I missed the New York Times article about Rutgers professor William Dowling, who is campaiging against college sports, and has written a jeremiad on the subject and gotten it published by– slight irony alert– Penn State University Press.
There are a lot of things to dislike about big-time college sports, starting with the rank hypocrisy of the NCAA, and continuing on through the lack of a meaningful championship in college football. I have to say, though, that Dowling kind of puts me off the book when he describes it to the Times:
“I wanted this book to be a monument,” Dr. Dowling, 62, said after class. “I wanted it to be a monument to the kids and the faculty who rallied around this issue. We tried to take on the monster of commercialized sports, even if it swallowed us up and passed us out the other end. Someone should know that we fought the good fight. And because I believe in literature as a form of symbolic action, I want readers to see the possibility of another way. Think about the impact of a book like ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ on slavery.”
OK, let’s try to maintain a grip, here, shall we? Let’s review:
- Chattel slavery: a moral evil exceeded only by genocide, whose existence in the first century of the American republic is a blight on the high ideals of the founders.
- College athletics: a fairly corrupt enterprise of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, attaining (in a transient way) a level of evil somewhat below that of a subprime mortgage lender.
Let’s not go around making rash analogies between the two, or even rash analogies between literary campaigns against the two. Though, on the bright side, this does make the various “New Atheists are just like ______” analogies look less offensively silly.
And then, of course, there’s this gem:
“If you were giving the scholarship to an intellectually brilliant kid who happens to play a sport, that’s fine,” he said. “But they give it to a functional illiterate who can’t read a cereal box, and then make him spend 50 hours a week on physical skills. That’s not opportunity. If you want to give financial help to minorities, go find the ones who are at the library after school.”
Oh, yeah. That will end well…
(Via Inside Higher Ed)
