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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)

Monday, September 11, 2006

Slight JuCo Bent

Yeah, so I'm sliding around site to site this morning, doing my usual thing, looking for stupid and embarrassing stories about universities -- stuff that isn't from Godzillatron U., though, which narrows things considerably... and I slip onto this little essay that could've been written by UD if she weren't quite so good a writer.

I mean, it's got a lot of her coordinates -- Division I sports universities boo; St. John's College yay... It's even written by someone who grew up a few miles away from UD... who attended high school in Silver Spring ('thesda's slightly less successful sister city) and graduated from the University of Maryland, where -- who knows? -- he could've learned all he knows about Law And Society from Mr. UD...

And it's not badly written... it's certainly written well enough for the lighthearted is-he-joshing sports columnist thing the guy does... I just wasn't sure it was good enough to be swept off its feet and pasted into University Diaries and all. But I note, as the day wears on, that the piece has been picked up by a number of papers, so maybe I'm being too fussy. Here it is.





In the vast wasteland of Sports Nation, Couch Slouch has been looking for a signpost of sanity. I no longer can root for the teams of my youth. My father went to UCLA, but that's just a football-and-basketball factory with a parking problem; I went to the University of Maryland, but that's just a football-and-basketball factory with a parking and drinking problem.

Both schools, like dozens of others that worship at the temple of Division I dollars, profess to higher learning and the integrity of their "student-athletes," but I wasn't born yesterday on a turnip truck, so whatever academic bunk they're selling, I ain't buying.

Well, thankfully I have found my salvation.

St. John's College in Annapolis has no intercollegiate athletics.

I don't know what the school's nickname is, but the check is in the mail!

Anyway, I'll get back to St. John's in a moment -- heck, I'd enroll there tomorrow, but my SAT scores have a JuCo bent to them -- first, let me get back to the big boys.

College football and college basketball have absolutely nothing to do with college. The "student-athletes" are simply cheap labor for multimillion dollar companies. And with that much at stake, a win-at-all-costs mentality is the rule rather than the exception.

I mean, if Larry Coker -- 54-10 in his time at Miami with a national title -- has one more 9-3 season, he'll be on a raft floating toward Cuba by New Year's Eve.

Sports radio, reflecting our sinking culture, spends entire days advising managers and coaches, berating managers and coaches, firing managers and coaches and searching the countryside for better middle relievers. If they just redirected their energy toward, say, crosswalk-signal maintenance, America would be 2 percent more livable.

(Can you imagine if sports radio debated Ohio State's physics department vs. Michigan's physics department the way it debates Ohio State-Michigan football? "I'm telling you, nobody does quantum theory like Prof. Gilroy in Ann Arbor. And, man, they have a lecturer there, Stewart Stenstrom -- this guy isn't even TENURED -- who brings it high and hard on optical spectroscopy like nobody's business, dude." )

For parts of two centuries now, Couch Slouch has argued that big-time intercollegiate athletics should be dismantled. Nobody's listening.

After I graduated from Maryland in 1981, I annually would receive a fund-raising letter. Each time I wrote back: I will not give you a penny until you eliminate intercollegiate athletics. Alas, I stopped receiving missives seeking money and, eventually, my name was removed from consideration for the school's "Distinguished Alumni" list and I was discreetly asked to make good on all my outstanding parking tickets from my undergraduate years there.

Meanwhile, St. John's operates the Great Books program -- a.k.a. "Paris Hilton Never Slept Here" -- in which students read great contributions to Western civilization: Aristotle, Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Moliere, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, W.E.B. DuBois, Joseph Conrad et al, plus the Bible and the Constitution.

(Note I: In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess that, sadly, the most recent book I've read is "Harrington on Hold'em, Volume III.")

(Note II: If you take the St. John's curriculum and combine it with a really, really good premium-cable package, I think we're talking Utopia here.)

No lectures, no exams, no homecoming rallies. They read a lot, then they discuss a lot.

But it's not all words and no play; the university keeps mind and body active through the retro-radical notion of intramural sports . You remember intramurals -- you play to win, but you have fun. Intramural sports is an extracurricular activity that doesn't trample all over a school's original purpose and standards.

Thank you, St. John's.

The school does dally in an occasional athletic meeting with another institution. Every year since 1983, my Johnnies play the neighboring U.S. Naval Academy in croquet. St. John's has dominated the series, but the Mids have won four of the last six meetings. And, frankly, if St. John's can't beat Navy next spring, I think a coaching change might be in order.