At Dagblog, Doctor Cleveland makes some rather remarkable forecasts about big time sports at American universities.
[W]e’re getting to the point where commitment to education at public universities and commitment to football at public universities don’t coexist easily. Spending tens of millions on football (and $3-7 million just on a coach’s salary) always annoyed some professors, but not in any way that rocked the boat. But when state budget cuts lead even a great public system like the University of California to cut back its course offerings and shrink its faculty while raising the tuition to three times what it was in 2000 and then raising it again, raiding Berkeley’s academic budget for six or seven million dollars a year on top of the official athletics budget starts to be a very tough sell.
Yet Doctor Cleveland concludes that crushingly expensive, academically irrelevant, big time sports will survive nonetheless because they fit the new corporate, anti-intellectual university model. The emergent university’s indifference to the student athlete’s education is merely an intensified case of its general indifference to all of its students’ educations.
There will still be some superb colleges in this country, a few of them likely better than American universities have ever been. A select few students will continue getting fabulous educations. But that number will be smaller, and many of their peers in less privileged colleges will get very, very different educations… College football will survive the conditions that allowed it to become what it is. In the end it’s more suited for what American education is becoming than it was for what American education was in the last half of the 20th century… Big College Football is entirely unconcerned about the vast majority of its athletes who will never be able to land the only job that college has prepared them for. Students will be allowed to drop out and drift away when the program has used them up; the model is enrollment, not retention. Developing the student as a whole person is entirely out of the question. And the rewards of the students’ hard work and effort are only for the fortunate few, while everyone else (no matter how hard they have worked) is labeled a failure. And a small group of privileged people will stand to make a massive profit. There’s a reason that people who agitate for “modernizing” our colleges and universities don’t complain about big time, pro in all but name college football. It already looks exactly the way they want college to look.
The writer is describing – with meticulous exactitude – America’s burgeoning for-profit university sector. Enrollment, not retention. Etc. As public universities put themselves online and in other ways cheapen themselves in emulation of the for-profits, we will see once respectable universities become, as Doctor Cleveland anticipates, the same pointless, damaging interlude in the lives of naive people that the for-profits already are.
An interlude with football games.
January 4th, 2011 at 10:27AM
“Spending tens of millions on football (and $3-7 million just on a coach’s salary) always annoyed some professors, but not in any way that rocked the boat.”
And there you have it. A minority of us tried 15-20 years ago, but the majority remained indifferent (as long as they got their raises and perks).