…
Student [game] attendance would likely drop off [without a new stadium] and the tailgating experience would be compromised.
Now the school’s in darkest deficit doodoo, game attendance is tanking, and the UW trustees, whose job it is to be trustees, are sniping at the ex-athletic director onaccounta he didn’t tell them how he was spending the students’ money.
UW trustees want to know: Who’s the steward of student and state money around here anyway?
A university president who doesn’t know the difference between incredible and incredulous.
$95 million in legal payouts (so far) can put a real crimp in your proofreader budget.
Does Washington State University exist? Last week, one of its engineering professors (natch) was arrested on way-serious federal fraud charges, and not only does Haifang Wen still offer his steely gaze on behalf of that university, but WSU spokespeople, when asked about our nation’s latest engineering department fraud (it’s as common as oxycontin abuse), say Huh? Dunno.
As longtime readers know, UD has proposed stationing armed guards at the doors of all university engineering professors (this would be easy at Texas universities, whose students could be offered work/study arrangements) in order to try to head their fake companies and pretend employees off at the pass… I mean, far be it from UD to malign an entire field, but in the many years she’s been blogging about universities she’s been amazed at the constancy with which engineering professors take federal research money and deposit it directly into their personal checking accounts.
UD has also proposed, since these guys make so much shit up, that they be transferred to Creative Writing, where they can be useful teaching students how to write fake investor letters. Wen in particular had a mind-blowingly elaborate series of fictions going.
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UD thanks Seelye.
At Florida State, salaries for non-coaching administrators rose from $7.7 million to $15 million. That’s the raise that Seminoles athletic staff gave themselves for running up a deficit of $2 million, while presiding over an academic fraud scandal involving 10 teams, and mishandling criminal allegations against football players.
LSU’s football program is rich as all get-out; whatever’s left of the university it’s sort of attached to is totally up shit’s delta.
So what to do with the shabby close to bankrupt nothing that used to be a university? The bunch of rags dangling off the quarterback’s Platinum Dazzle thigh? Team boosters at LSU are about to find seventeen million dollars to buy out a coach they don’t like, but money for a … school?
This guy’s panicking because after all “there is no football team without a functioning Louisiana State University… [T]here is no LSU Athletics without Louisiana State University.” You gotta keep the school at least on life support to keep the football team alive. Don’t you?
Not really. Think of the evolution of LSU in the following way. You know how in the first Alien film the alien baby needed John Hurt’s body in order to gestate? That’s LSU football. Needed a nice warm university to grow in, but now it’s all grown up and its host has no reason to live anymore.
There are plenty of ghost universities with thriving football teams, and UD has often named them on this blog. Auburn.* Clemson. Nebraska. Their spectral story is also LSU’s. Accept it, says UD.
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*
Some [Auburn] purchases … were optional, like two new twin-engine jets: a six-seat 2008 Cessna Citation CJ2+ ($6.4 million) and a seven-seat 2009 Cessna Citation CJ3 ($7.8 million), each bearing a blue and orange “AU” insignia on its tail.
The jets are used primarily by coaches to criss-cross the country meeting with recruits, contributing to Auburn’s recruiting costs nearly doubling in a decade, from $1.6 million to $2.7 million.
[Its] new video board, the largest in college sports, was also optional. Auburn has a history of trend-setting electronics displays. In 2007, it installed the first high-definition video board in the SEC, a $2.9 million purchase Athletic Director Jacobs decided was obsolete eight years later.
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UD thanks John.
… seems to have drawn more than a few eyes to itself. Its description of universities across America making their financially struggling students pay through the nose for football games they don’t attend is apparently compelling enough to have caught the attention of people.
The Washington Post, for instance, cites the article, and goes on to note that more and more schools are
requiring students who have few discretionary dollars to pay for something that has zero impact on their classroom experience. According to the Chronicle/Huff Post analysis, the 50 institutions with the highest athletic subsidies have many more financially needy students than those universities with the lowest subsidies.
What’s more, nearly all the growth in Division I athletics during the past decade has come at public universities. At the same time these university leaders were obsessed with conference realignments and big television deals, taxpayer support for public universities has fallen to unprecedented levels.
