A lot of people are saying this about Penn State football.
But pause.
Reflect.
What is left of Penn State without football? It’s the same question you’d need to ask about the University of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and a host of others. A few scattered academic departments; a demoralized student body transferring out in search of a tailgate; yawning stadia assuming the aspect of meteor craters.
The silence alone will kill most of the stragglers. Campus will come on all scholarly-like, and drinking will go from post-game debauch to post-Soviet despair. Here and there amid the twilight-of-the-superheroes vastation, crazed, tattered philosophy faculty will wail like Diogenes while enflamed remnant-students throw stones at them.
July 13th, 2012 at 1:16PM
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/2012/jul/13/lessons-penn-state/
July 13th, 2012 at 5:13PM
I have no idea what to make of your final paragraph there, UD (it scans like you’ve dipped into Aaron Sorkin’s pharmacopeia), but on the relationship between football and academic excellence you are just wrong. I refer you to the comments I gave some time ago:
I think I have a better metric for this “first-rate academics” evaluation. Economics is the dismal science, they say. I don’t know if I would characterize what they do science but they do appear to appreciate numbers and measurement. Here are some relevant ones from the 2010 National Research Council rankings of doctoral programs.
Let’s make it a head-to-head comparison, pitting a football mad public SEC school, say The University of Alabama, against an East Coast private liberal arts bastion, George Washington University. The NRC rankings are multidimensional, with rankings based on survey results and regression analysis (find methodology info at http://www.nap.edu), and has critics, but they are highly regarded.
Consider programs in Chemistry. There are a number of ways to slice the data but here’s the upshot:
Program Median Rank UA 67/178 GWU 98/178
I thought this might be unfair because I didn’t think GWU had an engineering program, which might put them at a disadvantage overall for STEM programs. Turns out they do (in fact, it’s the School of Engineering and Applied Science) it’s just that I had never heard of it, or anyone from there. Indeed, UA should be at a disadvantage, because GWU has a well-regarded medical school, while the medical school of the UA system is associated with UAB (Birmingham) and not UA.
But why pussyfoot around? Let’s go right to the heart of academic power, the departments of English Language and Literature:
Program Median Rank UA 78/119 GWU 107/119
[and oof, look at the quality ranking distribution for GWU http://graduate-school.phds.org/rankings/english/compare-programs?p1=7006&p2=6969. Monodisperse at bad]
So, whatever those GWU folks are doing on Saturdays in the fall when they are pointedly NOT watching their football team (they don’t have one, dontcha know) it ain’t improving the quality of their academic programs. Where does all the money go?
July 13th, 2012 at 6:20PM
Shane: As I said in the post, scattered departments (good departments) would undoubtedly survive if they pulled football out from under football-heavy schools like yours. There are serious and impressive departments at almost all football schools (most notably at the University of Texas).
What seems to me truest to say is that while the absence of football has little to do with academic excellence, the presence of football, on many campuses, compromises academic excellence and moral integrity in all sorts of ways — ways that I’ve tried to chronicle in detail through the years of this blog.
July 13th, 2012 at 6:38PM
But, seriously, why should football be a variable in the academic-rating-analysis anyhow? Much less a critical element in university life. It’s a huge WTF, even without the various forms of criminality.
July 13th, 2012 at 6:49PM
MattF: Yes. The basic thing is one wonders what the fuck football – at least megaton tv football – is doing on university campuses.
July 13th, 2012 at 8:23PM
“So, whatever those GWU folks are doing on Saturdays in the fall when they are pointedly NOT watching their football team (they don’t have one, dontcha know) it ain’t improving the quality of their academic programs. Where does all the money go?”
Yeah, I note how the top-10 universities in the country include any number of football powerhouses.
July 13th, 2012 at 9:07PM
Here’s a recent list of top ten schools.
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities
I see no football powerhouses, though I could be wrong. Duke comes closest, I guess, but their team hasn’t been up to much for a long time.
July 13th, 2012 at 9:40PM
Right, there’s no history of football at Harvard and Yale. John Elway did not go to Stanford.
Big time college football is a kind of historic accident. It may seem incongruous, but it is not necessarily corrosive to the missions of higher education. I still wonder at the mindset that sees Theater and Dance as legitimate Arts in the academic sense, but doesn’t see the beauty and physical excellence in football, or basketball. What would the Victorians make of this one-sided view of education? All mind, no body, and very little spirit.
July 14th, 2012 at 8:40AM
Right, there’s no history of football at Harvard and Yale. John Elway did not go to Stanford.
And if you’d like to deal with our actual point, you’re welcome to.
July 15th, 2012 at 4:33PM
Pardon, “Total”, I didn’t realize you were the one calling the tune here.
(Total. Total? What a strangely grandiose handle to hide behind. Unless, of course, you are in fact a cereal).
What point do you think you were making? The conversation seem to indicate that academic excellence and big time football we’re not mutually exclusive, but that the presence of big money athletics is problematic on campus.
Then you chime in with a list and say the best colleges do not play football. I say your list is biased to private schools who tend to no longer have important athletic programs (though many once did). It is also too short to take in the breadth of quality in higher ed in the US. Here’s a better list of top 25 research universities http://mup.asu.edu/research2010.pdf (pg18). Every one of the public institutions save one plays Div 1 college football, as do at least two of the private schools (USC and Vanderbilt).