This is one of the other big topics of discussion when Professor Greg Joseph and I meet for lunch. USC’s the worst (or at least we think so), although some of the other universities mentioned here are right up there. At New York Times , ” How Big-Time Sports Ate College Life “: IT was a great day to be a Buckeye. Josh Samuels, a junior from Cincinnati, dates his decision to attend Ohio State to Nov. 10, 2007, and the chill he felt when the band took the field during a football game against Illinois. “I looked over at my brother and I said, ‘I’m going here. There is nowhere else I’d rather be.’ ” (Even though Illinois won, 28-21.) Tim Collins, a junior who is president of Block O, the 2,500-member student fan organization, understands the rush. “It’s not something I usually admit to, that I applied to Ohio State 60 percent for the sports. But the more I do tell that to people, they’ll say it’s a big reason why they came, too.” Ohio State boasts 17 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, three Nobel laureates, eight Pulitzer Prize winners, 35 Guggenheim Fellows and a MacArthur winner. But sports rule. “It’s not, ‘Oh, yeah, Ohio State, that wonderful physics department.’ It’s football,” said Gordon Aubrecht, an Ohio State physics professor. Last month, Ohio State hired Urban Meyer to coach football for $4 million a year plus bonuses (playing in the B.C.S. National Championship game nets him an extra $250,000; a graduation rate over 80 percent would be worth $150,000). He has personal use of a private jet. Dr. Aubrecht says he doesn’t have enough money in his own budget to cover attendance at conferences. “From a business perspective,” he can see why Coach Meyer was hired, but he calls the package just more evidence that the “tail is wagging the dog.” Dr. Aubrecht is not just another cranky tenured professor. Hand-wringing seems to be universal these days over big-time sports, specifically football and men’s basketball. Sounding much like his colleague, James J. Duderstadt, former president of the University of Michigan and author of “Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University,” said this: “Nine of 10 people don’t understand what you are saying when you talk about research universities. But you say ‘Michigan’ and they understand those striped helmets running under the banner.” For good or ill, big-time sports has become the public face of the university, the brand that admissions offices sell, a public-relations machine thanks to ESPN exposure. At the same time, it has not been a good year for college athletics. Child abuse charges against a former Penn State assistant football coach brought down the program’s legendary head coach and the university’s president. Not long after, allegations of abuse came to light against an assistant basketball coach at Syracuse University. Combine that with the scandals over boosters showering players with cash and perks at Ohio State and, allegedly, the University of Miami and a glaring power gap becomes apparent between the programs and the institutions that house them. “There is certainly a national conversation going on now that I can’t ever recall taking place,” said William E. Kirwan, chancellor of the University of Maryland system and co-director of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. “We’ve reached a point where big-time intercollegiate athletics is undermining the integrity of our institutions, diverting presidents and institutions from their main purpose.” RTWT.
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Big-Time Sports Have Become the Public Face of American Universities
I’ve never studied the data, so this seems a little incredible to me, but with so much youth support for Occupy Wall Street, I’m sure we could find some larger empirical patterns with research. An interesting clip, via Kenneth Davenport .
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The Collapse of the Work Ethic Among Young Americans?
I guess they’ve got nothing else.
This is cool. McFaul’s an accomplished scholar and has taken his expertise right to the top of the diplomatic side of things. From Josh Rogin, at Foreign Policy , ” Meet the U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul .” And McFaul gets a shout out from Michael Rubin at Commentary, ” Russia Resets Relations… With Syria .” (Here’s one of the classic McFaul pieces, read widely in graduate school in the 1990s: ” A Tale of Two Worlds: Core and Periphery in the Post-Cold War Era .”)