But what’s most devastating in the Post piece is the long memory of its writer. We all know that when it comes to the bullshit promises that university presidents make about football, a good memory – to quote Elizabeth Bennet – is unpardonable. Yet Jeffrey Selingo goes there.
Nearly 20 years ago, I wrote an article about a group of universities that had recently joined the elite of college athletics: the NCAA’s Division I. They included California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, Hampton University, Norfolk State University, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Ok kiddies so before I reveal the fate of those schools, go ahead and guess how well they fulfilled their presidents’ promises of huge revenue and huge increase in applications and huge prestige. Go ahead! Or – you don’t have to guess, do you? Because the names Cal Poly San Whatever, Hampton, Norfolk State and Whatsizface at Greensboro just come racing to your mind when you think of revenue and enrollment and renown and prestige… And all because of Div I football!
What’s more, look at the attention they’ve drawn to their sports programs!
[All] have been relegated to the backwater of college sports, with games on weekday nights on obscure cable channels. The only way many of these universities make it to the big time is to have their name appear on the stream of scores on ESPN’s ticker or as blowout fodder for elite programs.
That’s right. Not only did their elite Div I status do nothing (probably less than nothing) for their academic status, it didn’t even do anything for their athletic status. All at huge cost to their students.
Indeed Selingo is impolitic enough to trace the outcome of Greensboro’s Div I promises even more closely:
[Twenty years ago,] its student fees paid for 80 percent of the subsidy provided to the athletic department. Officials told me they expected the share of student support to fall over time as their teams established winning records and garnered more outside support… Greensboro students today provide 81 percent of the subsidy. In other words, nothing has changed except that the department’s budget has quadrupled since the late 1990s and the student fee for athletics has almost doubled, to about $700 a year per student.
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People wonder why universities keep doing this. I mean, eventually, as Selingo concludes, their students are going to leave in order to attend a school where they’re not “paying for someone else’s [child-like] dreams.” So why?
If you read this blog with any regularity, you know how UD answers that question. Her answer is very simple, and you will probably resist it, but she thinks she might be right.
They do it because they can’t think of anything else to do.
I mean, of course, some presidents – like the hack running notorious Florida State University – are anti-intellectuals whose animus against thought processes as such will always mean a teeny mouselike teaching staff and a titanic athletics program. And some big sports schools, such as the University of Montana, have scared away so many potential students with their rape statistics that they have nothing left but games and a few vocational courses. (Remember: Just as, at the end of life, hearing is the last sense to go, so at the end of a university’s life, football is the last activity to go.)
But most of the universities doing themselves in via football are simply overseen by people – academic leaders, trustees, even faculty (remember the many loyal faculty foot soldiers at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) – for whom football (and sometimes basketball as well) is the very definition of a university. Their job is to worry about naming rights, beer sales, how many classes they can cancel around game days, cleaning up campus after tailgates, preparing for NCAA investigations, covering up crimes committed by athletes, building new stadiums, recruiting faculty who will help athletes cheat their way through their courses, and so many other things. They find these activities totally engrossing, and they will pursue them until vanishing state appropriations and vanishing enrollees force them to call it a day.
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UD thanks Prof. Mondo.
The shooter is at large.
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The victim, Ethan Schmidt.
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There are reports that the shooter is another professor. And that the shooter may have gone off campus after the shooting and killed him or herself.
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Begins to look maybe like a romantic entanglement.
Police said they are looking into the possibility that an earlier shooting in Gautier, Miss. — a five-hour drive from Delta State on the gulf coast — is connected to Schmidt’s slaying.
Officer Matt Hoggatt said the Gautier police department received a call shortly after 10 a.m. reporting a shooting at a residence located there. When police arrived at the scene in Gautier, they found a woman dead inside.
Hoggatt said that the suspect in the Gautier slaying is a man who at one time taught at Delta State and is believed to be romantically connected with the female victim, who lived with him at the home in Gautier. Hoggatt said that the suspect in the Gautier killing is believed to be the perpetrator in the shooting of Schmidt at Delta State, but declined to say what connects them.
The suspect’s vehicle was found on the Delta State campus Monday, but police have not yet found the man.
