Read UD‘s explanation. It is the most-read of her writings.
Read UD‘s explanation. It is the most-read of her writings.
You’re describing mainstream big-time American university athletics. Nothing to see here.
The place has an astounding consistency. Jockshop di tutti jockshops, it now has its trustees busy looking into two new degree offerings:
How to Keep Turfgrass Looking Good.
Ouch.
This is a line from a letter written to the president of Harvard from an alumnus, a pissed off rich guy. The letter is quoted in the Crimson.
The guy is an Ivy League T. Boone Pickens. An east coast Phil Knight wannabe. He’s in a rage because he’s just seen his investment in the school’s basketball team get shot to hell because of a cheating scandal.
You can understand his anger. A titan of industry takes over a sports team, he expects it to win. T. Boone’s luxury box tantrums when Oklahoma State football fucks up are the stuff of legend.
But wait a minute. This is Harvard University the guy’s talking about. When he says like many the Faculty of Arts and Sciences assigns he’s not talking about some jock shop. He’s talking about Harvard University!
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So. Let us put this matter into perspective. Let us look at the problems that conspired to produce the cheating scandal that broke up the basketball team this guy was bankrolling. Let us then consider solutions.
1. Yes, Harvard’s notorious for short-changing undergraduates. This isn’t going to change. Catering to professors who only want to teach graduate students is a Harvard thing. If you want to teach at a first-rate school that takes undergraduate and graduate instruction equally seriously, leave Harvard and go to Princeton.
Harvard’s relative indifference to its undergraduate component will inevitably produce some stupidly designed courses like this one, with its absurd take-home exam (take-home exams are invitations to cheat), inexperienced instructor, etc.
2. Bogus, easy-A, jock courses are the name of the game at big sports universities (for details, see recent events at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill), and no one cares, since winning is more important than educating the people recruited to play on the teams. Harvard is supposed to have a different ethos, but as long as it’s got a sports program that rich guys like the letter writer blow lots of money on, it’s going to have courses like this on offer.
3. Et ainsi, the letter writer can’t have it both ways. Either you put your money on a truly competitive team some of whose players are – inevitably – not scholars, or you settle for a reasonably but not dramatically competitive team made up of scholars. If the guy had put his money on a legitimately scholarly team, he’d be writing pissed off letters to Drew Faust about what losers they are, how she has to take recruiting more seriously, etc. He put his money on a not legitimately scholarly team, and now he’s pissed off because they’re not legitimately scholarly.
Solutions:
There’s only one solution.
1. Harvard should do what Oregon and Oklahoma State have done, and give the team to the titan. Phil Knight and T. Boone run basketball and football at Oregon and Oklahoma State. They basically own the teams. They bought them. Make Thomas Sternberg pony up Knight/T. Boone levels of support and give him the damn basketball team.
A professor of rhetoric gives Armstrong an F.
… administrators are choosing to spend millions on sports programs with only the faintest hope that they’ll one day see a return on their investment other than the dubious intangible benefits of having a few second-rate sports squads around to keep up school spirit. Moreover, they’re spending more on those programs every year.”
Jordan Weissmann does the numbers.
Nevada, our most mentally challenged state, is about to spend eight hundred million dollars on a 60,000-seat stadium for one of the losingest university sports teams around: University of Nevada Las Vegas football.
In an era where it’s been proven time and time again that building new sports and entertainment facilities doesn’t necessarily immediately create a return on investment — in fact, it often does the opposite — there is still no hesitation to go with the bigger is better model of property development.
It will feature a 100-yard long Adzillatron – the entire length of the field. It’s one thing to hurl shrieking sixty-yard long ads at captive audiences; at one hundred yards, there’s really no getting away from them.
The best commentary UD has so far seen on this comes from a reader of SB Nation:
It’s pitiful.
But we’re Vegas and we do stupid shit like this all the time.
And one fewer professor teaching grammar.
… avoid mixed metaphors.
Southern Cal has always struggled to gain a competitive foothold in the world of college basketball while playing second fiddle to its crosstown arch-rival UCLA, coming close on several occasions only to have it torn away by scandal or impatience.
They create confusion. And note the connection between mixed metaphors and cliches (playing second fiddle). They often appear together. Avoid cliches.
Things get worse in a later paragraph:
The institutional decline of Southern Cal, as business consultant and educator Jim Collins would put it, came like a staged disease; an initially unknown cancer that ate away silently at USC fed by its own gluttony for success. At first, it was almost impossible to detect but easily correctable. If the powers that be could have saw the writing on the wall and slowed the bleeding, the program might have been saved. Yet USC sunk deeper and deeper into the quicksand of its own arrogance, until it realized that all it had accomplished had only come about because of broken rules and scorched earth.