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Political Scientist Michael McFaul Confirmed as U.S. Ambassador to Russia
Pamela posted the original essay at the center of the controversy, ” DR. SUBRAMANIAM SWAMY: ‘HOW TO WIPE OUT ISLAMIC TERROR’ .” ‘ And now at Boston Globe , ” Pushed out of Harvard, professor returns fire: Dismissal stirs debate over free speech “: Subramanian Swamy is an outspoken man. That is what got him into trouble last July. While teaching economics at the Harvard University summer school, he penned a sharply worded column for a newspaper in India, where he is a prominent right-wing politician. Many readers thought his proposals would deny Muslims basic rights and incite riots. Some 40 Harvard professors called for his dismissal. But the furor died down, or appeared to, after Harvard’s president, Drew Faust, defended Swamy’s right to free speech as “central to the mission of a university.’’ The economics department invited him back for another summer. Swamy heard nothing else from Harvard. Then, a few weeks ago, he checked his e-mail and learned – from a Google Alert for his name – that his colleagues had fired him anyway. Encouraged by a private note from the summer school’s dean, professors who opposed Swamy came to a faculty meeting where summer classes were to be approved. The process is usually a rubber-stamp affair, but the professors argued so passionately that Swamy’s courses were voted off the slate. No one told Swamy about the meeting. Now, the case has devolved into an imbroglio about hate speech and academic freedom. The professors who led the charge against Swamy are buried in angry e-mails from his supporters in India. Others are torn, despising both Swamy’s column and the way he was relieved of his duties. Faust is in an awkward spot: She is scheduled to visit India in January. And the usually outspoken Swamy – who has made few public comments on the issue, save a few Twitter postings – is finally firing back. “I was surprised Harvard would do this, given that the president’s office said free speech was sacred,’’ he said in an interview. “The people who cut me out are leftists who have nothing to do with economics. There’s no allegation that in my class I said anything offensive. There’s no allegation that it has affected my research. It’s almost like the Spanish Inquisition – they didn’t give me a chance.’’ The professor may indeed be controversial, but the reaction by the Harvard faculty is totalitarian. But read the whole thing, at the link .
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Subramanian Swamy Hits Back at Terror-Coddling Harvard Professors Who Got Him Fired
Bruce Kesler has published a piece at City Journal , ” Cal State’s Chutzpah .” And here’s the blog entry at Maggie’s Farm, ” Kesler in City Journal: Hypocritical CalState OKs Anti-Semitism .” Kesler hammers CSU’s hypocrisy on Cal State Northridge Professor David Klein, a murderous anti-Israel eliminationist who maintains a hate site hosted on CSUN’s server: ” Boycott Israel Resource Page .” And here’s Bruce at the essay : Yet no one within the CSUN community has condemned Klein, and his webpage remains active—though it clearly violates university policies, which state that “use of computers, networks, and computing facilities for activities other than academic purposes or University business is not permitted.” The university also prohibits associating its name with boycotts and other politically motivated activity. CSUN further retains the right to remove “any defamatory, offensive, infringing, or illegal materials” from its website at any time. RTWT. I can guarantee you that if a conservative had done something like that and progressives complained, that web site would be down the memory hole faster than you can say Young & Hung .
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Cal State University Okays Anti-Semitism
Well, I was waiting to see something like this. The U.S. leftists are falling in behind the Communist Party of Canada in support of the Kim regime in totalitarian North Korea — and publishing their pro-communist agitprop at the anti-Semitic hate blog Daily Kos. See NewsBusters, ” Daily Kos Comes to Defense of North Korea; No Worse Than South Korea, USA .” Following the link takes us to the diary at Daily Kos, ” North Korea & Hysteria, Madness .” I love this passage: We have to realize that much of what is written about North Korea is for popular digestion regarding potential invasion. Let’s face it, North Korea is ripe for capitalism, there are millions of potential workers who will work for near nothing. The hope is that the regime will crumble like the Soviet Union and give way to massive investment opportunities. Right. Millions of potential skeletons, but check the post. I can see where Professor Caldararo is coming from. He cites some political science literature on Cold War international politics, and he places North Korea in the framework of a besieged state surrounded by hostile powers. This is something of a realist take, but realism has been perverted by the academic left to demonize Israel as a detriment to U.S. security interests. This Caldararo piece is another application of such abstract analysis in furtherance of the far-left agenda. In particular, this piece is noteworthy for its extreme moral equivalence between North and South Korea, and thus their respective patron systems, communism and capitalism. But while Caldararo is quick to point out the authoritarian politics of the South Korean state, he omits that today Seoul is a democratic regime and perhaps the most successful developing economy in the world today. He also leaves out the enormous human rights abuses and North Korea’s threats to international security and regional order, such as state-sponsored terrorism and nuclear proliferation. Inconvenient facts, I guess. In any case, see Doug Bandow at American Spectator , ” Otherworldly Defense of North Korea “: There is much to complain about South Korea under military rule. But, in case the professor didn’t notice, the South Koreans escaped repression and achieved freedom. It turns out that nasty dictator Park Chung-hee (and he was nasty!) followed economic policies which allowed his people to avoid famine and escape poverty. And dictator Chun Doo-hwan responded to mass protests by holding an election. Silly fellow. He was later convicted and originally sentenced to death for his crimes. His successor, a former general and ally named Roh Tae-woo, allowed another election in which former dissident Kim Young-sam was elected. Roh also later was convicted and sentenced to prison. These guys were amateurs compared to the Kims. See what I mean? But this is the progressive left for you. “No enemies on the left,” and all that. It’s the evil U.S. imperial system that’s the real problem, to hear it from these idiots. And of course, the hate trolls of the progressive fever swamps won’t be inundating the administration at San Francisco State with demands that this guy be fired. No, that’s reserved especially for people who dare to indicate a believe in God and moral decency. It’s pretty messed up. But this is just one more example of the upside-down world we live in where good and decency are deemed as evil and real evil is championed as the saving grace of humanity.
