FUNDING

The athlete—not, it should be said, a "star" athlete; he had, so far, failed to live up to the expectations that had led to the university offering him his scholarship, though he still held onto his spot in the starting lineup—maintained that the relationship was longstanding, at least in his eyes, having lasted more than two weeks if you counted spring break, and that sex had therefore been consensual. The woman's friends—not that they hung out all the time, but one of them had her in her Spanish class and another lived down the hall from her freshman year—said that she had been slurring her words and stumbling earlier that night, and that this was strange because, in general, they said, she could hold her own and didn't usually get sloppy. No one, at this point, had heard from the coach on the subject—he was in Hawaii, scouting, it was said—but the dean of students had promised to look into the matter, and had admonished the campus newspaper—really a blog and a Facebook page that produced a special print edition once a semester—for printing the name of the student athlete. Think about this young man's future, said the dean, and the opportunities that may now be closed to him. The newspaper was, some time later, at a budget allocation meeting closed to students and largely unattended by faculty, defunded—not by way of punishment or retaliation, no one needed to say, but because the school's official website, run by PR professionals in the administration rather than students, was already doing a fine job of keeping people up-to-date with what was going on, and this was, anyway, all agreed, a time for belt-tightening, the state of state funding being what it was. The paper's student editor, a member of Sigma Tau Delta and a frequent visitor to office hours, counted four typos in the email informing students that uinversity [sic] merit scholarships—of which she had been a recipient, and on which she had counted for the following year's tuition—had been eliminated; news of the cuts did not make it onto the school's website. Instead, at the top, with photos, was an item from two weeks before, on the ribbon cutting for the school’s new fitness center—a seven million dollar project paid for and named after the family who owned the local bottling company, a company that had, it was rumored, been granted exclusive and university-wide vending rights in perpetuity. One could just see the pricey bottle of enhanced water in one of the photos of the dean, beaming after learning he would be promoted to provost when the current provost retired. It is rumored he has long harbored a desire to run for public office.

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