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A photo on the school’s website shows [the presumed shooter, Shannon Lamb, and Ethan Schmidt] standing together, smiling at a 2013 holiday party. That same year, Schmidt thanked Lamb in the acknowledgments of his book.
… A recent survey of police records show that Washington State University has the most football players [in the country] who have been arrested within the past five years.”
Background on Washington State’s terrific football program here.
Ah, a walk down memory lane. This is from a 2010 AAUP report expressing dismay at Phyllis Wise (then a high-ranking administrator at the University of Washington) following in the footsteps of UW’s then president Mark Emmert (who as current head of the farcical NCAA makes far far FAR bigger bucks than he did on all of his presidential corporate boards) and displaying her I could give a shit greed to the world.
To Wise’s claim that Nike’s board was interested in her special expertise in their line of work, the AAUP responded:
It is difficult to see what special interest the Nike Corporation could possibly have in Phyllis Wise’s research expertise in obstetrics and gynecology.
Er… How to screw your employees?…
UD is therefore SOOOO not surprised that Wise is insisting on leaving her latest place of employment with every penny coming to her.
One day after the board of trustees rejected her first attempt, the former UI chancellor again tendered her resignation Thursday night, saying she would not accept a position as special assistant to the president and that she is consulting with her lawyers about ways to protect her reputation…
‘[T]he University agreed to provide the compensation and benefits to which I was entitled, including $400,000 in deferred compensation that was part of my 2011 employment contract.’
I want it all! You think by changing your mind and ‘terminating’ instead of retiring me you can avoid yet more ridicule (the University of Illinois has generated tons of that over the last few years) about the four hundred thou reward for the way I handled Salaita and other matters?
YOU CAN’T FIRE ME. I RESIGN. I RESIGN AGAIN. I RESIGN AGAIN. AND AGAIN.
It’s what Kierkegaard called infinite resignation:
Infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith, for only in infinite resignation does an individual become conscious of his eternal validity, and only then can one speak of grasping existence by virtue of faith.
As Wise embarks on her spiritual journey, the rest of us can giggle at the spectacle (see this post, about comedy and repetition) of Wise and her university tossing the terminate/resign ball back and forth. At great expense to Illinois taxpayers, of course.
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UD thanks Wendy.
1.) My fraternity brothers were preparing for finals at the University of Florida…
University of Florida! Are you kidding me? That university was just ranked number one in America for most athletes arrested!… Oh whoops. Let me concentrate on the matter at hand. Fraternities. Ok. Frat boys studying for finals…? Uh… ok….
2.)
when word echoed throughout Zeta Beta Tau that we were being blamed for unthinkable behavior: harassing combat-wounded veterans.
Linda Cope, the founder of the Warrior Beach Retreat, a local charity in Panama City Beach, appeared on Fox News and other media outlets alleging that we spit on veterans and urinated on the American flag.
Panama City Beach? Are you kidding me? The rankest town in America, where three men raped an unconscious woman on the beach midday and no one did a thing… It was only discovered when the police chief reviewed video in connection with a slew of other crimes. … But ahem. Let me once again concentrate on the matter at hand. Spring break, unspeakable acts…
3.)
We went from being anonymous college students to being the most hated fraternity in America over allegations that, to us, came completely out of left field.
Completely? Says here (see response from the national chapter at the bottom of the page) that “What was not pointed out was that at the time these events occurred, the chapter was already on probation imposed by the University of Florida.”
4.)
Many of us have family members who have proudly served in the military. My grandfather fought during D-Day. I have a photograph of my grandfather sitting on the wing of a captured German fighter plane.
The focal point of our chapter house’s living room was an American flag that we proudly displayed.
That’s all great. Great. But, you know, the male bonding that you love so much … too much… “Witnessing the tears and anguish of my brothers at the moment school officials clarified that our chapter had been officially closed was indescribably painful… [Nothing can adequately convey] the heartbreak and devastation that I and my fraternity brothers feel over losing an organization that we loved so dearly. Many of my brothers feel they have lost their collegiate identity.” … plus alcohol, can make you forget how much you love Old Glory…
5.)