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Niccolo Caldararo, Lecturer in Anthropology, San Francisco State, Hails North Korea as ‘Ripe for Capitalism’
( Note : When I place “The Israel Lobby” in quotes like that, I’m referring to the Mearsheimer and Walt smear thesis of a Jewish interest group section that dominates U.S. policy making toward Israel. I thought I’d put this up at top so there’s no misunderstanding about my meaning at the title.) There’s a ferocious backlash against Thomas Friedman’s latest New York Times column, ” Newt, Mitt, Bibi and Vladimir .” Instapundit has the link to Jennifer Rubin’s essay hammering Friedman, and see also Power Line, ” Tom Friedman Goes Mearsheimer and Walt .” And still more from Jonathan Tobin at Commentary , ” Thomas Friedman and the New Anti-Semitism-Part One “: The notion that the only reason politicians support Israel is because of Jewish money is a central myth of a new form of anti-Semitism which masquerades as a defense of American foreign policy against the depredations of a venal Israel lobby. This canard not only feeds off of the traditional themes of Jew-hatred, it also requires Friedman to ignore the deep roots of American backing for Zionism in our history and culture. Friedman goes on to embarrass himself by contrasting the reception Netanyahu received on Capitol Hill to the one he might get at a center of leftist academia such as the University of Wisconsin. There’s little doubt he would not be cheered there. But the same would be true of most American politicians or thinkers who deviated from leftist Orthodoxy. The notion that liberal campuses are more representative of opinion about Israel than Congress is laughable. It is the sort of whopper one has come to expect from the liberal chorus on the Times op-ed page and shows Netanyahu may have a better feel for what Americans think than Friedman. And continued here: ” Thomas Friedman and the New Anti-Semitism-Part Two .” Meanwhile, check yet another installment of Mondoweiss thanking God for Mearseimer and Walt, ” Why did it take 6 years to talk about the Israel lobby? ” My good friend Norm tells me that these people hate, that progressive especially hate Israel, and that it’s not going away. But I can’t stop shaking my head at the enormous chasm I see whenever I read this stuff. Mondoweiss (and I mean Phillip Weiss) argues that “The Israel Lobby” smear has now gone mainstream and that it’s “safe” for journalists like Chris Matthews to come aboard the good ship anti-Semitism. I guess that it’s just that I’d not realized how exterminationist is the left-wing project. So, I shake my head partly out of my own naïvity. There’s a war going on, and it’s fully enjoined on the question of the defense of Israel. Game on, I say. And give no quarter to these f-kers. Anyway, more from Elliott Abrams, ” Mr. Friedman’s Diatribe Against Israel .”
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‘The Israel Lobby’ Continues to Poison Leftist Politics
I was thinking about this when Pepperdine’s Professor Gregory McNeal sent me the link to his essay on drone warfare. There are a lot of conservatives in American higher education, and not just professors. I’ve been reading my students’ term papers and most of them are so full of common sense and reasonable analysis. I sometimes wonder how instead that college campuses have becomes such intellectually violent places, inhospitable to the robust exchange of ideas. I think conservatives on campus often aren’t as mobilized as are partisans on the left, and of course given the radical left orientation of the unions, there’s good incentive not to be. In any case, take a look at the piece from Ed Driscoll, ” Dropping the A-Bomb on History ” (via Instapundit ): If conservatives ever want to recapture the high ground of culture, just creating an alternative news media is nowhere near sufficient. they have to — somehow — recapture academia, where culture is ultimately created. And destroyed as well. RELATED : From Bruce Kessler, at Maggie’s Farm, ” Jews Confront The Gentlemen’s Agreement On Campuses .”
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Conservatives Must Recapture American Universities
One of the better, more concise discussions I’ve read on this, at Counterpoint , ” From the Editors: On the Controversy of John Mearsheimer ” (via Instapundit ). And from Pejman Yousefzadeh, ” It Is Time for John Mearsheimer to Go .” I wrote on this here: ” The Tragedy of John Mearsheimer .”
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More on the John Mearsheimer Anti-Semitism Controversy
