I think another external problem with Stanford’s athletic program is that it competes in what is viewed by many experts and fans as an inferior P5 conference. Pac-12 Commissioner, Larry Scott, didn’t have his contract renewed.
This characterization - and the suggestion that the author might have been primarily motivated by her own personal displeasure - doesn’t seem quite appropriate. The author describes the problem in terms of a declining ethos. Yes, her sport was cut. Yes, she was no longer in her sport (so others say). So what? It’s possible to understand the importance, and to approve, of the ethos of the “student athlete” - many university administrators certainly do! - without being personally involved in athletics at the moment, or even at all. And I’m sure many of us would agree there could be several ways to define the term “serious athlete!” Sure - it was vague. The author should have elaborated. But let’s not make the same error!
[quote]”Remaining Sports --Baseball, Basketball, Cross Country, Football, Golf, Gymnastics, Lacrosse, Women’s Rowing, Soccer, Softball, Swimming, Tennis, Track & Field, Women’s Volleyball, Water Polo
Eliminated Sports – Fencing, Field Hockey, Lightweight and Men’s Rowing, Sailing, Squash, Synchronized Swimming, Men’s Volleyball, and Wrestling”[/quote]
Oh, it’s “sour grapes” for sure. No doubt about it. And she’s a quitter too.
But for women’s rowing, I have attended games, matches and/or events of every single one of the sports listed in the “remaining sports” category at Stanford. OT - My D21’s BFF dives at the Stanford facility and it’s a gorgeous facility.
I’ve seen none of the other sports being eliminated. Why? Few care about the eliminated sports, but for the athlete and possibly their family. There are plenty of “serious athletes” left at Stanford. The “ethos” remains intact. I can’t speak to the rest of the article, but I’ve watched enough Stanford sports over the years to see serious athletes competing for national championships every year.
And it’s just my opinion, but a fencer is not a “serious athlete.” It’s more like archery, curling or shooting skeet. 
2 Likes
That would be your opinion lol. I know a few who would disagree with you, but they are personally involved in that athletic endeavor. Question: in your opinion, in terms of “serious athletes,” how is golf different from archery?
I wouldn’t call it “serious” vs “not serious.” However, some key difference are golf is a NCAA Div I sport in which I expect Stanford team members spend dozens of hours per week on the sport. Archery is not a NCAA Div I sport. At Stanford, it is a club sport in which I expect there is little formal practice requirements, and most spend only a few hours per week or less. Golf one of the more popular audience sports among persons in the United States. Archery is not.
Stanford has a history of many national championships in golf, including a national championship in the most recent men’s tournament. It also has some well known pro golfer alumni, including Tiger Woods. I only saw 1 national individual title in archery, described at https://www.stanforddaily.com/2015/05/26/katie-novotny-shoots-her-way-to-a-national-title-despite-lack-of-experience/ . The archer, Katie Novotny, is obviously not well known. Stanford golfers have likely been practicing for thousands of hours during HS and competing at a very high level. I expect most Stanford archery club members have little past experience. The article mentions that the national title winner began archery only ~1 year before winning the national title.
Fencing falls somewhere in between. Fencing is a NCAA Div I sport. I expect most Stanford-level fencers are extremely dedicated to their sport and have spent thousands of hours practicing and competing in their sport during HS, including performing well in near national level competition. At Stanford I expect fencers spend the maximum NCAA allowed number of hours practicing, not including many hours in travel and competition. Many would be offended by someone saying they are not “serious athletes.”
However, fencing is not popular with a typical US audience. It’s also not a popular college sport. There were only ~27 colleges with a NCAA Div I fencing team prior to COVID, which were mostly east coast schools, particularly Ivies. Stanford’s nearest fencing competition in distance was probably UCSD (nearly 500 miles away). The lack of interest among typical US audience means little opportunity be a professional fencer, like there is with golf. Stanford also has a history of mediocre performance in fencing, which doesn’t help the team’s popularity. For example, Stanford came in 12th out of 26 in the most recent tournament, which is similar to previous recent years. I’m not surprised to see fencing on the list of eliminated sports, but I would be shocked if Stanford eliminated golf.
1 Like
Do we know if OP is the author of the article?
If fencing has been cancelled & the author of the article is upset about that, then start a fencing club.
JB, those readings of your kids in their first quarter of their first year at the U of C were quite mouth-watering. The connections spring out:
–Homer leads to Virgil leads to Dante leads to Milton
–Plato leads to Aristotle leads to Cicero leads to Aquinas
–Machiavelli is a whole new world rejecting all of the foregoing.
Augustine seems missing from that brew, but I bet he got picked up later. And the historians and philosophers and plays and novels must be still to come.
