In other words: Top-flight recruiting!

A walk down memory lane!

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And sure… the place has deteriorated a bit since those glory days…

UD‘s pal Dave Ridpath talks about it.

By far, the largest student fee is … the intercollegiate athletic fee – which can be upwards of 80% of the total fee amount at many institutions not in Power Five conferences.

Conventional wisdom says that intercollegiate athletics is a boon to colleges and universities; that it’s wildly profitable; attracts new students; enhances fundraising; and boosts the university’s profile. Yet these are myths…

… [S]tudents [are] largely unaware of these fee amounts, and how much [of the fee is] allocated for intercollegiate athletics.

The athletic fee wasn’t obvious (in fact, it wasn’t even itemized) on university bills. Furthermore, getting the exact number from MAC institutions proved exasperating.

Considering the total fees assessed to fund athletics at [Mid American conference] institutions, it’s clear why schools weren’t exactly transparent about the fee. Once the actual fee amount was detailed to the surveyed population of students, over 90% were either against the athletic fee or wanted it substantially lowered.

Not sure how I missed this one.

Ben Edelman, Harvard’s terror-emailer – and the very embodiment of this blog’s signature category BEWARE THE B-SCHOOL BOYS – turns out to be a serial threatener of small businesses.

Four years ago, when a sushi restaurant wouldn’t honor his Groupon vouchers, he did it again, threatening to go after their license, etc., etc., etc., etc.

This time, though, the restaurant called his bluff, wished him luck with his complaints to the authorities, and told him that if he ever got near the place they’d call the police.

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Naturally, we’re all wondering what’s next. Will Korean Korners release a 2010 email exchange in which, in response to having been charged twenty-five cents for a second trip to the jasmine tea dispenser, Edelman promises to “take this right to the top, to my good friend, Harvard colleague, and current head of the Consumer Protection Agency, Elizabeth Warren”?

He’s the first George Washington University student US Today interviewed who actually did vote in the last election. (Watch him here.) Turns out he’s a political communications major.

More importantly, he’s the genius in the basement of my building who responds to my recurrent internet-connectivity anxiety attacks with infinitely sweet, infinitely long-suffering, positively Buddha-like compassion. As I fail to answer even the very first simple query he poses to me, as I stare at him with the frightened blank eyes of a cornered mouse, he draws in a very deep breath, bats his eyelashes at me in a way that just manages to avoid expressing his incredulity, and asks me another, even more primitive question. One that I can answer! I am grateful to my computer guy, and I’m glad he voted.

Truer words have ne’er been spake.

Legal duty? Or moral duty?

You take a school like James Madison University, a school no different from tons of others in this country… A school which recently spent tens of millions of dollars spiffing up its football stadium, and hundreds of thousands of dollars bidding on a home playoff game.

JMU is a U. A university. All that money might have been directed to education.

The last game played in JMU’s 25,000-person seating capacity stadium drew how many students? Let’s see:

Only 1,622 students came to Saturday’s game, despite JMU opening residence halls and dining facilities earlier than usual after Thanksgiving. JMU had estimated in its bid [JMU paid $200,000 for the privilege of holding this game] that 6,200 students would attend the game. Because the NCAA doesn’t allow host institutions to offer complimentary playoff tickets, JMU athletics sponsored all of the student tickets to keep them free. Documents provided to The Breeze [the campus newspaper] show that the price for each ticket was set at $10, and JMU budgeted $62,000 for the student tickets.

So let’s see if UD (notoriously weak on math) is getting this right. Correct UD if she’s wrong. In 2011, this school spent sixty-two million dollars increasing the number of seats in its football stadium to 25,000. We are now 2014, and at the last game fewer than 2,000 (non-paying) students showed up (even this figure might be optimistic, since schools typically count tickets picked up rather than human beings present). (Counting all non-student fans, the stadium was half full.) Again, this was a play-off game. Students tickets were free.

