All in all, great material for a mini-e-book narrating the twists and turns — financial, legal, political and personal — in a fiasco that added insult to injury.
4. Can’t anybody get the A-Rod story?
Can so many sports reporters really be so lame? I’ve suggested this before, but the absence of a definitive story on Alex Rodriguez’s contract with the Yankees and the insurance policy the Yankees bought to cover it has become ridiculous.
It’s now comically obvious that the Yankees are trying to do whatever they can — even telling A-Rod that his leg hurts when he says it doesn’t — to keep him off the field before what looks like his inevitable suspension for using performance-enhancing drugs. I almost expect to read tomorrow that someone from front office was caught leaving banana peels on the floor in the corridor of his hotel room.
Maybe we should organize a Kickstarter campaign to fund a reward for the reporter who can get the details of A-Rod’s contract and the insurance policy tied to it. How much money is at stake here? What are the trigger clauses behind the front office’s apparent effort to do everything short of hiring a hit man to keep him from returning to Yankee Stadium? If he has one at-bat or one inning on a major league field does the Yankee’s insurance coverage lapse? Would that mean they have to pay him even if he is suspended?
The "cushy university" argument is a little weak. First, UC has just under 19,000 faculty and over 230,000 students, a 12:1 ratio. Second, raw numbers mean very little, without looking at details: medical faculty do (and should) teach smaller numbers of students than those teaching, say, Econ 101. It's also vital to look at how much teaching is done by non-tenure track lecturers, adjuncts, and grad students.
As for staff, the numbers tell you nothing unless you look at what work is done by university employees vs outside companies. Groundskeeping, building maintenance, cleaning, food service, etc. can all be contracted out or done in-house. Assuming (for the sake of argument) that it cost roughly the same to perform this work either way and that both were equally effective, it would boost the size of the staff to have it all done internally without there being any meaningful difference in how "cushy" the university is. It also matters, of course, what services a university provides: a commuter school in a dense urban area doesn't need to provide as much in the way of housing or food services, but a geographically isolated one has to have staff to feed and house its students.
#1 Posted by Bruce Rusk, CJR on Tue 30 Jul 2013 at 11:36 AM
For a long time I’ve thought that surveillance cameras that could both see and hear — in other words catch and record what people were saying privately in public or semi-public places — would be the ultimate, and ultimately scary, Big Brother tool. Is that what this camera does?
Cleaners London
#2 Posted by John Ford, CJR on Tue 30 Jul 2013 at 01:38 PM