Let’s unpack.
The institutional decline of Southern Cal, as business consultant and educator Jim Collins would put it, [Would put what? What in the first words of this sentence does the “it” here refer to?] came like a staged disease; an initially unknown cancer that ate away silently at USC [The reader feels a sense of dread as this overused analogy gets going.] fed by its own gluttony for success. At first, it was almost impossible to detect but easily correctable. If the powers that be could have saw [Wow. Forbes, we have a problem.] the writing on the wall and slowed the bleeding, [Again, note the combination of cliche – writing on the wall, stop the bleeding – and mixed metaphor.] the program might have been saved. Yet USC sunk deeper and deeper into the quicksand of its own arrogance, [The final stage of this staged disease is quicksand.] until it realized that all it had accomplished had only come about because of broken rules and scorched earth. [Can’t resist throwing yet another image – scorched earth – onto his pile of words.]
… got filmed – it’s alleged – by the director of media for that university’s athletic department – coming out of showers after games.
[He] made the recordings by positioning the camera at waist level and placing a piece of tape over the red light to conceal that it was recording. [Authorities] “quickly discounted” the possibility of that having been done accidentally.
He accidentally placed a camera at waist level hundreds of times?
Yes, I think we can quickly discount that.
Anxious editorial in the Duke University newspaper about the fiasco at the University of North Carolina.
Duke is absolutely right to be anxious.
The only weak part of the editorial is its repeated insistence that the leaders of UNC must have been shocked to discover widespread academic/athletic fraud. No way.
In response to Junior Seau’s suicide, America speaks. A football player is just like a police officer or a soldier.
This thoughtful take on the Steubenville lads reminds UD of something she’s noticed about local coverage of university athletes who’ve been arrested for sexual assault or hazing or DUI or theft or gun play or whatever.
Katie Heaney wonders why reporters often devote a couple of sentences at the beginning of the article to the charges themselves, and then spend the rest of the piece talking about how the team’s defense is going to be weakened while the guy’s on trial, but there’s this other guy, a freshman, and this might be a huge break for him and he might rise to the occasion… Reporters often jump right to the win/loss implications of a sudden, er, removal of a key player from the lineup. They’re writing a sports piece with a bit of crime attached to it.
In the case of Steubenville’s multiple accused athletes – high school guys about to go to the universities that recruited them to play football – Heaney asks
[D]o we need to know how many state championships they’ve won? Do we need to know how much the suspects, if convicted, will be missed by their teammates and fans?
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This goes to the rape culture of certain towns and schools – a culture whose existence these places indignantly deny. Pathetic Penn State will insist to its dying day that Sandusky was a grotesque anomaly, that nothing in its engrossing pleasure in violent games had anything to do with current events there. Notre Dame looks the other way. Montana looks the other way…
UD isn’t sure why it’s so difficult for these places to own their violence. They produce violence all the time – on the field, off the field. Steubenville produces young men – local heroes – who film themselves being violent. Football gets more violent by the day, and these places are right there, fashioning young men fully up to the challenge of brutalizing and being brutalized at the highest levels.
Think of the post-nuclear athletic games in Nevil Shute’s On the Beach if you want a sense of where these places are headed: “They’re doing it because they like to do it, honey.”
… dominated, of course, by Penn State.
But the football-team-rape archetype isn’t raping little boys in locker rooms. It’s raping drunk coeds.
Some universities are more notorious than others in this matter; and of course many universities don’t produce groups of raping football players at all.
There’s also the rape pipeline to think about – high school football player rapists about to graduate to college football player rapists. That’s what the Steubenville Ohio case involves — guys who’ve already been accepted to various colleges, but have started raping before they get there. What’s a college to do?
It’s behind a New Yorker pay wall, but you might want to part with six bucks to enjoy Jay Martel’s brief Guide to the Top Bowl Games.
Here’s its last paragraph. The rest of the piece is along the same lines.
The E-Z-Does-It Catheter Cotton Bowl
This may be the marquee bowl game, with the undefeated Texas State College of the Pacific Homicidal Maniacs setting their sights on the No. 1-ranked Tallahassee University Khmer Rouge. These two college programs consistently rise to the top of every major statistical category including early-onset Alzheimer’s, so expect a real donnybrook. The media-day disclosure that every player on the Maniacs, except for the placekicker, sustained a concussion last week – even though no game was scheduled – sharply raised the level of anticipation for this clash.
There’s also news on coaches:
Lodi State made news last year by firing the former coach Chet Bracker after three losing seasons and paying him the remaining six million dollars on his contract to leave. This decision raised eyebrows, especially when Bracker came back and had to be paid another twenty-two million dollars to leave again.
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UD thanks Jeff.