Abolish NCAA sports. It has no "business" at universities

Shahab earned his masters degree in Nebraska before he settled down in Southern California for good.  He once remarked that the entire state turns red when the University of Nebraska's football team played at home. (Red is their jersey color.)

In the Midwest and the South, and even here in Eugene, college football rules the lives of many.  I was a fan, once, before I was woke, as we say now. 

The coronavirus threatens the football season, and people are already losing it.  Like this coach at Oklahoma State, who went on a rant:

“In my opinion, we need to bring our players back,” said Gundy (via Sports Illustrated), who has posted a 129-64 record over 15 seasons with the Cowboys. “They are 18, 19, 20, 21 and 22 years old, and they are healthy and they have the ability to fight this virus off. If that is true, then we sequester them and continue, because we need to run money through the state of Oklahoma. ...
Everybody needs to see football. Even if you just watch it on TV, it’s going to make people feel better.”

This is at a time when colleges and universities--including his own--are all closed down.

There are plenty of nutcases like him, and addicted fans in millions, who are already panicking about no-football-Saturdays.  tRump knows well that his base are "yuge" football fans, and not having football in the months leading up to the election will doom him even in the red states.  The toddler-in-chief has, therefore, thrown a tantrum about that too!

With the COVID-19 crisis, we now have an opportunity for a major reset.  Will we make use of this opportunity?

I have been blogging forever about the atrocity of the business of sports at universities.  The following is a quote from Katha Pollit, which I blogged about in November 2011:

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.

A much better system we too can have.

So, what should we do?  I need to only slightly alter Pollit's prescription:

Cancel the season. Fire everybody. Get real. Grow up.

Money, sex, and entertainment ... today's American university!

In an email to my colleagues, in which I shared with them an informative video, I wrote:

People pushing STEM while systematically marginalizing the humanities and the social sciences need to understand such a big picture, which is what the idea of liberal education is all about.  If any of you want to share this video with the institution's STEM-pushers, feel free; I have long given up on them.

I then wonder why I don't make friends ;)

Apparently there is one set of higher educational institutions where the humanities and the social sciences are alive and well. No, not the Ivy Leagues and other private elites.  There, the best and the brightest are feverishly in the pursuit of fame and fortune via Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

So, where are the humanities and the social sciences prospering?

I’ve only found one large class of schools where humanities enrollments have held steady: historically black colleges and universities.

Apparently most of the rest of us do not care about "crafting a philosophy of life."

 In 1970, seven in 10 students thought it was very important or essential to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life” through education, while about four in 10 (and five in 10 men) put a priority on using it to “make more money.” By the mid-’80s, these ratios had flipped. Of all the statistics on the humanities I’ve seen, I find this one the most depressing: For the past 40 years, the percentage of first-year college students who think highly enough of crafting a life philosophy in the course of their studies to muster the energy to fill out a bubble indicating as much has flatlined below half. It’s little wonder that so few major in the liberal arts in the end.

Across the board, there has been an ever increasing interest, a passion, a commitment, to one part of higher education: Athletics--football, in particular!  No scandal shall ever stop this deep-commitment.

Most of the big-time football schools are public--yes, taxpayer funded--like the U of Alabama, Ohio State U, ... an endless list. Many of them still referred to as land-grant institutions:

Each of these universities is a land-grant institution, established by the Morrill Act of 1862, which was sponsored by Vermont Senator Justin Morrill and signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln. Their guiding vision was to offer the highest quality of teaching, research, and service to communities across the country. These institutions have given our nation the greatest public-university system in the world.

Good ol' Abe will be shocked at how these institutions that he helped found have now become altars for entertainment, where coaches earn gazillion dollars, and scantily-clad women cheer the men on the field!

Do we have to then wonder how we ended up with this presidency, when even institutions that supposedly are about learning couldn't care a shit about life and truth?

Why the Rockefeller and Bush boys don't play pro football

Of course, it takes skill to play sports; I know it all too well.  But, there is more than mere skill:

[college athletes] who don’t come from dire poverty will in greater and greater numbers choose to do something else with their minds and bodies. Many NFL players began their lives in destitute situations defined by hardship, but many others come to the league from stable, middle-class backgrounds as well. That middle-class player, especially those like Russell Wilson and Colin Kaepernick who played multiple sports, will become scarce. Meanwhile, as ticket prices rise, we are facing a sport ready to go “full gladiator” as poor people, disproportionately black, damage one another’s brains for wealthy, disproportionately white crowds.