By contrast Stanford assigns these uber-contemporary books focussed on race as summer reading, and and it sets up a required course called “Engaging Diversity”. My suspicion is that it would be quite possible to pass through Stanford without ever reading any of these old texts that almost all Chicago students read in first quarter. Is that true? If so, does it matter?
The classic texts do not lend themselves to a doctrinaire approach. Their embedded beliefs and worlds have passed into obscurity and are no longer fighting faiths. The fury of Achilles and the piety of Aeneas can be examined calmly. Aquinas and Dante are strange worlds to us. The past, as it is said, is a different country. Without reading the older writers most youngsters would be unaware of these old ideas and cultural norms. They would not know how they broaden and complicate our understanding of our own world, how they in fact gave birth to our own world. To be deprived of that knowledge makes us poorer in imagination and understanding.
My own recollection of a Chicago education is that these old texts are examined in more than a spirit of antique-hunting. Yes, Achilles is very different from us, but we too have lives that are short and beset with tragedy: how should we live? What does Dante have to say about our human life? What does the good society described by Aquinas tell us about own society? What does that provocateur Machiavelli tell us about a new and terrifying world being born in defiance an old one?
We are not merely orienting ourselves in the world as we read these classic authors, important as that is: We are also taking lessons from models of supreme excellence in how to think and write about the most important matters in human life. Yes, we can find other models in our own time; Ta-Nehisi Coates may be one of them. However, it means something to have stood the test of a millenium or two. And one might well find in Coates echoes of earlier ages - if one knows anything about those ages.
I would have no way of knowing how Stanford profs would teach “Selected Readings in Race” or “Between the World and Me.” It seems likely that the latter work would be presented as definitive. Would dissent from it get a hearing in a Stanford classroom? Would it even be permitted? I ask these questions seriously and because I don’t know the answer. Maybe someone who does can tell us. On the face of it Annika’s concern about indoctrination seems plausible.
One of the virtues of reading the old authors is that because their writings long ago ceased to be holy texts they are open to uninhibited interrogation, criticism, dissent. If complete acceptance and submission to Aquinas was once required, it no longer is. Plato has always had his detractors (one of whom was Aristotle!). No one will be exiled for taking Dante’s part against the Pope in the wars of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. Machiavelli is a perpetual provocation, admittedly, but in our contemporary politics all sides channel his insights (without attribution!).
Whether a dispassionate and analytical distance from texts is desirable as opposed to a hot take on current authors is a big question. In a nutshell it’s the difference between the Stanford approach and the Chicago approach. As to which best serves the intellectual development of a youngster there can certainly be differences of opinion. But holding any opinion on anything ought to be the beginning of debate, not the pre-emptive end of it. (Aristotle taught me that.)
1 Like
She was clearly frustrated that both her sport and her narrow area of interest was increasingly marginalized at Stanford, but her primary frustration is that her political views are increasingly in the minority on campus. I don’t think the condemnation of Dr. Scott Atlas by Stanford faculty is an encroachment on academic or political freedoms. Dr. Atlas promoted his unscientific views, not as an academic, but in his official capacity as the White House advisor on coronavirus, with very harmful consequences to the fight against the virus. His association with Stanford damaged its reputation, and therefore, I don’t find its falcuty’s action inappropriate.
Yes. Will I remember reading “Grit” or will I remember The Aenid? The author is lamenting the passing of the classics (her field) and the inherent messages that are conveyed in the stories in these books. The idea of the human experience is the basis of many of these “classics”
While “Grit” is a great book, it’s a passing thought. A blip. A NYT bestseller that will be replaced with another line of thinking soon. It conveys a tiny perspective or an element or what matters in a life. Unlike many classics which cover the whole human experience it touches on a single note. If I were to chose an intellectual voyage for someone I’d chose the Iliad, or Socrates, or Shakespeare ( in any form) before “Grit” why? Because these classics have more to say about the human experience in its entirety. Notions which are applicable across centuries.
The single notations or notes where students are expected to “learn” and repeat the thinking of a particular author inherent in some modern books, like Grit rarely meet the level of any classic. The ones listed certainly don’t.
Aren’t we sweeping out the human experience in exchange for a single thought if we have uni-dimensional books on every shelf?
2 Likes
If Covid was a driver of eliminating these sports at Stanford due to costs, was the Depression a driver of Chicago’s elimination of football?
“When 1933 arrived, [Chicago] school president of four years Robert Hutchins decided to eliminate football from the university. It was a part of his plan to eliminate things from the school that would be a “distraction” to the student body and the professors.”
The last national title by a current Ivy League team was 1927.
Stanford had room to eliminate these sports while subsidizing athletics to a lesser degree. Many Division I programs already fund the minimum amount of sports. No further room to cut sports so they cut salaries through reorganizations or increase their deficit funding.
