WRONG DIRECTION FOR COLLEGE FOOTBALL

A sore spot for almost all college professors is athletic coach salaries at their institutions. I heard on the evening news that the football coach North Carolina State University is to be paid 2.2 million dollars with bonuses. Shocked I went to the internet and searched for football coach salaries. OMG. I found that the top five university college coaches around the country were above $4.8 million dollars with the top being $7.3 million dollars. This is an obscene figure in view of the educational funding status of universities.  Headlines around the nation are now decrying Gov. Scott Walker’s $300 million dollar cut to the University of Wisconsin; Walker is a man who wants to be President so is making what he thinks will be politically popular decisions. How can any of this make sense to the parents of college age students and people in general? If I can be presumptuousness enough to speak for them, “it doesn’t”. It has to do with economics and not education.

Lawyers head the American Bar Association, physicians head the American Medical Association, etc so why are academicians not heading universities, which business people and politicians head or are subservient to them. The University of Minnesota for example, has a chemical engineer as president who has set the requirement for faculty to grant tenure to a young professor to have documentable “contribution to entrepreneurship”. Scott Walker is playing to taxpayers of his state; if he can add the $300 million cut from the University of Wisconsin to the $120 million of the state education budget he has already made, he can lower taxes. What about the foot ball program? The reputation of the University of Wisconsin will depend on a winning football team; academics will take care of themselves.

I live in the state of North Carolina where the state education budget is under constant and severe attack by the Republican legislature. Did I mention we have $30,000 year student tuition while we pay our football coach $2.2 millions dollars? We entice industry into our state by not collecting property taxes, sales taxes, income taxes, and cutting their utility rates. Guess who pays for police and fire protection, for the highways and byways. Guess who pays twice the rate for electricity than industry pay. Do I have to ask why my property taxes are so high? What the hell, we can hire educated engineers etc from India, so why should we pay high taxes to educate people. Who cares as long as we can afford a can of cold beer, set in front of the TV, and watch a hell of a good football game—live the good life?  Go Wolfpack, go!  

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