A possible lesson from Covid: Sports is sports, and education is education

Two months ago, in May 2020, which seems like two decades in the age of the coronavirus, I wrote in this post:

In response to COVID-19, if higher education is forced to stay focused on its mission and reduce its extravagant expenses on athletics, then it will be one of the few benefits to come out of this global catastrophe.

Ahem.  It could happen.

First was an announcement from the Ivy League, which became the first Division I conference to suspend football for the fall:

The presidents said in a statement that sports could not be played under campus-wide policies that include restrictions on student and staff travel, social distancing requirements and limits on group gatherings.
“With the information available to us today regarding the continued spread of the virus, we simply do not believe we can create and maintain an environment for intercollegiate athletic competition that meets our requirements for safety and acceptable levels of risk,” the statement read.

Of course, Harvard and Yale are not the champs who win the ultimate prize.

And then the Ivy on the west coast, Stanford, had more news:

Stanford will discontinue 11 of our varsity sports programs at the conclusion of the 2020-21 academic year: men’s and women’s fencing, field hockey, lightweight rowing, men’s rowing, co-ed and women’s sailing, squash, synchronized swimming, men’s volleyball and wrestling.

Yes, synchronized swimming.  You read that correctly.

And you know well where you have watched synchronized swimming.  In Hail, Caesar ;)



Ok, you perhaps have not watched that movie.  But, surely in the summer Olympics. Yes?

In the US, universities are the prep schools for wannabe Olympians!  And, Stanford is a leader in that:

USC topped the list at every Summer Games from 1928 through 1964 (tied with Cal in 1948). UCLA’s run went from 1968 through 2004. Stanford had the most in 2008, 2012 and 2016.

Now, it does not mean that Stanford coaches only US athletes for the Olympics.  Nope.   Athletes come from all over the world to "study" at American universities so that they can get access to all kinds of personnel and infrastructure support.  Remember the scene in Bend It Like Beckham where the young women celebrate getting the soccer scholarship to an American university?

This bizarre aspect of American higher education investing gazillions on athletics is truly an awful American Exceptionalism!  I will quote this again:

In no other country’s university system, after all, does sports play anything like the central role it does in American academic life. Men do not go to Oxford to play cricket; the Sorbonne does not field a nationally celebrated soccer team. Even in the most sports-mad countries, sports is sports and education is education. That’s a better system.

Will the novel coronavirus eventually lead American universities to a better system?  I am not holding my breath on that!

Are You Not Entertained?

The President apparently worked the phones and told the sports executives that they need to plan on getting football going in September.

It makes sense only if you look at the issue from his perspective.  His base is also a sports-addicted population.  In the red states, NFL practically beats church-going during the season!

So, if there is no sports on the horizon, especially if there will be no NFL, then it will begin to dawn on even the most loyal tRump cultist that this COVID-19 is not any hoax, and that their dear leader has been lying to them.  As a result, in the elections in November, there won't be anything to stop the Democrats from running up the score against a weak and demoralized candidate and party.

I hope against hope that Americans will use this global catastrophe straighten out our individual and collective priorities.

I have, forever, blogged here about the awfully screwed up priorities of this American society (and others too) in which we paid gazillions to ball players, while systematically gutting long-term capacity building--from education to infrastructure to health care to ...

Here's a re-post of one of those from the past--this is from April 2017
*************************************************

Recall the sound bite "we need more welders and less philosophers" from back when it was the season of the Republican primaries? I wish we had engaged in a whole lot of discussion regarding that statement from Senator Marco Rubio. Instead, we collectively shrugged and moved on.

We could, and should, have used that opportunity to engage in discussions on what education ought to accomplish. If we had, then we would have agreed that we need both welders and philosophers, and that higher education is failing to deliver them.

Public higher educational institutions have suffered from extensive mission creep over the years. It is best (worst?) seen in how sports-oriented the taxpayer subsidized colleges and universities have become. Welders and philosophers are apparently way less important than athletics in the mission of higher education!

Countries where people are far more sports-crazy than we are do not waste their taxpayer monies like we do here in the US. Europeans, for instance, are maniacal about soccer, but they know well that sports is sports, and education is education. Or, consider my old country, India, where cricket is practically a religion. Colleges do not waste enormous resources on cricket and its gods.

If only we had continued to engage with the welders/philosophers soundbite, then we would have ended up talking about the wasteful practices in higher education, with athletics as perhaps the foremost waste of taxpayer money. But, of course, public institutions do not want us to talk about this, and the sports-addicted taxpayers are even less interested it seems.

A year ago, journalists in Michigan attempted to understand how much taxpayer money is spent on athletics by public institutions in their state. It was not an easy project. They “obtained through the Freedom of Information Act the financial disclosure statements provided to the NCAA from Michigan's 13 public universities that offer NCAA-level athletics.” Yes, through the Freedom of Information Act!

What they found did not surprise any of us who have been critical of this unholy mix of sports and academics in public higher education. Not only did the public institutions spend gazillions on athletics, “students are often "kept in the dark" when it comes to how universities fund college athletics and the degree to which colleges are subsidizing sports.”

Yet, whenever they cry funding shortage, universities are ready to cut philosophy before they even think of reducing the sports subsidies. I wish that legislatures, including here in Oregon with our huge budget deficit, would question the wisdom of public colleges as entertainment arenas.

