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Sunday, October 28, 2007
"Big-time college football is now so divorced from what actually goes on at a university as to be a kind of subsidiary, not even tangentially related to education." Good piece in the New York Times about the business of bigtime university sports. It features Florida, with its substandard higher education system, bankrupting itself on football: '[Universities] now have to pay millions a year to keep their programs going, and donors alone won’t cover the costs. Two [such] schools — the University of Central Florida and Florida Atlantic University — have ... run up multimillion-dollar debts building expensive stadiums.' The article concludes: 'Maybe the best thing that can be said about pouring money into football is that, as [one commentator] told me, stadium construction is hardly the worst thing that goes on in college sports. “Skyboxes are not the most cancerous elements in most athletic departments,” he says. And what is? His reply: “How about the recruitment of athletes who do not have the ability to benefit from a college education?” Hey, someone has to take the field in all those fancy new stadiums.' |