Vaunted:
often spoken of or described as very good or great : often praised
Uh, I guess. UD graduated from Northwestern University, but she married a Harvard graduate and … well… you know how that goes. She understands that NU’s intellectual currency and its university-market-hotness (always pretty high) has zoomed forward in the last few years, and she’s happy to hear that.
She herself, a ‘thesdan, knew little of NU’s prestige or whatever when she decided to go there. She went there because she thought she might want to be a journalist, and NU’s school of journalism was a good one. It took a semester for her to realize she didn’t want to be a journalist. After a quick chat about it with Erich Heller (“If you are unhappy doing that, why continue to do that?”), she transferred to the literature department, where she did indeed get a good education, and where she was very happy.
She went to one boring absurd football game which NU lost by (she seems to recall) sixty or so points, and gave no thought to the world of bigtime athletes and whether they were getting said vaunted education.
Years later, she got to thinking about universities as such, and this thing kept sticking in the university’s craw, as it were, this billion dollar revenue sports thing. As in the latest case — Julius Nyang’oro’s University of North Carolina — everyone knows you cannot under any circumstances reconcile the vast both-wings billion dollar media conspiracy university football has become with anything other than no college education (the player plays the game, takes no classes, goes pro after a year) or bogus college education (Nyang’oro plus the Academic Assistance Center whores keep the ball rolling).
Everyone’s excited about Northwestern’s players having made progress toward unionization, and of course it is a good thing. Few beyond the truly depraved find the NCAA millionaires and the hapless no ed/bogus ed players anything other than a repellent couple. And with a union the guys will get good medicare care after they bash their brains in. Plus they’re asking for shorter practice hours, the lazy bums.
It’s the practice hours that’s really going to piss off the NCAA, not the medical thing. The whole point is that this is professional football, not wussy college football. Take a look at the University of Oregon’s new practice center, its walls plastered with KILL THE ENEMY propaganda. You have to take the trouble to get to know this culture, I’m saying. There’s no reason it is located on university campuses. It is in fact wholly at odds with universities (drunken tribes cheering on violent bulk smashing up against violent bulk – not exactly the life of the mind, kiddies). Recall life at Nebraska and Oregon when Mr Football, Richie Incognito, studied at those schools. As long as sports factories who don’t give a flying fuck about educating the bulk keep the practice hours long, other schools aren’t going to shorten them.
What I’m trying to say is that, union or not, you can’t make it work. University football is always going to be the same. It’s always going to be disgusting and it’s always going to destroy universities. It makes too many icky people too rich.
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This, by the way, on our rapidly onlining colleges and universities, is what’s left (what may soon be left) of face-to-face, in person experience on campus. Hulk v. Hulk.
March 28th, 2014 at 3:05PM
http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201403280900
Andrew Zimbalist, economics professor and sports economist at Smith College
Ellen Staurowsky, professor in sports management at Drexel University
Larry Scott, commissioner of the PAC-12
Luke Bonner, co-founder of the College Athletes Players Association, which brought the case at the NLRB and former basketball player for UMASS
March 30th, 2014 at 9:55AM
As usual, the big winners are going to be lawyers, who will be able to vacuum money from both sides. Let’s start the bidding on the salary of the lawyer who will head the, uh, “players'” union at $350K or so.
I just hope I am retired by the time the players’ union demands a limit of five pages on term papers.
March 30th, 2014 at 7:47PM
Bless you, UD.
As a fellow NU grad, I am proud of our football players for standing up for what is just and honorable.
Jim Pitts, my fellow student in a German II course (with the unforgettable Fräulein Koenig), was both a Big Ten athlete of note and a Professor of Sociology at NU.
http://theurbannews.com/our-town/2013/jim-pitts/
Thanks, Jim, and UD.