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Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Intro English Professor


A piece on William C. Dowling, a Rutgers University English professor who reviles big-time university sports, appears in today's New York Times. Background on Dowling here.


'On the morning this week when the Rutgers football team reached No. 10 in the national rankings, Prof. William C. Dowling retreated four centuries to a favorite poem. It was John Donne’s “Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” the day’s topic in English 219, an introductory course in lyric literature. Dr. Dowling had set aside all 80 minutes for plumbing Donne’s 36 lines.

Coaxing, chiding, prodding, provoking, he led two dozen students through the thicket of archaic language and elusive imagery on the search for meaning...

...Dr. Dowling has stood as an idealistic absolutist, an intellectual convinced that the thunder of big-time athletics [is] crumbling the ivory tower of academe.

...[In] the bread-and-circuses department, the number of undergraduate applications has risen along with Rutgers’s sporting fortunes, as have annual donations to the university. Of course, some of the recent crop of students distinguished themselves recently by shouting obscenities at the Navy football team as it was being trounced by Rutgers a few weeks ago. [Bit sloppy for the NYT -- repetition of recent/recently in same sentence...]

Such an episode is a vivid reminder that given the tawdry history of corruption and compromise at Division I-A schools, something will happen soon enough either at Rutgers or somewhere else to make the critique in “Confessions of a Spoilsport,” [Dowling's just-released attack on major university sports] into prophecy.

...A self-proclaimed “academic traditionalist” who doesn’t drive and still thinks Bob Dylan betrayed folk music by going electric..."'



This guy doesn't drive? Does close readings of old poems? Loves early Dylan? Hates Division I-A sports?

Where do they find these people?