Hard to hold back the excitement when you see crowds like this.
And to think that some taxpayers and students resent subsidizing university football!
Wait, what? The JerryDome is going to be half-empty for Alabama-Wisconsin on Saturday night? For the Alabama Crimson Tide?
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.
This critique of this argument makes the above point.
It’s a great point, which UD would in fact revise and extend, in this way:
“There are over three thousand four-year colleges and universities in America. That 129 maintain markets in sex slaves has not caused higher education to wither away.”
In other words this is America, dammit, and we’ve got so many colleges and universities doing so many different things, that it doesn’t matter what some small number of them does – the larger national project of higher education is not going to wither away because of it. Only an hysteric would think that twenty or so Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment Redux programs are going to threaten higher education!
But hey. It’s Jersey.
Five current Rutgers football players, including the cornerback at the center of a university-led investigation into coach Kyle Flood, were charged Thursday with assaulting a group of individuals, including one student whose jaw was broken during the unprovoked attack.
… [Nadir Barnwell, one of the men charged,] is at the center of the investigation of [Rutgers football coach Kyle] Flood, with the university looking into whether the Rutgers football coach broke school policy by contacting a professor regarding Barnwell’s grades. The junior cornerback was declared academically ineligible in the spring, according to two school officials.
Flood defied academic support staff when he contacted the professor, two sources told NJ Advance Media.
And then there’s the Rutgers basketball program.
Lordy lordy. I have seen me some scuzzy programs, but Rutgers athletics lately takes the cake.
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“Coach Flood exemplifies our university’s standards and values both on and off the field,” Rutgers president Robert Barchi said in a statement.
That wasn’t long ago, right after he gave him a contract extension and a big raise. And, you know, what Barchi said is absolutely true. Putting its students in harm’s way via sadistic coaches and criminal players, and not giving a shit about academic integrity, is the Rutgers standard.
PS: They’re gonna have to pay over a million dollars to buy Flood out of his contract.
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I knew this was going to get funny.
Hands-on research in Criminal Justice majors.
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From a comment thread:
[H]alf our secondary just got arrested.
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Coach Flood Sings to His Favorite Player
I know I stand in line until you think you have the time
To talk some football with me
And if we find someplace to meet, I know that there’s a chance
You’ll end up beating on me
And afterwards you’ll drop into a quiet little place and break a jaw or two
And then I’ll go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like “I love you”
I can see it in your eyes
That you despise the same old lies you heard the night before
And though it’s just a line to you, for me it’s true
And never seemed so right before
I practice every day to find some clever lines to say
To make the meaning come through
But then I think I’ll wait until the evening gets late and I’m alone with you
The time is right, your perfume fills my head, the stars get red and, oh, the night’s so blue
And then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like “I love you”
American ingenuity at its best.
Plus she’s way quotable.
“Most people don’t find the things my friends and I do very funny, just immature, so I didn’t expect to get this big of reaction.” [SOS did some light editing on this statement.]
Meanwhile, the school has missed financial targets. A 2015 audit of athletic department finances reported that spending on equipment, uniforms and supplies came in 88 percent over budget in the 2014 fiscal year, while travel expenses were 57 percent over their mark. Meanwhile, revenue from ticket sales came in 21 percent under budget.
Overall, the school had planned to reduce its athletic subsidy by $3.5 million for the 2014 fiscal year, according to the audit. It ended up increasing it by $700,000.
La vie continue at wanna-be sports factory the University of Houston; this article about it even has the dude in charge of turning Houston into Clemson alerting us to the fact that sports are “truly the front porch of the institution.” So true, so true, which is why The Texas Tribune has done a long piece on how the school is spending itself into the gutter subsidizing games no one on campus wants to watch.
The quotation in my headline’s intriguing, isn’t it? Technically isn’t an athletic program. Yes, I see the point. It’s in the stadium and it’s used by the marching band, but it has nothing to do with athletics. It’s academic, see.
Along with all that money transferred from academics to athletics, UH has a new football coach who’s kind of the equivalent of this chick — he issues threatening language to students who might be considering not going to a football game (she issues threatening language to students who might be considering using terms like male and female). Poor students.
Here’s the bud today,
9/2/2015.
Click for a
clearer image.
I’m thinking it still looks
sunfloweresque.
This writer is talking about the big-time stuff, football, basketball. He thinks paying the players would make matters even more sordid. He sets the scene:
[P]ractically all of the dozens of football players [at the University of Southern California] with whom I interacted [as a tutor] resented their schoolwork, or to be specific, the requirement of it. They viewed it as a particularly onerous element of the raw deal that was playing collegiate-level professional sports for free. Without quite saying it, they viewed amateurism as a farce, a predatory bargain struck long before any of them had nailed their first slow-moving quarterback. They could live with the exploitation, it seemed, but certain things fell beneath their dignity, compulsory study being one of them.
However:
[T]he tragedy at the heart of college sports is college sports. Paying the players would only ensure the continuation of athletic programs as currently constructed. Everything would remain as it is, with the freakishly lucrative enterprises that are Division I college football and basketball nestled awkwardly within our higher education system. Payment would, in fact, give the system needed space to grow, protect it with a thin veneer of legitimacy, and free everyone from the constraints that have lately burdened the good time of college athletics.
