Lehigh Football Nation

I've been getting caught up with some nice MLK day "holiday reading" this weekend concerning the history of the fall of American University's president and how it's spurred a fresh look at university spending across the board. Maybe it's simply my focus on football all these years that made me miss the spectacular fall of former American University president Ben Ladner . Mr. Ladner did a lot of good things for AU in his nine-year reign, like increasing the academic profile of the school and multiplying their tiny university endowment by nearly ten, from $29 million to $271 million in 2005. Unfortunately that allowed Mr. Ladner to engage in a high-rolling lifestyle that included jet-setting around Europe, complete with personal drivers and limos, a personal chef making $88,000 a year and making regular five-figure trips to destinations such as the US Virgin Islands, UAE and Nigeria - all paid for by AU and the endowment that he grew. It's pretty remarkab...

For anyone who's interested about Patriot League athletics, this article from "Inside Higher Ed" is a must-read not only because Lehigh athletics are mentioned fairly prominently, but it talks about something I've talked about before - how football is, whether people like it or not, a vital way for college campuses to be diverse. Data drawn from the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s annual survey of graduation rates, analyzed by Inside Higher Ed, show that scholarship athletes make up at least 20 percent of the full-time black male undergraduates at 96 of the nearly 330 colleges that play sports in Division I, the NCAA’s top competitive level. At 46 of those colleges, according to the data, which are from 2005-6, at least a third of the black male population play a sport. And at 31 one of them, football players alone make up at least a quarter of the black undergraduate men. The trend is most evident at [a type] of institution...where the proportions of bla...