West Virginia University is gradually reducing itself to nothing – no foreign languages, a lot fewer professors, no grad program in math, fewer undergrad programs.
Shit, place ain’t got no money, and customers are voting with their feet.
Lotsa boohoo about all this from the liberal elites, but hold on jest a minute! Hang on jest one sec! UD ain’t crying, and she’ll tell you why.
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As you know, UD sees no reason why a country (Hungary) or a state (New Mexico, Nevada, West Virginia, Florida) that wants to reduce itself to an intellectual desert should be kept from doing so.
The American system is already correcting for this. Notice, for instance, how Hampshire College has stepped up to offer an easy transfer to New College students who can’t take it anymore. Nevada has always done beautifully on the dumbshit tourist trade and doesn’t need fancy theories to run casinos. Its wretched state university system should call it a day; smart young Nevadans can go to California. Same deal for other pro-ignorance states – this is a big country with oodles of good (and some supremely great) universities.
As for West Virginia. Feast your eyes on UD‘s coverage, over many years, of WVU – a hopelessly drunk and disorderly party school in a hopeless state from which those who can flee are fleeing. Morgantown runs with squalid bars in which frat boys try to kill pledges via drink. The kids riot after purty near every football game. The football and basketball coaches continue to be paid like princes. It’s a world, to be sure; a party school world which is about what a state like WV can manage if you tell it to establish a university. But you’re never gonna get the yahoos in the legislature to smarten the place up, and fact is most of its students are fine with the way things are. Those who aren’t will find good schools in driving distance: FIVE states border WV, and three of them have good schools.
If Huggins or the institutions of higher learning that employed and enabled him gave a rat’s rectum about “student-athletics,” he wouldn’t have spent 16 years coaching Cincinnati as it and he became nationally known for winning by recruiting “high social risk” players and academic non-achievers who had no legitimate reason to be enrolled in any college. Only 28 percent of his Cincinnati players, including walk-ons, reportedly graduated.
And he wouldn’t have spent another 16 years coaching his alma mater, WVU, paid up to $5 million per year to do so, apparently because WVU fully approved of his winning ways and means honed at Cincinnati.
So the national con of college sports — student-athletics — proceeds, no education, and in many cases fundamental illiteracy, in exchange for full scholarships, often on taxpayer funding.
A perennial Number One Party School, WVU boasts drunk, rioting, armed students (one riot featured gunfire), plus zillion dollar a year drunk coaches staggering all over Morgantown in front of the national media.
This blog has covered floridly pissed coaches and students at WVU for decades, and nothing ever changes. The school qua, well, school, never gets much money from the state, so it stays lousy; but the coaches and athletic facilities get zillions, and I guess it all goes to the coaches’ heads cuz so many of them end up, like this latest guy, the basketball coach, driving blind and endangering the lives of other drivers and pedestrians and the brave police who try to stop them.
This is what you call highly fertile University Diaries territory, and ol’ UD has been firing up her keyboard fingers, with special attention to the little fucker who left the fun to go to his car and take his gun out of his glove compartment.
UD was further fired up at the thought of letting it rip in regard to Leonid Brezhnev, WVU’s Director of Fraternal Values and Leadership, and his priceless comment on the event:
[W]e’reviewing this as an opportunity for us to collaborateand prevent it from happening again.
(I may have his name wrong.)
But then she went and checked out Garrett Boehme’s social media pages, and this took the wind out of her sails or the fire out of her fingers or whatever. She had such things planned for the shooter! She was going to do a whole riff on Garrett being a direct descendant of the great mystic Jakob Böhme who influenced Coleridge and Yeats and all and from whose Wikipedia page I took the following image, which reminds me so much of the work of my late friend Paul Laffoley:
But there was long-limbed, nature-loving Garrett grinning out from his Instagram, sharing his love of flowers and white water rafting and the National Guard.
I’m serious – if we can – armamentally – train him up in the difference between Taliban militants celebrating their takeover of the Panjshir Valley, and American soldiers targeting Osama Bin Laden, Garrett will be a crucial part of the homeland defense infrastructure that allows UD to sit securely in her bedroom, gazing at flowers.
This idea would create a brilliant synergy, sure to sweep up any suicide-hesitant gun owners into the general NRA-infused enthusiasm for La Vie (or in this case La Mort) Militaire. Just as locating the makers of oxycontin smack dab in the middle of the most addicted part of the US represents an obviously robust business plan, so placing the national headquarters of the NRA, which features a gun museum, a gun cafe, a gun bookstore, a gun movie theater, and just everything gun, in the very center of America’s suicide by gun epidemic, promises to take a real rifle blast to the head of the Depressed Cowboy State.
[West Virginia governor Jim] Justice … summoned both Marshall [University] President Jerome Gilbert and five members of the school’s Board of Governors to his office on separate occasions to demand that the school get rid of [the school’s football coach, and hire a friend of the governor’s], who is 73 and last was a head coach in 2004.
I brush my teeth with Coca-Cola, wash my face with mountain dew
We live down in chemical valley, licorice water runnin’ through,
Licorice water runnin’ through
… All is money, all is power, one man’s loss is another’s gain
I just do the best I can, put out my bucket, pray for rain
Put out the bucket and pray for rain
… Once we were Almost Heaven, now we’re open for business
That’s the place that I call home, West Virginia
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.
