There can be more than one problem. The influence of big-time college athletics is greatly corrupting to the institutions.
Personally, I think this indoctrination idea is exaggerated. Students are far more influenced by modern culture and TV and movies pushing the cultural envelope than they are by their professors.
I do believe, for example, the NFL is pretty much the only major sports franchise aside from NASCAR that is right leaning in its contributions to politicians and causes.
Personally, I think this indoctrination idea is exaggerated. Students are far more influenced by modern culture and TV and movies pushing the cultural envelope than they are by their professors.
Seriously? Have you looked at what is going on at our college/university campuses? College athletics is probably one of the few decent things, with some notable exceptions, happening at most of our larger universities. Which would you trust more politically? A football player who's been busting his hump to make it and is surrounded by a sometimes very conservative atmosphere stressing individual effort? Or your average liberal arts major who is steeped in leftist thought and how awful Western civilization supposedly is? Notice how many football coaches people like Hannity have on as guests for example. Notice how many are pretty conservative?
College athletics are NOT the primary problem with our universities. These institutions are turning out kids who have no understanding of what makes America actually work - in fact they turn out kids who are taught to hate the very country they are benefiting from.
You are absolutely right and the poster who mentions indoctrination of left-wing ideology and its implicit
fatal Political Correctness is missing one large and crushing
irony, which is that in THIS case, at Penn State, you had BOTH, coexisting in extremis. We had this guy, Jerry Sandusky, the WORST kind of pervert, getting away with the worst kinds of perversions only because the Penn State football program became SO important to the identity of the school and its economic feasibility, that the buck was continually passed down the ladder, starting presumably and importantly with the Grand Poobah, Joe Paterno, and up and down that ladder with McQueary, who actually witnessed a criminal act but was too timid to be a whistleblower. Who wants to be a whistleblower in the midst of these “good times” and profitable jobs? No doubt there ARE colleges with great teams who have been able to maintain some kind of
reasonable “balance” between the “bread and circuses” another poster tersely invoked, but with Penn State you had the intersection of perhaps the BIGGEST football program with its ‘iconic’ chief, Paterno, AND the cultural climate of “look the other way” in the face of transgressive sexual
behavior, which we all should have learned from, if nowhere else, in the still-lingering case of Michael Jackson.Both Penn State, Paterno,Sandusky, and Jackson comprised their own versions of “too big to fail”.