Sports U.
The highest paid Indiana University employee, acc’d’g to the an op-ed in today’s Herald Times (paywall), is basketball coach Tom Crean, who rakes in a cool $604,858 per year. Sitting just below him and IU Pres. Michael McRobbie ($566,860) in the pay firmament is football head coach Kevin Wilson, who pockets $531,644 per annum.
And just to make sure the jock pop. of our local institution of higher education gets its just deserts, athletic director Fred Glass boasts a &458,007 salary. Poor guy doesn’t even make a half mill a year; how does he make ends meet?
Tom Crean Accepting His Weekly Bushel Of Money
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Let’s not kid ourselves anymore: Indiana University, like many, many other U.’s around the nation, is really a sports entertainment concern that just happens to dabble in things like education and scientific inquiry on the side.
Funny thing is, just yesterday I had a sit-down with a pal o’mine who happens to be a research scientist at IU. Let’s call him Dr. Brain. Every year Dr. Brain must search for funding for his lab (as well as his relatively paltry salary) from granting agencies around the country. He must fill out reams of applications, justifying not only his scientific work but also his very existence as a learned member of society. Then he must lay awake nights wondering if this foundation or that federal government department will fork over a few thousand bucks. To keep his lab running and to ensure he makes enough to support his modest home and his 16-year-old car, Dr. Brain must cobble together any number of gifts from donors every single year.
Dr. Brain was overjoyed yesterday because his funding for the coming year seems in the bag. Note I typed seems. He hasn’t gotten final confirmation for his package of grants just yet. Everything, though, seems in order, he says.
Hmm. If there’s a problem, I wonder if Dr. Brain might be able to request grants from the likes of Tom Crean and Kevin Wilson.
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Books On The Brae
Col. John Tilford, former Dem primary candidate for US Congress and tireless advocate for veterans’ concerns, dashed off to Scotland with his lovely missus, Polly, not long ago. Natch, he found one of the few bookstores in a sparsely populated stretch of the northern highlands. He was eager to tell me about it when he visited the Book Corner last week.
The Scot store, he sez, was a two-story affair, the main floor ringed by a balcony-like structure. Nearly every square inch of the place is crammed with tomes and smack dab in the middle of the main floor is an old fashioned wood-burning stove. That, acc’d’g to the Col., is the facility’s heating plant.
I don’t suppose that store will be making the switch to selling e-books and Kindles very soon.
In any case, Tilford sent me a pic of the store:
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I imagine Tilford’s been wringing his hands of late over the VA hospital scandals and the unwillingness of certain obsessive ledger book-watching legislators to pay for veterans’ care. Far too many of us are perfectly happy to let somebody else’s kid get his brains blown out for the cause of “freedom” (something I’d argue this holy land hasn’t actually fought for since July 27, 1953). Nor are terribly many of us willing to pay for the psychological and physical care of people we’ve shipped off to all corners of the world to wage war for our interests.
Keep up the good fight for the veterans, Colonel!
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