Posted on 05/04/2012 4:02:16 PM PDT by Theoria
In more than 20 years I've spent studying the issue, I have yet to hear a convincing argument that college football has anything do with what is presumably the primary purpose of higher education: academics.
That's because college football has no academic purpose. Which is why it needs to be banned. A radical solution, yes. But necessary in today's times.
Football only provides the thickest layer of distraction in an atmosphere in which colleges and universities these days are all about distraction, nursing an obsession with the social well-being of students as opposed to the obsession that they are there for the vital and single purpose of learning as much as they can to compete in the brutal realities of the global economy.
Who truly benefits from college football? Alumni who absurdly judge the quality of their alma mater based on the quality of the football team. Coaches such as Nick Saban of the University of Alabama and Bob Stoops of Oklahoma University who make obscene millions. The players themselves don't benefit, exploited by a system in which they don't receive a dime of compensation. The average student doesn't benefit, particularly when football programs remain sacrosanct while tuition costs show no signs of abating as many governors are slashing budgets to the bone.
If the vast majority of major college football programs made money, the argument to ban football might be a more precarious one. But too many of them don't—to the detriment of academic budgets at all too many schools. According to the NCAA, 43% of the 120 schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision lost money on their programs. This is the tier of schools that includes such examples as that great titan of football excellence, the University of Alabama at Birmingham Blazers, who went 3-and-9 last season.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
I’m sorry, I’m a big fan of vagina studies. (that was my minor while going to engineering school. Thank God for BHSU.)
I don’t know about banning college football, but I’ve long believed that the NCAA is little more than a well-organized racket whose sole purpose is to make a perversion out of amateur athletics while running a large business operation.
Abolish it, and it will be Lindzen and Choi who have no jobs, not the anthropogenic global warming crowd, Christian professors will be sacked simply for their religious beliefs, free market economists will get the axe at most universities, . . . The long march of the left through the academy would be complete.
BTTT.
I believe that many universities would be even wilder wastelands of leftist drivel were it not for tenure.
As a Minnesota Gopher, maybe I should be proud that the U of M has already banned college football...
Detect it? Many majors specialize in it.
Remember Alan Sokol and the Social Text affair?
Of course I am Michigan fan, so I could be a little biased.
People who want to ban things like this are de facto morons. I don’t care what their justification or bona fides are...
Although, I think the corruption in colleges is real. More from government spigots than anything their amature sports teams engage in...
My, my, my, aren’t we just full of ABSOLUTES tonight!
“nothing”....”all...”
“Wrestling taught me some valuable lessons ... I always figured I could hold my own against the best in the world. It made me tough. Many times, I drew on that strength. It’s an inappropriate crutch perhaps, but that’s the way I’m made”.
I know the specific subject is college football, but this quote may help put the whole college athletics question into perspective.
Who said it?
Norman Borlaug http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2879372/posts
“Norman Borlaug arguably the greatest American of the 20th century died late Saturday (2009) after 95 richly accomplished years. The very personification of human goodness, Borlaug saved more lives than anyone who has ever lived.”
BTW, the first quote is from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug
I think (hope beyond hope really) that college baseball should be banned so I don’t have my Thursday and Friday evenings ruined by my wife dragging me to them.
I at least catch up on my reading while being stalled. I am halfway through Atlas Shrugged.
“According to the NCAA, 43% of the 120 schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision lost money on their programs.”
As a former student of college higher math (IIRC, I got a “D” in 5th Quarter Calculus), I have calculated that if 43% LOST money, 57% MADE money.
Better odds than trying to start a new restaurant??
Unless you need someone who knows calculus. I can teach a calc nerd team play. I can't teach a team player calculus if they don't get math.
Maybe.
The University of Chicago came to that very conclusion in 1939 and disbanded their football program.
And it wasn’t just any football program; under Amos Alonzo Stagg Chicago was one of the great powerhouses of college football.
But Chicago’s empty football facility didn’t entirely fade from history. Three years later physicists of the Manhattan Project created the first controlled nuclear reaction under the grandstands as they worked towards building the atomic bomb.
Ban Buzz!
“And exactly who is it that the author thinks should assume the authority to ban football?”
Teddy Roosevelt threatened to ban college football by Executive Order in 1906. There had been 18 deaths and 159 severe injuries in 1905. Mass momentum plays like flying wedges and gang tackling were part of the reason for all the carnage.
College presidents got the message and convened a rules committee. A neutral zone along the line of scrimmage was established, with a requirement that 6 men be on the line. The forward pass was introduced. First down was set at 10 yards, the game was to be an hour long with two 30 minute halves. Flying wedges and gang tackling were banned.
So the game was made safer and Teddy Roosevelt didn’t carry out his threat to do away with football.
And eating! Think of all the time and money we waste on that irrational venture when all we need is Mama Michelle's feeding center nutritional slop.
We should all be dull cyborgs engaging in mechanically induced sexual orgasms as we work in the elite's globalist serfdom.
This is sarcasm for the dimwitted.
I think a university should be a university. If it wants to host a big athletic club (some don’t, cf. the University of Chicago), then doing so should benefit the purpose of the institution. Analogizing using the athletic program as a means of raising money for the core purpose of the institution that hosts it to taxing the wealthy or successful is simply wrong-headed. Universities from the middle ages to the present day have had a singular purpose, and that purpose is not football, but the service of knowledge. Everything else — student life, grounds-keeping, fund-raising, athletics, . . . — should be ancillary to the actual purpose of the university. Or, perhaps you fancy that tails should wag dogs.
And yes, a great many majors will need to be abolished if we want to return to Prof. Smith's vision of education.
The American university is in much need of reform, but that reform must preserve and restore the university as it classically existed, not turn it into a polytechnic (though we should create a lot of those), not remodel it after the manner of a profit-making business (an enthusiasm on the right), nor as a social program (an enthusiasm on the left).
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