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(Rate Your Students)
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except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Thursday, March 08, 2007

Scathing Online Schoolmarm



Dim is the word for the low wattage writing UD features below.

Dim prose generates so little light that it's hard to make out any meaning. Reading it's like being underwater in a slimy murky world...

Or rather, since this is an editorial about the University of Southern Mississippi, appearing in a Mississippi newspaper, reading this writing is like moving very very slowly under a brooding canopy of Spanish moss...






In the big scheme of things, a 3,700-seat addition to a Division I university's football stadium is not that big of a deal. [Repetition of "big" already gumming things up. Writer should have dropped the first "big."] Considering it raises the total capacity to 37,000, it's something larger universities do with great regularity. [Logic of this sentence escapes me.] And some of those are already seating 80,000 or more.

The immediate reaction could be to ask why the money being spent on the stadium expansion [at USM] isn't going toward academic programs or higher salaries for professors.

The planned expansion of M.M. Roberts Stadium, scheduled to begin next month and completed Aug. 1, 2008, [See how there's nothing dramatically objectionable in this writing, yet in lots of little ways -- the redundancy of "planned" and "scheduled," the dropping of "to be" before "completed" -- it irritates?] is generating plenty of buzz, the most common being why add on to a stadium where sellouts aren't that common to start. ["Common" -- another lazy redundancy. And all mushy on the crucial fact of there being more than enough seats in the stadium for existing low fan interest. Of course, he wants to mush this point up, since it utterly undoes whatever case he thinks he has.]

It's a fair question but it's also one that doesn't address the larger issues, such as potential growth of the University of Southern Mississippi. ["Potential growth" is not an "issue" but a wish fulfillment.] The additional seats will include 34 suites, 320 club-level seats and 1,900 bleacher seats. A new scoreboard is also part of the plan. [Um... what'll I say now? Oh. I'll list the cool shit this thing'll have...]

The total cost will be $31,893,420. It will be paid for by $21 million in bonds and $9 million borrowed from BancorpSouth. The bonds will be retired and borrowed dollars paid from revenue from the leases of the already sold suites. None of the expansion will cost taxpayers. [It'll cost taxpayers. And it'll cost students. Both groups know this. It's eerie to read an argument like this, written as it were by a prose autistic, for himself alone, with no awareness of a world outside himself...]

It is no secret that college football - especially on the Division I level - has become as much about business as blocking and tackling. Major corporate sponsors often showcase their brand name at college football games, and are usually provided seats for their support. [So? Is this a good thing? Do you think reminding us that this has happened strengthens your argument?]

M.M. Roberts - more affectionately known as "The Rock" - is small by most standards, yet probably right in the ballpark of campuses with an almost 15,000-student enrollment. [Note the lack of any organization in this piece. It helps, by way of organizing an argument, to have an argument.]

What opponents of any expansion fail to realize is that it is often revenue generated from televised football games, regularly played on Tuesday and Thursday nights, that funds other programs across the university. [This almost never happens. Usually football drains revenue from universities.]

The challenge for Southern Miss is to go after those USM students who enjoy the fruits of the college experience but who don't attend the games. Attendance at both the men's and women's basketball teams, for example, has been far less than what two quality programs should enjoy. [La... la... la... what should I say next? Oh yeah. The kids don't go to the games. Clearly the only sane response to this is to add expensive new seats to the stadium and flush the little buggers out of their hiding places... ]

The argument that expansion is a waste loses validity when the students share in the benefits. [Believe it or not, this is the last sentence of an editorial in a newspaper. For this writer, life is but a dream. Someday, USM will expand... someday, its students will attend its games... Come dream along with me! The best is yet to be!]


---Hattiesburg American---

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