<p>This has been one of the most stimulating discussions I’ve ever followed on CC. Even though I’ve staked out a position against big-time athletics, the comparison with music performance has really got me thinking…</p>
<p>…that we all bring our unique talents to the table, and hard work, dedication and perseverence pays off?</p>
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<p>Ok well I don’t go to a school that has “top” sports programs, but the athletic program is indeed essential to my major. See, I am an athletic training student and I have to do clinical hours working with you guessed it: athletic teams. If it were not for our athletic teams, my major could not exist at this university.</p>
<p>“Because some of us are disgusted by adulation paid to athletes. We’d rather see that adulation go to people who are doing something more important in the world.”</p>
<p>At last–someone who comes right out with the real reason some people on this list are incensed about the recognition of athletic prowess. Outright jealousy.</p>
<p>Huh? That’s a non-sequitur."</p>
<p>Let’s just change a couple of the nouns</p>
<p>Because some of us are disgusted by adulation paid to [people like your children]. We’d rather see that adulation go to people [like my childern and people like them]."</p>
<p>Gee, sounds a lot like jealousy to me. (I know, its not fay-ur).</p>
<p>“Yes; for example, there’s no loyalty among U of Chicago alums for their school, at all (tongue-in-cheek; they are among the most passionate fans for their school if I judge by cc posts, and good for them).”</p>
<p>I never said or suggested that schools without strong sporting teams can’t have strong alumni support. Instead, I said that sports were an important unifying force because they are more accessible than other activities. You don’t get 100,000 (or 10,000) people cheering a Nobel Prize winner on a regular basis.</p>
<p>The reason is that rooting for your team is a) visceral rather than intellectual and b) has a critical us-them aspect. In these two regards, the only analogous activities that come to mind are religion and politics, both of which generate similar passions.</p>
<p>Actually, compared to its peer universities, the University of Chicago stands out for its weak alumni support. There are lots of reasons for that – pretty much everyone admits that undergraduate life there was unpleasant in the 60s-80s, and for a while the enrollment of the College was so low that its viability came into question. So Chicago has relatively few alumni in their peak giving years, and the percentage of such alumni who support it is significantly lower than at most of its competitor schools. It doesn’t even have a clear policy on legacies, because until relatively recently it wasn’t getting enough legacy applications to pay attention to them.</p>
<p>And the absence of competitive intercollegiate athletics was clearly one of the factors that inhibited the growth of a healthy undergraduate culture there. Not the only one, and no one today – after a couple of decades of significant improvement both in the quality of the undergraduate experience and in alumni relations – is suggesting that Chicago should have D I football or basketball. But like it or not, intercollegiate athletics, at least in popular spectator sports like football, basketball, and hockey, is a powerful catalyst for bonding and community-building among students.</p>
<p>If we go back to the original discussion point its not about a college hosting athletic teams, rather its about those athletes being real students. If a physics professor was given leeway to recruit 50 kids a year into his program but records show that only 5 had graduated, how long would the program last? Would it be cancelled if he won the Nobel for his research using these student-physicists?</p>
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<p>Well, yeah. This is Northwestern, btw. Of course theater, journalism and music are parts of the mission of the school.</p>
<p>osdad - The vast majority of college athletes - even D-1 athletes are “real” students.<br>
The real choice is up to the student. Sure, some skate through but other college students skate through or drop out as well. Back in the 60’s many college students stayed in college simply to avoid the draft.
The point is, college athletes are all given the opportunity. Colleges do more and more to make their success possible. Ultimately success is up to the student.</p>
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<p>My juniors are not curing cancer or penning the great American novel. They are “merely” bright, hardworking students. This isn’t about jealousy. Indeed, my D plays a varsity sport; my S does not, but works out avidly and I do agree “sound mind in a sound body” is a good thing. I just don’t care for academic standards being drastically lowered to attract athletes, and I prefer campuses that don’t have outsized, over-the-top focus on spectator sports.</p>
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<p>But that’s the whole POINT. What makes athletes so important that they deserve special studying facilities, enforcement of study hours, special tutors, etc.? The kid participating in the newspaper or the Young Republicans club doesn’t get special props from his school; he’s expected to figure out how to balance his time.</p>
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<p>I see your point, and maybe I’m being too stereotypically female on this, but I don’t see the need to have to have a “them” in order to have an “us.” I always felt like an idiot trying to work up real enthusiasm to “kill the other team” or to take it beyond just a friendly rivalry. It’s just a game. It’s not important. I am cheering on the Phillies in the WS, but really, the world won’t come to a screeching end if the Yankees win. I don’t know, it just always strikes me as stupid to have sports rivalries that go beyond the friendly level. And one t10 school on CC in particular – they talk about their sports rivals with a true trash-talk-they-suck mentality, and it really makes me think less positively of the school.</p>
<p>Because they miss class. They must practice a lot of hours. They travel to games.<br>
Honestly, students at any school can take advantage of the same opportunities. They just channel them for athletes so they CAN take advantage of them.
