And you might ask – Is it such a big deal that Yale’s football coach wasn’t a candidate or a finalist for a Rhodes scholarship, as he has claimed?
Well, yes. Especially at academic institutions, fake degrees, falsely claimed degrees, faked credentials, falsely claimed honors — these are almost as destructive to a school’s reputation as its sports program.
The president and dean of instruction at Bishop State in Alabama both have diploma mill degrees, which makes the place a laughingstock. A university run by people unable to graduate from universities … People running around calling themselves doctors when they’ve pressed a BUY YOUR DEGREE NOW button on their computer… It maketh a mockery of all aspiration to institutional seriousness.
The Yale thing is of course much paltrier; but the principle’s the same: You need to be legit.
November 20th, 2011 at 12:04PM
Whether or not the coach got anywhere near a Rhodes interview, the worse thing is putting the quarterback in a painful bind by asserting the coach’s own moral superiority by having passed up long-term personal distinction in favor of short-term loyalty to team and coach. If I were the president of Yale I would be incensed, not just because a lot of institutional resources have been invested in helping the student get to this point in the Rhodes competition but mainly because it indicates to the world that the Yale athletic culture views itself as autonomous from the academic life of the institution. This is sadly just as much the case in the Ivies as it is in the Big Ten. It will be interesting when the teammates start talking, since I think that many of them probably told the QB he should choose to go to the Rhodes interview.