“It’s going to continue to drain money from the core mission of the university. And there’s no end in sight. How many years do we do this?” keens a University of Massachusetts professor as the school’s ignorant padded armies clash by night…
It’s gotten quite lyrical, this national chorus of professors lamenting the tragic infinitude of university football — or, as the latest installment in Bloomberg’s series on the subject has it, “Football is Forever.” The author of the series points out that
Once a school fields a top-division football team, it’s nearly impossible to reverse the commitment.
I can’t go on, I’ll go on would be the more modern, tragicomic, version of this classic truth: The morally and financially rancid circus of big-time university football (toss in basketball, of course) cannot be dismantled. Eight times a year an addled elephant will be made to balance on its back legs in front of four rich drunks in the luxury suites and forty poor drunks in the bleachers, plus there’s the police and the littering tailgaters and the clean-up crew and that’s all folks. That’s the show. It struts its stuff forever and forever, signifying nothing, but royally fucking over your university.
January 6th, 2017 at 3:56PM
Congrats on the new GWU president.
January 6th, 2017 at 4:32PM
Anon: He and his wife rappel! This impresses me.
January 8th, 2017 at 2:35PM
Just remember the priorities at the modern American university:
Teaching is ok, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of research,
Research is ok, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of fund raising,
Fund raising is ok, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of football.
January 10th, 2017 at 12:20PM
Your new president, perhaps consulting with his old boss Shalala, will no doubt find a way to drive GWU to the same heights of excellence as Miami. Something like a Division I football team would be a good start.
January 10th, 2017 at 12:44PM
tp: LOL. I’m not sure he’s like Shalala, despite coming from sordid UM. Seems a rather more serious STEM sort…
As you know, I consider GW’s somehow having overlooked acquiring a football team by far the smartest thing the place ever did. I’m probably not alone in that opinion.
January 10th, 2017 at 2:23PM
If there is one solitary thing I will give our own President Peterprinciple credit for (otherwise a catastrophe in slow motion), it is helping to defuse the desire of some trustees to bring back football. I hope that your new prez can make a clean break from that aspect of Miami.
January 10th, 2017 at 7:11PM
He does seem very different from Shalala, but she hired him and they seemed to get along just fine though many a scandal. I don’t think there were many tears shed when they announced he was leaving.
I hope it works out for you.