… are the words of wisdom you need to hear as you seek to understand what has been going on in Morgantown. From her you-are-there perch in WVU’s sociology department, Karen Weiss has written Party School, a first-hand account of what Clifford Geertz might have called “deep play” at America’s colleges. These are excerpts from an interview she gave at Inside Higher Education:
Many residential universities, such as the so-called party schools … have become so well-known for their super-charged party environments that it would be very difficult to change the culture without negatively impacting enrollments that are now dependent upon the lure of this party scene. Moreover, many of the disruptive behaviors that I document in the book (e.g., burning couches, riots) have become “traditions” for both current students and alumni. As such, traditions are very difficult to change.
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[People who live in bad neighborhoods] feel terrorized, they change their routines to avoid certain streets, they don’t leave their homes at night. In many college towns, residents are beginning to experience similar problems (albeit less life-threatening) as a result of a minority of extreme partiers who make life uninhabitable [I think Weiss is conflating two phrases here: life unendurable and neighborhoods uninhabitable.] for their neighbors.
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While it is easy to see why bar and club owners are reluctant to eliminate drink specials or other promotions – after all, they make their profits from student drinking – it is more difficult to understand why university administrators, police and local town officials have not been more effective in reducing some of the problems caused by the party subculture. In the long run, it really boils down to a rather controversial reality: the party school is itself a business, and alcohol is part of the business model. Schools lure students to attend their schools with the promise of sports, other leisure activities and overall fun. Part of this fun, whether schools like it or not, is drinking. Thus, even as university officials want to keep students safe, they also need to keep their consumers happy. This means letting the alcohol industry do what it does best – sell liquor.
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That last bit is way important. All prospective university students interested in drinking know where to go – Cal State Chico, UWV, University of Georgia, University of Texas, almost anywhere in Wisconsin – to fit in. It’s like – who doesn’t know that Key West is a better place to drink yourself silly than Salt Lake City? And just as Key West’s business model – the thing it does to attract tourist dollars – involves the provision of alcohol every five steps or so down Duval Street, so central to UWV’s business model – the thing it does to attract applicants – is the provision of alcohol five steps off campus in every direction. Many of its most high-profile traditions (Weiss cites couch burning and rioting) are about alcohol.
You expect eighteen year olds who may have chosen WVU because the joint is gin-soaked not to drink gin once they get there?
You expect UWV to change its business model?
As Weiss points out, it’s not just a business model. It’s a way of life.
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Update: DRC, a reader, updates UD on the student. He has died.
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Don’t forget: The president of West Virginia University is Gordon Gee.
All fraternities and sororities at West Virginia University were suspended Thursday after an 18-year-old freshman was found unconscious and not breathing inside a fraternity house, just a week after a different fraternity was suspended after 19 pledges got into a street brawl, university officials and police said.
And of course there was the matter of that massive, massively destructive student riot last month. Etc. Etc. Do a “West Virginia University” search on this blog if you have a lot of time and a strong stomach. It’s cute to call a university a “party school,” but at perennial top-ten party school WVU what it really means is huge numbers of permanently pissed, violent students (and, in some cases, pissed coaches) who end up torching Morgantown and fucking up freshmen whose bodies haven’t adjusted to prevailing blood alcohol levels.
Still. It’s interesting to see that even WVU has a tipping point.
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But don’t get too excited. A temporary cease-fire has been negotiated between the two primary factions – the university and the fraternities. Left out of negotiations so far are both the government and citizenry of Morgantown, which will have to be included in any future agreement.
Further, there are very likely to be conflicts within Morgantown, for instance between business interests (large numbers of students with near-fatal addictions to alcohol attract large numbers of bars) and public safety advocates. Any attempted crackdown on alcohol will also mean a very unhappy sports program, which understandably fears a falling-off in game attendance if students are no longer allowed to get drunk enough to burn down Morgantown.
On top of all of this, the numbers crunchers at WVA will have to be consulted, since they can provide crucially important estimates not only of riot-preparedness costs, but settlement expenses arising from wrongful death suits filed by parents. It will be the money managers’ job, moreover, to remind the university (see Penn State and Chapel Hill) that public relations firms tasked with the almost-impossible job of making squalid universities smell like roses do not come cheap.
To make matters worse, the local public radio station recently featured a professor at WVU who gave it hell for deciding to spend seventy-five million on an upgrade for its rapidly emptying stadium. WVU’s athletic director came right back at him with the following argument:
There is no argument that West Virginia University’s first responsibility is to provide the best and broadest educational experience possible for its students. It is the first part of our land-grant mission of teaching, research and service.
In what way is football part – a key part – of an educational experience? Answer: It isn’t. More and more WVU students seem to realize that. But even as attendance tanks, WVU spends all its money on its football stadium.
… the nation’s number one party school last year (this year it’s number two), the school that has over the decades hired more drunks and debauchees as coaches and athletics directors than any other, the school… oh, read UD’s many posts about WVU if you have a taste for the sordid – put West Virginia University in my search engine… Anyway, it should come as no surprise that the coach at the center of the Oklahoma State allegations has moved on to… West Virginia University! Joe DeForest will be soberly scrutinized by head coach Dana Holgorsen, himself a man of unimpeachable self-control.
Hey, where is everybody? We’ve got these hotshit teams, going to the big bowl and all, and … nada! Not only do our universities take a big ol’ hit, but we’re gonna have to scramble to find people to give these tickets awayto if we want to avoid looking a bit… meagre… fanwise… on tv.
“Obviously we had hoped that we would sell more with it being a prestigious bowl, a BCS game,” [the West Virginia University sports marketing guy] said.
Yeah WTF. Human enterprises don’t come any more prestigious than the Bowl Championship Series; and – dang! – football’s the front porch of the American university! I challenge you to say one word against big-time university football! So WHAT the hell’s going on.
