OT: NYT article about the culture of sports at academic institutions

a little while ago, it was the center of the page with a picture of Ohio fans.  The article also mentions James Duberstadt.

At a lot of colleges, athletics is the tail wagging the dog.  It sure is great to be a Wolverine where the academic programs don't have to take a back seat to athletics no matter how good or popular the athletic programs may be.  And the B1G seems to be the only major conference that is as interested in academics as athletics when considering adding teams. 

And you're right to point out the absurdity of extrapolating from a short time period at Oregon to all of athletics.  

I almost fell out of my chair at the part about Duke using the Lacrosse witch hunt debacle as an excuse to examine the athletic program.  It should have been a lesson in examining the idiotic "academicians" who were calling for the Lacross players' heads on poles because a false story fit their skewed preconceptions.

college. For example, when I was in school my mother and grandfather died. Their respective deaths had an impact upon how I performed in the classroom. Other people deal with mental health issues, financial problems, pregnancies, etc. To single out athletics as a distraction is to ignore the plethora of issues that plague students everywhere. Students are human beings afterall. They have the same problems that the general populace has.

Articles like this only highlight the fact that many academics live far too much in a world of theory and too little in the world the rest of us live in. I think these people ought to stop writing books and start interacting with their students. Maybe then they'll understand that athletics is far from being the greatest distraction that confronts students.

Back in the 50's and 60's nearly every varsity athelete registered for the Introductory Astronomy class taught by Dr. Hazel Losh.  Rumor had it that her grading scale was A for athlete, B for boys and C for coeds.  She was proudly escorted under The Banner at every game by the captain who was at least 2 feet taller and 150 pounds heavier than her.  As they say, "The crowd went wild!" 

Those too young to remember this remarkable lady may want to read the SI article written after we beat that school from down south to earn a trip to the Rose Bowl in 1964. 

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1076667/index...

At the pep rally on the Diag the night before the game Doc Losh is quoted as saying

"Remember this. Scholarship is not the only important thing at Michigan.  Go Blue!"

Here's the truth, which many students have figured out but their professors are loath to admit: your college GPA, your major, your courseload - most of that stuff ultimately doesn't matter in the big picture.  For most people, all that really matters in the post-college world is that they have a college degree.  Where they went to school can help, too.  But what they actually did while they were in college will ultimately be pretty irrelevant.  Future employers are not going to care what your courseload was sophomore year.  That's not to say that you should blow off your studies, but they don't have to be your sole focus when you're in college.  It's OK to go to sporting events and have fun, too.  

I will say, though, that having students camp out for seats (which can cause them to miss class) always struck me as dumb.  I like that our students don't have to go through that.  

What a lot of academics don't understand is that when their university's sports teams win, it increases their university's overall name recognition.  When their university's has a well known brand, it helps them when research grants are awarded.

A lot of academics complain about sports coaches being paid high salaries.  They fail to recognize that when coaches are being paid well, it raises the salary benchmark for all university employees.

Academics are like a barrel of crabs trying to get out.  Instead of helping each other escape, they drag down the ones that climb to the top of the barrel.

Everyone knows where Duke stands in the academic order. I don't want to give it any extra attention, but I think its inclusion in that article clearly shows that the Sportsfest includes all levels. Stanford, too, was mentioned. Gives the article more credibility ... sometimes the NYT will tiptoe around its reader base and associate vaguely troubling trends only with public schools in flyover country.

Two points.

1) The article gives the sense college kids going to sporting events has become a huge problem in recent years.  It could have been written 20 years ago about me at Michigan or a friend of mine at Duke.  It might shock the authors to find out that we both survived and are doing quite well, thank you.

2) There is a value judgment underlying this article. Let's agree that college kids do not spend every waking moment either in class or studying.  Thus, college sports is not taking away study time.  Rather, it is one of the many, many non-academic opportunites that are available for a college student .  (In my opinion, a student who is going to blow off a paper to go to a game would blow off that paper regardless.  He or she would just find something else to do if the sporting event didn't exist.)  Thus, the negative light given to sports attendance is just a value judgment on how others use their time.   I am sure that the professors subjectively believe that it is better to go to a play than a football game.  However, the facts are that the same about of studying (zero) gets done at both events.  I would also argue that, in the placed called the real world, I have gotten more out of talking to clients about how I saw Desmond's catch against ND than any play I ever went to.  (Yes, I actually went to a play while a student.  Ok, OK, I was trying to date a girl in the play, but it still counts.)

the first topic I've seen on this site where I have vehemetley disagreed with the opinion of the status quo.  I loved my time at Michigan, I loved my classes, I loved the people I met, and I loved going to sporting events.  But I do agree with most of the points in the NYT article.  I pour over this website daily to learn about recruiting, read postgame analysis, and just bathe in the rumor mill.  But, I know that this is just a hobby for me. (one that I love)  

To me, most of the people on this site have always come off as intelligent, passionate, and successfull.  This is one of the reasons why I love it here.  But I don't think we are necessarily the norm of college sports fans.  Maybe my frustration is more geared toward the culture of drinking, maybe it is about the people who--as others have said--were going to blow off academics anyway, but I think sports can be an unhealthy outlet for a lot of people.  In my time at Michigan, I met many people who aren't where they wanted to be today.

