… complete with wishful thinking …
[T]here is nothing wrong that can’t be fixed by 18 strong college presidents — that’s how many seats there are on the NCAA executive committee — acting in concert to curb their own worst excesses, and impose stiffer penalties.
… and the apparent belief that all university basketball and football players graduate from their universities:
They get a four-year ride free of the mountainous student loans that burden so many of their peers — a collective $900 billion worth. Ask any parent who is paying tuition what a scholarship is worth. Pay players? Please. We’re already paying them as much as a half-million dollars apiece over four years, maybe more.
And, pound for pound, there’s the insanest defense of playing football and basketball as an exercise in college-level intellectuality you’re ever going to see:
I don’t know that revenue-sports, basketball and football, are more valuable than any other performance-based learning experience, in which stakes are damn high and the audience brutally demanding. But they’re certainly not less valuable. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once praised sports as “high and dangerous action,” because, “in this snug, over-safe corner of the world we need it, that we may realize that our comfortable routine is no eternal necessity of things . . .”
Yeah. Take the game they’ve been playing since they were ten, put it on a big field with tv cameras, and watch it morph into a university subject. Jenkins wants football and basketball players to be able to major in I ran up and down a field today.
Much better, UD thinks, that they major in ethics, taking advantage of field work opportunities in cults of corruption at American universities.
**********************************
SOS loves the way Jenkins ends with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Reader: Make a note of it. To lend parting gravitas to your argument that football and basketball are university subjects, wheel out Holmes or Churchill or Lincoln saying they are high, and dangerous.
Dangerous, to be sure. They are full of danger.
What they bring to the university, however, is – so very often – unutterably low.
April 2nd, 2011 at 9:18PM
“18 strong college presidents”…reminds me of the story about the engineer and the mathematician who are trapped at the bottom of a deep well with unclimbable sides:
Engineer (pretty despondent): I guess there’s no way we can ever get out of here
Mathematician (very chipper): I know exactly how!
Engineer: And that would be…?
Mathematician: Assume a ladder!
April 3rd, 2011 at 6:57AM
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Jenkins. Well marinated in the jock culture, I’d say. Seems a little fixated on Gordon Gee, too.
April 3rd, 2011 at 6:18PM
Brandeis said something about sunshine being the best disinfectant.
UD apparently does not like germs.
The devil can cite Supreme Court justices for his own purpose.