John U. Bacon

The University of Michigan named a new president last month, and the football team landed another great class of recruits last week. But there’s another story that keeps eclipsing those two.

I’ve been reluctant to write about Brendan Gibbons, because so little is clear – from the incident that started this saga five years ago, to the various responses since.

A few things are clear, though, starting with this: the athletic department continually fails to follow the advice of legendary athletic director Don Canham, “Never turn a one-day story into a two-day story.”

This story starts back in 2009, when Wolverine kicker Brendan Gibbons had an encounter at a party with a female student. Ultimately, only two people know what happened, but we do know she contacted the Ann Arbor police, then decided not to press charges.

This put the university in a tough spot. In 2009, it was a tenet of university policy that it would not look into such situations unless the alleged victim came forward. But in 2013, the university revised its code, no longer requiring the alleged victim to start an investigation.

That’s why it wasn’t until November 20 of 2013 that the Office of Institutional Equity concluded that Gibbons “engaged in unwanted or unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature, committed without valid consent, and that conduct was so severe as to create a hostile, offensive, or abusive environment.”

From everything I’ve seen, the university played it straight, and the athletic department never attempted to interfere with the process. That’s the good news.

The bad news is, having gotten the hard part right, the athletic department seemed determined to get the easy part wrong. 

The various responses have given the appearance of skullduggery where none existed. We still don’t know when the athletic department found out about the panel’s ruling. But we do know three days after the ruling, on November 23, head coach Brady Hoke started Gibbons, who kicked three extra points in a 24-21 loss to Iowa.

Before Michigan’s next game, against Ohio State, Hoke – who might have been following orders – claimed Gibbons had injured his leg. Before Michigan’s bowl game, on December 28, Hoke said Gibbons had gone home due to a “family matter” – yet we know the university expelled Gibbons on December 20.

I understand that Hoke was trying to grant his player as much privacy as possible, but all he had to say was Gibbons had broken team rules. Obviously, lying for him breeds suspicion.

The public didn’t learn Gibbons had been expelled until January 28, when the university’s student paper, The Michigan Daily, broke the story. No one in the department has publicly questioned anything in the Daily’s story, or its excellent follow-up by Zach Helfand (a former student, in the interest of full disclosure), or asked for any corrections.

But a few days later, when Hoke addressed the Gibbons issue with a group of reporters, the Daily was not informed of the event, leaving many to conclude they were being punished.

The department has vehemently denied excluding the student reporters, claiming the other reporters had asked for the interview days in advance. For that reason, they say, it was not a formal press conference – which seems to be a distinction without a difference, especially when Hoke released a prepared statement at the event, whatever you call it.

But even if we take them at their word, they were naïve not to predict the public wouldn’t believe them, especially given this administration’s habit of backpedaling after public relations gaffes with explanations that are disingenuous at best. The list includes the initial decisions not to bring the marching band to the Cowboy Classic in Dallas; banning the seat cushions they sold to fans for $20 at the spring game; displaying a giant Kraft macaroni noodle under the scoreboard the day before a home game; and paying thousand of dollars for the skywriting stunt over Spartan Stadium. Each time, the department’s attempts to backtrack fueled fans’ anger, instead of extinguishing it.

It doesn’t help that the department also has a recent history of bullying the media. Under athletic director Dave Brandon, the staff habitually calls reporters to chastise them for printing what they consider negative stories, or simply unflattering statistics. They’re not above threatening to cancel exclusive interviews.

One writer told me, “Every interview and press conference the department sets up is presented as a huge favor, not just them doing their jobs. They show amazing contempt for the media.”

What happens next? Gibbons is gone, the police consider the case closed, and the Daily reporters have returned to official media events.

Brandon recently told The Detroit Free Press that the relationship between an athletic director and a university president is “tremendously important.” That is particularly true at Michigan, where the athletic director answers only to the president.

Michigan’s president-elect, former Brown provost Mark Schlissel, has not commented on this situation, and wisely so. But it’s hard to imagine his first brush with the athletic department was the honeymoon either side had hoped for.