Some of me feels like the Times article was unfairly putting the blame on just one activity. (even if that activity controls an ungodly amount of money, which...I'm not going to touch this one.  This can of worms is big enough to eat me.)  But when I am on college campuses I often find myself looking around at people in bewildermint.  If you aren't going to go to class, won't mainly focus on school, and don't want to take advantage of the academics--why are you here?  Why are you spending 4 (more?) years and huge sums of tuition money to be here?

My other big issue with the article is that the academics quoted complain that sports are a non-productive use of time for the students, and act as if a university should be some efficient factory for producing well-rounded intellectual citizens.  Yet, that hasn't been the case for universities in decades, if ever.  Schools exist to teach people only as much as they are willing to invest in, and are not governed by the need to maximize resource usage to output; they are, with few exceptions, horrifically inefficient at meeting their stated goals.  That's okay, of course, because even an inefficieny model still leads to hundreds of thousands of young people being educated and pumped into the economy. 

But if universities were run efficiently (as some of the respondents intimate they should), we probably wouldn't have sporting events (at least non-revenue sports), but we also would not have "cash-losing" fields of study.  Most universities would focus on medicine, law, business, and the hard sciences over all other - those consistently produce money-making professions and bring in research dollars and lead to money-making inventions.  Most of the liberal arts would disappear, as they produce individuals with useful skills but not necessarily ones rewarded in the marketplace.  And so that would mean the number of the anthropology, english, history, etc. professors would be severely reduced as well, and salaries of those that remain would also be cut.

So I guess my point is that while I do agree that the ludicrous salaries being paid to assistant coaches and athletic trainers are troubling for institutions with limited budgets, they are still more of a positive to the bottom line than many of the other programs that academic institutions keep around.

I went from undergrad at Michigan to getting my MA at a decidedly non-football institution, the University of Chicago.  Who, as many of you might know, tanked its big-time football program in the 30s in an attempt to reform the school away from being known for football.  They turned the football stadium into an atomic collider.  But I digress.

Anyways, at the opening meeting for our program, the first sentence out of the program director's mouth was a stuffy joke about how UC wasn't some school where people sulked around on Mondays because the football team lost.  Which was followed up with a warning to those of us who came from such schools that it was time to put that out of our heads.

Long story short, there are many profs, and some schools, who will never understand the appeal of big-time athletics.  And who will tailor their entire world-view to that opinion.  And then there's Michigan, where both the academic and athletic worlds can coexist quite nicely.  

It's their loss.  I sulked around the UC campus on Mondays a lot when I was there because of Michigan football,  and still managed to do perfectly well in school.

has been on-going for over 100 years.  Many academics would not allow football on campus as a varsity sport because it would take away from the school, not add to it.  Mr. Yost won a hard-fought battle against the elitists of his day.

For the first 50 years of Michigan football, our main rival was.......University of Chicago.  Yes   that IS true.  UC has more conference titles in FB than sparty.  But in 1936 UC cancelled football to focus on academics because that was important.  UC is a very highly ranked school, primarily due to UC being a private school.

However, is UC better than UM?  No.  Their undergrad is ranked higher but our graduate programs are ranked higher.  So this debate will continue for the next 100 years.

I was in Baton Rouge this Fall, and got to go to a game (LSU v. W. Kentucky -- not marquee I admit).  From what i was told, the libraries close there on home game dates.  That seems extreme and would never happen at Michigan.  Although on the handful of games I missed as an undergrad to catch up on schoolwork I'll admit the libraries were not very busy.

have to give credit where credit is due: OSU 1961-2; and, much as it nauseates me to mention it after witnessing his behavior 1968-78, from Woody ca. 1961,

Yet in some ways this was Woody's finest hour. There was an ugly mood on campus. This was before the campus riots of the later sixties, but it was something of an augury of things to come. The team had played its heart out to go to the Rose Bowl. The entire Columbus establishment (and Columbus, remember, is the State capital) felt that the team belonged to them, and to Ohio, and not to the rotten outsiders who by a quirk of fate had had the power to vote them down. But Woody stood against them. Before a great rally — in the light of the bonfire in which the crowd would gladly have immolated the objects of their anger — Woody defended the faculty. They had done their duty as they saw it, and we must accept the decision of the vote, he said. What they represented in the life of the university, he told the angry crowd, was far more important than the football program. He told the crowd to disperse, and the students to go back to their books. That ended the matter. Woody was a team player, and the university was his team. There was neither bitterness nor condescension in his manner. And I never heard of him complaining about it afterwards.