[The people who run the BCS] have allowed their athletic programs to run completely amok. The two people who symbolize what the BCS stands for are, without question, Miami President Donna Shalala, who did everything but rename her school “Shapiro U” while currently jailed booster Nevin Shapiro was lavishing money on her and the one-time “U,” and, of course, Ohio State President Gordon Gee, whose two trademarks are his bow tie and his foot planted firmly inside his mouth.
It was Gee who made himself the Neville Chamberlain of college athletics last spring when he was asked if he would consider firing Jim Tressel as football coach and he replied with a straight face, “Fire him? I just hope he doesn’t fire me.”
The shame of it is that Tressel didn’t stay at Ohio State long enough to get around to firing Gee before Tressel left in disgrace. Of course, the NCAA, led by its top stooge, President Mark Emmert, has been so busy calling meetings and being shocked to learn that cheating is going on that it has yet to take any action against anyone — and will probably come down with a really hard wrist slap when the time finally comes.
John Feinstein, Washington Post
…a Washington Post sports reporter, to make playing football a university major. [Scroll down.] Now a UD reader sends her the latest Jenkins dispatch, in which she provides details of a sports major which would grant students academic credit for their on-field efforts. It would also toss in courses on, like, The Cultural Meaning of Play.
Jenkins writes strangely, and says strange things. Here’s her first paragraph:
If we would quit being half-ashamed of college sports and assign them some real value, we might just cure some of their corruptions. The NCAA should stop treating athletic departments as ticket offices attached to universities like tumors and instead treat them as legitimate academic branches. In fact, why shouldn’t we let kids major in sports? Aspiring athletes should be able to pursue their real interest, as a business and an art.
Let’s take this step by step.
If we would quit being half-ashamed of college sports and assign them some real value, we might just cure some of their corruptions. [Americans are fully-proud of college sports, and they assign them stupendous value. What is Jenkins talking about?] The NCAA should stop treating athletic departments as ticket offices attached to universities like tumors [Way strange simile, though it fits, I guess, with her use of the word “cure” in the preceding sentence. But does she really think the NCAA, of all places, considers college sports a cancer? For the NCAA, college sports is precisely a cure – a cure for poverty.] and instead treat them as legitimate academic branches. In fact, why shouldn’t we let kids major in sports? Aspiring athletes should be able to pursue their real interest, as a business and an art. [A college education, after all, is a four-year opportunity for students to pursue their real interests, be these dribbling balls, building meth labs, playing video games, or whatever. When it comes to constructing a curriculum, colleges should inquire of students what they would like to do. Then they should build buildings and hire people to help them to do those things.]
UD finds this sentence a bit vague:
Varsity athletes deserve significant academic credits for their incredibly long hours of training and practice, and if they fulfill a core curriculum they deserve degrees, too.
I get the first claim – that purely physical activity warrants intellectual credit. Pant, Run – three credits at an institution of higher learning. Okay.
But the second claim – that if athletes fulfill a core curriculum they deserve degrees – confuses me. Where in this piece does Jenkins say anything about core courses? It’s all about colleges letting athletes do what they want to do – play sports, and major in sports. Jenkins compares a sports major at, say, Auburn, to a theater major at Yale. She says nothing about this — the extensive field of academic requirements you’ve got to get out of the way before Yale lets you be a theater major. She alludes to an academic core, but that’s all. She’ll let other people figure out how to, uh, tackle that one.
… warns Bloomberg.
Pish posh.
The Bloomberg writers rehearse all the familiar outrages –
Rutgers University forgave $100,000 of the football coach’s interest-free home loan last year. The women’s basketball coach got monthly golf and car allowances. Both collected bonuses without winning a championship.
Meanwhile, the history department took away professors’ desk phones to save money and shrank its doctoral program by 25 percent. After funding cuts by the deficit-strapped Legislature, New Jersey’s state university froze professors’ salaries, cut the use of photocopies for exams and jacked up student tuition, housing and other fees.