About the writer: Ann Arbor resident John U. Bacon is the author of the national bestsellers “Fourth and Long: The Future of College Football,” “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” and “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” You can follow him on Twitter (@Johnubacon), and at johnubacon.com.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

I’ve often joked that some Michigan football fans aren’t happy unless they’re not happy. But after eleven games this season, even they could be excused for having plenty to be unhappy about. A week ago, the Wolverines were 3-and-4 in the Big Ten, with undefeated Ohio State coming up next.

The Wolverines had been surprisingly bad all season – until the Ohio State game, when they were suddenly, surprisingly good, falling short by just one point in the final minute. It was the first time I have ever seen Michigan fans feeling better about their team after a loss than before it.

Still, the heroic performance was bittersweet. The most common reaction I’ve heard this week: Where was that team all year? And which team will return next year – the one that got crushed by Michigan State, or the one that almost beat the Buckeyes?

But Michigan’s bigger problems are off the field, not on it. In just four years, the athletic department’s budget has expanded from $100 million to $137 million – and that does not include the $340 million earmarked for a new building master plan.  This rapidly growing empire could be threatened by a perfect storm of a bad record, skyrocketing ticket prices, and next season’s horrible home schedule.

This brings up two questions: How do they increase the budget by 37%? And where do they spend it?

First, Athletic Director Dave Brandon pushed aside faculty control. Michigan’s Advisory Board on Intercollegiate Athletics didn’t even know he planned to promote Michigan’s men’s and women’s lacrosse teams to varsity status – at a cost of over $3 million year – until the day before it was announced. But that’s one day sooner than they hear about large hikes in ticket prices, and just about everything else the athletic department is doing.

Michigan’s late athletic director, Don Canham, wrote in 2005 that without faculty control, athletic directors have virtually no restraints. “What $70-million dollar business could conduct business without a board of control?” Just eight years after Canham wrote his final piece, warning of “unbridled expansion,” Michigan’s athletic budget has almost doubled. Guess Mr. Canham knew what he was talking about.

Second, the athletic department needed to find new sources of revenue, and squeeze more money out of the old ones. To do so, it has tripled the size of its development staff, and pumped the prices of tickets and “seat licenses” by roughly 30% to 50%, or about $100 per seat. The athletic department now charges $9,000 for corporate events in the stadium skyboxes and $6,000 for a one-hour wedding reception on the 50-yard line. They even charge school kids for tours, which Michigan had always provided for free.

When former athletic director Bill Martin told me, “Just because you can charge them more, doesn’t mean you should,” he sounded like somebody who had retired a century ago, not in 2010.

Add it all up, and the department will not just cover its expanded $137 million budget, it will show a nearly $9 million budget surplus.

So, where does all this money go? Brandon declined to be interviewed for my latest book, “Fourth and Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football,” so I talked to Bill Martin and former Michigan president James Duderstadt, who have seen a few budgets in their day. They’re alarmed that so little of the new money actually goes to student-athletes, and is instead spent on – well, just about everything else.

Staff salaries, for example, have grown from $34 million to $49 million under Brandon, including a 62% increase in administrator compensation. The athletic department’s spending on “Marketing, promotions and ticketing,” and “Professional travel and conference dues,” have tripled to almost three million. But perhaps most surprising is the $2.6 million the department now spends on “Hosting, Food and Special Events,” an increase of almost 500%.

In other words, the additional millions the fans are now being forced to pay are not going to the students on the field, but the suits in the building – including almost a million dollars a year for the athletic director himself, three times the salary of his predecessor.

“Look into how much is spent on marketing, then look at how effective it is,” Martin told me. “You don’t have to do marketing at Michigan. We have the fans. We have the support. We have a great reputation. All you have to do is win. If you win, they will come. You just need to make it as affordable as possible for your fans.”

Dudertadt added, “It’s a different operation now. And I think it’s a house of cards. No matter how much you ‘build the brand,’ if you don’t have the product, sooner or later, it gets you.”

And that’s why the football players aren’t just fighting for their teammates and their school, or even the school’s other sports. They’re fighting to pay for the soaring salaries of people they’ll never meet.