Also, Jeff Selingo would smile seeing that Ms Nordquist commented that “My parents have always thought athletics were important, but since I didn’t have much interest, they shuffled me around until they found something I liked.” And the travesty that squash was also eliminated. You get a scholarship at a Division I program and higher competition but at least admission to a top-rated LAC that fields a team.
I am skeptical it was all about money. (A) Stanford’s endowment is huge. (B) some of the sports they cut were ones that get a lot of attention these days for being affirmative action for rich people. © If they were serious about cutting athletic costs, they could trim here or there some of the other programs (cough football cough) that take up a bigger part of the budget. Maybe they are doing that, too, I dunno.
Dominant athletic programs has become such a dominant part of its public persona- it is hard to square with its academic side. It feels like they go about it in a different way than the Ivies. I sort of figured the cuts were a way to recalibrate and get the budget more in line with the ethos.
That said, I think most universities could do with some recalibration on that front.
More than just affirmative action for the rich, several of these sports were implicated in the college cheating scandal. Stanford’s (former) sailing coach went to jail for a day for his part in that. Stanford mostly ducked problems with cheating, but had Stanford been party to large-scale cheating (like some other universities), that could have created large and lasting reputational problems.
OP is a first-year student at UChicago.
The author of the opinion piece brings up several issues with Stanford, none of which reveal merely personal dissatisfaction with her own sport (with which she’s no longer affiliated, as others have pointed out). The author’s disappointment seems directed at a perceived decline in what once made Stanford a great undergraduate program. Hence, the focus on “ethos” in the discussion. Is the author correct? Why or why not?
And that would be “their” opinion.
Well, archery doesn’t have those cool remote control golf bags and battery-operated golf carts to make sure one does as little exercise as possible. 
Yes. In Western Civ for my kids, although I believe that Confessions is read in other Hum sequences. When I look at Hum and Sosc, I see a holdover from the Hutchins era. When contrasted with the more contemporary methods taught in the physical science and bio core classes, and even the more contemporary methods taught in some humanities or social science major courses, it all makes for quite a bit of reflection! I’ve been puzzling over it for a few years now. Does this mish-mash of old and new actually work? But my kids don’t worry about any of that - they just enjoy the readings. And actually, I need to remember that acquiring wisdom is an organic process which isn’t necessarily neat and tidy. I’m glad the College no longer tinkers with revising the Core’s overall curriculum. They add new sequences now and then as is appropriate for the progression of scholarship. But they keep that which is popular and rigorous - and some of those long-standing sequences are definitely both. Unsurprisingly, there has been no drumbeat from either students or faculty to purge the DWM’s from the Hum or Sosc curriculum, such as what goes on at other schools.
2 Likes
I haven’t read the entire thread, but I have read the Stanford Review piece. Here is a link to the open letter announcing the decision on the athletic teams. Makes sense to me.
1 Like
I’m all for interpretive understanding, but this is kind of putting thoughts into the author’s head! Conservative viewpoints are also in the minority at other great universities, including UChicago. Why do we not see a similar article from their right-wing rag?
As others are suggesting that personal disappointment is the primary motivation of the author, I’ll venture an analogy: the faculty are personally triggered by the physical presence of Hoover right smack in the middle of the Stanford campus (that tower you see in all the pics? It’s Hoover), and will do anything in their power to get rid of it 
I don’t know enough about the faculty senate proposal to comment at this point; however, the senate is an institutional body of the university so it does sound like they are trying to suppress academic inquiry. Criticize Dr. Atlas, not the institution from which he hails. After all, no one tries to censure the entire Stanford University when one of its faculty makes a dumb statement.
Aside
It was a derogatory name used by Cincinnati journalists as part of sports rivalry, to say that Chicago was full of hot air. It was popularized by Charles Dana, of the New York Sun, as an attack of on this Midwestern upstart city bidding against the REAL city of New York for the World Fair.
/Aside
Aside #2
The East Coast people still look down on Chicago, which is why there are so many posts here which have only a single point which is “How DARE upstart University of Chicago peasants compare themselves to Ivy League aristocracy!”.
/Aside
2 Likes
I believe the list of teams that were publicly mentioned in the cheating scandal includes the following. I don’t see much correlation between which sports had cheating scandals and which sports Stanford cut. The only sport that was mentioned at Stanford was sailing, which was cut. However, the sports that were mentioned at other colleges were not cut at Stanford.
Basketball – USC
Football – USC
Lacrosse – USC
Rowing (women’s) – USC
Sailing – Stanford
Soccer – USC, UCLA, Yale
Tennis – Georgetown, UT Austin
Volleyball (women’s) – USC, Wake Forest
Water Polo – USC
It’s possible that the sailing scandal made some persons question what the point was to have an unpopular sport like sailing that some consider essentially affirmative action for rich White kids, which might extend to similar thoughts about fencing and such (fencing is actually notably more diverse than sailing).
1 Like