Rutgers also increased funding for sports. The 245-year-old school spent more money on athletics than any other public institution in the six biggest football conferences during the 2009-2010 fiscal year, based on data compiled by Bloomberg. More than 40 percent of sports revenue came from student fees and the university’s general fund.
— that sort of thing… But no one cares. A few odd professors maybe.
The tension the writers are picking up on has to do with fans worrying about how their teams are going to do this year.
This is from a talk he gave at Berkeley.
Society’s attention to athletics, Nader said, has moved people down what he called the “sensuality ladder,” a theoretical scale of people’s interactions with the world…
“Your education is supposed to push you up the sensuality ladder,” he said.
One problem here is that Nader – known, when he ran for president, as “ascetic-in-chief,” is so far up the anti-sensuality ladder that he can’t really be seen at all. The most commonly used name for him is Saint Ralph.
Another problem is that your university education should feel perfectly free to push you down the sensuality ladder. Educated people – with some exceptions, like Nader – like to explore the senses, and indeed many of your humanities courses (like the one UD‘s teaching right now about beauty, in which we just read Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” with its famous concluding lines: In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art) feature artworks and ideas that celebrate sensuality.
… sends her this article by Allen Sanderson, who proposes a sin tax on
college football games. Yes, I am advocating that we impose steep taxes on all intercollegiate football advertising, television broadcasts, logo merchandise sales, and gate receipts.
… This money could be set aside to provide funding for the ex-players to return to earn a degree, enter a graduate program, and/or start a small business.
Fans and universities benefit enormously from [the] exploitation [of players]. It is no stretch to treat this as in the same category as smoking, drinking, gorging ourselves on hot dogs and nachos, most of which we do in the stands or our family rooms while these exploited workers toil for our entertainment and the coach’s yacht. As citizens we should be above having our entertainment whims sated on the backs of these youngsters. Will it put an end to the cesspools at Ohio State, Oregon, Miami, USC, Auburn, LSU and …? No…
Nice, the way he calls them cesspools. UD‘s been doing that for years, but no one at those schools seems to mind that multiple people call them cesspools. Strange.
Ohio State has had so many players suspended or in trouble that Smith, who spoke and answered questions for 18 minutes, has to differentiate between the tattoo-related violations — “the broader issue” as he calls it — and other suspensions.
No wonder Gee is the country’s highest-paid public university president. Keeping an eye on things.
First they fail to sell out Boone Pickens Stadium. Now some guy from Bethany (I checked. It’s definitely in Oklahoma.) writes a letter to the editor:
The University of Oklahoma Board of Regents voted to give OU football coach Bob Stoops a $4 million to $5 million salary per year. No coach is worth that kind of money …!
What in tarnation’s going on??
One reason [Colorado State University] pushed so hard to play an annual game against [the University of Colorado] in Denver was the potential ticket revenue. Sports Authority Field at Mile High, where the Denver Broncos play their home games, holds more than double the 32,500-seat capacity of CSU’s Hughes Stadium.
CSU could bring in more than $1 million in revenue, Kowalczyk said, even after game expenses are deducted, if it were to sell its full allotment of tickets. Instead, the school won’t come close to its budgeted goal of $800,000 in ticket revenue from this game.
But… we could have brought in more than a million… if we’d sold the tickets…!
A 2010 report showed more than $800 million in student fees were used to subsidize athletic programs annually, he said. Vanderbilt spends $10 million-$15 million a year to support its athletics program — at a cost of $2,000-$3,000 per student each year, [Vanderbilt economics professor John] Siegfried said.
That may explain why schools with Division I teams tend to charge higher tuition than those without such teams, he said.
Studies also have shown schools with Division I teams don’t receive significantly more student applications than those that don’t have such teams, he said.
So why did 109 universities upgrade their sports programs to higher divisions in the 1990s?
“Are they all stupid?” Siegfried said. “I don’t think so.”
Big-time sports programs have been shown to generate sports-related media attention for universities. Schools with Division I football programs also typically receive 8 percent more from their respective states by way of financial support, he said.
