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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Saturday, September 25, 2004

Rah. Rah.



If you go to Google News and key in COLLEGE or UNIVERSITY, ninety percent of what you get is sports-related: game won, game lost, coach paid, coach overpaid, post-game riot, post-game rape.

UD sometimes feels irresponsible, paying as little attention to campus sports as she does, since the subject dominates American news coverage of the university. Every now and then she tries to work herself up to giving a shit.

Yet not only would UD's interest in sports have to grow to become cursory (as Oscar Wilde put it in another context). She is also hampered by the fact that most of the significant college sports stories make you want to puke. They are full of sweaty field flunkies idling away their pre-professional years with illicit trips, under-the-table gifts, and staff-provided prostitutes. The feel is very 'fifties, a Rat Pack Vegas sort of thing, and UD routinely fails to stay awake for it.

Yes, most of it represents a stupendous travesty of higher education in America and a staggering waste of money. But UD can't for the life of her see any way in which it'll ever change... except that it'll certainly grow worse.... can you sense the futility UD feels here? ... Ah, Sunflower! weary of time... I fall upon the thorns of life... I bleed... Allow UD, as her voice fades, to have a very eloquent professor, who teaches at a Big Sports school, do the talking for her...




One of the witty things that sports fans say to me is, Don't you wish you could pack 60,000 people into the stands for a lecture on Beowulf? This tiresome question is supposed to remind me that more people care about what happens at the stadium than in my classroom, that classrooms are in fact boring, that literature isn't nearly as exciting or as popular as football. So, who am I to be criticizing athletics? Obviously, I'm just envious.

My answer is no, I'm not motivated by envy. The parents of America aren't shelling out $10,000, $20,000, or $30,000 a year to send their kids to watch football games, I remind them, but to get an education. There are tens of millions of parents out there refinancing the house and going into lifelong debt because they consider the classroom experience that I provide just that valuable. I have no doubts about the value of what I do.

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Only a few weeks later, I read another story in the morning paper, which reported that our university's annual "civil war" game against Oregon State had been rescheduled for the Saturday before finals week at the request of network television. I wasn't the only faculty member to learn about this development from the newspaper; not even the provost had been consulted. His precious "dead week," with its elaborate rules forbidding distractions, was now the biggest party weekend of the year.

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The fans, of course, can't be expected to consider the situation from the owners' point of view — the owners in this case being institutions of higher learning, mostly public ones, and almost all in deep financial trouble. Most fans would be surprised to learn that these tremendously popular spectacles make no money for their owners, and in fact cost most universities precious millions they can't afford. How could fans know about the danger posed by athletics budgets that rise at twice the rate of academic budgets? If they did understand, perhaps they'd worry that what they were watching was really the college sports bubble, not unlike the dot.com bubble or the Enron bubble. Rapid growth often spells disaster. The fans probably wouldn't worry anyway. It's not in the nature of fanhood. So it's up to the owners — us — to slow things down before the bubble bursts.

But the fans are not going to understand why, and they're going to scream bloody murder if they think professors are interfering in their fun.
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But then there's another part of me that sometimes takes over, which is simply outraged about the situation of American higher education in relationship to athletics. I'm lucky: the University of Oregon has a relatively clean, self-supporting, well-managed, and pretty successful, sometimes even inspiring, athletics program, and an enlightened administration. But still, the faculty leadership at the university is at this moment absolutely and totally furious about athletics. Nike wants to build us a new $200 million basketball arena. I suppose we should be grateful, but the fact is that we don't need or want it, and all the procedures of shared governance are being bypassed to make it happen.

Oregon is becoming a test case, an extreme example, a cartoon of what's going wrong in higher education today, with this spectacle of arms race mentality and commercialization.