Sell the college programs to the leagues with which they already do business. Sell college football to the NFL and the television networks for $25 billion and a cut of all future revenues. Same with basketball and the NBA. Let the leagues oversee player development and safety and training. Pay players in the same manner as minor league baseball players. As a condition of service, all players get an irrevocable academic scholarship to be applied whenever and wherever they choose, toward any degree from an AA to an MD.

Two liberal arts types at NYU live blog a Stern (NYU’s business school) class.

Results? Amusing.

“Tailgates are the core of this school in the fall.”

… just-released report about the real slave class in big time university athletics. These are the professors and academic tutors who devote themselves to play-acting the student part of the student-athlete. Shadowy simulacra sacrificing themselves for the good of the team, mentors/assistants/helpers (they go by many names) often do more than write papers and attend classes for the guys. One of them at the University of North Carolina paid thousands of dollars in parking tickets for a player.

Despite the large, one-time payment being made by credit card just one day before UNC attempted to [interview the tutor about academic fraud], University officials say they did not know about the [player’s] parking tickets until November 2010.

“The University learned this information during a separate review of parking citations received by football student athletes in response to media requests for records under the North Carolina Public Records Act,” the response states.

Those records, for which The Daily Tar Heel [the UNC student paper] and other media outlets sued, showed UNC football players racked up 395 tickets totaling more than $13,000 in a three-and-a-half year span.

One of the additional monitoring measures UNC has now imposed is a biweekly report of student-athlete parking citations from UNC’s Department of Public Safety.

LOL. The Biweekly Student-Athlete Parking Citations Report. This is going to crowd out the biweekly student-athlete police citations report.

Plus, in response to rampant cheating via tutors, here’s what UNC’s going to do:

… UNC has abandoned the academic mentor program, imposed additional constraints to student athletes and their tutors or learning assistants, increased the budget to hire and retain tutors and to expand rules education for tutors, among other corrective actions.

That academic mentor program sounded so good… academic… good… mentor… good… But now they have to trash it! What are they going to put in its place? What are they going to call it? Academic Enactor Program? Meanwhile they’re going to “expand rules education for tutors.”

What about rules education for professors, like this guy?

The author of the much-discussed long Atlantic article about paying college athletes sends a comment to University Diaries:

Big universities are addicted to sports money, but not because it helps the academic budget. Nearly all athletic departments have such enormous expenses that they run deficits, not surpluses, covered partly by involuntary student fees. I quoted unversity presidents saying forthrightly that sports are an unsustainable obsession at the expense of academics.

We are the only country in the world that hosts big-time sports in higher education. You seek to divorce sports from academics to preserve the latter. The two may well be incompatible, but we have not yet even begun an honest debate on that question because the NCAA has reform efforts mesmerized by phony issues of amateurism.

UD thanks Branch for the comment. She agrees that in important ways her railing against big time sports is a kind of throat-clearing for the real argument that can only ensue when things get de-mesmerized.

Who knows . . . maybe we’ll even succeed in impressing Margaret Soltan.

… the University of Oklahoma.

[T]he OU board approved a raise for football coach Bob Stoops before it got around to giving the school president authority to break its commitment to the Big 12. Stoops had been trying to get by on only $4.9 million a year in Norman.

Three women respond to a benighted article in the Guardian about the burqa.

… MacArthur recipient, writes a hell of a poem. Look at her elaborate rhyme scheme here. Quite something.

Sublunary

Mid-sentence, we remembered the eclipse,
Arguing home through our scant patch of park
Still warm with barrel wine, when none too soon
We checked the hour by glancing at the moon,
Unphased at first by that old ruined marble
Looming like a monument over the hill,
So brimmed with light it seemed about to spill,

In the penumbra of a tree. At last
We rose and strolled at a reflective pace
Past the taverna crammed with light and smoke
And people drinking, laughing at a joke,
Unaware that anything had passed
Outside in the night where we delayed
Sheltering in the shadow we had made.

*****************************

Source: Poetry (June 2008).
Reprinted here.

*****************************

So… it’s a narrative, describing a couple walking home from a dinner out (they had wine; maybe they’re a little tipsy), under the moon … The poem’s title, the word sublunary, refers to anything that occurs on earth, beneath the moon … anything earth-bound, really, as opposed to heavenly. In John Donne’s A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, the speaker rather disdainfully refers to “dull sublunary lovers” whose love isn’t true love because it lacks the transcendent quality of the speaker’s. So to be sublunary is not only to be resident on the earth; it can also imply that you are a little dull, grubby, material, stuck in the thinginess of things … incapable of reaching the heights of passion and clarity.

And indeed this couple, arguing, hot with wine, unprettily earthbound in a scant patch of park, feels sublunary enough.

