What an outrage!!!!!!!!

My god, do you believe this?

The Chronicle of Higher Education has released its latest salary survey and, if you can believe it, there are forty-two presidents of private colleges and universities in the United States who get paid more than one million dollars!

Forty-two!

Some of these schools are exactly the big-name schools you would expect to pay high salaries, like Columbia, Yale, MIT,  Stanford, or the place at the top of the list, the University of Chicago. Others, however, are kind of surprising. Roger Maris College, Johnson & Wales, or the University of Laverne ??Granted, it probably is the only institution of higher learning you've ever heard of in Laverne, California, but really? $1,184,224 (31st)?

Who knew American colleges had so much money to throw around?

I'll tell you who knew: football and basketball coaches.

That's right, while the Chronicle is surveying academic salaries, USA Today surveys what NCAA members pay their coaches, and it happens that one or two of them also haul in over a million. Like seventy--yes, seventy--head football coaches, thirty-six basketball coaches, three assistant football coaches, and nine athletic directors.

In fact, if you want to find a coach who makes less than what Robert J. Zimmer, the president of the University of Chicago and the highest-paid president in the country makes, $3,358,723, you have to go down to Steve Spurrier, who coaches football at South Carolina and is number twelve on the coaches list; or number six on the basketball coaches list. Mike Krzyzewski, known universally as "Coach K" because literally nobody can pronounce his name, makes more coaching basketball for Duke than the top two university presidents.

So if you're a fundraiser calling for contributions to Michigan State, where I got my undergraduate degree, or Michigan, where I went to law school, don't be surprised if, instead of getting out my checkbook, I ask you about the $11,725,488 you paid your head football and basketball coaches last year.

Fixing college sports

Fair's fair, okay?

I am the former customer of two big corporations who are prominent in college athletics. One is Michigan State University and the other is the University of Michigan.

Every year around this time I see posts from other people who also used to be customers of those corporations, or other corporations that are essentially indistinguishable from them, cheering on the football teams fielded by those corporations. So why not once again publish my rant about fixing college sports?

A couple of years ago King Coleman posted a story in Salon about the meager efforts to fix college sports, in which he asserted, among other things, that the people who run the NCAA care about education.

I don't get to hang around with the NCAA bureaucrats, but I can't believe King's statement that there are lots of people in the NCAA who care about education, or think education is more important than athletics.

If they did, there are a couple of simple policies they could adopt:

1. No athletic scholarships. This is necessary because history has shown that college sports are hopelessly and irreversibly corrupt.

Okay, they're not going to do that, so . . .

Make the schools invest in academic performance, by:

1. Give coaches tenure and put them on the academic salary scale, with evaluations and compensation based on graduation rate. You object that the best coaches won't stay, and the teams will do worse? Okay. You've just said that athletic performance is more important than academic performance.

2. A scholarship gives the "student-athlete" a full ride until they graduate, even if that takes ten years, or forever.

3. Impose strict limits on the number of athletic scholarships they can award. Once a scholarship is awarded, it is not available to be reissued until the student holding that scholarship graduates, no matter how long that takes.

4. The way schools have need-blind admission policies, adopt athletics-blind admission policies.

They don't want to do these things? They've just told us they don't care about academics.

It's a good thing he knows what's important

You may have heard of Rep. Joe Barton. Even if you didn't know anything about him before, he recently distinguished himself as a science expert, mocking Energy Secretary (and Nobel Prize winner) Henry Chu for trying to use the concept of plate tectonics to explain how petroleum deposits could have formed under such cold areas as Alaska and the Arctic Circle, a video he himself posted on YouTube under the heading "Energy Secretary puzzled by simple question".

Not as well known is his stand on government. Like most conservative extremists, he is against big government. He signed Newt Gingrich's Contract on America in 1994, which stated,

This year’s election offers the chance, after four decades of one-party control, to bring to the House a new majority that will transform the way Congress works. That historic change would be the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public’s money.

So why is he in the news this week? Pretty simple, actually. He's standing up for the kind of principle that any small-government conservative would be committed to: the power of the federal government to decide the national NCAA football champion!

I kid you not. According to Barton, the need for national football playoffs is so obvious, and so important, that if the NCAA won't do it voluntarily he will introduce legislation to force them to do it.

So I ask you: if we can't get Michelle Bachman to say something stupid on camera every week, aren't you glad we have Joe Barton to pick up the slack?