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“They weeded out the intellectuals from the University Of Kampuchea. Did not help athletics one bit.”

Barry Petschesky at Deadspin reminds us that you can identify everyone at your university who wears glasses and take them out to the public square and shoot them through the head, but that won’t necessarily help your football stats or put more butts in the seats on game day.

His caution is prompted by the panic and confusion at the University of Kentucky, a school that has sacrificed everything for football, but isn’t able to fill its stadium. Seeking a cause, one fan tells a local radio host that the problem is that the school’s too intellectual. There are professors and students there. Professors are hostile to football. A lot of the students are from foreign countries, and they don’t even understand football, much less watch it.

Cosmopolitans and intellectuals will have to go if UK wants to bring its football program back.

*******************

UD says this guy is jumping the gun. The picture is not as urgent as he would have you believe. UK has succeeded in making its academic ranking plunge, and there’s every reason to assume this trend will continue.

And do you really have to purge the university of its students and professors? UK hasn’t even begun looking into, for instance, the system of threats, retaliations, and incentives many other university ticket offices have adopted in order to get people to attend their football games. Let’s exhaust moderate measures before we go nuclear.

**********
UD thanks Derek.

Margaret Soltan, December 13, 2013 3:31PM
Posted in: sport

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UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil

It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo

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truffula, commenting at Historiann

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Dagblog

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Dissent: The Blog

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