Constraints here means the need for universities to find ways to pretend that these guys are in some sense students.
The pretense works fine as long as the university is itself, tout court, a pretense – the University of Alabama, Clemson, Baylor.
The pretense is always falling apart at Blanche DuBois schools, schools that continue to flatter themselves that they’re universities (Penn State, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill). At UNC they have spot checks to make sure professors are meeting their classes – – along, of course, with spot checks to make sure athletes are attending them. It’s one big pre-school program.
UD‘s beloved Don DeLillo makes a few remarks on his way to winning another prize. This particular remark reminded UD of something Saul Bellow said about Bernard Malamud:
Well, [Bernard Malamud] did make something of the crumbs and gritty bits of impoverished Jewish lives. Then he suffered from not being able to do more. Maybe he couldn’t have, but he looked forward to a fine old age in which the impossible became possible. Death took care of that wonderful aspiration. We can all count on it for that.
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The filmed murder of the two journalists in Virginia had me – and others – thinking about DeLillo, particularly his short story “Videotape,” later incorporated into his novel Underworld.
Over two decades ago, author and novelist Don Delillo published the short story “Videotape,” about a young girl who unwittingly films the murder of a man in a car behind her family’s van. Written in second person, the story manages to capture humankind’s rejection of, as well as fascination with, watching death play out on screen.
“The tape is superreal, or maybe underreal,” wrote Delillo. “It is what lies at the scraped bottom of all the layers you have added.”
I thought of “Videotape” after hearing about the Virginia shooting and taking in some of the images and facts, chief among them the chilling detail that the killer filmed the murder and made it available to the public on Facebook while fleeing police.
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Here’s some of his prose, from The Names, whose main character, an American living in Athens, is finally visiting and walking around the Parthenon. He has been avoiding it for months.
The marble seems to drip with honey, the pale autumnal hue produced by iron oxide in the stone. And there are stones lying about, stones everywhere as I cross around to the south colonnade – blocks, slabs, capitals, column drums. The temple is cordoned by ropes but this mingled debris is all over the ground, specked surfaces, rough to the touch, wasting in acid rain.
See here you have DeLillo trying to convey a postmodern disposition in the context of an ancient setting. So what he’s going to do is mix things stylistically, making plenty of room for both the enduring power of the classical temple and its values (a power the character has until this moment avoided because, in the context of a chaotic and ugly contemporary world, he finds this monumental realization of those values – “beauty, dignity, order, proportion” – “daunting”) and the much greater pull of a post-classical, post-romantic, hyper-technological world.
Here’s how he packs cultural history into his little paragraph: classicism, romanticism, modernism, postmodernism:
DeLillo’s first clause has a very simple stripped down classical balance and dignity – The marble seems to drip with honey. His second starts out pure romanticism – pale autumnal hue …
Hey – in fact – lookee here: a sonnet by Romantic poet Felicia Dorothea Hemans, “To A Dying Exotic” —
AH ! lovely faded plant, the blight I mourn,
That withered all thy blossoms fair and gay;
I saw thee blushing to the genial May,
And now thy leaves are drooping and forlorn.
I mark’d thy early beauty with a smile,
And saw with pride the crimson buds expand;
They open’d to the sunbeam for a while,
By all the flattering gales of summer fann’d.
Ah ! faded plant, I raise thy languid head,
And moisten every leaf with balmy dew;
But now thy rich luxuriant bloom is fled,
Thy foliage wears a pale autumnal hue;
Too soon thy glowing colours have decay’d,
Like thee the flowers of pleasure smile and fade.
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(UD has helpfully bolded the pertinent phrase.)
And then, number three, DeLillo moves right into modernity – science, technology, ye olde disenchanted world, here represented by iron oxide. In the hands of a mediocre writer, this shift from classicism to lyricism to iron oxide would be jarring, but DeLillo’s light and lilting prose maintains its music throughout the disenchantment, which makes everything flow … like honey. He’s not like Henry Miller, who wants to shock you, jolt you, who has Henry walking the streets of Paris in Tropic of Cancer and writing
[Some of] the women … look so attractive from behind, and when they turn round – wow, syphilis!
This isn’t about the character’s consciousness being shocked by acid rain. He knows how the world has degraded. It is about the mild cumulative realization in this particular setting of (in the novel’s final lines)
… the nightmare of real things, the fallen wonder of the world.
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Here’s UD‘s take on another DeLillo short story.
The best-known so far is Jim (“In the morning he would read the Bible with another coach. Then, in the afternoon, he would go out and cheat kids.”) Tressel, but in today’s New York Times Joe Nocera identifies a rival for top seed.
[Baylor University president] Ken Starr was as complicit in the two-year-long silence [about a football player/rapist)] as anybody in the Baylor athletic department, which makes his current “anguish” seem like little more than P.R. posturing…
But it’s at moments of crises like this one when people discover how a university, and its president, prioritizes athletics. Baylor, a Baptist school that professes to adhere to Christian principles, appears to have “sheltered” a “perpetrator,” to use Starr’s own words, because this particular perp might be able to help the team win a few games.