The university where I have been teaching for fifteen years is no exception. A decade ago, a 25-million dollar facility was built primarily to meet the NCAA Division II requirements. Such an outrageous expense would not have been incurred if sports were played at the lower tier National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA,) in which the university participated until the year 2000.

America is exceptional indeed—when it comes to diverting taxpayer money on entertainment, when that could be spent instead on welders and philosophers.

This taxpayer-supported entertainment is what the Declaration of Independence meant by "the pursuit of happiness"?

The pursuit of madness!

March Madness has ended!  More on the Madness here.

It is time then to re-post this from April 2017 ;)
*************************************************

Recall the sound bite "we need more welders and less philosophers" from back when it was the season of the Republican primaries? I wish we had engaged in a whole lot of discussion regarding that statement from Senator Marco Rubio. Instead, we collectively shrugged and moved on.

We could, and should, have used that opportunity to engage in discussions on what education ought to accomplish. If we had, then we would have agreed that we need both welders and philosophers, and that higher education is failing to deliver them.

Public higher educational institutions have suffered from extensive mission creep over the years. It is best (worst?) seen in how sports-oriented the taxpayer subsidized colleges and universities have become. Welders and philosophers are apparently way less important than athletics in the mission of higher education!

Countries where people are far more sports-crazy than we are do not waste their taxpayer monies like we do here in the US. Europeans, for instance, are maniacal about soccer, but they know well that sports is sports, and education is education. Or, consider my old country, India, where cricket is practically a religion. Colleges do not waste enormous resources on cricket and its gods.

If only we had continued to engage with the welders/philosophers soundbite, then we would have ended up talking about the wasteful practices in higher education, with athletics as perhaps the foremost waste of taxpayer money. But, of course, public institutions do not want us to talk about this, and the sports-addicted taxpayers are even less interested it seems.

A year ago, journalists in Michigan attempted to understand how much taxpayer money is spent on athletics by public institutions in their state. It was not an easy project. They “obtained through the Freedom of Information Act the financial disclosure statements provided to the NCAA from Michigan's 13 public universities that offer NCAA-level athletics.” Yes, through the Freedom of Information Act!

What they found did not surprise any of us who have been critical of this unholy mix of sports and academics in public higher education. Not only did the public institutions spend gazillions on athletics, “students are often "kept in the dark" when it comes to how universities fund college athletics and the degree to which colleges are subsidizing sports.”

Yet, whenever they cry funding shortage, universities are ready to cut philosophy before they even think of reducing the sports subsidies. I wish that legislatures, including here in Oregon with our huge budget deficit, would question the wisdom of public colleges as entertainment arenas.

The university where I have been teaching for fifteen years is no exception. A decade ago, a 25-million dollar facility was built primarily to meet the NCAA Division II requirements. Such an outrageous expense would not have been incurred if sports were played at the lower tier National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA,) in which the university participated until the year 2000.

America is exceptional indeed—when it comes to diverting taxpayer money on entertainment, when that could be spent instead on welders and philosophers. This taxpayer-supported entertainment is what the Declaration of Independence meant by "the pursuit of happiness.”

The madness of rock-climbing walls

It is March Madness here in the US, and this means nothing to the rest of the world--as it should be.  In fact, I would rather that there were no March Madness even here in the US!

March Madness is when people can engage in betting in their work places.  It is when even the uber-left professors* will forget how the system screws the folk.  It is college basketball championship rounds.  Supposedly an amateur event, there are billions to made by corporations, the NCAA, the coaches, and the universities.

Apparently having good sports teams and athletics facilities are all that really matter in the part of higher education to which people really do not have to engage in fraud in order to get admission!  Because, once you have those, then students come in even from afar, from outside the state. And, getting those out-of-state students is a big moneymaker for publicly-supported universities, which otherwise won't be able to fund the multi-million dollar compensation for coaches!

So, these universities fall over each other in order to recruit students from other states.  Often, these out-of-state students are also less-capable ones who "had been rejected by their home flagships."; the more capable are able to find seats in their own states, which makes tuition more affordable.

And, what exactly are these less-capable students looking for?  Ahem, ""What these less-than-top-notch scholars may be most interested in ... are amenities like rock-climbing gyms and lazy rivers."

Such is the state of "higher" education in the country!

Even our small school spent a nauseating amount of money in order to build a flashy new gym with a rock-climbing wall and an indoor pool.  I blogged about this back in 2011--eight years ago.

A few months ago, I wrote to the university's budget committee that the university should rethink its allocation for athletics.  Guess what happened?  They did not consider it worth discussing.

* Years ago, in a newspaper op-ed I included a comment on how even leftist faculty are all in support of college sports.  Ooooh, I touched a raw nerve ;)  A loud leftist faculty wrote in a campus distribution list (which included me) linking me and Faux News' glenn beck ... hahahahaha

Money, sex, and entertainment ... today's American university!

In an email to my colleagues, in which I shared with them an informative video, I wrote:

People pushing STEM while systematically marginalizing the humanities and the social sciences need to understand such a big picture, which is what the idea of liberal education is all about.  If any of you want to share this video with the institution's STEM-pushers, feel free; I have long given up on them.

I then wonder why I don't make friends ;)

Apparently there is one set of higher educational institutions where the humanities and the social sciences are alive and well. No, not the Ivy Leagues and other private elites.  There, the best and the brightest are feverishly in the pursuit of fame and fortune via Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

So, where are the humanities and the social sciences prospering?

