University Diaries » Reflections after events at the University of Missouri…

… go to the amazing centrality of football in American public universities. As one professor puts it, “intercollegiate football, or basketball, is perceived as the face of the modern public university, large or small.”

The. Face.

So, a couple of comments post-Missouri:

So much of the political and social economy of state universities is tied to football, especially in big-money conferences like Southeastern Conference, where Mizzou plays… [University] administrators created this world where our universities revolve socially, politically and economically around the exploited labor of big time football. Now let them reap what they sow.

***********

[W]hen did sports become more important than academics in American universities…?

… [T]he USA is the only country where college sport venues … consume as much, or more, capital budget than the entire balance of the university.

… [It is] worth great value to a college to recruit a “student” who possibly [can] barely read and write.

… It is doubtful anyone is willing to separate athletics out of America’s universities. But not recognizing the corruption this has done to the original academic purpose of these institutions is turning a blind eye to the obvious. For far too many universities job #1 is about running a sports franchise.

When most of the meaning, and much of the budget, of your state school rests on football, when you are essentially a setting for farm teams, the figures on campus impersonating university presidents and provosts will be toppled again and again with each athletics crisis. Those crises – cheating scandals, rape epidemics, whormitory exposes, the abuse of players by coaching staff, teams that double as criminal gangs, professors who offer hundreds of bogus independent studies per semester, cripplingly cost-overrun stadiums, outrageous student fee hikes, etc., etc. – are built in to the football school system. Only when you drop all university-pretense, in the way Auburn and Clemson and Nebraska have done, will you stop clownishly crashing into one catastrophe after another. Humiliating betrayals of your academic mission only happen if you continue to pretend you have one. If you are smart, you will make the University of Alabama your model, where the long and happy reign of the state monarch – the football coach – guarantees social tranquillity.

***********
UD thanks Rick.

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Notes of a Neophyte

Conservative English PhD Says:
November 16th, 2015 at 10:45AM

I’m guessing Ross Douthat is not your cup of tea (or whatever), but he had a very interesting editorial in the NYT, and this part struck me:

“The contemporary college student is actually a strange blend of the pampered and the exploited.

This is true of the college football recruit who’s a god on campus but also an unpaid cog in a lucrative football franchise that has a public college vestigially attached. . .

It’s true of the rich girl who discovers the same university that promised her a carefree Rumspringa (justified on high feminist principle, of course) doesn’t want to hear a word about what happened to her at that frat party over the weekend.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/opinion/sunday/a-crisis-our-universities-deserve.html?_r=1

Margaret Soltan Says:
November 16th, 2015 at 1:56PM

Conservative English PhD: Thanks for the link – I’m going there now to read the whole thing. UD

david foster Says:
November 16th, 2015 at 3:32PM

“The contemporary college student is actually a strange blend of the pampered and the exploited.”

Not so strange…isn’t this the traditional model of selling one’s soul?…X years of being pampered followed by an eternity of the other?

Also the traditional model for livestock as holiday time approaches…

Margaret Soltan Says:
November 16th, 2015 at 7:37PM

david: Funny!