Due process was conveniently cast aside to mollify an angry public that deemed the allegations indisputably factual in light of the stereotypical fraternity culture portrayed in the media.
Yes, it looks as though your fraternity didn’t behave as outrageously as initial reports suggested. Maybe you’re right to be upset that the resounding response from America to this clarification of your Panama City Beach behavior is So fucking what. But you go to the University of Florida, you’re a member of a fraternity already on probation, and your guys were part of ongoing, high-profile Panama City Beach foulness. Sorry.
6.)
With no means to defend ourselves, we had no choice but to watch our execution in the court of public opinion.
Soyez tranquille! Guns are on their way. Once you’re fully weaponized, no one will be able to shut you down.
… striding the campus. A camera crew trails him. He’s got the whole get-up, including the funny white ponytail. Like this.
I’m pretty sure this is related to the fact that prospective students are here this weekend (what luck for the school – it’s one of the most beautiful spring seasons I’ve seen in DC) to decide whether, having been admitted, they’d like to attend GW.
I just got out of a lunch for students admitted to the university honors program (UD teaches university honors courses). Families were there too, asking questions about the program, some of which UD tried to answer. We were in the City View Room in one of the newer buildings on campus, and after the lunch UD went out to its balcony to see about that city view.
Quite wonderful – the shining river, monuments galore, the grasses and trees of a heavily gardened city. Less thrilling were the squat brown buildings (State Department, etc.) that huddle everywhere and make up most of official Washington. I watched some planes land at National and then went downstairs and walked around.
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Yesterday was mild and sunny – a quintessentially April day in Garrett Park, with the white blossoms popping out on UD‘s dogwood and the hydrangea budding like mad.
For a dead end street in a rather obscure town, the setting was noisy: Our neighbors across the street are selling their house (yours for a million dollars), and they had a large crew duding up the garden; other neighbors were leaf blowing and lawn mowing and playing basketball. Trains occasionally steamed through along the nearby CSX tracks, and large groups of cyclists bombed by.
A cardinal kept shrieking at me. It has built its nest in one of our front bushes, and it wants me to get the hell out of my garden.
UD herself was noiseless: She just stood in her front yard like a dummy, staring up at the clear blue sky and marveling.
That’s a significant part of the problem right there, isn’t it? If the question is How does a university suddenly break into the global limelight for having graduated Jihadi John and sponsored Haitham al-Haddad? part of the answer lies in the fact that the Westminster University student I quote in my headline believes he’s saying something good about his school when he tells us it’s a place that believes all opinions are valid. He’s boasting.
Presumably not everyone at Westminster University thinks it’s valid to opine that homosexuals should be slaughtered like pigs, or that women whose clitorises are still attached to them are apostates. Probably some people at Westminster can think of yet other invalid opinions, opinions that reflective institutions like universities shouldn’t spend time discussing. The Holocaust never happened. The Earth is flat. The Bush administration planned and carried out 9/11. All non-Islamic artifacts must be destroyed.
To be sure, reflective people should be interested in the phenomenon of large numbers of people believing things like this. The more we know about cruelty, fanaticism, conspiratorial thinking, and the failure of any element of the empirical tradition of thought to take hold, the better off we are.
A university graduating people unable to make basic distinctions between valid and invalid beliefs creates a safe space for fanatics. This is what Westminster University appears to have accomplished.
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… Emwazi studied in an environment where his sympathies for jihadi terror were considered “the norm”, and therefore unremarkable; praiseworthy, even. Here, his perverse ideas could be nurtured by his surroundings, rather than flagged up as a concern…
In 2006 at the University of Westminster, the ISOC Annual Dinner from that year featured the Al Qaeda recruiter, Anwar Al Awlaki. It also featured hate preachers Murtaza Khan and Haitham Al Haddad – both of whom support Islamic terrorists killing those deemed “apostates”.
… [Jihadi John] walked into a university which had welcomed hate preachers dreaming of an Islamic State.
… [T]here will be a brief flurry of media interest in how Emwazi attended a university which hosted a leading Al Qaeda recruiter just before he joined, and in university extremism in general. When that dies down, [Haitham] Haddad’s invitation to the University of Westminster may well be restored, and we will all go back to ignoring Islamist extremism on-campus, because it takes too much effort to solve, and it’s too awkward to talk about in polite company.
