'It's not easy being a billionaire, apparently. You think ahead. Work hard. Build a business. Grow the business. Create jobs. Make billions. Give a lot of the money away. All good, right?

No, sir.

You've got to give it to the right people. It doesn't matter that it's your money. It doesn't matter that your vision built that fortune. If you give the money away as you see fit, well, then, gentlemen such as Nathan Tublitz come along to tell you how indecorous you really are. [I'm steamed! Signed, Disgusted! I mean, the guy's not even working up to the rage and the insults. It doesn't occur to Mike that most people think it actually matters a great deal what you do with large sums of money. It matters how you make it (working conditions for Nike employees around the world aren't merely a matter of what Phil Knight feels like making them) and it matters how you spend it.... Of course we can't dictate to Knight's twin, T. Boone Pickens, that he not give 165 million dollars to Oklahoma State University for the exclusive use of the sports teams there; but we can certainly do what Nathan Tublitz is doing in regard to Knight, which is criticize such choices harshly. We can point out that, like Pickens, Knight will increase the corruption of the program because the size of his gift will mean he can basically run it as he likes. We can point out that Oklahoma State University is a third-tier school kept there by the anti-intellectualism of powerful people like T. Boone Pickens, etc. All of this and more Mike should think about before he begins shouting.]

You know who Phil Knight is, most likely. He's the guy who built the Nike empire after attending the University of Oregon and running track for the Ducks. His love for the university and appreciation for what his sporting background helped do for him led Knight recently to donate $100 million to the athletic department, which reportedly will help to fund a replacement basketball arena for the esteemed -- but crumbling -- McArthur Court.

You probably don't know who Nathan Tublitz is. I can't say for sure, but this seems to trouble him. [Here Mike offers his psychoanalysis of Tublitz. Tublitz, fundamentally, is jealous. He wants to be rich and famous like Phil Knight. His opposition to bigtime campus sports stems from these psychological problems.] Tublitz is an Oregon biology professor who is co-chairman of the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics, a self-appointed group of professors that presumes to tell universities who they should be admitting and athletic departments how they should be operating. [Yes, Mike's annoyed that professors complain about special admits who will never ever ever graduate. Mike doesn't care that these guys don't graduate, because he doesn't care about universities. He cares about sports. And he really dislikes people who care about universities.]

And now, Tublitz is telling Knight how to spend his money.

"The priorities of the university are totally out of whack when so much money can go to an ancillary activity of the university when the rest of the university goes begging," Tublitz told The Oregonian about Knight's gift.

Tublitz is registering his ire with Oregon, but the university really only had two choices when Knight called to offer the chance to bathe in his largesse: yes or no. [Mike, Mike. Your monomania has kept you from learning about university philanthropy. It's quite common for universities to advise alumni on how they might best direct their gift. In fact, it's not unknown for universities to turn down all or part of gifts which alumni donors insist must go in directions the university for whatever reason doesn't think they should go. This is called integrity, Mike. All universities have it, or should have it.] Any other response would have been more than a little presumptuous. One does not keep one's relationships intact by opening the Christmas present and saying, "Great, but I'd much rather have a Rolex." [What sort of relationships do you keep intact by passively acceding to everything your friend demands?]

In fact, Knight has given many more millions to his alma mater, money that helped build a law school building, renovate the library and endow academic chairs. As if to prove he's as much a fan of higher education as hoops, he also dropped $105 million on Stanford's business school, where he long ago earned an MBA. [Mike's first good points. He's buried them in this paragraph, though, and he's about to leave them.]

Tublitz and the group he fronts, however, have an obvious animus toward collegiate athletics. When they issued a report in June that essentially called for universities to make their athletic teams more in line with their student bodies, I wrote an e-mail to him and posed the question of why, indeed, athletes aren't treated more like other students in similar disciplines. I asked why students who major in theater, dance and music are presented academic credit and degrees in those subjects, whereas athletes do similar work in their sports are said to be performing strictly extracurricular activities.

His response was so revealing:

"You seem to have a bit of a misunderstanding of the fundamental bases of academics. Art, music, theater, and dance are serious academic disciplines; they are not a game. If you believe that their subjects are only 'entertainment,' you might consider taking an art history, music theory, theater staging or physics of dance course at an accredited university. These courses are academically rigorous and packed full with serious academic content, something not present in any athletic endeavor." [UD would have been a mite less condescending. On the other hand, Mike's confusion is pretty amazing.]

This is the kind of attitude sports frequently confront within a campus setting. It does not matter that the coaches who work for colleges study their sport and innovate within their sport with as much rigor as any ballet teacher or voice instructor. [LOL] It does not matter that the public and the university community, on the whole, place an obvious value in what the coaches and athletes are creating for them. [Everybody loves us!] You've still got professors such as Tublitz demeaning their work -- dismissively calling basketball or football "a game," as if it's no more sophisticated than Parchesi. [What are we supposed to call it? A Socratic dialogue?]

When a person with this approach makes a public statement about athletics, he or she should be taken no more seriously than the person who looks at a Picasso and claims the guy just didn't know how to draw.'

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