If you care about Michigan athletics, it’s scary to think what could happen when the players inevitably fall short, and the fountain of fan money starts to dry up.

About the writer: Ann Arbor resident John U. Bacon is the author of the national bestsellers “Fourth and Long: The Future of College Football,” “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” and “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” You can follow him on Twitter (@Johnubacon), and at johnubacon.com.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

Moments before the Michigan Wolverines introduced Brady Hoke as their new head football coach in 2011, Michigan fans had lots of questions. Why not hire a national star like Les Miles or Jim Harbaugh, who both played at Michigan? Who was Brady Hoke? Was he up to the task of taking over the Wolverines, and returning the team to glory?

Hoke answered these questions by nailing his first press conference. He won over more Michigan fans in just a few minutes than his predecessor, Rich Rodriguez, had been able to capture in three years, for a variety of reasons. When a reporter asked Hoke if the Wolverines would be rebuilding in his first season, he famously replied, “This is Michigan, for godsakes” – and a star was born.

It’s hard to remember a happier honeymoon than Hoke’s. In his rookie season, the Wolverines beat Notre Dame, Nebraska and Ohio State – the latter for the first time in eight years. They won their first BCS bowl game since a young man named Tom Brady did the job in 2000, en route to an 11-2 record. From the fans in the stands to the team in the trenches, the love for Coach Hoke was universal.

But then a great senior class graduated, the schedule got tougher, and Michigan’s amazing luck finally ran out. Hoke’s second team went 8-5, but most fans gave Hoke a pass, and I believe rightly so.

But the Wolverines don’t look much better this year, and might even be worse.

The Wolverines narrowly escaped losing to the lowly Akron Zips – which might have topped Michigan’s historic upset at the hands of Appalachian State. Then they barely slipped past a bad Connecticut team – which fired their coach shortly thereafter – before finally losing to a Penn State squad so hampered by sanctions, including a drastic reduction of scholarships, it was playing with one hand tied behind its back.

Still, the Wolverines were 6-1 – until last weekend. The final score said Michigan State 29, Michigan 6, but the Spartans did a lot more damage than that. They swarmed Michigan quarterback Devin Gardner all day, sacking him seven times, and held Michigan to minus-48 yards rushing. Yes, that’s right: Michigan would have been better off not running a play at all than trying to run the ball.

The Spartans are now 8-1, and playing for a Big Ten title. The Wolverines are 6-2, and playing to keep their fans on the bandwagon. It’s not the two losses that have Wolverine fans worried. It’s that the team is not getting better. Instead of looking sharp and strong – Michigan trademarks – they look sloppy and soft, and seemingly more so every week.

To Michigan fans’ credit, only the lunatic fringe is calling for Hoke’s head. His two great recruiting classes have barely reached the field, and even hinting that the coach is in trouble could scare off the next class of recruits. Further, if Michigan fires two consecutive coaches after three years, the place starts to look like a revolving door that no credible coaching candidate would even consider.

A more concrete problem is next year’s home schedule, which might be the worst in Michigan history. Instead of being served traditional rivals like Notre Dame, Michigan State and Ohio State, Michigan fans will be treated to Miami of Ohio, new Big Ten member Maryland, and yes, Appalachian State, for reasons only the athletic director must know.

Well, the schedule might be down, but the prices are sky high! Taking in a Michigan football game for a family of four – without restaurants or hotels – can easily top a thousand bucks, the rough equivalent of two days at DisneyWorld.

Michigan’s bean counters are worried that thousands of fans, already pushed to the limit, might finally drop their tickets. That could break Michigan’s 38-year streak of 100,000-plus crowds. A few more losses on the field in the remaining four games – none of them easy – certainly wouldn’t help.

Last year, I wrote, “It won’t be fair to judge Hoke until his recruits become his players, and that takes a few years. By then, fans will either find Hoke’s coaching style charming or cheesy, depending on one just thing: the number of games he wins.”

Former coach Bo Schembechler used to say: every day, you get better, or you get worse. If the Wolverines get better, the wins will take care of themselves over time, and all will be right in Arborville. If they don’t, no one can save them, and the future will be someone else’s to face.

