Selling Sno-Cones at the Beach

why I could never be a college president

I could never be a college president because I'd have to be shilling for ethically bankrupt ideas like this dumbass stadium financing plan the U has cooked up lately. Here's the deal: the U "owns" some land in Rosemount (someone told me it was mostly a swamp and therefore not buildable) and the State of MN is gonna "buy" that from the U for just under $10m a year for 20 years, in order to "preserve it from development" and make it "accessible to the public" with walking trails and whatnot. What, the Regents were gonna build condos there if the state didn't buy it?? Puh-lease.

Skipping over the technicalities that allow things to be legal when they are not ethical, don't the citizens in this state in some sense ALREADY own this land? Who "owns" the U and its property? Does it "belong to" the Regents and not the citizens of this state?!?

As if that were not insult enough to our moral intelligence, President Bruininks has the gall to point out cheerily that this deal will allow student stadium fees to be reduced from $200 a year to $100. I suppose it's better to call out the stadium fee as a separate line item on the tuition bill (so that we can be outraged every semester when we pay it) rather than have it wrapped into a tuition hike, but that too is part of a rhetorical game to keep tuition rates low by covering the revenue gap with increases in fees.