Yep, when I blog like this, you can see that the old commie, leftist, me is very much alive and well.  Tell you what, I am always glad that part of me is alive and well.  If I didn't think about the race and class and gender implications, then I will worry about me.  It is just that I don't like the idea of always, always, viewing the world through a race or class or gender issue.

Anyway, that excerpt is from that old commie rag, for which I always have a soft spot--The Nation.  It is in the context of San Francisco 49er linebacker Chris Borland walking away from gazillions of dollars.

source

He is only 24, and has some years left banging his helmeted head against other plays.  But, that is exactly why he called it quits.

Untold legions suffer from CTE, a brain ailment that affects motor skills, memory and impulse control. Early onset dementia and ALS can result from the kinds of repeated blows to the head that happen on every play of every game. The ignominious history of head injury casualties includes high-profile suicides of Hall of Famers Mike Webster and Junior Seau. It includes Dave Duerson who like Seau put a bullet in his chest instead of his head so his CTE-wracked brain could be studied. It also includes icons of the 1980s like Jim McMahon and Tony Dorsett struggling with basic life-functions. History shows that playing NFL-level-football is like playing Russian Roulette with your future, and Chris Borland decided to do what so few have done and put the gun down. “I just honestly want to do what’s best for my health,” Borland told ESPN’s Outside the Lines. “From what I’ve researched and what I’ve experienced, I don’t think it’s worth the risk.”

When the NFL fights a very good fight downplaying the long-term health issues of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE,) Borland makes this compelling point even when talking about "his passion for the “visceral” violence of the sport":

That doesn’t mean football players are pieces of meat. I think the most important people to convey that message to is the football player himself. You’re not a commodity, you’re a person.

I hope that this madness that is called a "sport" is sent to a dark corner as was that other brain-damaging sport of the past--boxing.  The sooner the better.

A new year means a new highest paid "educator" ever at nine million dollars!

With fewer and fewer students choosing to enroll in my classes, soon I will be forced to blog for loose change.  So ... how much would you pay to subscribe to my daily rants and raves?

Of course you would not spare a penny, and would rather condemn me to the unemployment lines, right?

Because you--well, not personally you, but as a stand-in for an American--would rather be entertained.  I don't entertain.  Not even close.

So, you want to be entertained.  And that is how you would spend your money.  There are millions of Americans expressing such choices.

So, guess what?

Shit like this happens: Jim Harbaugh is done with the San Francisco 49ers.  The team that he coached was not entertaining enough this year.  Off with his head then!

But, oh, this is Jim Harbaugh.  So, guess what?  Shit like this happens:

Harbaugh is expected to become college football's highest-paid coach, earning more than the $8 million per-year salary that was originally reported, sources told Rapoport. Nick Saban is the highest-paid college coach at $7.2 million per year. Harbaugh's number could reach as high as $9 million per year, according to NFL Media's Albert Breer.

Are you now happy that nine fucking million dollars a year is what a public university will spend on a football coach in order to entertain the masses?  Are you not entertained?

As you the consumer make these choices, there are fewer dollars to spend on other things. Like, you know, education.  Who cares for those youth who come from low- and middle-income families with no trust funds for their education, right?  It is their mistake not to have been born into rich families.

It is only a matter of time before the university where I teach gets into a budget squeeze that has already affected other institutions.  You as the taxpayer will then point to classes like mine with three and five students and remark, "what a waste of money with only three students in a class!" because you are not being entertained with your tax dollars.  You would rather have that tax money back in your wallet in order to spend it on football coaches who will entertain you.

A liberal democracy means that you have the right to make these choices.  More power to you.  May you have enough and more entertainment in the new year and beyond.

Can you locate Michigan on this map and determine whether its needs to be updated? ;)
Source

Higher education does not care about its unemployed graduates. It is football season!

"How adrift were you at twenty-two?" is not only internally poetic and philosophical but is also a quick online questionnaire at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

I would love to include that questionnaire as my first day activities when classes begin in a few days.  But, I won't--I cannot afford to drive away even more students than I currently do!

I could give those questions to any number of young people I come across.  Like the young woman who works at the grocery store that I frequent.

I first met her a few years ago, when she started working there.  Through small talk when she was scanning my purchases, I came to know that she was a student majoring in psychology at the local big university that is attached to a minor-league football team.  Every time I was at her counter, I chatted with her--she was always bubbly and excited about college and the world, which made this tired old curmudgeon happy.  When I asked her about career plans, she knew one thing: “I don’t want to become a lifer here.”