And that is the last thing Michigan needs right now.

About the writer: Ann Arbor resident John U. Bacon is the author of the national bestsellers “Fourth and Long: The Future of College Football,” “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” and “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” You can follow him on Twitter (@Johnubacon), and at johnubacon.com.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

For decades, students at Michigan football games were assigned seats, with the seniors getting the best ones. But last year, according to the Michigan athletic department, roughly a quarter of the 22,000 people in the student section were no-shows. So, athletic director Dave Brandon decided to switch the student section from assigned seating to general admission – first come, first seated – to get them to show up on time. Or, at all.

In fairness, growing student apathy is not unique to Michigan, nor is the move to general admission seating. And not all top programs allow every student who wants season tickets to get them, as Michigan always has.

Nonetheless, the students, who were accustomed to starting in the end zone as freshmen, then moving year by year toward mid-field, went ballistic. They gathered more than 2,000 signatures for a petition, and 1,500 “likes” for their movement on a Facebook page, just three hours after the announcement. In an admittedly unscientific poll conducted by The Michigan Daily, 85 people said they “love it” while 497 said they “hate it.”

Yes, some students can display a breathtaking sense of entitlement. And they won’t get much sympathy from the average fans, who have to pay two or three times more for their tickets, plus pay out a Personal Seat Donation – and that’s only after they get off a wait list, which costs another $500 just to get on it.

But before we bash the students too much, perhaps we should ask why they’re not showing up. Getting mad at your paying customers for not liking your product as much as you think they should, then punishing them for it, is probably not something they teach at Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

“Why didn’t the athletic department ask for any student input before implementing this?” asked Central Student Government president, and business school student, Michael Proppe. Good question.

But if the athletic director didn’t ask the students what they thought about the new policy, or why they arrive late or not at all, I have a few hunches. Because tickets are so expensive now, and games take so long, the current students didn’t go when they were kids – which is when you get hooked on watching the band flying out of the tunnel and the players touching the banner. No matter how tired or hungover we were in college, we wouldn’t think of missing those moments.

Of course, our habit formed because we knew the game was going to start at 1:05, every Saturday, for years. Now it could be noon, or 3:30, or 8 – and sometimes they don’t tell you when until a couple weeks before the game.

Why? TV, of course. Which is to say, money.

Back then, we also knew Michigan would be playing a solid opponent – every game. In Bo Schembechler’s 21 seasons, they played 59 regular-season games against non-Big Ten teams. How many were not from major conferences? Exactly one: Long Beach State, in 1987. The other 58 all played in what we now call BCS conferences – where the big boys play.

My freshman year, Michigan played all nine Big Ten opponents, and two non-conference teams. Central, Western, or Eastern Michigan? No, try 20th ranked Notre Dame on the road, and 12th ranked UCLA at home. My junior year, Michigan’s first two home games were against first-ranked Miami and 16th-ranked Washington. Think we got there on time?

Now they give us a steady diet of junk food football from lesser conferences, even lesser divisions, and expect us to pay steakhouse prices. Delaware State, anyone?

Back then, we knew we would be entertained with first-rate football and first-rate band music – and nothing else – because only two games per season were televised. No TV means no TV timeouts. In those few moments we weren’t watching football actually being played, we were listening to music actually being played, with the band treating us to cult classics like Bullwinkle and the Blues Brothers. And the entire event took less than three hours.

Now, every single game is televised, which means commercial breaks, which means games that push four hours, often in the cold. During those breaks, instead of live band music – which you can’t get anywhere else – they often give us recorded rock music, which you can get anywhere else. And now they’re replacing that with ads on the big-screen TVs.  Okay, the ads are for Michigan’s other teams, not toothpaste, but they don’t thrill any students I’ve met.

Some weekends the Wolverines don’t play at all, because after they added a 12th game, for still more money, the longer schedule requires off weeks, and also pushes the Ohio State game to Thanksgiving weekend. So long, out-of-state students!

