I discovered this Word document that I had in my files while searching for a different document. I thought it would be a good time to share it with the rest of you Cougs. I think it was originally posted on one of the Cougar websites, not sure which one now. I added a couple items at the end relative to points made in the narrative. Not sure when it was originally written, but my saved document was dated 2013.
Why We Hate the University of Washington
Virtually every major sports team has a rival. Most of the time, the basis for these rivalries are mere geometric proximity or a particular historical event. For some fans on both sides of the Apple Cup line, the rivalry starts and ends there: it’s just a game between cross-state rivals with a long history.
But for some WSU fans it goes a little deeper than that. They hate the University of Washington. They hate their coaches. They hate their former coaches. They hate their administrators. They hate their fight song. They hate their colors. They hate their admissions department. They hate their budget office. They even hate their museum if you can believe it. They loathe the basic premise, philosophy, and modus operandi of the institution.
In a different situation, such disdain might be misplaced. But in the case of the University of Washington, the school seems to do everything possible to earn this ire.
The origins of the diametric differences between WSU and UW can be traced the to the shear bipolar makeup of the State of Washington itself. Whether you are talking political, economic, ecological, or geological composition; eastern and western Washington could not be more contradictory. In that light, it was surely inevitable that the two halves would go on to house rival academic institutions.
But the differences have grown well beyond that original framework.
Washington State University, a landgrant institution built in the middle of nowhere (even by Eastern Washington standards) was charged with educating the masses. It has functioned ever since out of an emphasis on necessity.
The University of Washington, which exists today on one of the most expensive pieces of property in the state, was founded in order to boost the prestige of the town of Seattle and educate the sons of the local elite. It has functioned from the very beginning on an emphasis of prestige. Though it bears no geographic relationship to the original school campus founded in 1861, which closed its doors three times without graduating a single student through 1876, the UW still clings to this older date for the sole purpose boosting its legacy as being “the oldest public institution of higher learning west of the Mississippi.”
Few public institutions encompass a greater air of aristocracy than the UW. In that light, it is no accident that in 1892, when the students faced with the choice of its school colors being red, white and blue (the colors of George Washington's flag); or purple and gold (the colors of royalty), they overwhelmingly voted in favor of the latter. Likewise it is entirely appropriate that the school song would later become, "Bow Down to Washington." From the earliest days, the UW clung to a blue-blood mentality and little has changed.
Today University of Washington is the largest recipient of federal subsidy for its research of any public university, a distinction it has held since 1974. The school wears this distinction with pride as a symbol of the quality of researchers it has, but the academic community grumbles that it is more sign of a school who has learned how to exploit the system and is more concerned with the grant writing potential of its professors than their teaching ability.
The UW’s tendency towards entitlement and greed has been on display more clearly over the past few years.
In 2004, the UW medical school spent $25 million in legal fees to defend hundreds of members of its staff in the largest Medicare fraud case in U.S. academic history. It paid the federal government a settlement of $35 million for running a “criminal enterprise,” of overbilling, with a “conscious and deliberate decision to ignore the facts before them.” A professor, who was previously been brought on sanctions for allowing his students to see tightly guarded test booklets for national medical exams, was found guilty of obstruction of justice and for creating an “atmosphere of fear and intimidation” within his department. Rather than terminating this professor with ample cause, the university paid him $3.7 million to retire.
In 2005, a peer-conducted investigation of prestigious paleontology collections at the UW’s Burke Museum of Natural History, concluded nearly all of the fossil specimens had been collected illegally from federal lands without permits. Of greater concern was the fact that no field research notes were kept by UW professors or students, with the exception of a few “torn pieces of brown paper bags.” The only maps kept were little more than pencil dots on road maps, of “unusable scale, outdated, or unrelated to any known collecting areas,“ and unusable for any research purposes. What data was collected was found to have “errors not within a reasonable margin of error.” With suggested recorded collection points were many miles off from any probable locations. One particular fossil, which “if its presumed stratigraphic occurrence is correct,” is the “last fossil primate known in North America, placed the locality on a highway in Oregon.” The study concluded that “fossil collection in the Burke Museum cannot be relied upon for its accuracy or its precision,” was collected and recorded with “a disregard for completeness and accuracy, either though carelessness or deliberate falsification,” and that “their significance to modern paleontology may have been drastically and perhaps irretrievably reduced.” In other words, the UW has an ill-gotten multi-million dollar dinosaur trophy room, and destroyed it academic value in the acquisition of it.
This past year the UW announced that in order to boost revenues, it will be admitting fewer in-state students. The UW desires the higher out-of-state tuition rates (even at reduced academic admittance requirements) over educating the more qualified Washington residents. WSU announced it will admit more in-state freshmen to help cover the gap. In Olympia, UW student lobbyists argued with legislators to raise their tuition rates to boost revenues for their school. WSU student lobbyists (along with the other 4 public universities) argued for lower tuition rates to help financially struggling students.
Then there is the athletic department, who’s ethical track record over the past 30 years is almost beyond belief.
October 1985: Former UW player Michael Kay Green is arrested after a two-month spree in which he attacked nine women. He is convicted of several robbery charges, rape at knifepoint, abduction, and murder charges. He blames addiction to steroids from his time at UW for his violence.
May 1987: UW running back Trevin Moore is arrested in connection with the knifing and robbery of a Seattle woman, and is also convicted in three other attacks on Seattle women. He is given an “exceptionally light sentence of one year,” according to the Seattle Times.
www.spokesman.com
