This much we know. But Gerald Gurney and Mary Willingham also touch on something UD finds of increasing interest:
Providing a quality education for all athletes has been sacrificed for a tribal fanaticism for college athletics.
Tribalism and fanaticism are precisely the sorts of things universities are supposed to stand against – to educate against. These profoundly anti-social and anti-intellectual motives have traditionally found a home in the private, peripheral space of the fraternities. How amazing, now, to watch tribalism and fanaticism infect entire American universities! To watch presidents and trustees who are just as brainless and belligerent as some of the school’s frat boys!
Recall Kevin Carey on the nihilistic tribalism of some American universities:
[The university’s academic unit can go, but] the football team must be saved because the intense tribal loyalty generated by big-time sports is one of the chief mechanisms employed by universities to create the illusion that they exist. I’ve lived in Chapel Hill and experienced the closest thing to full-scale Dionysian revelry one is likely to find in modern America, on Franklin Street after the men’s basketball team won it all. It was thrilling. It felt like we were one people, all of us, conquerors. But it was also an illusion (I wasn’t a student at the time), a false consciousness manufactured by the university to conceal its non-existence as an academic institution.
The source of the athletics fanaticism, from this point of view, is quite obvious. Increasingly, without the athletics, there’s nothing there.
******************
(Photo link is from a new sports cafeteria at the University of Oregon.)
October 26th, 2015 at 7:41PM
Gurney and Willingham write that “the potential loss to the reputations of the universities pales in comparison to their failure to adequately educate football and men’s basketball players.” But this misses what strikes me as the *real* scandal: the building of the NCAA into a system that exploits talented, hardworking high school athletes who are not prepared to benefit from college but have to pretend to be students anyway. In order to develop their talent to the level where they can sell it for what it’s worth on the market (i.e., turn pro), they must first put in several years working for nothing. I say “nothing” here because, if you’re grossly academically unprepared to benefit from higher education (and in any event hardly ever go to class) all that tuition you’re getting is worth nothing.
The scandal is not the failure to educate those who don’t particularly want a college education in the first place. The scandal is a system that, unless you’re at the level of a Kobe Bryant coming out of high school, pretty much requires that you work four years for free. And one of the uglier truths of this system is the extent to which those supplying the talent are black and those profiting off of it are white. It’s the post-Jim-Crow version of Ralph Ellison’s Battle Royal.
October 26th, 2015 at 7:56PM
it’s a disaster all around.
avenues to credit hours with absolutely no intellectual/academic effort… initially for just the athletes, but then available widely in an attempt to skate ncaa rules…
kids told they would get a great education in exchange for their efforts on the field not actually being given that great education…
athletes forced into uncompensated labor…
yeah, it’s pretty fucking glorious. go team!
October 26th, 2015 at 8:16PM
Dr_Doctorstein: I love your analogy to Ellison’s Battle Royal in Invisible Man. That scene captures the sickening grotesquerie you’re getting at.
October 29th, 2015 at 11:30AM
In real life, universities are just like cities: they have wonderful neighborhoods, so-so sections, and horrific slums. They can be sports factories and real universities at the same time, but the different parts tend to separate from each other.
On another note, an advisee, one of our department’s few athletes told me that “Coach” informed her minions not to schedule any classes between 11 AM and 2 PM, because that’s when they are going to practice next semester. In the old days, I might have gone shrieking directly to the president, but these days, I won’t bother: I would need to scrape him out of the corner of his private bathroom, where he spends all day long huddled with the lights out, clutching a “Go Castaways” pennant in one hand and the next budget cuts for academics in the other.
October 29th, 2015 at 12:00PM
tp: The prez. Laugh Out Loud.