University Diaries » EXISTENCE PRECEDES PUTRESCENCE.

So now with all this talk of vanishingly few people going to football games (we’ve been talking about it on this blog for a long time), UD is here to tell you the truth about why it’s happening.

Recall Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous dictum – Existence precedes essence. With football, it’s equally existential, though with a twist.

Existence precedes putrescence.

Did you know NASCAR attendance/viewership is also tanking, at an even faster rate than university football? NFL attendance/viewership is down too.

The core problem is one of – incremental, to be sure, but real enough – civilizational progress. We are failing to replicate yahoos.

With each passing year, our young men look at stands rich with drunks either screaming at fields rich with assholes, or enduring fifteen minutes of ads screamed at them from stadiums rich with Adzillatrons, and they ask themselves: Is it just me, or is this disgusting? Am I alone in feeling kind of dirtied up by what I’m being put through here? By the sort of people I’m supposed to be cheering for? By the whole cheesy exploitative atmosphere? Does anyone else notice the hypocrisy of all this clean-cut Americanism as the world’s thinnest overlay for greedy coaches, concussed players, and the total domination of tv revenue?

In short:

I have a life (that’s the “existence” part) and I don’t have to spend one moment of it with this rottenness (putrescence).

The problem is particularly acute on college campuses, where a real-time war is being waged between the pressure from the institution to civilize, and the pressure from the game to barbarize. At least NASCAR isn’t being staged on the fields of Harvard! The great disadvantage under which college football labors is its proximity to sources of human development.

As universities respond by retrofitting stadiums with less and less seating, it’s going to occur to them that things like football and NASCAR are assuming the subcultural status of professional wrestling and motorcycle gangs. Schools will begin the titanic task of dismantling the vast smoky hollow that was their football stadium.

Watch the demolition, and you will be reminded of people all over Europe pulling down statues of Lenin.

Trackback URL for this post:
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/wp-trackback.php?p=59026

UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil

It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo

There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub

You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog

University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog

[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal

Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education

[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University

Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University

The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog

Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages

Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway

From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law

University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association

The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog

I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes

As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls

Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical

University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life

[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada

If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte

Comment on this Entry

UD REVIEWED

Archives

Categories