Schools with sports teams that have winning records typically see higher attendance at sports events, he said. However, they also often feel compelled to pay their coaches competitive salaries, a problem Siegfried called the “prisoner’s dilemma.”
“All that happens is they get paid more and more and more,” he said of coaches.
Ol’ T. Boone must be pissed. I mean, this is Oklahoma State, people! T. Boone who, with all his money and influence, really runs the team … really runs the school… endows OSU with yet another amazing gift: a huge new stadium! And the team is winning games!
But they can’t sell out the stadium.
… the University of New Mexico, has finally fired football coach Mike Locksley. Can’t win a game; does all sorts of embarrassing shit when not losing games.
Why did it take them so long?
After New Mexico completed another 1-11 season last year, the Lobos decided to retain him — in part because they could not afford the $1.4 million buyout to his contract.
But take heart, UNM. Dave Schmidly is still president!
… even for the inside guys.
Former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese, his heart aching over the death of Dave Gavitt, Big East founder and his best friend, went on ESPN and WFAN the other day with all emotional guns blazing. He said college athletics is controlled by football, money and greed. He called it absolute chaos. He said that until two years ago he would have argued that college presidents had loyalty and integrity. Not anymore.
… have columns facing one another and playing off one another nicely. The Social Contract, headlines Krugman; The Amateur Ideal, headlines Brooks. Both writers want to say that in some realms of life capitalism’s competitive market ethos should be suspended; that, underlying all of the purely financial contracting among us, a social contract impels us to act in self-sacrificing ways for the good of the polity.
David Brooks regards the university as one of the most social contracty places in America, and well he might. Universities are non-profits, enjoying immense tax and other advantages, because the state defines them as privileged locations of social good. Unlike the justly detested for-profit schools, universities aren’t in it to make a buck. They’re dedicated to educating people. Brooks even thinks they have a moral mission:
As many universities have lost confidence in their ability to instill character, the moral mission of the university has withered.
UD understands how religious schools might perceive themselves as having explicitly moral missions (Catholic Seton Hall, for example, despite having had to blast more imprisoned alumni names off of buildings than any other school in America, and having hired one of the foulest coaches known to humankind, presumably sees itself in this way.) but she does not believe the non-religious university has – or should have – a moral mission. See Clifford Orwin for a nice expression of her views.
Brooks says what he says about withering because he, like everyone else, sees the amoral hypercapitalist joke amateur university sports (basketball and football, that is) has become. He laments, in a pointless way, the withering of the character-rich amateur university sports tradition. Couldn’t we bring that back? Its “lingering vestiges”? Even in the face of billion dollar tv contracts?
Lingering vestiges. Aren’t they kind of like whispering hope? Durn pretty language. But really.
How is Brooks going to gather up and preserve the lingering vestiges? Reverse the ten-year, billion-dollar contracts? Has Brooks noticed what the most popular major in America is? It’s business. Brooks doesn’t exactly have his finger on the pulse of the American student:
College basketball is more thrilling than pro basketball because the game is still animated by amateur passion, not coldly calculating professional interests.
No – it’s thrilling because it’s played by essentially professional players who are really good. And listen: Who spouts moral mission language at the university? It really isn’t faculty, or even administration. It’s precisely the clever sports programs. Go there – to your six-million-dollar coaches and money-under-the-table boosters – for all of the moral mission, character-building language you can stomach. UD‘s been there – at a host of university sports conferences – and she’s heard it all. If Brooks wants to play right into the hands of Nick Saban he can go on gassing about moral character. Nick’s right there with you. He’s been there waiting for you.
Until we can pivot our eyes back to what universities are – intellectual institutions – we’re going to stay all misty-eyed as Nick Saban and Jim Calhoun (Coach sets an example, you know! Here’s one of Calhoun’s hero recruits. Really made good. Lectures British civil servants! All because of the early example set by the richest public employee in the state of Connecticut!) lecture us on how universities are places that make us better men.
I’ll write about Krugman in a moment.