Mary Willingham at Chapel Hill. An anonymous professor at Rutgers. An anonymous broken-jawed student at Rutgers.
Let’s call what’s happening at the American university what it is: A peasant revolt.
The once-stable hierarchy we’ve come know –
Coach
Players
Boosters
President
Professors
Students
– is being shaken to its foundations as sporadic uprisings escalate among the people. The Rutgers professor suddenly refuses to give a passing grade to a football player, and, when the coach strong-arms the professor, the professor continues to refuse to back down.
This was a coach who didn’t want to lose arguably the best player in what was an historically bad secondary for Rutgers a year ago, and wasn’t going to let a lowly professor take [Nadir] Barnwell away. He was going to use his rarefied status as the highly paid leader of King Football to make sure that no meager academic policy was going to get in the way of wins and losses.
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The problem is the “bloated sense [of] entitlement among players and coaches who … start to feel as if they can get away with just about anything. Being treated like campus gods can do that, a campus to which they are often only nominally tethered.”
We have all seen the disturbing footage of statues being forcibly taken down, and we rightly worry about the fate of other monuments dotting the homeland.
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It’s pointless to wallow in nostalgia for a time when students gratefully absorbed blows to their faces from good secondaries and professors regarded membership in bogus academic departments as their contribution to the team’s defensive line. The question is What Is To Be Done.
Begin by remembering this. Welcome to my little village! says poor Marie Antoinette. Wake up before it’s too late.
September 6th, 2015 at 9:11AM
Give the coach an F. He should know by now that he needs to assemble a reliable stable of faculty jock-sniffers and easy graders–a coalition of the compliant and complacent, in other words. The faculty jock-sniffers should be the ones running interference on the grading issues, not the coaches.
To be fair, some of the coaches in our minor sports are really pillars of rectitude and probably more serious about their players’ academic progress than faculty in the students’ majors.
September 6th, 2015 at 10:33AM
tp: All absolutely true.