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I recall a seminar discussion about Immanuel Kant’s “democratic peace theory,” in which a student wearing a niqab opposed the idea on the grounds that “as a Muslim, I don’t believe in democracy.” Our instructor seemed astonished but did not question the basis of her argument; he simply moved on. I was perplexed, though. Why attend university if you have such a strict belief system that you are unwilling to consider new ideas? And why hadn’t the instructor challenged her? At the time, I dismissed her statement as one person’s outlandish opinion. Later, I realized that her extreme religious views were considerably more prevalent within the institution.
The only thing shocking here is the instructor’s failure to challenge the student. Totally irresponsible; and, for students like the Westminster graduate writing this opinion piece, totally demoralizing.
I don’t think the university itself is advocating extremism, but by failing to prevent the advocacy of such ideas, the institution is attracting students who are sympathetic to them. Students who do not identify with extreme Islamist ideology are being put at risk of discrimination, intimidation and potentially radicalization by the university’s failure to properly handle the situation.
… shrinking market for law students in a manner so byzantine it would take up a chapter of Corpus Historiæ Byzantinæ if Hieronymus Wolf were still alive. Then, after talking to a buddy on the Georgetown University law faculty, she began to realize that the very same byzantine practice goes on there, and is in fact spreading among all but the lowest ranked law schools in America.
The lowest ranked can’t do it because it involves netting (details here) huge shoals of second-year transfer students from law schools in the abyssopelagic rather than hadalpelagic zone.
Although I guess if you’re the nadir in the States – like, for instance, Arizona Summit (someone there probably thought it’d be clever … distracting? … to name the place Summit) you can try harvesting a school of foreign fish (though given many differences among legal systems, this would be a challenge).
The small fry are starting to fight back. Not only is Arizona Summit fucking with its first-year curriculum, making it difficult both to get a good grade point average and to have taken the sorts of courses you need on your transcript to move to the second year curriculum at many schools. Also:
Arizona Summit students have to meet with a dean at Arizona Summit before they transfer and before they can get their transcripts.
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Before their transcripts are released, female Arizona Summit students have to submit to a mandatory transvaginal ultrasound.
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Just kidding.
That’s not happening yet.
Universities don’t get much worse than San Diego State, an epicenter of the drug trade, a money-hemorraghing sports joke, and a school run (though considering what goes down there, is anyone actually running it?) by a president whose greed so outraged the local community that legislators moved toward imposing mandatory salary caps on executive pay there.
And now, with the eyes of America on the issue of rape on campus, SDSU’s fraternities, apparently looking for something to do since an unusually big drug raid two years ago shut down their main activity, have decided that their contribution to the crisis will be assaulting women and pitching dildos.
Where are you, President Hirshman? The local suckers pay you almost half a million dollars to do something. But what is that thing?
Drugs and violence. Violence and drugs. If you take away your students’ drugs, they turn to violence. (“[S]even students have reported being raped at SDSU this year, one about 24 hours after a protest last Friday night against sexism and sexual violence.”) For some of your students, those are apparently the only two behavioral options.
UD says, Maybe it would be safer to give them back the drugs.
… also suspends all fraternities.
But what are you going to do? Fraternities are designed for drinking and fucking. Riots and rapes are the totally unsurprising results.
Forget the routine sado-masochistic theater of hazing. That’s a trifle here.
But it’s your culture. If you’re UVa or WVU or Dartmouth or Arizona or whatever, it’s who you are. You won’t be able to suspend them for long.
Unconvinced? Look at the way Florida State and Penn State have responded, en masse, to their outrageous sports scandals. Look at entire local cultures, really, composed of journalists and police and lawyers and trustees and alumni designed to let sports-related miscreants do whatever they want to do. Penn State students rioted when their rapist-enabling coach was let go. Florida State students blocked the latest New York Times account of their foul football team. There’s nothing to be done with such places. Really nothing, beyond what people have done with notorious rape campuses like the University of Montana. They think twice about sending their daughters there.
Nothing to be done except this.