Everything we could take for granted – the starting time, the schedule, the non-stop fun – the current students cannot.  The students aren’t leaving Michigan football. Michigan football is leaving the students.

Habits are hard to develop, but they’re easy to break. Instead of bringing back the elements that students used to get hooked on in the first place, Brandon increased student tickets by 23 percent.

“Even though they want to try,” Brandon told MLive.com, “no one can make a claim that we’re doing anything here that’s financially motivated. (Because) we’re not.”

So how, exactly, is a 23% price hike not financially motivated? Brandon says it’s to pay for Recreational Sports, but it all comes from the same pot of money that pays the director of a nonprofit department almost $1 million a year, and pays to replace Schembechler Hall, built in 1990 for $12 million, with something bigger, better and more expensive. They knocked it down this week. I’m guessing they did not tell the donors who wrote those large checks for Bo’s building that they intended to tear it down in 23 years.

Brandon says he simply wants the students to come early, and I’ll take him at his word. But some students are convinced he simply wants to run them off to make room for more full-paying fans, and his decisions – unwittingly, perhaps – have given them fodder for their conspiracy theories.

If Brandon is not answering to the past, is he focused on the future? After angering these students, does he think they’ll come back 10 or 20 years from now, at four times the price – and bring their kids, to keep the chain going?

I wouldn’t bet the Big House on it.

But Brandon is.

About the writer: Ann Arbor resident John U. Bacon is the author of “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” and “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football” – both national bestsellers. His upcoming book, “Fourth and Long: The Future of College Football,” will be published by Simon & Schuster in September 2013. You can follow him on Twitter (@Johnubacon), and at johnubacon.com.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

Editor’s note: A version of this column was originally published in the Feb. 18, 2013 issue of Michigan Today.

In the Michigan hockey program’s 90-year history, some 600 players have scored more than 10,000 total goals. But the man who scored the team’s very first goal, 90 years ago, might still be the most impressive one of the bunch.

He was the son of legendary American architect Albert Kahn, who built the most recognizable buildings in Detroit and Ann Arbor, almost all of which still stand. He pioneered the new discipline of neurosurgery, serving 22 years as chief of the department at the University of Michigan Medical Center. In his free times, he liked to fly planes, speak half a dozen languages, and hang out with folks like Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Charles Lindbergh.

But to his teammates, back in 1923, Eddie Kahn, MD ’24, was simply an exceptional college hockey player.

When he was in high school, however, you would have been wise to predict none of this. Certainly, his famous father didn’t.

More than half a century after Eddie Kahn’s father passed away, Albert Kahn remains on the short list of great American architects. He designed over two thousand buildings, including almost every architecturally significant structure in downtown Detroit: the Fisher Building, the Belle Isle Casino, the Detroit Golf Club, the Detroit Athletic Club and the Grosse Pointe Country Club, Detroit Police headquarters and the homes of The Detroit News and The Detroit Free Press. 

In Ann Arbor, Kahn designed such iconic buildings as Burton Tower, Angell Hall, West Engineering, the Natural Science Building, the graduate library, the hospital (Old Main), not to mention the Ann Arbor News building, the Delta Gamma sorority and the Psi Upsilon fraternity. Plus his personal favorites, the Clements Library and Hill Auditorium.  So farsighted was his vision that nearly every one of those buildings is still fulfilling its original purpose.

His son, however, was an entirely different matter.

Eddie Kahn admired his father immensely, but his first day interning at his father’s firm was such a disaster, “I put on my hat, left the office, and never returned again,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Journal of a Neurosurgeon.”

After Kahn graduated from high school with “a most undistinguished record, scholastically and otherwise,” he writes, “it was decided that a post-graduate year in a preparatory school before I went to college couldn’t make things worse.”

After eight weeks at Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts, Kahn was failing fifteen of his 22 credits, when he learned discipline through study, and confidence through sports. In a baseball game against arch-rival Exeter, “I was as tense as could be. An easy fly came to me, and I was shaking as I caught it. It was the same with the next one. But from then on, I had complete confidence and everything seemed easy. That afternoon, I pulled in seven flies, including some rather difficult chances.

