That was written in 2010. Add the billion-dollar tv deals, much, much more money for the coach, etc.
My point is that the University of Oklahoma football program is rolling in it. The University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma are the “two richest, most powerful programs” in their conference.
And yet like many rich and powerful sports universities, Oklahoma has become visibly microcephalic, bearing on its enormous body a shrinkingly small brain. Oklahoma, with its pathetic academic budget, its hopeless struggle to have anything to do with education, is what you look like when you graft, as George Will says, “a 109,901-seat entertainment venue [onto] an institution of higher education.”
You get a manic depressive university president who spends Monday slobbering over the team’s amazing amazing victories OH MY GAWD I CAN’T BELIEVE IT COACH STOOPS WE’RE NOT WORTHY!!!! and Tuesday sobbing into his beer about no money for, well, the school: “You have to keep the lights on. You have to keep health insurance,” Boren wailed to the student newspaper the other day.
Forget classes and professors. We can barely put food on the fucking table! What kind of a world are we living in when you can have a trillion dollar football team and no lights in the library? If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we run our little school?
“It would be a tragedy if we lost the humanities, the social sciences, the arts and the rest,” Boren stated. “That’s one of the real dangers: universities will think, ‘Ah, quick solution. Do away with all that.’”
Being president of a school like Oklahoma is sort of like being one of the generals who run Myanmar. You preside over a resource-rich campus which should be able to sustain itself at a pretty high level. But because of greed and corruption, your job is essentially to oversee a few people making a lot of money while pacifying a starving population. What a tragedy if we lost the humanities! Message: I care.
November 22nd, 2011 at 2:01PM
UD, you know that under David Boren’s presidency, the amount of resources devoted to academics at the University of Oklahoma has increased substantially, and its academic reputation has improved in parallel to the increased expenditures. (Boren, an ex-Senator, has been a very effective lobbyist with the state legislature–and that’s saying a lot in Oklahoma.) They may still be no Harvard, or even an Illinois or Indiana, but they’re a lot better than they used to be. Among the many things they do that you would appreciate, is their very effective undergraduate honors college. And, just to make the point for UD’s readers, I don’t work for OU, come from Oklahoma or live in that state.