University Diaries » A Sensationalistic Headline for …

… yet another telling of the scandalous story of university football and basketball. The New Yorker headlines its bland review of current big time campus sports

THE END OF COLLEGE FOOTBALL?

Which has a distinctly New York Daily News ring to it. What happened to the New Yorker?

Fans don’t care as long as the games are played, universities as long as the television contracts are renewed…

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Andrew Zimbalist says that Taylor Branch is wrong about college presidents running the NCAA:

Branch’s assertion to the contrary, college presidents do not run the NCAA. It is run by athletic directors, coaches and conference commissioners, with a smattering of jock-crazed college presidents serving on NCAA committees who have done the bidding of the athletic programs and pass periodic reforms to help preserve a modicum of legitimacy for the system.

But I think Branch is right. The head of the NCAA is customarily a (former) college president; it used to be Myles Brand, and now it’s Mark Emmert. Surely Emmert’s successor will be Gordon Gee.

And there’s a whole lot more than just a smattering of jock-crazed presidents (and other highly ranked university administrators) on those committees.

And the NCAA can’t run without the greed and passivity of university presidents, so it absolutely must keep feeding those two things.

AND the NCAA needs college presidents to maintain the fiction that the organization has a shred of academic significance.

I’d say – along with Taylor Branch – that the power center of the NCAA is the university president and the university administration.

As Ellen Staurowsky says:

As commercial interests in college sport continue to grow, the fictions understandably become more difficult to sustain. The shame rests not with college sports per se but with higher education officials who have served as the architects and promoters of such a system.

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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.
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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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