“I cannot overstress how much confidence simplifies the task of the conscientious, competent surgeon. On the other hand, overconfidence is very dangerous for any surgeon.” Brain surgery may be woefully complex, but some of the qualities needed to do it well are best learned on a field of grass or a sheet of ice.

Kahn took these lessons with him when he enrolled at Michigan in 1918, living in a beautiful brick home his father designed across Washtenaw Avenue from “The Rock.” Kahn got through both his undergraduate and medical training in six years, working in the very hospital his father had also designed.

Eddie spent his limited free time playing on the informal hockey team, then on the varsity team after Coach Joseph Barss – who was also a medical student – launched the program. The team’s second season, 1924, was undoubtedly the first and only year in college hockey history when a team’s captain and coach were medical school classmates.

“My dad talked about Eddie Kahn quite a bit,” Barss’s son told me. “I know they were good friends who respected each other a great deal.”

On the eve of the program’s opening night in Jan. 12, 1923, The Michigan Daily wrote, “Kahn is probably the fastest man on the team and is a hard fighter.” The student writers later gushed that Kahn, “played a furiously aggressive game from start to finish. He was knocked out twice but stayed in the lineup and performed sensationally.”

And so he did. Kahn scored or assisted on at least half of his team’s goals that season, often by skating the entire length of the ice with the puck. In 1924, Kahn’s last year in medical school, the diminutive forward became the team’s second captain, then went on to become an internationally acclaimed neurosurgeon.

Despite Kahn’s demanding career and intense work ethic, he was able to mix in some adventure, too. After graduating, he spent some time practicing in Vienna and Russia, where he met with Ivan Pavlov, the scientist who won the 1904 Nobel Prize for his famous discovery that ringing a bell before each meal eventually caused dogs to salivate at the sound of the bell alone, a phenomenon now known as the “Pavlovian response.”

After he returned to the States and started working at UM’s hospital, he volunteered for the Army medical corps from 1940 to 1945, for one dollar a year. He entered France via Normandy’s Utah Beach just a few weeks after D-Day, mended soldiers at the Battle of the Bulge, and was among the first to arrive in Paris when the Allies liberated the City of Light.

“Kahn knew Europe well,” says Rudy Reichert, who played for Michigan in the early 1940s and went on to become chief of staff at St. Joseph’s Hospital in town. “He knew Gertrude Stein and Hemingway personally. When the Americans entered Paris, it was Eddie who brought the U.S. generals into the city, because he knew his way around and knew about a million languages, so he could show them where to go.”

Shortly after he returned to Ann Arbor, Kahn ran into Harry Bennett, Henry Ford’s infamous union buster, at a cocktail party. Bennett asked Kahn if he wanted to go flying the next day. With Charles Lindbergh.

Lindbergh, who tested planes at nearby Willow Run during the war, maneuvered the aircraft with an ease that Kahn, who was a licensed pilot himself, could only admire. “I have never seen a man so relaxed or so much part of an airplane,” Kahn writes.

When Bennett dared Lindbergh to buzz the Huron River, however, the plane didn’t have nearly enough power to clear the riverbank in front of them. “I could only think that at least I as going to go down in good company,” Kahn writes. As they flew closer to the side of the bluff, Lindbergh suddenly veered the plane to the right, gracefully avoiding disaster – with a grin.

Kahn replaced his mentor at the University Hospital, Dr. Max Peet, as the head of the Neurosurgery Section in 1949, a position he held for 22 years until he retired in 1971. Along the way Kahn completed two editions of “Correlative Neurosurgery,” an essential textbook for generations of doctors.  It does not, however, make for light reading. Some of Kahn’s chapters include, “Papillomas of the Choroid Plexus of the Fourth Ventricle,”  “Section of the Ninth Nerve for Glossophyaryngeal Neuralgia,” and the always popular, “Lipomas of the Conus Mdullaris and Cauda Equina.”

You get the idea. This really is brain surgery.

“Great empathy for his patients, honesty, humility and a fine sense of humor were his hallmarks, in addition to his skillful hands,” said his former colleague, Dr. Richard C. Schneider. “No physician was more deeply admired and loved by his patients.”

