With the beginning of the Sandusky trial, the rhetoric-fest also begins. The outrage expressed months ago, when the story broke, now expresses itself again, often with an emphasis on the pathetic obsession with football in Happy Valley.
They’re pointing the same thing out about pathetic Auburn: “The shooting has shaken Auburn, a city of 53,000 that revolves around the football team.”
You’d never know there were universities in these locations.
[I]f all this is true, Sandusky was allowed to operate for years because other men decided there was something more important than innocent children.
Football.
Indeed in what way can it be said that universities, as we understand them, are at these locations? These are places where people are driven by blind fanaticism toward patently unworthy objects. It’s hard to get farther from the ethos of the university.
… as Mrs Potts sings, and I’m talking here specifically about the venerable tendency of some units of some universities to conceive themselves – not evolve into, but define themselves from the word go – as handmaidens to commerce. To put it genteelly.
They’re not made up of researchers with established interests. They’re made up of people who look around at government and industry and say Whaddaya want us to say?
Medicine and economics are the most likely places to find these generators of client-friendly research, but almost any part of the university might harbor them. SUNY Buffalo for instance recently sort of magically generated this new institute, the Shale Resources and Society Institute, “without consultation with the faculty senate or … putting an advisory board in place.” The hastily assembled Shale and Society specializes in producing fracking is beautiful research – and, since this research comes out of a respectable university, the fracking industry waves it about and insists on its legitimacy.
Some SUNY faculty members are unhappy about this. One of them says: “We should make sure that our research efforts don’t look like industry public relations efforts.”
Here she talks about how California’s great public university system got her started:
Fortunately, the semester fees at UCLA at that time were extremely low. I worked in the library, at a dime store, and at the bookstore. I was able to complete my undergraduate degree without going into debt. I took courses across the social sciences and graduated after three years by attending multiple summer sessions and by taking extra courses throughout. In my last year as an undergraduate, I graded Freshmen Economics.
Getting off the ground wasn’t easy:
[I]t was very hard for any department to hire a woman in those days. Fortunately, the [Indiana University] Department of Political Science later needed someone to teach Introduction to American Government on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturday mornings at 7:30 a.m. They appointed me as a Visiting Assistant Professor to do that. After a year of teaching freshmen, they asked me if I would be Graduate Advisor and moved me to a regular appointment at that point.
Ostrom contributed to the framing statement of the Tufts Summer Institute of Civic Studies, run every year by Peter Levine and Mr UD.
Ah, big-time athletics. The front porch of the university! Beeeeeeg money maker! Applications for admission go through the roof!
Eh bien. It’s hard to keep up. But let’s see:
The biggest problem Penn State’s president had before his school’s storied athletic program caught up with him involved his having flown a private plane to Harrisburg in order to tell the legislature that his school was really hurting financially.
So he was a little tone deaf! It’s not like he said in a 2001 email that
“it would be ‘humane’ to avoid alerting social services” to allegations against the now world-famous Jerry Sandusky – who, you may recall, until recently had a flavor of campus ice cream named after him…
Athletics has already brought Penn State so much. It may now make it the first American university to have a president brought to trial for failure to report a crime.
****************************************************
Paul Frampton gets one; Jerry Sandusky gets one. Everyone gets one. Bless the DSM.
Sandusky’s defense team also filed a motion to allow evidence that he has histrionic personality disorder…
From the New York Times:
[T]he mild-mannered [dean of Tunisia’s Manouba University, Habib] Kazdaghli shows little inclination to back down. He is not about to give up one of his much needed classrooms so the students can have a prayer room, especially, he said, when such facilities exist nearby. Nor is he willing to allow female students to wear veils in class, as Salafists demand.
“How can you teach a student when you cannot see her face — or give an exam when you don’t know who it is?” he said.
UD‘s friend Jonathan sent her news of the sudden resignation of the president of the University of Virginia. UD was intrigued by this part of the university’s official statement about her departure:
We also believe that higher education is on the brink of a transformation now that online delivery has been legitimized by some of the elite institutions.
There’s more stuff in the statement about needing “a much faster pace of change.”
Obviously Virginia’s MOOC policy wasn’t a central part of this decision, but UD finds it striking that the university singled it out. It suggests that all ambitious universities are – or should be? – thinking about MOOCs.
****************************
For UD‘s series of posts on her own MOOC, go here.
****************************
Related.
… would wait a decent interval before the it had nothing to do with Auburn football bullshit started up. But here it is, bright and early Monday morning:
This is not a sports story. It has a sports element, but it is not a sports story.
As such, it is not a reflection on college athletics or Auburn specifically. It is a reflection on our society…
Auburn football players, past and present, were involved, but that is not the story. The story is that young people have had their lives snuffed out far too soon. The story is that we as a society have issues that need to be addressed.
… The sadness and anger that is being expressed today, the questions that are being asked, should be focused [on] the loss of lives, not that some of those involved, some of those who died, used to play college football. To make the sports angle the focal point of this story is to miss the greater issue at hand.
If you’ve read University Diaries for awhile, you know what I call this tactic: Going Cosmic. This thing that happened, this problem that confronts us, can’t be understood (the writer uses the word ‘senseless’ four times in his senseless opinion piece) or even in a modest way solved. No, no… it’s society, society, society.
It doesn’t occur to this fool that Auburn is a society, a self-enclosed world designed to generate bad outcomes. Its board of trustees is full of former Auburn football players. For decades the school was for all intents and purposes run by Bobby Lowder, a football-obsessed trustee. Cheating is endemic – player payments, bogus courses, you name it.
You want to understand the heart of Auburn society? Here’s an ESPN writer:
Here’s what we say to athletes from a very young age: Here’s a scholarship for excelling at a violent game, here’s fame for excelling at a violent game, here’s a chance at millions for excelling at a violent game. We reward young, immature people for excelling at a violent game and then, when that violence crosses over the constantly moving line of what’s socially accepted, we all jump back and gasp in faux horror like total phonies and call for drastic action.
Senseless! Tragic! Society’s to blame! Or, to quote again from this unconscionable local opinion piece: “What’s the world coming to?”
Oh Lordy Aunt Bee yes what’s it coming to??? I declare I need smelling salts.
*******************************
Tons of these coming in now. Just a senseless random event having nothing to do with Auburn’s football culture.
This writer is particularly pissed that an article in the New York Times about the murders quotes someone suggesting that “guns and marijuana appear to be a part of the culture around the Auburn football program.”
*********************************************
Auburn football and guns? Nah.
… in my latest Inside Higher Ed post.
Read it here.
… is a dangerous place.
**************************
Updates are coming in. So far it looks as though three people are dead and several wounded. Current and former football players seem to have been involved in the fight over a woman that set off the shooting.
In the most recent sports school scandal, North Carolina at Chapel Hill has asked a professor who offered pretend courses to football players to pay up.
UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Holden Thorp told trustees Friday that Julius Nyang’oro was asked to repay $12,000 for teaching a 2011 summer course as an independent study rather than a lecture.
Does anyone really think this guy — who was chair of his department, and who will be allowed to retire with full honors at this end of this year despite the fact that he taught tons of bogus courses — is going to pay the university this money?
**************************
Longer article, with many important comments, here.
You can say that again.
This will likely be a pretty big story – an eminent literature professor is arrested for prostitution, with mug shots provided of him in drag and out of drag.
*****************************************
Max Reinhart is 65 years old. UD predicts that he will retire.
*****************************************
Keep in mind that the University of Georgia is a public university, in a state with a very conservative legislature.