Last week the University of Alabama fired football coach Mike Price before he even coached a game. During a recent trip to Pensacola, Fla., Price went to a strip club. Later that evening, a stripper ran up a room service bill of more than $1000 (on Price's tab) by ordering one of everything on the menu.

This week, Iowa State is likely to fire men's basketball coach Larry Eustachy. After his team lost to Missouri last winter, Eustachy stuck around Columbia, Mo., and hit a party. Pictures of him slurping Natural Light and rather chastely kissing female Mizzou students on the cheek surfaced on the Internet a week or two ago. The athletic director has asked that Eustachy be fired, and the school president is thinking it over.

I can't speak to the Alabama situation. I've spent exactly 27 minutes of my life in a strip club, and I can't say they were the most engaging moments of my life. I did get to see a stripper rip the waistband off my friend's underwear and tie it around his head (this bachelor party "special" was purchased from the DJ for a mere $20), but other than that personal amusement factor, it was painfully obvious to me that the women on stage did not like the men for whom they disrobed, and that gave the whole scene a decidedly creepy nature.

I can, however, offer an opinion about partying at Missouri. I spent five years in Columbia, and I wasn't exactly a wallflower. While I did not have trust fund amounts of money to blow on wine, women and song, I did hold a few jobs which contributed to my party coffers. I've hurled in just about every corner of the campus, and I can tell you the best places for a late-night public display of extreme affection. But, geez, so can anyone who went to any college, right?

The year before I enrolled, Playboy (or someone else in the know) rated Mizzou the best party school in the country. This pissed off the administration, who began to implement changes to try and change this perception. My freshman year this meant that you needed a "Greek I.D." to attend fraternity parties. There was an easy way around this: Just say you wanted to rush. Unlike sororities at M.U., which have a very formal rush the two weeks before school starts in the fall, frats pretty much rush year-round.

Dorms also participated heavily in the party act. Entire floors would sponsor at party at a bar or roller rink or Moose lodge or somewhere. A couple guys of age would buy the kegs, the dorm would rent a bus and a guy at the door would collect three bucks a head.

The perfect system for college partying, to tell you the truth. Imagine: Two or three hundred kids and two operating kegs. Even if you slammed your beers, you had to wade through an impressive line to get more. There was very little chance of getting more than six or seven beers in an evening, unless you focused solely on drinking beer and not on getting laid (talk about your pathetic characters). To top it off, someone else was doing the driving, so there were no drunk 18-year-olds plowing daddy's Camaro into a bus stop. The dorms in question pocketed the profit and spent it on a overnight canoe trip/kegger or some other pleasant springtime debauch.

This all ended my sophomore year. I happened to attend the first bash targeted by university. Someone on campus alerted the local police. The police drove over to the party and shut it down after a protracted struggle. No one was hurt and very little property was damaged, but the decided ugliness (a cop car was attacked, etc.) pretty much shut down the whole off-campus party scene. Every time someone tried to get around the new attitude, the administration would come down hard. By the time I graduated, Mizzou was hardly the party school I knew when I arrived. The school had succeeded in lowering the number of massive bashes.

On the other hand, other drug use skyrocketed. While heroin was almost unheard of in the midwest back then, coke, ecstasy, crank and acid were easily acquired. More to the point, kids were getting busted left and right for DWI, and some of them didn't live to face the charges.

Did the overall level of education at the school get better? No. The state of Missouri has historically underfunded higher education, and the gubernatorial administration of John Ashcroft (yes, the same one) seemed intent on removing the "state" label from the public schools in the state by trying to cut off fends altogether. When I entered school, M.U. offered some fifteen foreign languages. When I left five years later only French, Spanish and German were offered every semester. During those five years, in-state tuition increased almost three-fold, and out-of-state costs nearly doubled. The administration never publicly addressed these serious problems. It simply kept bragging about how it was winning the war on student drinking.

During the time that I'm describing, the school's lobbyist to the legislature also served as an assistant vice-chancellor in charge of student activities. She was one of the most active administrators in the war on drinking, always issuing press releases about M.U.'s latest salvo. Whether or not her focus on the drinking problem took away from her duties as a lobbyist, she failed to secure decent funding for the school from the legislature. She should have spent more time securing the educational mission of the school and less on cranking out an almost endless series of programs, each of which promised to end the problem of excessive student drinking.

I'm not saying that a university should look the other way when large numbers of its students are flouting the law. Nor should it fail to address a legitimate student health issue such as excessive drinking. But it should consider the consequences of a sharp crackdown. In this instance, after the "war on drinking" began, more dorm resident died in drunken driving accidents, and many more overdosed on other drugs. And while the administration was spending a great deal of energy fighting underage drinking, the university itself was dying. Not only did M.U. cut course selections by the scores, it shuttered entire schools. You can no longer get a geology degree at the land grant institution of the state of Missouri.

Last I heard, state universities weren't in business to prepare a few people for lives as a professional athletes or, for that matter, to provide entertainment for alumni. They weren't established to provide cheap research facilities for corporations, and they weren't created to further the careers of academics. States established universities to educate the citizens of a the given state. Sports are great (I'm a big fan--really), and there are many wonderful things discovered by post-docs and the professors who lead them. But anything that distracts from educating the people needs to be put in its proper place.

I'm not saying that idiot coaches (who are paid far more money than any professor or administrator) should be allowed to act like fools in public. But these aren't the issues which should concern the upper levels of school administration. I could care less what happens to Mike and Larry. They're big boys, and unless they've spent most foolishly, they're already millionaires many times over. I don't care if they get fired or even if they ever work again. Coaches are precisely the sorts of people who should be all but irrelevant to the mission of a fine university. The next time I hear about a controversy at a major state university, it had better be about the quality of its courses and not some silly thing about what an athlete or coach has gone and done.

Jon Worley believes that a conscientious regimen of the imbibing of intoxicants can actually aid in the acquisition of knowledge.