As she was getting close to graduation, more than a year ago now, she continued to have that excitement in her and carried out the typical American college student's plan to travel through Europe for a few days.

I still see her working at the same grocery store. Scanning groceries and bagging them.  I don't know how she feels about it because I intentionally avoid going to her counter.  I worry that I will ask her about life.  I don't want to do that.

Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, whom I have cited plenty of times in this blog, have a new book that follows up on where their previous work ended.  In this essay in the Chronicle, they are not optimistic about the long-term future of the typical college graduates including the likes of that grocery store checkout woman:

In terms of economic outcomes, two years after graduation 23 percent of those in the labor market were either unemployed or underemployed (working fewer than 20 hours per week or in jobs where the majority of workers had not completed even a year of college), and less than half had full-time jobs that paid $30,000 or more per year. They also were struggling to become independent: 24 percent were living at home with their parents, and 74 percent reported receiving continued financial assistance from parents.

Their book is based on case studies, in which they track down some of the students they had interviewed for that previous book.

As colleges have sold themselves as economic-development vehicles, and their degrees as tickets to the middle class, the ethos of the marketplace has become their master, overshadowing their civic and intellectual purposes.
The tight embrace of higher education and the economy has an obvious downside: When times get tough, colleges take a beating. Predictably, tales emerge of recent graduates with expensive and worthless degrees failing to make their way into adulthood. They come from many of the same colleges, we are told, that are the envy of the world.
As college costs increase, so do expectations about payoff and questions about value. How should colleges be judged, if not by the financial success of their students? Is it higher education’s job to fix the economy?

To readers of this blog, and to anybody who has had the unfortunate experience of listening to me, these are not new issues at all.  The tragedy is that despite all the mounting evidence, we continue to go about with higher education with more of the same.  How unfortunate!

Arum and Roska argue--and I concur with them, of course--that colleges are to be blamed a lot for how things have turned out:

We find it implausible that in a globalized knowledge economy, the current state of affairs will continue indefinitely. Not just because the growth in college costs is unsustainable, but also because legislators, families, and students will have difficulties justifying why resources are increasingly allocated not to improving instruction but to building new dormitories, student centers, and athletic facilities. While this might be an effective institutional strategy for attracting 17-year-olds as consumers and keeping them satisfied with "bread and circuses" once enrolled, it has produced a competition to provide the best amenities and student services money can buy and the least challenging academic demands and expectations.
It is high time for educators to say enough is enough. If we continue to sit on our hands, the public’s faith in higher education will continue to erode, and poorly designed accountability frameworks will likely be imposed upon the system. And we will have ourselves to blame.

Yes.

"Colleges," Mr. Schneider says, "may be really sorry they went down this road."

Oh yeah?  How about 'em Ducks!

Revelation on a football saturday evening: Lucky to be alive!

Saturday evening.

I finished the leftover home-cooked food, loaded up and ran the dishwasher, and enjoyed a hot shower.  There was nothing left to do but to settle in front of the television.

I switched it on.  

I channel-surfed past the football games and ended up at C-Span's BookTv--it was a few minutes into the After Words program with Richard Dawkins.

Who would want to miss watching an interview with Richard Dawkins.  And watch football instead?  Not me. No, sir!

Dawkins was being interviewed about his latest book, which is a memoir, part one.  Even normally, he is a good storyteller, and in this he was even more relaxed.  The ground that was covered was not anything new--from life and science, to atheism, to justice.  And, of course, about meme.

Dawkins' points were yet again a reminder on how lucky we are to be alive, given the randomness of it all.  (For you lazy people, I have clipped that segment here from the program that is available in its full length.)

He refers to how even a sneeze could have resulted in a different world history sans Hitler.  And uses sneeze as that metaphor so much that I wondered why he didn't quote Martin Luther King, Jr. who talked about the sneeze as well. In the powerful "mountain top" speech the day before he was assassinated, King talks about getting a letter from a young girl, a white girl, who wrote to him after he survived the stabbing by a crazy woman.  Referring to the NY Times report that King could have died if he had even sneezed, the girl wrote to him that she was happy that King didn't sneeze.

So, yes, a sneeze is all that matters, metaphorically and literally sometimes.

