… as she read (and listened to) this visiting law professor at way-past-hopeless West Virginia University complain about the school spending $75 million to upgrade its football stadium. As another WVU professor explains:
[T]he party school is [now] a business, and alcohol is part of the business model. Schools lure students to attend their schools with the promise of sports, other leisure activities and overall fun. Part of this fun, whether schools like it or not, is drinking. Thus, even as university officials want to keep students safe, they also need to keep their consumers happy. This means letting the alcohol industry do what it does best – sell liquor.
The important part of that statement is the beginning: In America today, the party school is a business, and WVU is America’s number one party school.
Anyone trying to introduce changes to that business model is excuse me but kind of a fool.
The only thing that changes this business model is un p’tit peu too much rape and pillage, and then things only change for as long as it takes to clean up the lawsuits and probations and all. Then it starts up again.
So who is this Michael Blumenthal who gets on the local airwaves and says
I have to admit that I hold to the now antiquated belief that universities are for education, not sports; that the most important people on a university campus are the students, not the football players, and that the main purpose of large amounts of spare change is to do things for those who need it most, and have it least.
He can’t be the poet Michael Blumenthal, because he’s a poet and not a law professor…
OTOH, the poet Blumenthal is also notorious — for having written another futile protest, this one against the love me do ethos of many creative writing programs. In a 2001 letter to his students at Santa Clara University (he was there for a visiting gig), he wrote that often their writing instructors simply flattered them in order to get good course evaluations:
You have been neither loved nor nurtured. You have, rather, been lied to and betrayed. Though the mother’s milk that flows from such breasts may temporarily satisfy your ravenous appetites for praise (and its donors’ hunger for tenure), it is not, I assure you, a very nourishing brew. You have been told that the not good is good, that the unworthy is the worthy.
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… But yes! Turns out the WVU Blumenthal is the Santa Clara Blumenthal. This restless, interdisciplinary man has taught all over the world and has lately landed in one of the weirdest campuses in America, a truly anti-intellectual funhouse.
UD admires Blumenthal’s willingness to open himself to hostility, incomprehension, and indifference; but surely he knows no one’s listening.
June 14th, 2014 at 12:09PM
What does it say about USAAmerica that a guy as accomplished as Blumenthal is the equivalent of a door to door salesman, except with less security?