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When UD wrote “The Faculty Bench,” back in 2006…

… she pointed out that one of many reasons professors don’t fuck with their universities’ often fucked up athletics programs has to do with simple abuse. Criticize campus sports and every yahoo from the chair of the board of trustees to the local wino who doesn’t go to games but joins fellow drunks to trash the town during tailgates is going to come after you. You’re going to be called names six ways to Sunday.

Few people want to spend their lives dealing with dicks. So few people squawk about sports.

But over the years this blog has accumulated a pantheon of professors, a handful of heroes, who have been willing to stand up to the abuse. (Some of them are here, here, here, here, and here.)

Mark Killingsworth, an econ professor at Rutgers, is one of these. As that absurd school sports itself to death, Killingsworth hammers away at the obvious point that it ain’t got no moolah. “I have to assume that so far the plan [to expand athletics] is to keep [the] status quo, to keep taking money out of academics,” says he, and ain’t it the truth. But no one else in the state of New Jersey (with the exception of Killingsworth’s father-god, William Dowling) cares, and indeed if you go by most of the comments on all the articles about Killingsworth in the local press it’s pretty clear that many people in New Jersey think poorly of Killingsworth.

Moral: Think twice before getting between a boy and his concussion.

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

Update:

Rutgers is an enormous public institution, with an annual budget of $3.6 billion. It is responsible for educating 65,000 students. Why isn’t that more important that competing in the Big Ten?

Margaret Soltan, May 8, 2015 9:21AM
Posted in: sport

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3 Responses to “When UD wrote “The Faculty Bench,” back in 2006…”

  1. charlie Says:

    “And some professors are dupes. They actually think the sports program contributes significant money to the academic side of their university. In almost every case, they are wrong, and they could discover they’re wrong. Yet they remain in a sort of bad-faith fog about it.”

    UD wrote this back in ’06. Since then, we’ve only heard the same PR hacks yapping about the benefits of football programs, their ability to generate revenue and increased enrollment, and bring in big money contributions from anywhere and everywhere. So shut the hell up about the cost of the football program, none of yass know what’s yass talkin bout.

    LSU’s bankruptcy puts an end to that idiocy. The flagship of LA, the featured public institution, and the state doesn’t have enough resources to maintain the school’s academic integrity. What about all that crap that admins and marketing shills have been saying, with increasing hostility, of the sanctity of the game, how you can’t have a legit school without a big time football team. You can’t get any bigger than LSU, usually in the National Championship hunt, a first division member of the most prestigious football conference in America. And yet, it flounders, and the only solution that I’ve heard is get rid of tenured profs and close departments. What is going on in Baton Rouge is the future of higher education, football won’t be touched, academics will be further degraded. A hell of a lot of USAAmericans believed nonsense, the consequences of such stupidity will become evident….

  2. theprofessor Says:

    The athletics skeptics don’t get called names here, UD…the admin & other jock-sniffers just look at us like we’re aliens from outer space. After all, everyone who mattersknows that university education doesn’t just take place in a classroom or library. In fact, most of it doesn’t take place in a classroom or interacting with some prof or book. Come to think of it, almost none of it takes place in a traditionally academic setting. The real venues for learning are the basketball court or maybe the soccer fields, where students learn valuable leadership skills.

  3. Margaret Soltan Says:

    tp: LOL. Extreme LOL.

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