“I would not let my son play pro football,” [President Obama remarked]… “At this point, there’s a little bit of caveat emptor,” he went on. “[The players], they know what they’re doing. They know what they’re buying into. It is no longer a secret. It’s sort of the feeling I have about smokers, you know?”
True, the question was not about college football. But UD wonders: Since on many campuses college football is indistinguishable from pro, wouldn’t a person object to that as well? You’re getting just as much brain tissue kicked out at the University of Georgia.
[Penn State University trustee Joel] Myers said the [Joe] Paterno statue idea came to him last week. He envisions Paterno and [Fred] Pattee — whose eras are decades apart — either shaking hands or standing arm in arm.
… Scott Paterno, a son of the legendary coach, said any Paterno-Pattee statue must include his mom, Sue…
… they’ll be able to calculate that their share of that money is zero percent.”
Colbert on the University of North Carolina.
… is that Glenn Reynolds assumes no one’s noticing.
… When hundreds of fake courses can be taught, to often functionally illiterate students, without anyone noticing, it suggests that there’s not much going on in the way of quality control. UNC isn’t even offering makeup classes for this fake coursework, meaning that the bogus credits will remain on students’ transcripts…
It’s possible that this problem is limited to the University of North Carolina, and that some particularly toxic strain of corruption has somehow infested its lovely Chapel Hill campus. But it’s more likely that UNC isn’t as unusual as all that. Near-illiterate athletes are certainly not limited to UNC…
[I]t’s also quite possible that many classes, taught at many schools, are only a cut or two above the no-show classes that Julius Nyang’oro allegedly offered. Because if you can get away with offering hundreds of bogus classes at a top American university for years before anyone notices, the quality control [in general] isn’t very high.
Everyone notices. Everyone knows: the athletes, of course; the athletics department, the professors, the academic departments, the student body. The local rah-rah media. Unless the shit for some reason hits the fan really really hard (as happened at UNC), no one cares, no one’s going to talk about it, and no one’s going to do anything. And certainly nothing will come of this latest national university scandal, the whole UNC thing. It’ll blow over.
“We’re going to make sure they understand that Jesus Christ should be in the center of our huddle, that that’s something that is important,” [said a University of Connecticut football coach]. “If you want to be successful and you want to win, get championships[,] then you better understand that this didn’t happen because of you. This happened of our Lord and Savior.”
(I’ve taken the quotation from an article that expresses indignation over U Conn’s, uh, reservations about the coach.)
… when all we care about is our receivers. When your football team is your university, as is the case at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, you’ll accept anyone who can catch a ball well, and you’ll make up pretend classes for those people to get A’s in so they can remain eligible to catch balls for your sports factory.
This has been true, is still true, and will remain true at all of America’s big-time sports schools, and if you think a little academic scandal is going to change that, you’re a fool. The system can’t work if you only admit college-level students.
The high schools do their bit – America now has a rich and complex system of diploma mills feeding their staight-A grads to the sports factories. All the sports factories have to do is keep the mill going – fake classes, fake grades, piece of cake.
If, as at Chapel Hill, the system occasionally breaks down and reveals itself to the world… Well, point one, the world already knew and doesn’t care; and point two, there is no point two.
And if, in a class action suit against the NCAA’s refusal to pay athletes for the commercial use of their names, the athletes’ lawyers point out that the only justification for this refusal – universities are providing athletes with an education – is a total joke (see above)…. Well, the NCAA has lawyers too. I’m sure they can get around this somehow. Still, it’s fun to read stuff like this:
The athletes are using the [Chapel Hill] case to contest the NCAA’s claim that the athletes were getting a meaningful education in exchange for helping universities and the NCAA make millions of dollars from their exploits on the football field or basketball court.
This week, Mary Willingham, the UNC learning specialist who blew the whistle on the lecture-style classes that never met, was named as a witness for the attorneys representing current and former college athletes in a class-action suit against the NCAA. The lawsuit is commonly known as the O’Bannon case, after former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon. He sued after seeing his likeness being used in EA sports video games without being paid.
The case, nearly 5 years old, has a trial date in June. Michael Hausfeld, one of the attorneys representing the athletes, said Willingham’s experiences as a former learning specialist for the athletes’ support program, plus her research into the academic abilities of those athletes, make her a strong witness. She would counter the NCAA’s claims that athletes can be barred from being paid for their athletic efforts because the universities are providing them an education.
“The NCAA is arguing that it is necessary to impose restraints on the athletes because in doing so, it promotes the integration of academics and athletics,” Hausfeld said. “We think that’s patently false, and we have other statistics that demonstrate that very vividly. Mary adds a personal experience which further highlights the falsity of that representation.”
I mean WHOOOPS. You forgot the educate them part!
But then, who could blame you? Ain’t nothing around here that looks like a university.
[Mary] Willingham … has said in interviews that she has received death threats and hate mail. [University of North Carolina Chapel Hill] police spokesman Randy Young said investigators have contacted her and “are responding appropriately.”
Why must Willingham die? Because she said this.
… Willingham said her research of 183 football or basketball players at UNC from 2004-12 found 60 percent reading at fourth- to eighth-grade levels and roughly 10 percent below a third-grade level. She said she worked with one men’s basketball player early in her 10-year tenure who couldn’t read or write.
[Interviewer] – [T]he accusation is that this goes back as many as 200 classes into the 1990s and that this department was being used to inflate athletes’ grades. But at this point, has there been any clear connection made between this department, this professor and higher-ups in the athletic department?
[News and Observer Reporter] – No. There haven’t been. The connections have been with the tutoring program for athletes. We obtained, you know, correspondence that showed that the tutoring program, you know, they knew that these classes weren’t meeting.
See how we all have to wait and pretend to be idiots until events force the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill to admit the full conspiracy? You know what UD would like to see, just for the fun of it? An interview with UNC trustee and official trustee sports booster Dwight Stone. Dwight heads The Educational Foundation, aka Ram’s Club, and UD‘d love to ask him about what he’s been ramming through that organization … But Dwight’s the top and the tutoring program is the bottom, and it’ll be quite a while, and many bureaucratic layers, before we get to what the most responsible body of all – the board of trustees – was doing while the University of North Carolina went from a university to a punch line.
The modern American university (and professional) football game attracts fewer and fewer inside-the-stadium people (there’s much research and hand-wringing going on about this at the NCAA), but many schools do continue to attract large crowds of pointlessly milling drunks outside the stadium on game day. They piss in the street, get in fights, and occasionally kill each other — not that different from what some of the frats on campus get up to…
As stadiums empty, we can expect to see an imbalance between inside and out, in which a football game is played in front of no one except the band, and at the same time a massive sodden riot is staged outside the game. Universities with on-campus stadiums will have the most to lose as these marauders make their way onto the quads and into the libraries. The University of Georgia has been dealing with the phenomenon for a number of years now, so perhaps it can give other institutions advice on crowd control.
… things must indeed be getting dire.
Three of the four clubs in the [professional football] playoffs can’t sell all their tickets…
[E]ven at the college level, where coaches are paid multiples of millions annually, where loyalty to the old school has all but disappeared and the players, no longer satisfied with a free education (such as it might be) and public adulation before they retire to bagging groceries or drawing unemployment checks, are demanding part of the loot at the gate.
You might think that it would occur to the owners, or university presidents who are the owners at the college level, that strangling the golden goose is not a long-term strategy for success.
We make them a special kind of student, the student-athlete [football player], and tolerate their thuggishness and discount the brains we are knowingly damaging, and then discard them.