Stories like this one always remind UD of the university administrator who, at a conference on university athletics, insisted that the way to overcome the separation between faculty and coaches was to make coaches professors. “Coaches are just like professors,” he said. “Essentially they are professors – people paid at universities to teach students. They should be regular tenured faculty.”
It’s intriguing to think about the Rate My Professors page of Billy Gillispie, Bobby Knight, Mike Leach, Mark Mangino… Instead of the Helpfulness category, you’d have Abusiveness (Physical) and Abusiveness (Mental).
Maybe you’d reserve those categories for certain classroom professors too, but only if, during discussion, they had a tendency to shout You worthless piece of shit and Hey pussy pussy at students; and, when seriously annoyed, concussed them.
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As to lecture content:
Football is violent by design. It became a sensation because of television, yes, but also because it expressed certain truths about American life: the dangers of the mines and mills, dirt, struggle, blood, grime, the division of labor, the all-importance of the clock. But we’ve changed, which is why white middle- and upper-middle-class fans recoil at the cascade of injuries that can make ESPN resemble the surgery channel…
September 22nd, 2012 at 3:02PM
“certain truths about American life: the dangers of the mines and mills, dirt, struggle, blood, grime, the division of labor, the all-importance of the clock”
Were/are “the dangers of mines and mills” specific to *American* life? This would be news to Agricola, who wrote a handbook on mining in German in the 1500s, and to those who lost fingers in British textile mills in the early 1800s.
I might give him the division of labor (Fordism/Taylorism) and the importance of the clock as zeitgeist factors contributing to the rise of football, but really, dirt, struggle, blood, grime, etc have been part of the human condition for most people for a long time.