I’ve only found one large class of schools where humanities enrollments have held steady: historically black colleges and universities.

Apparently most of the rest of us do not care about "crafting a philosophy of life."

 In 1970, seven in 10 students thought it was very important or essential to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life” through education, while about four in 10 (and five in 10 men) put a priority on using it to “make more money.” By the mid-’80s, these ratios had flipped. Of all the statistics on the humanities I’ve seen, I find this one the most depressing: For the past 40 years, the percentage of first-year college students who think highly enough of crafting a life philosophy in the course of their studies to muster the energy to fill out a bubble indicating as much has flatlined below half. It’s little wonder that so few major in the liberal arts in the end.

Across the board, there has been an ever increasing interest, a passion, a commitment, to one part of higher education: Athletics--football, in particular!  No scandal shall ever stop this deep-commitment.

Most of the big-time football schools are public--yes, taxpayer funded--like the U of Alabama, Ohio State U, ... an endless list. Many of them still referred to as land-grant institutions:

Each of these universities is a land-grant institution, established by the Morrill Act of 1862, which was sponsored by Vermont Senator Justin Morrill and signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln. Their guiding vision was to offer the highest quality of teaching, research, and service to communities across the country. These institutions have given our nation the greatest public-university system in the world.

Good ol' Abe will be shocked at how these institutions that he helped found have now become altars for entertainment, where coaches earn gazillion dollars, and scantily-clad women cheer the men on the field!

Do we have to then wonder how we ended up with this presidency, when even institutions that supposedly are about learning couldn't care a shit about life and truth?

The Moais of Oregon

The plan is to submit this for consideration as an op-ed piece.
**************************************

A perfect storm is brewing in the Oregon public policy environment. When that storm makes landfall, Oregon’s higher education system will be devastated beyond recognition.

For years, it has been a struggle to fully fund the state’s public universities. Taxpayer dollars pay for less than ten percent of the research universities’ operations, and the regional universities--like Western Oregon University, where I teach--manage with a quarter of the operating expenses paid for by state allocation.

This is bound to worsen when the next recession hits.

Economies go through a period of growth, followed by stagnation. The Great Recession of 2008 was particularly hard. Since the end of that recession in June 2009, we have had steady growth in the economy over the past nearly nine years. However, growth cannot happen for ever; while any recession is difficult to predict, it will arrive sooner or later.

The coming recession will make state dollars scarce, and public higher educational institutions cannot even dream of balancing their books on the shoulders of students. Students already graduate with debt that many of the old-timers did not have to bear back when the public vigorously supported investing in higher education. To subject students to even higher debts will be outright robbery.

Students from other countries are willing to pay for an American education--they pay much higher fees than our residents do. However, the Trump administration is increasingly making it difficult for them to come here, which does not make any economic sense leave alone the benefits of greater understanding across cultures. And, because Oregonians are having fewer kids than before, the current K-12 student population in Oregon will not translate to increasing numbers of native students at higher educational institutions. All these will further complicate the coming budgetary battles.

Further, over the past couple of years, the political rhetoric in the country has turned intensely anti-intellectual. “We need more welders and less philosophers” has become a mantra. Politicians have virulently attacked various fields of inquiry that they deem wasteful. This means that when the recession hits, voters have already been primed for chopping down public universities.

Tragically, even as public higher education heads to a collapse, we are behaving similar to how the people at Easter Island did. Easter Island is located in the Pacific Ocean, and about 2,000 miles from the Chilean coast. There, as the population faced ecological crises, they--the Rapa Nui--spent more and more resources erecting stone statues--moais--hoping for divine intervention. The gods did not help, and the civilization ultimately collapsed about 400 years ago.

On college campuses, we have been constructing moais in plenty over the years. Athletic stadiums and facilities are our modern day moais, which we continue to build despite the financial urgency. Unfortunately, the massive spending on athletics, including the astronomical salaries for coaches, finds support across the political spectrum, even from the ultra-left faculty on campuses.

Like at Easter Island, these modern day moais too will merely bear witness to the collapse of public higher education in Oregon, unless educators and political leaders begin to prepare for the coming storm keeping in mind the best interests of the state’s future.

Fuck the welders and philosophers. We need entertainment, dammit!

(Am debating within myself whether I should send this to the editor, and make more enemies when published!)

Recall the sound bite "we need more welders and less philosophers" from back when it was the season of the Republican primaries? I wish we had engaged in a whole lot of discussion regarding that statement from Senator Marco Rubio. Instead, we collectively shrugged and moved on.

We could, and should, have used that opportunity to engage in discussions on what education ought to accomplish. If we had, then we would have agreed that we need both welders and philosophers, and that higher education is failing to deliver them.

Public higher educational institutions have suffered from extensive mission creep over the years. It is best (worst?) seen in how sports-oriented the taxpayer subsidized colleges and universities have become. Welders and philosophers are apparently way less important than athletics in the mission of higher education!

Countries where people are far more sports-crazy than we are do not waste their taxpayer monies like we do here in the US. Europeans, for instance, are maniacal about soccer, but they know well that sports is sports, and education is education. Or, consider my old country, India, where cricket is practically a religion. Colleges do not waste enormous resources on cricket and its gods.