When discussing the remarkable odds against which we have come to exist, Dawkins recited that old Aldous Huxley poem.  The genius and polymath that he is, Dawkins has it all in his memory.  A lesser mortal that I am, I later googled for it:

A million million spermatozoa,
All of them alive:
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah
Dare hope to survive.
And among that billion minus one
Might have chanced to be Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne—
But the One was Me.

It was the first of the million million to reach the egg and won the race.  Who knows how I would have turned out if it had been one of the others, eh!  

Thus we are born. Out of randomness. We evolved out of random events.  Life itself evolved in a random manner.  

Who better than Monty Python to put this all in perspective ;)

We are what we eat. We are what we like?

It is football season.

No, I don't waste my time and money watching the games.

In the comics section of the newspaper, football season is always a reminder to good ol' Charlie Brown (yes, in reruns and, no, not the character 'rerun') not to believe that this time he will kick the ball that Lucy offers to hold for him.  Not to believe whatever Lucy says about no more cheating and lying.  Yet, he trusts her that this time it will be different.

Good ol' Charlie Brown.

We love the Charlie Browns of the world because they are Charlie Browns.  It will be a rotten, rotten world if there were no Charlie Browns.

I wonder if our preferences for cartoon characters also says something about our own personalities?

The University of Nike's Pigskin Palace. Knight is no Carnegie!

A couple of days ago, NPR aired a piece on the steel baron, Andrew Carnegie, who gave away a good chunk of his fortune to build public libraries throughout the United States.  Yes, public libraries. To be accessed for free.

In 1889 Carnegie wrote an article called "The Gospel of Wealth," in which he spelled out his views on philanthropy: "In bestowing charity the main consideration should be to help those who help themselves."
The rich should give, so the poor could improve their own lives — and thus the lives of the society. Giving was a code of honor. "The man who dies rich dies in disgrace," Carnegie said.
Nasaw says the steel master was in his 30s when he decided he was merely the shepherd of his wealth.
"It is his responsibility to give it back," Nasaw says, "to return it to the community because the community — all of those men and women who contribute to the making of Carnegie steel, the mothers who feed their children, the day laborers, the whole large community — is responsible for making this wealth and they're the ones who have to get it back."
So public libraries became instruments of change — not luxuries, but rather necessities, important institutions — as vital to the community as police and fire stations and public schools.

Yes, Carnegie was ruthless as a businessman, as a capitalist.  But, the legacy he left behind includes:

1,689 public libraries. Temples of learning, ambition, aspiration for towns and cities throughout the United States.

And then there was a contrasting story about the latest college football excess at the University of Oregon, thanks to Nike's Phil Knight:

The Football Performance Center at the University of Oregon features rugs woven by hand in Nepal, couches made in Italy and Brazilian hardwood underfoot in the weight room that is so dense that designers of this opulent palace believe it will not burn.
This is Oregon football. There is a barbershop with utensils from Milan. And a duck pond. And a locker room that can be accessed by biometric thumbprints. And chairs upholstered with the same material found in a Ferrari’s interior. 

The Oregonian's columnist aptly describes this as Pigskin Palace, and writes:

It's Phil Knight's money, of course, and there's a lot more where that came from. But the new structure does seem to send out a message to everything else on campus.
A University of Oklahoma president once told legislators that he wanted a university the football team could be proud of. Oregon might now hope for a university the football building could be proud of.

 We could have had by now a university that the state can be proud of if valuable and scarce resources are not invested in sporting facilities, right?

Carnegie left behind a rich legacy, despite his brutal business practices.  Vanderbilt too. The Ford Foundation contributed so much to the entire world.  Bill Gates and Warren Buffett seem to continue along in that old American tradition.

And then we have the awful ones like Knight who are all about self-aggrandizement.  It is even more awful that people love it all. Even more pathetic that the left-leaning faculty are always too keen on following football that is clearly at the expense of education. And students are always delirious with football success even when they are jobless after graduating from the university.  Oh the insanity!

“We are the University of Nike,” said Jeff Hawkins, the senior associate athletic director of football administration and operations. “We embrace it. We tell that to our recruits.”

I am ready to puke!

Who is ready for some football?

Good ol' Charlie Brown:

And the devilish Calvin :)

Football: offside versus ineligible receiver :)

It seems like every game has its own quirky rules.  American football has plenty of those.  Cricket is nothing but one quirky rule after another.  Which is why Calvin developing his own rules for playing baseball with Hobbes was all the more hilarious.

Here is John Cleese explaining football's soccer's offside rule:

Ineligible receiver downfield? click here