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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)

Monday, October 15, 2007

Runaway Train


Last night, at a restaurant in Union Station, UD shared a plate of spicy calimari with Nathan Tublitz.

Today, at the annual meeting of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, she'll watch him and other panelists talk about "Crises Spurring Faculty Involvement" at various big sports schools.

The whole meeting's about the relationship between faculty and university sports. UD has already, at Inside Higher Ed, discussed this subject, and she's looking forward to hearing many other people discuss it.

Right now, she's on a metro car hurtling toward the National Press Club, where the Commission's meeting.

A woman across the aisle from UD reads a book titled The Millionaire from Nazareth: His Prosperity Secrets for You!


$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$



"Faculty have thrown in the proverbial towel."

This is the first statement at the big morning gathering of the Commission that strikes UD. Which proverb features towels?

It's an ugly woody underlit room in the National Press Building, and the people in it are mainly white men in excellent suits. Most have Southern accents.

One of the reasons for the towel-throwing is that there's always vapid rhetoric to keep things hopeless. Can't do anything about it, says one speaker, until we solve this nation's race and gender inequities. It's all about facilitating communication among stakeholders, says another. UD reaches for her bubbly water and considers leaving...

Then Scott Adler speaks, and she perks up a bit. "Here's what all faculty gotta understand. Sports on your campus is gonna cost you. It's not going to make money. And there's no data to support the idea that athletics, when it does occasionally bring in money, brings it in for anything other than more athletics."

A couple of people in the audience who don't understand the difference between a singular example and a trend protest that at their school sports makes money hand over fist. Adler explains the difference to them.

His basic point is that athletics and faculty are two totally separate worlds. They can't even talk to each other, let alone work together.

Another guy on the panel asks: "Can we articulate and measure the academic value of college sports? If not, then we're making it very hard to justify the enterprise."

Adler says that university athletics has "spun out of control. We're just running to catch up and patch the holes. [He's talking off the cuff. I'm not going to fuss about mixed metaphors.] It's a runaway train."


!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!



But then it gets depressing again. A guy from a local university gets up and says coaches should be professors. "I'd love to see them join the faculty. They have so much to offer." UD packs up to leave...

Oh, but the session's over. People are clustering in little groups now, chatting about who's working where -- professional gossip. While they do that, UD recalls how she evolved into a blogger who writes a lot -- has to write a lot -- about bigtime university sports.

When she began University Diaries, she thought she'd write mainly about intellectual conflicts on campuses. She gradually realized that sports is a humongous university crap-making machine and must be attended to, whether she likes it or not.