If only we had continued to engage with the welders/philosophers soundbite, then we would have ended up talking about the wasteful practices in higher education, with athletics as perhaps the foremost waste of taxpayer money. But, of course, public institutions do not want us to talk about this, and the sports-addicted taxpayers are even less interested it seems.

A year ago, journalists in Michigan attempted to understand how much taxpayer money is spent on athletics by public institutions in their state. It was not an easy project. They “obtained through the Freedom of Information Act the financial disclosure statements provided to the NCAA from Michigan's 13 public universities that offer NCAA-level athletics.” Yes, through the Freedom of Information Act!

What they found did not surprise any of us who have been critical of this unholy mix of sports and academics in public higher education. Not only did the public institutions spend gazillions on athletics, “students are often "kept in the dark" when it comes to how universities fund college athletics and the degree to which colleges are subsidizing sports.”

Yet, whenever they cry funding shortage, universities are ready to ax philosophy before they even think of reducing the sports subsidies. I wish that legislatures, including here in Oregon with our huge budget deficit, would question the wisdom of public colleges as entertainment arenas.

The university where I have been teaching for fifteen years is no exception. A decade ago, a 25-million dollar facility was built primarily to meet the NCAA Division II requirements. Such an outrageous expense would not have been incurred if sports were played at the lower tier National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA,) in which the university participated until the year 2000.

America is exceptional indeed—when it comes to diverting taxpayer money on entertainment, when that could be spent instead on welders and philosophers. This taxpayer-supported entertainment is what the Declaration of Independence meant by "the pursuit of happiness.”

Thus spake the market!

Think about this: Most kids and adults like to be entertained.  Most kids and adults alike do not care to invest time and energy into reading and thinking.  Are those fair enough generalizations?

Thus, if we had money to spend along with the time, then most of us would shell out our time and money on entertainment.  And what better entertainment than sports, right?

If we leave everything to the market, then that is the kind of an outcome we can expect.  Which is also what we see increasingly happening in higher education, where students spend their time and money.  And with plenty of help from taxpayers, sports rule.  The flashier and more exciting the sport is, the more is the money spent on it.

Which is why it is no surprise that this op-ed (in the NY Times!!!) author has taken it to the logical extreme: He (of course it is always a "he" when it comes to such nutcases!) says it is high time universities offered majors in football and basketball and ...: He cites how the market has already spoken in favor of this:

Last weekend, nearly 157,000 people packed Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee to see the University of Tennessee battle Virginia Tech, the largest crowd ever to turn out for a football game, college or professional.
With popularity comes money, and lots of it. In April, the N.C.A.A. signed a deal with CBS and Turner Broadcasting for an eight-year, $8.8 billion extension of their March Madness basketball TV contract to 2032, while the college football bowl series brings in more than $500 million annually.

Exactly.  When was the last time a philosophy match brought in such money?

The author offers more:

Athletic budgets have swelled as a result. Texas A&M is on the verge of becoming the first campus to bring in more than $200 million a year from athletics. The University of Iowa just announced a 10-year, $45 million contract extension for its football coach. In 40 states the highest paid public employee is a college coach.

Oh, I get it now; the high salaries of coaches at colleges is to be lauded as the market speaking loudly.  What was I thinking!

 The $6.9 million annual salary of Nick Saban, the head football coach at the University of Alabama, is equal to the combined average salary for nearly 100 assistant professors at the school, according to the most recent data available.

Get rid of those faculty in geography and pay the football coach some more, I say.

Oh, wait, except that coaches earning gazillions, and the NCAA being an awesome cash machine, are not the results of the free market.  Click here, and in the table sort it out by the final column on "% Subsidy" if you want to puke all over the screen!

And, oh, while the coaches get paid gazillions, the worker-bees, also known as students, do not get paid.  Surely that is how the market works.  It does not?

It's wrong that taxpayers are forced to subsidize professional sports teams via stadium deals and the like. It's equally wrong that taxpayers and students see their bills jacked up to fund college sports teams, no matter how enjoyable the spectacle. I suspect that if and when the actual payouts to athletic departments for sports programs become better known, this worm will turn.

Nope, in this entertainment obsessed world, no worm will turn anywhere.  Who cares if 30-year old Johnny can't read and lives in mom's basement as long as he gets screens full of entertainment!

Are academic deans furious and waxing wroth over the latest athletic scandal?

The athletics-driven higher education is finally in some serious shit.
Way past time.
But at least now.

What happened, you ask?

For 18 years, thousands of students at the prestigious University of North Carolina took fake "paper classes," and advisers funneled athletes into the program to keep them eligible, according to a scathing independent report released Wednesday. ...
In all, the report estimates, at least 3,100 students took the paper classes, but the figure "very likely falls far short of the true number."

If ever one needed a metaphorical smoking gun in order to take the issue seriously, well, now there is no denying it.

"As an athlete, we weren't really there for an education," Rashad McCants, the second-leading scorer on the championship University of North Carolina basketball team 10 years ago, told CNN's Carol Costello. "You get a scholarship to the university to play basketball," he said. In other words, the point wasn't for him to actually learn. That's just sad.
"The university makes money off us athletes," McCants told Costello, "and they give us this fake education as a distraction." When McCants first made these remarks, university representatives tried to shoot the messenger, attacking him and his credibility.

