Whatever the caliber of play, a few hundred students attended the games. The university was known more for eggheads than big biceps, and at halftime, instead of a marching band, a giant kazoo was brought onto the field. Fans followed with smaller versions of the instrument, moving about haphazardly rather than in formation, an activity meant to celebrate the concept of Brownian motion, the random movement of particles.
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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
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It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
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There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
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You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
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Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal
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[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
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Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
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The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
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Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
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From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
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As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
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University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
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If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte
September 17th, 2011 at 8:01AM
Well, yes, football, in its place, subordinate to the real purposes of the university, can be an asset. I liked the notion of Chicago playing Carnegie Mellon and Washington at St. Louis: a midwestern Ivy League in the making.
The difficulty, and the piece makes this clear, whether intentionally or not, the difficulty is keeping football in its place. Coaches aggrandize. People like to win, even vicariously.
I was struck by the fact that the Chicago squad — all 80 of them and Chicago doesn’t have an immense undergraduate student body — were recruited. No walk-ons. I was at Columbia in the ’70s. There were always walk-ons on the football team then. One of my colleagues at work sent all three of his sons to Columbia in the ’80s and ’90s. Two of them played football for Columbia as walk-ons. If your entire squad is recruited, you’re trying too hard.
And when coaches try too hard in aggrandizing the football program, they do things which are bad for the university — not University of Miami bad, necessarily, but bad.
The sportswriter thought this amusing. The player, too. Perhaps even the coach, if the sportswriter (it is the way of sportswriters and coaches) showed him the passage. But the clear implication is that if you’re too dumb for Princeton, Chicago will welcome you. That’s an implication that Chicago faculty, other Chicago students, Chicago alumni are unlikely to welcome.
September 17th, 2011 at 9:15AM
jim: Yes – I was struck by that detail about the ACT too.
September 17th, 2011 at 11:21AM
In the spring of 1967 (if I remember the year correctly) the U of C scheduled its first revival of intercollegiate football. Students protested with a sit-in on the 50-yard line. Having watched a practice, I’d noticed that my alarm clock had the same ring as that of the starting signal. Just before the official signal, from the 50-yard line, I punched my alarm clock to give its own sporting call. Both teams responded and rushed towards each other – and towards the sit-in students whom the coaches had told their teams to trample as if they weren’t there. At that moment, other sitters threw out two extra footballs, which, like the official ball, were immediately pursued by various factions of the opposing teams. This student support of the concept of the university puzzled the visiting team, whoever they were.
When asked what we wanted to happen there instead of football, we said, “A new library – this is a university !” As far as we knew, the idea to put the library there came from the students and was taken up by various faculty and administrative committees after the sit-in.
September 17th, 2011 at 11:30AM
Jeremy: LOL! And to have been part of it!
September 17th, 2011 at 6:25PM
I used to go to the football games, first year (freshman year for the uninitiated), to support a couple of guys in my house who were on the team. The best game I saw went into a couple of overtimes. At the close, Chicago was five yards out from the end zone. The QB handed the ball off to some poor guy who fumbled it into the end zone. Carnegie Mellon recovered and rushed it 102 yards to their end zone. What a game.
September 17th, 2011 at 9:01PM
Caelius Spinator: LOL.