Ban football. Yes, college and NFL

I can't help but wonder how a student at the University of Oregon will cope when in-state tuition has recently gone up by 9% and the state legislature passed an 11% decrease in funding to the Oregon system overall for 2011 and 2012. Yet thanks to the largess of Nike founder Phil Knight, an academic center costing $41.7 million, twice as expensive in square footage as the toniest condos in Portland, has been built for the University of Oregon football team.
Always important to feed those Ducks.

 Quite a few interesting aspects to the above excerpt from this piece:

• It is from the Wall Street Journal
• A friend, "R," in India--yes, India--sent me the link, along with a note "you'll love to read this"
• The last I might have seen/met this friend in real life? About 35 years ago!

Anyway, we can't seem to write enough analytical and editorial essays about why football ought to be "punted" away from colleges and universities. And then when we think about the atrocious damages it causes, especially to the brain, it becomes all the more urgent to ban the bloody sport.  It needs to fade away the same way that boxing has lost the kind of attraction it once had.

All the more that I am looking forward to the upcoming Intelligence Squared debate on football. 

Strictly from an academic perspective, there is nothing for me to add to what the author writes:

Call me the Grinch. But I would much prefer students going to college to learn and be prepared for the rigors of the new economic order, rather than dumping fees on them to subsidize football programs that, far from enhancing the academic mission instead make a mockery of it.

We ought to keep in mind that this sport-centered academic culture is an uniquely American irrationality.

In no other country’s university system, after all, does sports play anything like the central role it does in American academic life. Men do not go to Oxford to play cricket; the Sorbonne does not field a nationally celebrated soccer team. Even in the most sports-mad countries, sports is sports and education is education. That’s a better system.

But then, ahem, who cares for what I blog/think/write/say, right? :)