Remember the lawsuits against the NCAA that colleges and the sports body were simply making money off the students who were hired under the guise of "student-athletes" but were, ahem, not students and only athletes?  The whole thing is a "subversion of the academy":

 The NCAA is a cartel of the major athletic universities in the United States that sets wages, playing conditions, and other aspects of intercollegiate athletics. Most prominently of these is a restriction on payments to football and basketball players. These two sports create billions of dollars in local and national revenues via gate receipts, TV contracts, and ancillary merchandise, not to mention millions of dollars annually at member schools in donations by alumni and other supporters of athletic programs.

It is a tangled web that was woven at UNC.  A web that involved even a, wait for it, ethics professor!  Yep, an ethics professor, who "directed the university’s Parr Center for Ethics," was totally in the middle of this scandal!

The president of Macalaster College is furious:

this is not fundamentally an issue about sports but about the basic academic integrity of an institution. Any accrediting agency that would overlook a violation of this magnitude would both delegitimize itself and appear hopelessly hypocritical if it attempted, now or in the future, to threaten or sanction institutions—generally those with much less wealth and influence—for violations much smaller in scale.
Most of us work very hard to conform to the standards imposed by our regional accrediting agencies and the federal government. If falsified grades and transcripts for more than 3,000 students over more than a decade are viewed as anything other than an egregious violation of those standards, my response to the whole accreditation process is simple: Why bother?

Exactly!  Why bother with real work?  I agree with him that the university should lose its accreditation until it is able to convince us that the grades mean something.

The crime involves fundamental academic integrity. The response, regardless of the visibility or reputation or wealth of the institution, should be to suspend accredited status until there is evidence that an appropriate level of integrity is both culturally and structurally in place.
Anything less would be dismissive of the many institutions whose transcripts actually have meaning.

Of course, that will not happen.  Because, dammit, that won't happen!  After all, this ain't anything new :(

The insanity in (of) higher education--Oregon edition!

I so wish I had not picked up early in my life the bad habit of reading the newspaper every morning.  Life would have been so much easier.

Even though my eyes got to the headlines even as I picked up the paper from the porch, I had all the more the reasons to keep it for the last.  You would have done the same too when the headline blared:

UO begins a new era of bargaining
A sea change arrives as a union forms and oversight shifts

After reading through the comics pages (which were a dud!); the local pages (lots of dog-bites-man stories!); sports (Dodgers on top in the division!); opinions (nothing by me, so who cares!) I finally got to the front section and the main story:

It’s a cash problem.
“In most states, the legislators — along with the federal government — have reduced (support) and the proportion of their budget that goes to higher education,” Boris said.
That’s true in Oregon.
The state has steadily decreased its support for its universities over the past two decades until Oregon student tuition pays the lion’s share of the cost — 70 percent — while the state pays 30 percent, according to Oregon University System figures.
Scrambling for money became a way of life at the University of Oregon.

 So far, so good, right?  Finally, a recognition of the bottom-line that "it's a cash problem."

So, what are they gonna do about it?

Fasten your seat-belts. In case you feel queasy, look away from your computer and keyboard.

Ready?

Contributions from the university’s general fund to athletics has long been a bone of contention with UO faculty. The athletic department gets much of its revenue from sales of tickets and television broadcasting rights.
This past week, administrative bargainers handed the union documents confirming that the university — as opposed to the athletic department — pays about $2 million annually to provide special tutoring to student athletes exclusively at the John E. Jaqua Center for Student Athletes, the shimmering glass building at the campus entrance.
That amounts to roughly $4,000 per student athlete; the university spends a fraction of that for special tutoring of non-athlete students. In May, the university senate formally asked Gottfredson to require the athletic department to pay for the tutoring at the Jaqua Center.
At the bargaining table last week, the union’s professional negotiator, David Cecil, told the administration’s professional negotiator, Sharon Rudnick, he would evaluate the university spending on tutoring student athletes.
“We’ll let you know if we think it’s a wise investment,” he said.
Gleason said the union is entitled to an opinion, but the decision is management’s to make. 

You read that correctly.  Everybody recognizes that there is a cash problem. But, dammit, there is no way we are going to touch that expense item on athletics.  

Wait, there is more.  

That was the insanity from the management side that it was their decision to make, even if the investment in athletics is an unwise one.  Faculty can be insane too--after all, we faculty didn't pursue our doctorates for nothing, and typically the deans and presidents were once faculty!

 United Academics of the University of Oregon wants 16 percent increases in spending on faculty salaries over the two years for the 1,900 members in its bargaining unit. In the past week, the administration offered 10.5 percent. “That’s the one that’s the greatest challenge for all of us,” said Tim Gleason, dean of the School of Journalism and Communications and an administration bargaining team member.
The union’s proposal would cost the university $20 million more than the current two-year budget for faculty salaries. The administration’s proposal would be $14 million more — a $6 million difference, according to the administration’s figures.

16 percent. 10.5 percent. Oh well, we might as well give them a 20 percent raise. 

Oh, wait. Whatever happened to the bottom-line:

It’s a cash problem.

I suppose we can pay-it-forward!

Students ignore their debts as long as their athletic teams win?

This blog post on the tax we are effectively imposing on the younger generation attracted quite a few visits, according the site traffic data.  I commented there, rather sarcastically, that:

The youth are paying big time for all our irresponsible decisions. But, youth being youth, their focus might not be in the metaphorical screw but in the literal one, and it will be a while before they will realize how much we have messed them up!

