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"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Monday, January 30, 2006

UD Blogs
the Knight Commission
Summit at GWU


I

It all starts on the Metro, like so many of UD's ventures. This is the first time she's written on her new Averatec laptop while on a moving object (unless you count Earth). It's a weirdly beautiful Monday morning, very foggy, sunbeams angling down everywhere. Irish.

By the time she gets to GW and the Knight Commission meeting, the fog will have lifted, and the sun will be center stage. She'll walk quickly past Square 54, the still-empty block where the GW Hospital used to be. She'll feel awkwardly bureaucratic, clutching the black briefcase (UD doesn't do briefcases) in which her Averatec lurks. But she has decided to try live-blogging this conference on university athletics.

What does she expect? Franchement, she expects extremely well-groomed people speaking in platitudes. She believes virtually every aspect of current mid- to big-time university athletics to be indefensible, and she expects the well-meaning people in the room to dance around that possibility in a pleasant, concerned, vacuous way.

But for the moment she's on the Metro. Dupont Circle directly to your right.

II

Here we are. I've arrived a bit late, in the middle of a jargon-laden, simpleminded Powerpoint presentation: Student Athlete: Privilege, Burden, or Both? "A lot of people assume that athletes are only at the university because they can play the game. This is not based on reality." Um, yes, in many cases it is. She's a sociologist and has much to say about socialization and shit. Definitely a platitude person: "All of our leaders need to work together."

Next guy at least tells me about what sounds like an interesting site: badjocks.com. But then he Blames Society. See prior platitudes. I like some of his language: refers to some athletes' "rants and asinine behavior." Their favorite party games: CEO's and Office Ho's. Pro Athletes and Trophy Wives. But then he gets all weepy and dumb: "We expect these guys to be above reproach." No we don't. We expect much much less than that.

Next, a University of Florida player talks about how his coach has a very effective exercise he does with the football team. "He makes us close our eyes and imagine the most important woman in our lives." (Hint: It's Mom.) "Then he tells us to imagine she's being beaten in front of us. And imagine ourselves just standing there doing nothing." This does sound powerful, but to what end? So you beat the shit out of the guy...

Members of the Commission now respond: "It's about the university president. It starts from the top." (What happened to the "larger culture" argument?) Good ol' Hodding Carter's on the Commission, and UD is temporarily distracted by her effort to remember ... oh yeah, now she remembers... a smutty little Carter-era joke involving Hodding Carter and the wife of the president, both of whom blow a little dope in the White House... but onward: It's all just more platitudes: "We don't have enough dialogues...all universities should have mandatory life skills courses for all students, not just athletes... these guys need to learn what it means to be a man..."

III

After a ten minute break, we're on to the next panel. I'm now sitting on the edges of the event, plugged in to an outlet along the wall. I'm feeling forgiving, since after all the subject of the first panel was vague stuff -- values, morals, ethics, good, evil.

The President of SMU presides.

Everyone seems to be southern.

"Life," he intones, "has gotten more complex... websites follow high school recruiting... influence of coaches on decisions of young men and women... influence of shoe companies and others in the commercial world."

Some high school kid and his parents - he's about to go to Florida State University...recruitment began in his sophomore year... a very articulate confident guy, very smart... "My junior year started and I had about three or four coaches in my school every day...from all sorts of universities... summer of my senior year...overwhelming, the amount of phone calls I received. It's a lot of pressure. It got to a point where I couldn't take much more of it. I got a text message from Governor Jeb Bush."

UD found the next guy, a local high school student heavily recruited, very moving: "I wasn't very good at school. Sports was the only thing I ever wanted. Just wanted to be the best at everything. But I need to find something other than basketball that's going to make me happy and successful. These big summer camps: I'm a momma's boy. I'm alone at this basketball camp... These guys are big. But it's basketball and I just want to compete and play. I'm competitive... I've never seen so many coaches in my life... When you get exposure a lot of guys just come shooting at you. You don't know who's real and who's fake. There's three hundred colleges."

High school coach: "The influence of money has become tremendous... I've seen people offered ten, fifteen thousand dollars to play on high school - forget college - teams... Recruitment coaches are not responsible to anyone... Because of this unsanctioned thing, it allows all kinds of corruption... They take them to Las Vegas, give them prostitutes and drugs... I think it's easy for a kid to become corrupted... I know guys who've changed high school five, six times..."

A sports journalist: "Jerry Tarkanian said nine out of ten major college teams break the rules. The tenth one's in last place." He reviews statistics that make it sound as though virtually every school is corrupt. "The rules are not being followed... boosters, sports agents, corporate shoe guys... Summer basketball coach is the new point person for those three groups.. Heavy recruitment of eleven-year-old kids who can play happens because they are very valuable. It is extremely lucrative to run a summer basketball team... There is a ton of money in this. Fly by night storefront schools that can get you your transcript. They're a joke. This is what the system has created. I don't think the NCAA is interested in tackling this issue...The people who are breaking the rules are writing the rules; they're sitting on NCAA committees. The cheaters are running the show. The University of Georgia is an influential institution, for instance, that is corrupt to its very core."

All eyes swing around to the President of the University of Georgia, sitting with the Commission on the other side of the table. He blushes. Or does he just have a florid face?

One way you know this is an athletic gathering. No one gets out of their seat and sidles over to the aisle. They just jump.

Commission has definitely taken offense at this temporary eruption of the truth. "It does us no good," says one of them, "to be so accusatory... using older violations and making pretty stark statements without looking at balance... Look, you say there's been all these violations. Well, that's right! Somebody's catching these guys! [This guy - a college athlete himself back when - forgot to take intro logic.] You can attack Nike all you want but ... we've got a dialogue going... something positive came out of that...There are moves in place right now... Some of your writings [speaking directly to the sports journalist now] are about as balanced as Fox News..."

And now a word from the University of Georgia president. What the hell can he say? Sports at his school is - UD knows - she's followed it - rancid. "I want to take a couple of minutes to be defensive. This writer is welcome to his opinion. But I think we don't want to paint with too broad a brush. I've got the scars to show for changing some of the things we're talking about. When you've got 10,000 employees some of this stuff is going to happen... We're the ones in there pitching... We can either curse the darkness [I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP] or get involved in trying to make improvements..."

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

David Epstein at Inside Higher Ed covers the same event.