Let’s go back to that 1,622 figure. Look what the school estimated they’d get. 6,200. Off by a rather significant figure, no? You’d want to ask – where did the highly compensated athletics department at JMU (“[In 2013,] three of JMU’s top seven salaries were those of coaches.] get that figure? Out of their ass?

Where’s Nate Silver when you need him? But even so, aren’t there one or two statisticians at JMU who might have been consulted? After all, the – let’s call it the tanking pattern – is well-established…

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Tiens.

Et alors.

Ecoute.

That student up there… that JMU student going on about the duty of all people admitted to James Madison University to attend football games… She’s the cutting edge. She and her school represent the future of university football.

One option of course is to shut the program, as the University of Alabama Birmingham just did. Almost no one else is going to choose that option.

Most everyone else is going where JMU’s headed: After the endless campus newspaper articles and official statements from the coaches and angry articles in the local booster press full of threats, bribes, and recriminations, will indeed come the punishment of those unwilling to assume their duty to take one of the 25,000 seats.

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Okay, so here we go into numbers again: Figure about ten thousand locals show up at the games. James Madison has close to 20,000 students. So to fill up the stadium something around 15,000 JMU students will have to step up and do their duty.

Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of boredom*
Rode the fifteen thousand.

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* “Football games are fun,
but partying is more fun.
I may go for the first half,
but it gets boring after a while.”

You think sitting at a stupid three-hour football game is boring? Try sitting in a jail cell for a week.

The Washington Post’s interviews with the three friends of “Jackie” who rallied around her in the immediate aftermath of events make clear that all three are skeptical of her claims.

Even more ominously:

[P]hotographs that were texted to one of the friends showing her date that night were actually pictures depicting one of Jackie’s high school classmates in Northern Virginia. That man, now a junior at a university in another state, confirmed that the photographs were of him and said he barely knew Jackie and hasn’t been to Charlottesville for at least six years.

There’s always a guy – Vinod Khosla, Tom Perkins, Todd Henderson, Glenn Hubbard and Frederic Mishkin, Dick Fuld… There’s always an ugly rich guy whose greed, aggression, and general dickishness launch him straight up into the news-of-the-world stratosphere for a week or two.

This week it’s $800 an hour consultant and Harvard business school professor Benjamin Edelman, who threatened massive legal retribution against a local Chinese food merchant who overcharged him by four dollars. Now, in the long tradition of God opening a door when he closes a window, embarrassed students at Harvard have started an online campaign in honor of those precious four dollars:

Jon Staff launched a fundraising campaign called ‘Harvard Gives: $4 to Fight Hunger’, encouraging Harvard students to donate four dollars to the Greater Boston Food Bank, in response to an article on Boston.com, which publicised a dispute between Edelman and the Sichuan Garden restaurant in Woburn.

… ‘In accordance with our community values, we are calling on all Harvard students to flip the script by donating $4 to provide for for those in need’, [the campaign organizer] wrote.

[The organizer also said he hopes this campaign] will remind people that Harvard is a big, diverse place full of almost universally wonderful people behaving well.’

Although unfortunately in Yeshiva’s case, this means its appalling Moody’s rating – B3 – is affirmed as unchanged.

In the wake of expensive scandal after expensive scandal, some of it having to do with the fallout of the sort of conflict of interest you get when your virtually all-male, all-buddy board of trustees has its fingers in each others’ hedge funds (I’m looking at you, Bernie Madoff and Ezra Merkin), Yeshiva threatens to collapse as a viable financial entity, which Moody’s couldn’t help noticing.

Given the severity of deficits and limited liquidity, the university may exhaust liquidity before completing a restructuring of the organization.

On the up side, Yeshiva’s president, who so far has dealt with the Madoff scandal, the conflicted board of trustees scandal, and the financial collapse by literally trying to airbrush Madoff from Yeshiva history, ignoring alumni begging him to alter the board of trustees, and denying any financial difficulties at the school, has finally decided to drop a hint or two of trouble.