I should have noted there that jingoistic athletic worship distracts students as much as, or even more than, sex does.  How else could one explain students not only failing to protest against data--like the in map below, which is about the highest paid public employees in each state--but that they actually support increasing expenditure on athletics even though that only adds to their financial obligations come graduation?

As noted in the source for that map, such an allocation of money means:

This is money that is overwhelmingly going to field football, baseball, lacrosse, and other sports teams. It's not going to create new sections of Biology 101 or English 251 or underwrite the discovery of the next Streptomycin or publish the next Economics and the Public Interest or anything that remotely comes close to education or research.

I simply cannot understand how the public and elected officials alike can continue to engage in such a moronic and wasteful use of scarce resources that is not doing anything productive to make future generations richer and wiser!

In fact, it is the other way around: there is an athletic arms race.  

The trend begins with the broadest comparison possible in Division I – the more-elite FBS programs vs. the smaller, less-wealthy FCS ones. While the cost of instruction rose 53.3 and 48.2 percent at FBS and FCS institutions, respectively, and tuition rose 54.6 and 47.0 percent, instructional salaries increased only 15.8 and 14.14 percent. Total athletic coach salaries, meanwhile, rose 67.1 and 59.4 percent, and football coaches’ salaries rose even faster: 80.8 and 61.9 percent.
Narrow that down to the most elite of the elite, and the difference becomes even more stark. In the Bowl Championship Series conferences, whose champions automatically qualify for a slot in one of the five BCS bowl games, instructional salaries rose 15.8 percent – which, as it happens, is 1.7 percent higher than the increase at FCS programs. But total athletic coach salaries rose 78.4 percent, and football coach salaries rose 96.6 percent.

These are the few occasions when I allow myself to say this: Fuck!!!

“Presidents should really start asking the question, what is the purpose for athletics on my campus"

Oh yeah?  Good luck with that!

Meanwhile, students continue to pay for tuition and fees and don't even bother showing up for classes and don't care to turn in assignments.  What the heck is going on?

It is all beginning to show up in the real world:  

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in a new study, found that 30-year-olds with student loans were now less likely to have debts like home mortgages than 30-year-olds without student loans — even though most of those with student loans are better educated and can expect to earn more money over their lifetimes. The same pattern holds true for 25-year-olds and car loans. 

“It is a new thing, a big social experiment that we’ve accidentally decided to engage in,” said Kevin Carey, the director of the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation, a research group based in Washington. “Let’s send a whole class of people out into their professional lives with a negative net worth. Not starting at zero, but starting at a minus that is often measured in the tens of thousands of dollars. Those minus signs have psychological impact, I suspect. They might have a dollars-and-cents impact in what you can afford, too.” 

The weak economy and tight credit standards remain the main culprits preventing young people just establishing themselves from making major purchases. But millions now face putting a substantial share of their take-home pay toward past debts rather than present needs. Student loan debt leaves them with less money for things like clothes and restaurant meals. And it is even more likely to suppress purchases of more expensive items that need to be bought with credit. A poor job market is compounding the problem

Who cares, right, as long as the athletic monster is well fed?  Let me use that word once more: Fuck!!!

Universities spend more on athletics than academics? Shocked, shocked :)

May I first have a chart, please?

We certainly know how to spend the precious dollars in order to educate the youth.  USA! USA! USA!

"I'm shocked, shocked" as Inspector Renault said :)

I hope even the smaller universities like mine will read such news items and correspondingly amp up their sports expenditures, and drastically scale down the emphasis on education.  What a tremendous waste it is to educate the young, especially at taxpayer expense, right, when coaches at these universities are vastly underpaid?

More on the deplorable state of contemporary higher education!

At the BBQ to which my neighbors/friends had invited me over, I slipped into a rather serious and depressed/depressing mode while talking about education.  It has become one giant ponzi scheme at so many levels, I told them.

Almost a day and a wonderful grilled steak and conversations later, here I am reading more during my solitary lunch break, and .... yep, more depressing stuff.  If only students would understand how much the system is sucking them dry!

Exhibit A: This WSJ report that "Only 49% of graduates from the classes of 2009 to 2011 had found a full-time job within a year of finishing school, compared with 73% for students who graduated in the three years prior."  Despite a plethora of such reports, students don't seem to care, and I have often wondered why.  Could there be a great deal of truth in the report's simplistic/sarcastic comment?:

Many students nonetheless express optimism, though perhaps that's simply the Lake Wobegon effect: They might believe they're all above-average after years of positive reinforcement from their parents. In the same vein, they may see themselves as exceptions to the rules of the job market.

And then there is the whole aspect of athletics versus academics. 

We might even cut down the number of classes we offer, and reduce the numbers of full-time instructors, but never shall we even marginally reduce our commitment to athletics.  It is similar to the maniacal Republicans adamantly holding the line on military budget.  Exhibit B: This Bloomberg report on the supremacy of athletics at public institutions:

Rutgers funneled $28.5 million from the university budget and student fees into sports, the most among 54 U.S. public universities in the biggest football conferences, based on data compiled by Bloomberg for the fiscal year ended last June. It was at least the second straight year at the top of the list for the state university of New Jersey, despite cost-cutting after lawmakers and faculty protested that academics were losing out.
(To see Bloomberg’s data on sports spending at Rutgers and 53 other schools, click here.)
“Rutgers puts too much money into athletics at the cost of basically every other department,” said Stephen Sweeney, the Democratic president of the New Jersey Senate, in an e-mail. He applauded efforts by Athletic Director Tim Pernetti to increase revenue. At the same time, he said, “the faculty, student body and the families of students who are supporting them through school simply pay too much.” 

