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Friday, December 22, 2006
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Stanley Fish Has Quite the Podium... ...at the New York Times. He also teaches at one of the very worst universities in the country, Florida International. FIU is a national scandal in many instructive ways: it has a greedy and inept president, cares almost exclusively about sports, imposes ever-higher athletic fees on a struggling student population... And rather than educate that population, it's gonna build a big, big, BIG new stadium for it... Despite free admission [to games] for students, many have yet to catch the buzz. Although the school said it sells nearly all 17,000 seats for home games, marching band member Leoncio Alvarez said he often looks up to a half-empty stadium. Although the university's president so mismanaged a major donor to a proposed medical school that FIU lost $20 million when he decided to withdraw the funds, and although, as a recent article in the Miami Herald points out, "FIU football's most intense national exposure came this year as a result of an on-field brawl between its players and UM's. ESPN played clips of the fight repeatedly," the university continues to put most of its resources - its students' resources - into games. It pays enormous sums for coaches, and for coach severance when one coach after another fails to work out. FIU's leaders are cynics; its students are saps. The place has become a national story. Where is Fish? Hundreds of thousands of people read his high-profile Times column. He is not shy about speaking his mind. He could do massive good for the school. He should speak up. |