In a recent interview with The Commentator, a Y.U. student newspaper, [Richard] Joel blamed the university’s deficits on a “lack of effective and adequate reporting and controls.”

… He added that some department heads lied about the financial health of their departments.

Well, when the head of your school can sometimes be less than forthcoming, you’re likely to conclude that you can … dance around a little bit too…

Digging a deeper gravy for himself.

… if I weren’t also dreading the inevitable cutesie denouement of this brand of story: The icky Harvard professor will suddenly radically un-ick himself and become best friends forever with the Chinese restaurant guy, and we will have to endure the two of them dragging their forgiveness and reconciliation act all over the media.

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Okay, two limericks so far. One from a reader:

What a marvelous prof is Ben Edelman
His check was four more and it’s fatal, man
He’ll spew legalese
O’er this bill for Chinese
Ben’s too hungry to pay like a gentleman

And one from yours truly.

Few acts are more certainly fatal than
Arousing the wrath of Ben Edelman.
Everything jerks him
But nobody irks him
As much as a chef with a ladle can.

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See? See? This is what I mean!

In an apology posted Wednesday afternoon on his Web site, Edelman wrote: “Having reflected on my interaction with Ran, including what I said and how I said it, it’s clear that I was very much out of line. I aspire to act with great respect and humility in dealing with others, no matter what the situation. Clearly I failed to do so. I am sorry, and I intend to do better in the future.”

Edelman, who is an attorney in addition to a professor, said that he’s reached out to Duan and plans to personally apologize to him.

Grr. Brace yourself not only for their joint Oprah appearance, but for their decision to open a restaurant together with some goddamn cutesie name like …

EdelDuan!

Says here that Rolling Stone will entirely re-report the now-notorious “Jackie” piece (UD assumes this means a group of RS editors will re-report the piece?), a project that will involve “head[ing] to UVa both to sort through the errors of the story and to tell readers what actually happened.”

Indeed, as Joseph Heller put it, Something Happened. It’s even possible that we’ll find out much more precisely what.

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Some people believe “Rolling Stone was credulous about such an intense story because from factcheckers to editors to writers they are predisposed to believe the worst about fraternity brothers at an elite university.”

I suppose this goes to a culture clash idea: The argument would be that you’ve got brainy lefty hipsters who write stuff like this about Goldman Sachs, versus a fratful of future Mr Goldman Sachs… Sachses…

Maybe. UD thinks it may have more to do with the Huguely factor — UVa was attractive and … plausible… to the writer of the piece and to the factcheckers and editors and writers because as recently as last March Huguely’s murder of his girlfriend was still in the news.

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And why, UD has been asking herself, was she so “credulous about such an intense story”?

First of all, as I said above, something traumatically assaultive did happen. At this point, this seems to me beyond doubt, though of course we could turn out to be living in the sort of Kafkan world in which the whole damn thing is a lie… I’ll just say again that this seems to me wildly unlikely. So I was credulous because there was credible material in the story.

Second, though, and pertinent only to me: I was perhaps borne along by the prose. It didn’t occur to me, as I praised the article’s writing, that the writing was maybe too good, too perfectly lurid. I was captured, as they say, by the style, and as a result I take on the coloration of Gwendolyn: “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.”

… by Emily Yoffe.

Carol Tavris is a social psychologist and author of the feminist classic, The Mismeasure of Woman, and, with Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me). She says she is troubled by the blurring of distinctions between rape (notably by predatory males), unwanted sex (where one party agrees to sex not out of desire but to please or placate the partner), and the kind of consensual sex where both parties are so drunk they can barely remember what happened — and one of them later regrets it. She says, “Calling all of these kinds of sexual encounters ‘rape’ or ‘sexual assault’ doesn’t teach young women how to learn what they want sexually, let alone how to communicate what they want, or don’t want. It doesn’t teach them to take responsibility for their decisions, for their reluctance to speak up. Sexual communication is really hard — you don’t learn how to do it in a few weekends.”