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UD is...
"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)

Friday, August 31, 2007

University of Oklahoma Football Team
Being Siphoned Off, Player by Player



Tim Burke has a lengthy consideration on his blog today of why Americans hate professors. It's titled Angry at Academe, and it offers reasons why people like UD are loathed by the rest of the country. Let's take a look.

Americans resent the monopoly universities have over their career success. The university stands "like a colossus atop almost all forms of social aspiration, [and] a lot of people who might be better off chasing their own muse get corralled inside higher education." The professor represents the embodiment of the university's unavoidable power over everyone's future.

Americans also resent the tenurati's perks and privileges:


We’re not nearly as well-paid as most other professionals, but tenure-track faculty have embedded compensations which almost no one, professional or otherwise, has in this economy. Job security is almost the least of it: the ability to work without direct supervision from a boss might be even more valuable. And faculty within their institutions are accustomed to at least think they are in control of the institution, and perhaps they should be. It’s not wrong for faculty to think that their work is at the center of higher education, that without them, the whole thing would be pointless. But these basic structural facts alone also tend to isolate academics even from other workers in their own institutions, and have a spill-over into the wider communities that they live within. Add to that some of the peculiar flourishes of scholarly and intellectual cultural life, and you have a reason for a structural antagonism between academic professionals and the wider society. I don’t think there’s much to be done about it except to know it is there, to soften its edges, and to be humble about its manifestations.


Tim could have been more explicit here. We get to lord it over other people at our institutions; once tenured, we have the sort of job security unimaginable to most Americans; we have spectacular autonomy and a lot of time to ourselves. I'm not sure what he means by the "peculiar flourishes," but let's assume he has in mind geegaws like regular sabbaticals and leaves, an often glorious campus setting, a rich and enviable cultural life (this is part of the reason for the fast-growing trend toward people wanting to retire next door to universities), and, for many professors, getting paid to do something you love.

The operative word is envy, which is why Tim concludes the paragraph by using the word "humble." Professors can be quite arrogant -- or can sometimes be read as arrogant even if they're not -- and this, coupled with all of their privileges, may make them look vile, smug, entitled.

And then there's a general incomprehension of intellectuality for its own sake:

There are a lot of forces in American life since 1950 that have pushed our culture away from valuing knowledge that is impractical or has no immediate application. Universities have colluded in defining the value of what they do in terms of careers and economic rewards, but that’s also been done to them by the relentless careerism of students and their parents. The ghastly cynicism of big-time college athletics has had a generally corrosive effect, often feeding a belief that college is primarily for parties, getting laid, and social networking.



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UD's humble take on all this is that the incomprehension goes both ways.

Although she blogs incessantly about them, she doesn't really understand many of the people who gum up the works at so many American universities.... When she reads about their doings in the news, she has to scratch her head. I mean, fine... they don't like her... they don't get her... but she doesn't like and doesn't get them....

Following events at an acutely anti-academic place like the University of Oklahoma, for instance, is for UD like reading a story by Isaac Babel, in which the world's been turned upside down and makes no kind of sense... or, no -- it makes sense, but a malign and absurd sense... Things are so bad at places like OU that they routinely tip over into comedy:





Freshman wide receiver
Ryan Broyles has been suspended from the Oklahoma football team after his arrest early Friday on suspicion of trying to steal gasoline from a Norman convenience store pump.

“Effective immediately, Ryan is suspended from the team for an indefinite period of time," OU coach Bob Stoops said in a statement released Friday afternoon. "I take very seriously the conduct of our players and I will not compromise my expectations for anyone associated with our program."

Stoops has reason to take the matter seriously. His program is coming off a year-long ordeal involving three players being paid by a booster for hours they did not do at a Norman car dealership. Two of the players, Rhett Bomar and J.D. Quinn, were dismissed right before camp opened for the 2006 season. [You know it's the local press here, since the writer both sobs along with the coach on the subject of his "ordeals," and chooses not to pick up on the irony of Stoops announcing that a notoriously corrupt program takes player conduct seriously.]

The NCAA and OU conducted a joint investigation. The NCAA infractions committee found OU guilty of failure to monitor last July. The committee extended OU's probation -- the university had been penalized for violations committed in its... basketball program the previous year -- through May 23, 2010.

Of the Broyles matter, whether it was isolated in nature or other players were involved, OU assistant athletic director Kenny Mossman said: "We'll look into it thoroughly."

According to Norman police Capt. Leonard Judy, a patrol officer observed the 19- year-old Broyles standing between an SUV and a pump at a closed Mr. Shortstop convenience store in east Norman at 12:10 a.m. Friday.

The officer, Judy said, discovered a key stuck in a lock on the front panel of the pump, and determined it belonged to Broyles. Broyles was also in possession of override codes which he used to activate the pump after gaining access with the key. [Codes and key! Enterprising lad. Wonder how he got that stuff.]

Judy said Broyles was arrested on attempted larceny charges and booked into the Cleveland County Detention Center. A Cleveland County Sheriff's Department spokesperson confirmed Broyles posted $200 bond and was released at 3:44 a.m. Friday.

Ron Henderson, owner of the Mr. Shortstop where Broyles was arrested, distanced himself from the university when contacted Friday.

"I've heard all these conspiracy theories that I'm a donor or supporter of the program. Nothing could be further from the truth," he said. "Other than I'm a general fan like everybody in Norman might be. I've never met Ryan Broyles, and don't know anything about him other than what I've read about his as a player.

"I've never had a key to those pumps and I've been here 36 years. I'm totally amazed to find out something like this could happen. My real concern is who might have those keys or codes and how long this has been happening. We've had problems balancing our inventory and some irregularities the last two or three months. We thought the problems were leakage in the lines or tanks. We never dreamed it might be something like this." [Theft plus leakage. Make a note of it: Mr. Shortstop.]

Henderson, who was Norman's mayor from 2001-04 and who owns three Mr. Shortstop stores in the city, said he contacted OU athletic director Joe Castiglione Friday morning.

"I wanted to make him aware of the situation," he said. "Other than that, it's pretty much in the hands of the police. My thing is to cooperate with the authorities through the investigation process, to find out how widespread this is and if others have keys."



What I'm getting at is that for UD this is totally Twin Peaks... Ask her to unpack this series of events -- the mysterious keys and override codes, the conspiracy theories, the irregularities, the gas station owner who was also the mayor -- and she simply can't. She can note the chilling fact that one by one the players for the Oklahoma team are being spirited away... she can wonder whether, as each vanishes, there will be any team left at all... She can wonder why this activity takes place at a university, and why this university's squalid team is, as Mr. Henderson tells us, universally adored ... But she can't make sense of it, because it seems to her incredible that any university would stoop so low as to be this...