredients (this goes on at all schools where this sort of thing happens) involve focusing on

1. the shock and anguish of the coaches (How could anyone have seen this coming? They were like sons to me. etc.)

2. the tragic loss to the team’s win record (Defense is going to have trouble recovering from this absence from the lineup…)

3. the tragic nature of life in general (the school’s most articulate and sad-faced administrator blinks in front of the cameras and talks of the essential wounded enigma of being as such)

4. the remarkable compassion and competence of the school’s mental health professionals as they rush to deal with traumatized students

5. the way this has made the school a stronger place by bringing us all together through adversity.

It’s awkward. How entangled do universities want to get with businesses like Millennium?

A federal grand jury in Boston is investigating Millennium Laboratories of San Diego, a fast-growing private company selling urine drug testing services to pain clinics across the United States.

The company not only is under investigation by the Justice Department for allegations of health care fraud but also for intimidating former employees, one who was portrayed in a slideshow at a company meeting as a corpse in a body bag…. [It is also accused of] getting doctors to order unnecessary urine tests [– the testing, amid an epidemic of pain pill use, reveals whether patients are abusing the drugs –] and charging excessive fees to Medicare and private insurers.

I mean, nothing wrong with industry money, but you do want to keep an eye on the particular representatives from industry offering it.

Millennium sales tactics [it is alleged] included a chart showing doctors how much they could boost their own income by increasing the number of urine drug tests they ordered. For instance, a $15 payment to test for one drug could balloon to about $800,000 a year if 20 people a day were tested and each urine sample was tested for 11 drugs, the chart said.

It is a beautiful synergy, when you think about it. Keep prescribing the pain pills — the medical profession almost has the entire American population on them — and then, concerned at the shocking escalation in their abuse, make your patients pay for urine tests. It’s funny to think about how America’s hundreds of thousands of pill mills will be giving the test to make sure their customers are taking their Oxy and Roxy. If you’re in the urine testing biz, like Millennium, you get them coming and going, as it were.

So, you know, a very becoming business altogether, and if you’re Duke or Washington you might want to keep an eye on the Justice Department proceedings and ask if you want to continue whitewashing the reputation of these outfits.

… the dean of the recently opened, totally unnecessary, school of law at the University of California Irvine.

In response to the terrible crisis in that state’s public system, Erwin Chemerinsky warns darkly against

freezing or decreasing executive and faculty salaries. If the University of California is going to retain and attract high-level faculty, it must pay the same as comparable schools across the country. Over the last few weeks, I have negotiated salaries with superb professors we are attempting to recruit who are currently teaching at Harvard, Northwestern and Yale. The University of California must match their current salaries or they will not come. As much as I love living in Southern California, I could not have afforded to leave Duke University if it meant taking a substantial pay cut.

Well, let’s get to it. How much do you make? How much do your law school colleagues make? How much do they teach? How many of your graduates get jobs as lawyers (the Irvine school opened despite the fact that California has a glut of lawyers, and large numbers of unemployed law school grads)? And, uh, didn’t you tell me, when justifying your unjustifiable new school, that your faculty would be all about turning out public interest lawyers? So… hard-nosed, hyper-capitalist, private sector salaries for our faculty, but of course! And crappy non-profit positions for our idealistic students.

I mean, I ask how much you make because you say you couldn’t afford to live in California unless you earned what you earn. What do you earn?

Let’s say at Duke you earned $300,000. Are you saying that you couldn’t afford to live on less than that?

Remember the University of Chicago’s Todd Henderson. And he teaches at a private school…

Vous savez… UD‘s father, a scientist at the National Institutes of Health, made a lower salary than he would have in the private sector; but he didn’t seem to mind, because he thought public service was a high calling. What happened to that whole thing?

Listen to Kristin Luker, Chemerinsky. She’s a colleague of yours at Berkeley.

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UPDATE: From the comments at TaxProf blog:

Going from US News rankings, at the top [of California’s universities] are Stanford and CalTech– both are private and so from the state’s point of view are cheap/free (never mind federal research dollars for a second). Then we get to the state university system: UC Berkeley, USC, UCLA, UC San Diego, UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara.

Then, after all these schools, you finally get to UC Irvine. I can see the rationale for their flagship schools (and even having more than one flagship given the size of California). I can see the argument for a strong set of second-tier institutions, too.

Can anyone explain why Irvine, ranked ninth in the whole wide state, is recruiting from Harvard, Northwestern and Yale? Just what is Chemerinsky saying here? By his own argument, being world-class is expensive, and so from a return-on-taxpayer-investment perspective, Irvine shouldn’t be frozen, they should be gutted to keep the top California universities on top.

Chemerinsky is arguing against freezing or cutting the law school. What he should be defending is the law school’s existence in the first place.