… a writer attempts to convey to British people the madness and squalor of big-time American university sports.
Along the way, he quotes Charles Clotfelter:
“Sport is in a way the connection with people that offsets the idea of the forbidding ivory tower of intellectuals,” Clotfelter says. “To think of the institution as purely an academic enterprise is probably to misconstrue it. It’s more than that. It’s also a social thing. We’re in both of those worlds.”
An odd statement, no? First of all – forbidding tower of intellectuals? Where? Name an American campus to which this description corresponds. UD‘s George Washington University – atypical in some ways, typical in many others – is mainly about guys in suits teaching public relations or law in the morning and heading off to their consultancy at the IMF or their gig at Brookings in the afternoon.
Second: Yes, a university is also a social thing. And it features huge numbers of sports to enhance its sociable atmosphere. Swimming, wrestling, volleyball, track, tennis …
Oh, whoops. Universities are dumping those sports to pay for football.
November 28th, 2011 at 3:49PM
The English, of course, invented this nonsense, though we’re the ones who ran it into the ground. I suspect that they escaped its worst excesses thanks to insurmountable class consciousness, at the critical time, within the universities.
In certain structural respects British professional football (soccer) has much more in common with American college football than it has with the NFL.