Eddie Kahn was an original. He hated mundane tasks like lab work; he resisted playing all the holes of Barton Hills Country Club in numerical order; and because he was already independently wealthy from his father’s fortune, he insisted on working for a salary of one dollar a year. “But he never had any money on him!” Reichert recalls. “You’d go down to the cafeteria, where it was 35-cents for a meal, and he’d say, ‘Geez, do you have 35 cents for me?’ The guy was just oblivious to money.

“People would surround him at the cafeteria just to hear his stories of all these famous people, and he knew ‘em all. But he was also an extremely modest guy, didn’t like drawing attention to himself. He wouldn’t even go down to pick up his plaque when he was voted into the Deker Hall of Fame. I picked it up for him.”

But Kahn stayed close to Michigan hockey. Although he was heard to remark that the game just wasn’t the same “since all the boys started playing inside,” he attended at least one game every season, with the exception of the war years.

During his 22 years as chief of neurosurgery, Kahn trained 44 residents, 16 of whom became the heads or assistant heads of their own university neurosurgery departments. If Albert Kahn is still on the short list of great American architects, his son is still on the short list of great American surgeons. Although surgical advances aren’t as obvious a legacy as architectural landmarks, Kahn invented enough surgical tools and innovations to be named president of the Society of Neurological Surgery, the field’s first and foremost organization.

“He wanted to be known as Eddie Kahn,” longtime protégé Dr. Dave Dickenson said, “and not as Albert’s son.”

It’s fair to say, when he died in 1985 at the age of 85, that Dr. Kahn’s lifelong quest to make a name for himself was a success.

Thinking back on his old friend and mentor, Rudy Reichert says, “He was just a remarkable guy.”

About the writer: Ann Arbor resident John U. Bacon is the author of “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” and “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football” – both national bestsellers. His upcoming book, “Fourth and Long: The Future of College Football,” will be published by Simon & Schuster in September 2013. You can follow him on Twitter (@Johnubacon), and at johnubacon.com.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

This week, the University of Michigan announced an increase in the cost of “seat licenses” for football season ticket holders.

Before I dive into what all this means, let me explain what a “seat license” is, because, if you’re a normal person, it won’t make much sense.

A “seat license” is a fee that teams make their fans pay just to reserve the right to buy the actual tickets. They call it a donation – which is a stretch, since every fan apparently decided to donate exactly the same amount, or lose our tickets. But that allows us to claim it as a gift to a state university, and a tax deduction.

It’s hard to call that honest. Thanks to the latest hike, it’s hard to call it cheap, either.

In fairness, Michigan was the last of the top 20 programs, ranked by attendance, to adopt a seat license program, in 2005 – even though Michigan always finishes first in attendance. And the seat licenses started gradually: $250 for the best seats the first year, then $500 the second. They were nice enough to spare the folks in the endzone.

But this week Michigan pushed the seat license for the top ticket up to $600 each, and even the folks in the endzone will have to pay $150 per ticket, just for the right to buy them. In the past decade, the total cost of my two tickets on the ten-yard line has more than tripled, to over $1,700. But my seats are no better, and the schedule keeps getting worse.

It makes you wonder how we got here.

I can remember on football Saturdays our parents giving us five bucks each, and that would cover a two-dollar student ticket, a hot dog, a coke, and a little plastic football to toss around outside the stadium at halftime. That finski made the Michigan football players the cheapest babysitters in town. We got hooked watching the band flying out of the tunnel, the players leaping up to touch the banner, and the little dogs, Whiskey and Brandy, nosing a soccer ball up and down the field at halftime. We fell in love with it all – and I couldn’t wait for football season to come around again.

When we became Michigan students, it never occurred to us that we wouldn’t go to every game we could. What else would you want to do?

Former Michigan Athletic Director Don Canham sold the experience – and we bought it. Canham was a great marketer, but what impressed me most was what he would not do for money: solicit donors, put advertising on the uniforms or in the stadium, charge for tours – or ask for a raise. He had already made millions in business, and didn’t feel the need to squeeze more from his alma mater.