So, ok, those are at the undergrad levels. The typical cure offered by the higher education industry is, well, more schooling. So, we then have excited people going in for PhDs in fields like history, which is Exhibit C:


If it were not for the fact that it is a brilliantly sunny and warm spring day, this would be one hell of a depressing Monday!

Trickle down works! In athletics, not economics

First an excerpt from this piece:

As professional sports grew into a multibillion-dollar enterprise, colleges followed suit. Small programs grew big; big programs grew huge, all chasing ESPN glory and cash. So, in turn, high-school athletics programs grow, emulating their big siblings on campuses.

There is a widespread consensus that our public-education systems are in serious trouble. But amid the conflicting diagnoses of the problem—teacher training, standardized testing, socioeconomic conditions—we have missed this obvious one: The growth of high-school athletics over the past generation has necessarily meant fewer resources devoted to academics, especially in the zero-sum budgetary environment of so many school districts.

Yep, the effect trickles down to high schools (and lower too?) despite any number of horrible problems at the professional and collegiate levels.

After annus horribilis 2011, no one can deny with a straight face the corrupting effect of our athletics-business complex on higher education. We need to reckon, however, with the toll that college athletics and all its trappings take on high-school education as well.

Should we then be surprised at all that our public education doesn't deliver?

Recently, American school reformers have been flocking to Finland to discover what makes their primary and secondary education so good. However, as my Ohio State colleague Kenneth Kolson wrote recently in a letter to The New York Review of Books, most of them fail to acknowledge that Finnish schools "offer no team sports, which means no 'student-athlete' hypocrisy, no cheerleaders, no pep rallies, and no architectural shrines devoted to the cult of youthful athletic prowess." He is under no illusion that the Finnish model can be replicated here.

College Football: A tale of two universities

It was such a pleasure to read this op-ed by Barry Glassner, who is the president of Lewis and Clark College here in Oregon. He writes about being smitten with Division III sports, and notes:

Division III schools emphasize the experience of the athletes, not the sports-consuming public. The NCAA specifically calls on us to "place special importance on the impact of athletics on the participants rather than on the spectators ... and the general public and its entertainment needs."
...
On D-III playing fields, student-athletes really are student-athletes. At this level, no one gets athletic scholarships. Students compete not for fame and big crowds, not for a shot at a pro career, but purely for the fun, excitement and educational benefits they derive.

This is what most of us imagined colleges and universities to be--environments where there is enough opportunity to engage the body along with the engaging life of the mind.

In contrast, the former president of the university where I teach justified the gazillion dollar expenditures on athletics-related items:

Since moving from NAIA to NCAA Division II in 2000, Western Oregon University has been adjusting to the economic realities of competing at a higher level.More money was needed for scholarships, travel and increased investment in facilities, such as the new Health and Wellness Center opening this year, that will relocate the football team from the Old PE Building on campus.

Perhaps Division III was no good for us?  Even though it is immensely more than good enough for Lewis and Clark?

More on athletics versus education

Two items from the same issue (Sep 29th) of the newspaper:
First on athletics:

Chip Kelly, University of Oregon make a $20.5 million deal with new contract | Six-year deal puts Chip Kelly among the highest-paid coaches in the nation

And now on education:

The Oregon University System presents the state’s next governor and Legislature with a welcome opportunity. It’s understood that all state programs, including higher education, can expect less state support in the next budget period and beyond. Oregon’s universities, however, believe they can perform as well as in the past or better, even with stagnant or declining state funding, if Salem would give them more flexibility in managing their own affairs.

So, ... let me see. Despite all the tight controls that the state has on the little resources it allocates, universities find enough and more millions to spend on athletics.  And, they expect people like to me to believe that their spending on educating students will improve if only those controls would be released.  Oh yeah, it so excites me as a taxpayer that academics will suddenly become the overwhelming priority.  As a faculty member, I am ecstatic about total independence for state universities. (editor: can you be anymore sarcastic?!)

Oh, in case you thought this was the story only at the large schools in the system, I want to remind myself about this from the president of the smaller, regional, university where I am employed:

In 2008-09, university support accounted for more than half of the $4 million athletic budget this past year, reaching $2.2 million from just less than $900,000 in 2006.

Let us see when the highly entertained taxpayers wake up to reality that the joke that is on them on so many levels ...

The ultimate student-athletes. Just awesome!

Sporting News has the 20 smartest athletes around.  One hell of an impressive list.  Makes sports and universities proud.
Scanning the list, I spotted this one:

Ryan Fitzpatrick, QB, Buffalo Bills
• Age: 27
• On-field accomplishments: 2004 Ivy League MVP, first Harvard quarterback to rush for more than 1,000 career yards. In 2005 with the Rams, became the fifth quarterback in NFL history to throw for 300-plus yards in his debut.
• Alma mater, major: Harvard, economics
• SAT score: 1580
• Off-field/intellectual interests: “I’m an Apple technology junkie.”
• If I weren’t a professional athlete, I’d ... “Probably (have) done the Wall Street thing for a few years and then maybe branched out a little bit. But finance is what I’d be involved in.”
• Nerdiest thing about me: “That’s probably a better question for my wife. But I love Scrabble. I’m playing Scrabble on my iPad constantly.”

