Gimme Football, or Gimme Death

There is so much to write about higher education in the context of COVID-19.  A post like this one from two days ago is simply not enough!

Consider this tweet:

#Clemson's #Swinney and Texas A&M's #Fisher are the two highest-paid college football coaches ever
Fisher: a 10-year guaranteed deal worth $75 million.
Swinney: a new 10-year contract worth $93 million.https://t.co/7ZK4wNIYeB#ncaa #HigherEd

— Am.Dr.Khe (@congoboy) April 25, 2020

How is it possible for a coach of a ball team at a public university to earn 93 million over a decade?  Do people not see the insanity here?

Of course, those are rhetorical questions.  People simple did not care, and do not care.  It is almost as if Americans took up arms in 1775 and yelled, Gimme Football, or Gimme Death!  Football and basketball became the core of the American religion!

For years, top-level programs have bathed in cash. They’ve erected lavish facilities, signed coaches to multimillion-dollar contracts and massively increased athletic staff sizes. ...But the gravy train has hit a snag.

As I wrote in this blog-post on this very date in 2016, "how do we get the American public to understand what education is about?"

Well, judgment day maybe just about round the corner:

In the end it [sic], it probably won’t matter what people believe or want. The cold, hard numbers will have final say. At some point, it might not be economically feasible for most Division I college athletic programs to continue to operate as they have.
That point might be now.

In response to COVID-19, if higher education is forced to stay focused on its mission and reduce its extravagant expenses on athletics, then it will be one of the few benefits to come out of this global catastrophe.

The following is an unedited post from May 1, 2016:
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The Sunday edition of the local newspaper had plenty of pages dedicated not to the Syrian crisis, nor to climate change, and not even to the latest antics of the Donald.  The pages, with color photographs galore, were about football at the local university!  Thankfully, I did not throw up all over the paper ;)

It is simply bizarre that everybody, from the president--who was his usual masterful self at the comedy improv last night--down to the high school student complains about the cost of higher education and, yet, there are only a few of us who have been railing against the wasteful allocation of precious dollars towards college football (and basketball too.)  About five years ago, in this post, I quoted Katha Politt who phrased it well:

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.

Which is why it was refreshing to read about a public university in a neighboring state deciding that it did not want to participate in the athletic arms race.  The president of the University of Idaho, which is the state’s land-grant university, writes that some of the alumni and supporters do not agree with his decision because of the impact on the "institution’s “prestige” and “relevance.”  The university president responds to them:

Success on the football field should complement the prestige and relevance of our academic institution. But football affiliation or performance should not define prestige and relevance. The impact of our institution should define us, as measured by the entire experience for our student body, including our athletes; by academic excellence across the university; by sustained research, scholarly activity and creative success; and by deep engagement with communities and partnerships with industry.

Oh my!  Finally, a university president develops a spine to stand up against the brainwashed who believe that colleges and universities exist in order to entertain them!

Why should my university's decision about what conference to play in matter to anybody outside our institution? Because I think our situation has potential implications for dozens of universities that play big-time college football and says a lot about the state of college athletics.

Exactly!  This is 'yuge', as the guy with short fingers and a huge ego says.

We can and will create an outstanding student-athlete and communitywide experience around our program, a vibrant football culture that is a great front porch for Idaho’s leading, national research university, a draw for future students and a continued source of pride for current students. And we can do it in a way that does not constrain the university and does not distract from our core mission.

"Core mission."  What a quaint idea for a university president to make a decision based on the mission's and higher education's mission!  How do we get other universities and their presidents to understand this simple concept?  More importantly, how do we get the American public to understand what education is about?

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