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Dangerous Liaisons

“I think every campus has faculty members who are cheap dates when it comes to academic matters related to athletes.”

He said it; I didn’t.

Note that the author of this piece goes from calling professors who’ll do anything for campus athletes “friendly faculty” to “cheap dates.”

UD proposes that we take the matter one step further, from the euphemistic friendly faculty to the almost-there cheap date to the fully honest sports whore. (Functional equivalent of the much better known pharma whore.)

Plenty of sports factories have a well-established corps of comfort women among their undergraduates, students whose job it is to … entertain hotly sought-after football and basketball prospects. Not only should it not be difficult for us to acknowledge that there are faculty members similarly willing to do almost anything for the team; UD thinks that schools like Auburn and Chapel Hill should sponsor self-studies (these could be carried out by sociology professors, for instance, or psychology professors) aimed at illuminating the background and character type of faculty liable to corrupt the school by the irresistible force of their attraction to athletes. Once we know more about this segment of the faculty, we can institute some reforms. Like barring them from being faculty liaisons to the sports program. And keeping an eye on that curious course (Sociology of Communications Studies of General Studies of Sports Marketing) they keep offering.

Margaret Soltan, June 1, 2014 1:40AM
Posted in: sport

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8 Responses to “Dangerous Liaisons”

  1. UO Matters Says:

    Keep in mind the author is the former head of the NCAA infractions committee, now a lawyer for a firm specializing in helping athletic departments deal with infractions. He has every incentive to blame what’s happening on the faculty, rather on the NCAA cartel, and that is what he is doing.

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    UO Matters: The problem (and one that the author of the piece should have tried to clarify) is that “the NCAA cartel” and big-time sports university faculty/administration are pretty much the same thing. That is, the NCAA is basically run by coaches, administrators, and indeed faculty from the sports factories. So I’m not sure I agree that the distinction between the cartel and the faculty that you draw is compelling.

  3. Polish Peter Says:

    “…how many points were in a three-point shot?” Trick question! I would answer “zero”, since there are no points for just the shot. Of course, if the ball goes in the basket, then there are three.

  4. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Polish Peter: Funny!

  5. Dr_Doctorstein Says:

    How many points in a three-point shot?

    A trick question indeed! One that definitely needs to be, as we say, problematized.

    What IS a three-point shot, anyway? A shot made from behind the arc that results in the ball going into the basket? OK, sure, but not so fast. What about all those shots made from behind the arc during the pre-game shoot-around? Do those count for three points each? Of course not. Shots made from behind the arc only count as three points under certain conditions, the conditions that demarcate the game itself from everything that is not the game. (Of course, just as we can ask “What is a three-point shot?” we may also ask, “What did we just mean by ‘the game itself'”?)

    The shot is not “really” a three-point shot unless it occurs under something we might call, I dunno, a set of felicity conditions. At this point maybe we should be calling in the aid of John Austin and thinking about the three-point shot in a basketball game as performative in a way analogous to the utterance “I do” in a marriage ceremony. A whole new way to think about athletics as “performance”….

    We can also ask, What is a “point”? Is it natural or wholly conventional? That is, does it exist independently of all the social structures that make basketball possible–everything from basketball leagues to the local city council ordinances that pay for the basketball courts at the park to the informal conventions that govern pickup games?

    If a player makes a three-point shot during a game, but the scorekeeper never officially records it, what then? Suppose the scorekeeper, contra the referee, personally feels that the player had a toe on the line, making the shot, in her view, a two-point shot. She still has to record three points; if she doesn’t, she will presumably be fired by someone with the authority to fire her. Does that mean that the notion of a “point” is somehow bound up with a set of power relations?

    If this seems outlandish, think of what occasionally happens at the local park when the legitimacy of a three-point shot is disputed in a pickup game, and the adjudication of that dispute escalates from argumentation to fisticuffs. What is the difference between the adjudication of such disputes on the playground and in the NCAA?

    Can we better understand what a “point” is by dragging in Hobbes?

    What is the point of asking “What is a point”? I like to ask these sorts of questions in my classes partly to help clarify certain ideas in philosophy and lit theory in a way that might engage the athletes and sports junkies sitting in the back row, and partly to establish a kind of professorial authority, as a way of saying to the back row, “Hey, guys–even when it comes to sports you don’t really know anything, so listen up.” And partly, I confess, just to f*ck with their minds.

    For their own good, of course.

  6. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Dr_Doctorstein: A +++

  7. John Says:

    that some tenured professors at leading research universities are, in fact, “sports whores” is a profoundly disturbing phenomenon. can anyone explain it, please?

  8. Margaret Soltan Says:

    John: I think the simplest explanation is that sports factory universities decades ago figured out that the key is actually creating departments, fields of study, seemingly legitimate branches of knowledge within the university, that are actually about little more than advancing the school’s football and basketball programs. These are where the bogus classes take place, where sports whore professors are located, etc. If you look at just two recent scandals that preceded Chapel Hill – Auburn and SUNY Binghamton – you find that the sports whore was a department chair (same thing at Chapel Hill). So we’re talking about whore departments, whore department heads, whore administrators. And of course university presidents like Gordon Gee are … well, you fill in the blank.

    As to the larger question – why would a professor do this? I don’t think these people are really what you’d call professors. From the start, they never were. They were fans with advanced degrees in their favorite subject: jocks and how to serve them.

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