It is also a way to prevent abuse - which I would think would be a good thing.</p>
<p>btw - Northwestern is a Big 10 school.</p>
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<p>Here is at least one man who feels the same way. I love college football, as mentioned previously, and get very worked up about “my” team. But this crap about demonizing opponents and getting into fistfights with their fans, trash talking, etc., is just moronic.</p>
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Yes, I agree but this is changing the subject ;)</p>
<p>From the standpoint of a university president, it’s not hard to see the appeal of an athletic program at all. It markets the institution very effectively, creates a feeling of community among the students, faculty, alumni, and surrounding community, and in some cases even brings in dollars. The benefits far outweigh the costs, certainly the financial costs.</p>
<p>But in order to get those benefits, you don’t have to educate the athletes at all. You could hire them as employees, except that would disqualify your programs. You have to pretend, at least – and I am not arguing that pretending is all that most universities do – that they are students like any others. That’s no great problem, though, because pretending they are students actually lowers the price one has to pay to attract them. The NCAA is a very successful cartel device to cap compensation to top-quality college athletes.</p>
<p>That analysis predicts a lot of what big-time college athletics looks like. Athletes are not treated the same as regular students, because they aren’t regular students. Athletes are given a lot of services that help maintain their student status, because that is the deal: both they and the university have to pretend they are there to study and learn (as long as it doesn’t interfere with practice, conditioning, travel, and games). Most colleges do more than that – a lot more than that – because they DO care as a moral matter that athletes receive an actual education.</p>
<p>From the standpoint of the athletes, college athletics is a series of opportunities. They can continue to compete and to develop in their sport (which presumably they love). They can get an actual college education with some work and accommodation to the coaches’ demands and their own demands of themselves as athletes. They don’t HAVE to take that opportunity, but many do. In return, they have to do the work they were hired to do. Generally, it’s not such a bad deal for them.</p>
<p>“And the absence of competitive intercollegiate athletics was clearly one of the factors that inhibited the growth of a healthy undergraduate culture there.”</p>
<p>Actually, Chicago has an extensive DIII athletic program.</p>
<p>[University</a> of Chicago Athletics](<a href=“http://athletics.uchicago.edu/]University”>http://athletics.uchicago.edu/)</p>
<p>But if it is like many other highly selective schools, the bulk of the student body doesn’t care. Instead, I suspect that for many at the school, the word “jock” is generally preceded by “dumb.”</p>
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<p>I actually had a student-athlete tell me the other day she had to go to the library to print something because she was not allowed to print it in an “open” computer lab because her major was not ____. It didn’t matter that we have to pay for our pages no matter where they get printed…</p>
<p>Students who do all their coursework in music performance, creating art or theater don’t get a BA or BS degree. They get Bachelor’s of Fine Arts degrees, reflecting the fact that they didn’t study liberal arts or science, but instead fine arts.</p>
<p>If bigtime sports colleges were honest, they’d be offering Bachelors of Sports degrees for their students who don’t study liberal arts but instead concentrate on sports performance. Why doesn’t Duke offer a Bachelor of Basketball? How about Maryland awarding a Bachelor of Football? But no college offers these degrees, because no college thinks sports performance worthy of a Bachelors degree. As much as excellence in sports is admirable and requires hard word, it’s not an academic discipline.</p>
<p>Chicago has an extensive DIII athletic program, but (a) I think it’s more extensive and more competitive than it was in past decades, and (b) yes, it struggles to get student attention much more than teams do at schools with more continuous athletic traditions.</p>
<p>It’s not true, however, that people there think of the jocks as dumb. First of all, there are few if any jocks there who are so good at what they do that anyone would think of compromising academic standards to get them there, and the same is true of most of their opponents. There’s a huge difference between Chicago recruiting and recruiting at, say, NESAC or Ivy League schools. Also, Chicago does not place the same kind of demands on its athletes that many competitive D-III colleges do. My daughter had a close friend who was a recruited athlete to a competitive team at Oberlin, and (until she quit) athletics dominated her life there (including during vacations) to a much greater extent than I believe is true for any athletes at Chicago.</p>
<p>Second, there really are no gut majors for athletes, and athletes have to do the Core along with everyone else. The athletes who do decide to come to Chicago tend to have the same kind of intellectual curiosity and appreciation for rigor and argument as the other students do, or else they would have gone elsewhere. Especially the better ones.</p>
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<p>Thanks, justamomof4, I had no idea ;-).</p>