The current athletic department now aggressively seeks donors and corporate sponsors. It has brought advertising back to Crisler, in a big way, and has started sneaking advertising into the once-pristine Big House, too. They now charge to host corporate events, wedding receptions, and even school tours, which had been free since the Big House opened in 1927. Heck, until a few years ago, they didn’t even lock the gates during the week.

Michigan’s not alone, of course, and they will tell you it’s the cost of doing business – but what business, exactly? When current Athletic Director Dave Brandon said on “60 Minutes” that the “business model is broken” – what he failed to grasp was that it’s “broken” because it was never intended to be a business in the first place. After all, what business doesn’t have to pay shareholders, partners, owners, taxes, or the star attractions, the players and the band?

From its inception over a century ago, the athletic department’s goal was simply to be self-sustaining. They exercised a balance between meeting the financial needs of the athletic program, and restraining themselves from becoming a simply-for-profit professional team. But the goal now is more, more, more, with no limits in sight – but for what?

Skyrocketing salaries, for starters. In 1969, Bo Schembechler came to Michigan for $21,000. Today Brady Hoke receives $3.25 million a year – 155 times more than Bo received his first season – and Hoke is still a half-million dollars behind Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz.

When Bill Martin reluctantly accepted the job of athletic director in 2000, he insisted he be paid a dollar his first year, and his second, before agreeing in his third year to the middling rate of about $300,000. Like Canham, Martin had become a multi-millionaire businessman, and didn’t want to be a burden to his alma mater. He later turned down the president’s offer to double his salary, and declined all bonuses, while removing all advertising from Crisler Arena.

His successor, Dave Brandon, served as the CEO for two Fortune 500 companies, and is worth well over $100 million. His salary at Michigan is fast approaching a million dollars, including bonuses. For the first time in Michigan’s long history, the athletic director makes more than the president.

The people behind our current “business model” count on our boundless passion for Michigan football to keep us coming back – and they know how to exploit it. But my passion is for the players and the band and the tailgaters who will give just about any passerby a hot dog and a beer, simply for the asking. My love is not for the money-changers trying to turn a buck on every facet of our fun.

I might not be alone. For the first time since Bo got here in 1969, when attendance started growing every year, you’re starting to see the trend go the other way. Some games this year you could see thousands of empty seats, most of them in the student section, and I have a theory as to why.

Walk around Michigan Stadium, and you won’t see many kids. How many parents want to shell out a few hundred bucks for what is now the most expensive babysitter in town? Better to leave the kids at home, bring your business associates, and call it a tax deduction.

When these kids become college students, they are not addicted to Michigan football the way we were. Many of them could take it or leave it – and they proved it this fall.

But none of this solves my problem, the same one thousands of longtime fans are facing: Will I shell out $700 for my two seat licenses? Yeah, I probably will. And they know it.

But for the first time since I plunked down two bucks for a student ticket 40 years ago, I feel less like a loyal fan, and more like a fool. And that doesn’t feel good.

This might be the dawn of a new era – or the dusk of an old one.

About the writer: John U. Bacon is the author of “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” and “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football” – both national bestsellers. His upcoming book, “Fourth and Long: The Future of College Football,” will be published by Simon & Schuster in September 2013. You can follow him on Twitter (@Johnubacon), and at johnubacon.com.

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The building was constructed in 1990 for UM’s football program. It contains locker rooms, meeting rooms, medical treatment rooms, training areas, weight rooms, and administrative offices. The project will add about 7,000 square feet to the building, renovate an additional 7,000 square feet, and integrate the Margaret Dow Towsley Sports Museum area. The main entrance will be moved to the north of the building, off of a parking lot, and will include a statue of Bo Schembechler, UM’s legendary football coach. Funding will be provided from athletic department resources.

According to a staff memo, the project will be paid for by UM’s athletic department, with the work completed by the winter of 2014. About 25 construction jobs are expected to be supported by this project.

This report was filed from the Michigan Union’s Anderson room on UM’s central campus, where the regents held their December meeting.