Read more here: 

ht

Joke of the day: Bush :)

Read somewhere the other day:

Q: What do Democrats and USC Trojans have in common?
A: They both blame Bush for all their problems

Muahahaha :)

With USC, it is Reggie Bush, of course. who has also returned his Heisman Trophy.  I suppose Bush doesn't need it anymore now that he has a Super Bowl ring!

The entire Bush chronicles are a nasty reminder about the level of money in college sports.  It is, after all, not the first time, nor will be the last time, for such stories.  What I don't get is how the world of higher education and the public go on pretending that college athletics aren't about money ... Perhaps such a behavior is consistent with everything else: we don't seem to be concerned about the debt, or the war, or the power of corporations, or ....

Maybe it is time to rename the country, the United Apathy of America ... oh well ...

Anyway, back to USC, I hope their sports suck for the next few years. Why? The last time USC football was in the dumps, in the Larry Smith years (which is when I was a grad student there) and after, USC started focusing on academics. Now, USC's academic ranking has picked up like crazy.  USC's academic reputation is now on par with UCLA, and its freshman acceptance is selective--though not anywhere as selective as Harvard or Stanford.

The entering undergraduate student body at USC is the most academically talented in the university’s 130-year history.
Average standardized test scores for the incoming class are in the 96th percentile. More than 85 percent of incoming freshmen were in the top 10 percent of their high school class and around 10 percent of them were valedictorians. The average GPA of the group was 3.7.
USC received 35,794 applications for 2,972 places in the fall 2010 freshman class. With this year’s applicant pool, USC’s admission rate was 24 percent.

I hope this is no plateau, and that the university will continue to enhance its academic standing under the leadership of the new president.

Fight on, Trojans--in the classrooms and in the labs, that is.

How colleges flush money down the athletic toilet!

Not a topic new to this blog. 

This time, let me quote from this LA Times piece by the hottest contemporary critics of higher education (and apparently not my university's favorites!) Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus:

If you look at how that added revenue is being spent, it's hard to argue that students are getting a lot of extra value for all that extra money. Why? Colleges aren't spending their extra revenues, which we calculate to be about $40 billion a year nationally over 1980 revenues, in ways that most benefit students.

One thing colleges are spending more on is athletic teams, which have become a more pronounced — and costly — presence on campuses everywhere. Even volleyball teams travel extensively these days, with paid coaches and customized uniforms. Currently, 629 schools have football teams — 132 more than in 1980. And all but 14 of them lose money, including some with national names. It's true that alumni donations sometimes increase during winning seasons, but most of those gifts go specifically to athletics or other designated uses, not toward general educational programs.

On a percentage basis, I suspect that athletics at smaller schools require a larger percentage of subsidy from general funds than larger schools do; yes, I am basing this on our own experience.

The average football squad has gone from 82 to 102 players, due to sub-specialties required by esoteric coaching strategies. The number of women's sports teams has also risen sharply. Since 1980, for example, the number of women's soccer programs has soared from 80 to 956. And teams cost money — often lots of it. Varsity golf at Duke, open to both genders, costs an estimated $20,405 per player per year. Because there are no revenues for most sports, the deficits often have to be covered by tuition bills.

When higher education is no longer about the education part, and is so focused on entertainment, is it any wonder then that America seems to be falling behind?  These costly investments are only as good as ... well, like that old Iceland adage of peeing on yourself when out in the cold: feels nice and warm for a second, but in the end you are worse off than before!

So, what is the bottom line according to Hacker and Dreifus?

A whole generation of young Americans is being shortchanged, largely by adults who have carved out good careers in places we call colleges.

Or, as I tell my students sometimes: "you are screwed"

Spending on athletics in public universities: need for a lemon law!

In 2008-09, university support accounted for more than half of the $4 million athletic budget this past year, reaching $2.2 million from just less than $900,000 in 2006.

This news item wouldn't matter if it were a report on a private university.  But, at the taxpayer supported institution that is also my employer?

I don't want my tax dollars to be spent  wasted this way, when students at the same university pay the highest per-credit tuition rate in the system--even more than at the research universities!  And, when there is very little on the horizon to suggest that the state's economic picture will get better any time soon.

So, why all these expenses anyway?

Since moving from NAIA to NCAA Division II in 2000, Western Oregon University has been adjusting to the economic realities of competing at a higher level.More money was needed for scholarships, travel and increased investment in facilities, such as the new Health and Wellness Center opening this year, that will relocate the football team from the Old PE Building on campus.

Well, wouldn't it have made economic sense then to have stayed in NAIA and, therefore, not have incurred all these additional expenses?  "It's elementary, my dear Watson."

To a large extent, universities--yes, academics, too, and not merely athletics--reflect decision-making and resource allocations that result from information asymmetry as best illustrated through the lemons (defective cars) sold, which is also why we have lemon laws.  In contrast to the automobile consumer market, however, the public has no clue about the defects in the lemons here--higher education--and has to pay whatever the asking price is, and is stuck with the purchased product.  In case the public has questions, the people who can clarify that are also from, guess what, higher education. ...