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Sunday, August 19, 2007
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Thanks to Nathan Tublitz and to the Editor of... ... William C. Dowling's recent book, Confessions of a Spoilsport, UD now has a couple of hot new sources on the subject of professor/bigtime campus sports incompatibility to consider. Dowling's editor wrote to UD a few months ago and told her that her blog's healthy readership helped convince his press that Dowling's book would have an audience; he then sent UD a copy of the book when it came out. Professor Tublitz is one of the strongest bigtime sports dissenters at the University of Oregon; he just forwarded UD an intriguing essay by one of his colleagues. Loyal readers will recall that UD herself, in a column at Inside Higher Education last year, considered why professors and university sports machines don't mesh. Some of what she said there is echoed in Dowling's book and in the piece by Jim Earl that Tublitz sent; but while clownish UD played a lot of this material for laughs, these other guys are real serious... By the way, all three of us -- Soltan, Earl, and Dowling -- are English professors... Don't know what to make of that... Anyway, let's take a look at what these guys say. Dowling has this Nietzschean take on the campus culture of bigtime sports boosterism, on the emergence of student Yahoos (he's a Swift scholar) whose distinctive characteristic -- in direct opposition to the founding ethos of the university -- is "a simple refusal of the gift of rational consciousness." He says, citing Nietzsche's term, that they suffer from ressentiment: [They have] an inferiority complex that is compelled to seek revenge in symbolic terms. [They are] denied any real outlet in action becuse of the perceived power or social superiority of their opponent. That's why they're driven to compensate for their weakness with an imaginary revenge. In the case of booster ressentiment, that revenge is an attempt to exert symbolic ownership of the university through Div 1A sports. This is one major reason why boosters are so eager to commercialize universities through professionalized athletics. The more the campus is plastered with logos saying "Always Rutgers, Always Coke!" the less it will seem like an alien citadel of ideas and higher culture. The more often a university faculty member can be persuaded to lead fans in chanting advertising slogans, the less one has to feel intellectually inferior to professors as a remote and cerebral caste. The sooner the university resembles a shopping mall - with "customers" instead of students and "consumer preferences" instead of course requirements and a coherent curriculum - the more rapidly the boosters' ever-present fear that someone, somewhere, is trying to live life on a higher level than that of Monday Night Football and satellite pornography can be assuaged. Again, Dowling writes a few pages later: At Div 1A universities, the oppression is felt to be the university itself, with its ancient associations with a "higher" culture of knowledge and ideas, and, on the individual level, its demands for reading and analytic thinking. Dowling's book is a tight and intelligent narration of heroic efforts on the part of Rutgers students and faculty to fight off the brain damage of bigtime sports, but his theory of underlying Yahoo-motivation isn't very convincing. It assumes an awareness of professors as such; it assumes a vague grasp of the nature of universities. Neither of these things seems to UD likely to be present in many of these students, so resentment -- or any other emotion in regard to them -- cannot develop. His theory flatters professors, founded as it is on an assurance that we're envied for our higher-level existence; but no American walks into UD's book-lined house and says "I resent the fact that my walls only have flat-screen tv's on them while your walls have books. You must be living a more valuable life than I. Fuck you. I will now torch your shelves." No, UD's visitors look around for the tvs, and, not finding them, smile at her with frightened eyes and get the hell out of there. They're spooked, man! You should see them scoot! "G-gotta go feed the meter..." "There aren't any meters in Garrett Park." "G-gotta go...uh..." Jim Earl has a more down to earth take on the matter in his essay in the Eugene Weekly. Here's some of what he says: Most intellectuals have relatively highbrow tastes. They wouldn't make a great booster club. They don't especially like crowds, they don't like uniforms, they don't like to paint their faces or do the wave. Most professors don't look very good on a dance floor. As a group, we're pretty repressed. [Sounds about right, and UD says something very similar in IHE. Keep in mind, though, that he's conflating professors and intellectuals. Only a few professors are intellectuals.] Earl recalls getting annoyed while talking to a coach at his school: ... I'd just heard Bill Moos say one too many times how football teaches the kids about life. God, I'm tired of that argument: Football belongs in higher ed because it teaches students about life? That's so empty a thought that it's hard to refute politely. To be polite I usually respond (it's pitiful, I know) with statistics from Bowen and Shulman's Game of Life that show that the kids actually learn no such thing from football. We happen to know (from a book, naturally) that most players don't have particularly great track records in the business and professional worlds after college, for all their storied leadership skills, team playing, discipline and motivation — though they do a lot of coaching of kids' sports on the side, which is nice. I'm not criticizing the players; I just don't want to hear the AD tell me how much they're learning in the locker room or on the field. Not everything is educational. Some things are just for fun, for entertainment, and football might just be one of them. Too true. Earl now proceeds to show greater discernment than Dowling: ...I saw in an instant that in the world most men inhabit, my beliefs in the natural superiority of understanding over force and of cooperation and compromise over competition are naïve and idiotic. I might as well have said that the unexamined life isn't worth living or that money and celebrity aren't the highest goals of a wise man. What freakin' universe do I inhabit, anyway? |