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
This clip’s apparently from 2007 and includes the current lineup. More blogging tonight. PREVIOUSLY : ” Hey, Hey, Hey! ”
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‘Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love’
From Monday’s drive time, “10 at 10″ from 1965 at The Sound LA : Get Off of My Cloud – Rolling Stones Gloria – Them In the Midnight Hour – Wilson Pickett Do You Believe in Magic – Lovin’ Spoonful The Kids are Alright – The Who Wooly Bully – Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs Set Me Free – The Kinks Like a Rolling Stone – Dylan For Your Love – Yardbirds You Won’t See Me – Beatles Once upon a time you dressed so fine You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you? People’d call, say, “Beware doll, you’re bound to fall” You thought they were all kidding you You used to laugh about Everybody that was hanging out Now you don’t talk so loud Now you don’t seem so proud About having to be scrounging for your next meal How does it feel How does it feel To be without a home Like a complete unknown Like a rolling stone? You’ve gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely But you know you only used to get juiced in it And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street And now you find out you’re going to have to get used to it You said you’d never compromise With the mystery tramp, but now you realize He’s not selling any alibis As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes And ask him, “Do you want to make a deal?” How does it feel How does it feel To be on your own With no direction home Like a complete unknown Like a rolling stone? You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns When they all come down and did tricks for you You never understood that it ain’t no good You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat Ain’t it hard when you discover that He really wasn’t where it’s at After he took from you everything he could steal How does it feel How does it feel To be on your own With no direction home Like a complete unknown Like a rolling stone? Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people They’re drinking, thinking that they got it made Exchanging all kinds of precious gifts and things But you’d better lift your diamond ring, you’d better pawn it, babe You used to be so amused At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal How does it feel How does it feel To be on your own With no direction home Like a complete unknown Like a rolling stone?
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‘Like a Rolling Stone’
Well, I can’t imagine when a teacher would have time to sleep, although one semester when I had a night class, after I held my office hours in the afternoon, I’d lie down on the floor to rest before going back out to teach. But that’s not what this is about, at Blazing Cat Fur and Jawa Report :
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Students May Not Take Pictures of Sleeping Teachers
That would be the new Van Halen tour and album. See Los Angeles Times , ” When David Lee Roth talks, it’s ‘A Different Kind of Truth’ .” It’s an old joke, but when David Lee Roth delivers the punch line it sounds more like a mission statement: “How many lead singers does it take to put in a lightbulb? One. You hold the bulb and wait for the world to revolve around you.” Missing from the joke is how the singer is left standing there in the dark waiting for his proper wattage. On Feb. 7, Interscope Records will release “A Different Kind of Truth” and, as the world turns, it will represent the first Van Halen studio album featuring Roth as lead singer since “1984″ — which was released 28 years ago this month, right before Ronald Reagan announced plans to run for a second term. Time flies — or does it drag? Earlier this month, on a crisp, sunny morning in Pasadena, Roth, now 57, welcomed a visitor to his 20-room, Italianate mansion to talk about Van Halen past, present and future. Roth actually rejoined the band “five summers and a million years ago” for the 2007-08 reunion tour, but it’s taken this long for the still-volatile collective to finish an album that satisfies all of their agendas. The amazing thing is that they finished at all; like the Beach Boys, Eagles, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Guns N’ Roses and Fleetwood Mac, Van Halen is part of the Southern California history of world-class soap operas disguised as platinum-selling bands. Van Halen’s brawny brand of music has sold more than 80 million albums, but offstage the group has been a fragile alliance that has fallen apart again and again because of creative clashes, drug torpor, grudges and, more recently, health issues. Continue reading . Van Halen will by playing live
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?
This is fascinating. From Charles Murray, at Wall Street Journal , ” The New American Divide ” (via Glenn Reynolds ): As I’ve argued in much of my previous work, I think that the reforms of the 1960s jump-started the deterioration. Changes in social policy during the 1960s made it economically more feasible to have a child without having a husband if you were a woman or to get along without a job if you were a man; safer to commit crimes without suffering consequences; and easier to let the government deal with problems in your community that you and your neighbors formerly had to take care of. But, for practical purposes, understanding why the new lower class got started isn’t especially important. Once the deterioration was under way, a self-reinforcing loop took hold as traditionally powerful social norms broke down. Because the process has become self-reinforcing, repealing the reforms of the 1960s (something that’s not going to happen) would change the trends slowly at best. Meanwhile, the formation of the new upper class has been driven by forces that are nobody’s fault and resist manipulation. The economic value of brains in the marketplace will continue to increase no matter what, and the most successful of each generation will tend to marry each other no matter what. As a result, the most successful Americans will continue to trend toward consolidation and isolation as a class. Changes in marginal tax rates on the wealthy won’t make a difference. Increasing scholarships for working-class children won’t make a difference. The only thing that can make a difference is the recognition among Americans of all classes that a problem of cultural inequality exists and that something has to be done about it. That “something” has nothing to do with new government programs or regulations. Public policy has certainly affected the culture, unfortunately, but unintended consequences have been as grimly inevitable for conservative social engineering as for liberal social engineering. The “something” that I have in mind has to be defined in terms of individual American families acting in their own interests and the interests of their children. RTWT. Plus, Murray’s new book is out January 31st, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 .
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Civic Decline Accelerates as Working Class Abandons Marriage and Religion and Upper Class Becomes More Isolated From the Mainstream