They suddenly remember there’s a lunar eclipse tonight, and they look up at the moon, which is so far as “unphased” as they.

The poet means unfazed – undisturbed, calm – but she packs the phases of the moon into the word unfazed and comes up with this remarkable neologism. The moon hasn’t eclipsed; and the couple hasn’t changed from its sublunary dullness.

In the eventual darkening of the moon the couple sees their own darkness, their daily confused sublunary struggle (we are here as on a darkling plain, as another moony poem has it). Their disturbance at this sudden perception is mirrored in the disturbance the eclipse generates in the world around them: dogs bark, confused and disbelieving birds and crickets complain. The world is out of sorts; in the absence of the moon there’s not even the understanding of oneself as sublunary, not even the stability derived from a sense of one’s place in the universe.

And then the moon was gone, and in its place,
A dim red planet hung just out of reach,
As real as a bitter orange or ripened peach

In the penumbra of a tree.

The cold hard clarity of the moon – shedding at least some light on our lives, and offering at least an icon of transcendence toward which to aspire – now gives way to the bitter reality of our hopeless and confused embroilment on the earth, our

old chaos of the sun,
Or … old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free…

Ah love! Let us be true to one another! says Arnold, and so says Stallings; the oblivious world of the taverna misses this eclipse of all light, but, having ourselves seen it, we of course cling to one another:

we delayed
Sheltering in the shadow we had made.

It’s like the end of another poem set in Greece – James Merrill’s Santorini: Stopping the Leak. At the end of his walk, the speaker finds himself ready for a “tavern in the shade,” a place to shelter from the too-harsh sunlight and moonlight of an untranscendent world.

The only thing that can “eclipse” the pain of our all-too-humanness is love ((Reaching for each other’s fingertips)); the only true sheltering shade from this harshness is the shade we create for ourselves, together.

And that tour de force of a rhyme scheme, with its sly unexpected recurrences – eclipse only eventually finding fingertips, marble, long-since forgotten by the reader, returning as warble? It conveys both our continued (modest) mastery of a world we might be tempted to give up on as an object of understanding; and in its snaky sneaky gorgeousness it helps accustom us, in any case, to the penumbra.

Yet another advantage of online teaching: During his probation, Professor Larkin will develop online courses. After that, I gather he will teach them.

HARVARD CONNECTION COULD AID, HINDER WARREN

Boston Globe

Through the bloody September twilight, aftermath of sixty-two rainless days, it had gone like a fire in dry grass — the rumor, the story, whatever it was. Something about Miss Minnie Cooper …

He anticipated even the names of our cars.

From Dry September.

A University of Pennsylvania professor died over the summer, but the university forgot to cancel his course. Students bought the books, showed up… and waited.

While waiting, they received an email from an administrator telling them their professor was dead.

They got the email while they were waiting in the classroom. Yup, they bought the books, showed up for class, and BAM, your Blackberry goes off with the news that the very guy you’re waiting for is dead and now you have the afternoon to go back to your dorm and think about your own mortality. That’s the worst part of this story — you can’t even go out and party after you get the news and be all, “Whoo-hoo class is canceled! Pack the bowl!” A guy actually died.

… yet another telling of the scandalous story of university football and basketball. The New Yorker headlines its bland review of current big time campus sports

THE END OF COLLEGE FOOTBALL?

Which has a distinctly New York Daily News ring to it. What happened to the New Yorker?

Fans don’t care as long as the games are played, universities as long as the television contracts are renewed…

****************************************************

Andrew Zimbalist says that Taylor Branch is wrong about college presidents running the NCAA:

Branch’s assertion to the contrary, college presidents do not run the NCAA. It is run by athletic directors, coaches and conference commissioners, with a smattering of jock-crazed college presidents serving on NCAA committees who have done the bidding of the athletic programs and pass periodic reforms to help preserve a modicum of legitimacy for the system.

But I think Branch is right. The head of the NCAA is customarily a (former) college president; it used to be Myles Brand, and now it’s Mark Emmert. Surely Emmert’s successor will be Gordon Gee.

And there’s a whole lot more than just a smattering of jock-crazed presidents (and other highly ranked university administrators) on those committees.

And the NCAA can’t run without the greed and passivity of university presidents, so it absolutely must keep feeding those two things.

AND the NCAA needs college presidents to maintain the fiction that the organization has a shred of academic significance.

I’d say – along with Taylor Branch – that the power center of the NCAA is the university president and the university administration.

As Ellen Staurowsky says:

As commercial interests in college sport continue to grow, the fictions understandably become more difficult to sustain. The shame rests not with college sports per se but with higher education officials who have served as the architects and promoters of such a system.

It’s a review of a show she curated at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.