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Foosball is the Devil!

Last week, the Eugene Weekly ran a piece written by U of O professor Jim Earl criticizing the sports fetishism of colleges and universities in America. Fair enough, you might say. He could have a point, considering the U of O is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a new basketball arena, while its dorms rank among the worst in the nation. But does Earl tackle this problem? No, he goes for the gusto and attacks sports in general (and football, specifically) for their inherent moral wrongness. I’m not joking; this man is the ultimate killjoy. Check it out:

“What bothers me, really, is what football is teaching the kids about life. Take a bunch of high school kids, many of them from tough backgrounds, and just shower them with luxuries like private jets and air-conditioned lockers with Xboxes. Fulfilling their crudest teen fantasies is teaching them something? What, that life is a game? Great lesson.”

But that’s just the opening salvo, my friends. The main meat of Earl’s diatribe is based on a meeting between him, The Frohn and the late, great Bill Moos. Earl is yammering away about his tweed jacket or some other shit when he accidently makes an awkward faux pas.

“[I] blurted out something like this: ‘You know, the relation of football to higher ed isn’t exactly natural or obvious. After all, the values of the football field are the exact opposite of the values they learn in class. In class they learn that violence and force are wrong, that life’s not a contest, that beating the other guy isn’t the goal …’ I could have gone on, but […] Dave and Bill were staring at me as if I’d just peed on the table.”

Well, duh. I’d look at Earl the same way if he pinched off that verbal turd in my office. Seriously, who used the wayback machine to transport Professor Goodvibes here from the ’60’s? First of all, I thought the whole reason I’m going to college is so I can get ahead in life. Oh right, but it’s not a contest. Excuse me. Second, imagine if, at this point in the conversation, Bill Moos put Earl in a headlock and gave him noogies until Earl admitted that football is totally awsome. Where’s your peace, love and understanding now, Stodgy McKilljoy?

I yearn to quote more of Earl’s surreal, Appolonian tirade, but you can read the whole thing for yourself. I guess I could make some jokes about Earl being picked last in gym class and wearing tweed jackets, but I’d rather deflate his argument with an actual example. Take the town Barrow, Alaska. Well north of the Arctic Circle and 500 miles from the nearest town, it’s an unlikely place for people to live, much less play football. Nevertheless, the local high school put together its first football team, even though they had to practice on gravel and no one knew how to actually play the game. Thanks to donations from some random woman in Florida, the Barrow Whalers got an actual turf field … about 20 feet away from the Arctic Ocean.

Here’s the rub, though: since the formation of the football team, attendance and grades at the high school have rose dramatically. What’s that, you say? Sports having a positive effect on teenagers? That’s right. it’s the inspirational, feel-good story of the year. Of course, playing sports doesn’t mean that you will be a good person. It doesn’t guarantee good morals. At the very least, though, it is an incentive for kids to go to school and keep their grades up, so why not? I mean, god forbid that a kid get a free (or discounted) college education for being good at sports – an opportunity he or she might never have had otherwise. Arguing against the athletic arms race happening on college campuses is one thing, but arguing against sports completely? Lame.

  1. […] if the UO Athletic Department wasn’t already having PR issues, now their public face has been suspended for next weeks home game against Fresno State […]

  2. Ossie says:

    Scapegoat. That is the word that should be used in this debate more often. And this goes beyond Earl’s article, which was obviously for entertainment purposes. Aren’t there better ways to help your department, your fellow faculty and the University than devoting so much time to protesting the growing Athletic Department budget? The Athletic Department is a separate entity from the classrooms of the UO – yes there are overlapping programs and gray areas, but it is still two separate organization attempting to coexist in a balanced manner.

    This argument is old. Fun, but old. When are the professors going to actually open the doors to the public of their little academic portal worlds and expose the actual inefficiencies and barriers within the departments and schools? Try asking some questions that will lead to beneficial answers, not tales of medievalists trying to stick it to the corporate man.

    Where is the detail in this argument?

  3. Niedermeyer says:

    “I just think that many professors feel that while the merits of football have been championed in this balance, the merits of the academic side of this equation have been shadowed, creating a situation where athletics thrive, and academics kind of wither away.”

    Academia hasn’t needed the help of football to achieve irrelevance and mediocrity… athletics is just an easy scapegoat which helps prevent our learned sages from confronting the many shortcomings in their collective worldview.

    I may be straying into fanboy territory with this, but if more professors questioned the orthodoxies of academia the way say, Professor Harbaugh has with the diversity program, they would see that their own house needs putting in order before blaming football from “diverting attention” from academics. Frohnmayer hasn’t stonewalled Harbaughs attempts to determine the practical value of diversity efforts because he is too focused on athletics, just as the professors who criticize Harbaugh for asking tough questions aren’t too learned and enlightened to rise above calling him a bigot.

    My point is that given its deep commitment to criticism qua criticism, Academia could stand to do a lot more serious soul-searching and self-criticism. Every dollar that goes to athletics is not coming at the expense of academics, and in the big picture, professors have it quite good by 21st Century standards. After all, the disciplines which eschew the PC pissing matches and navel-gazing irrelevance in favor of some measurable value to society tend to attract sizeable donations and other opportunities. Whining does not, and rightly so.

  4. Blaser says:

    T: I wasn’t attempting to defend Earl’s essay, but instead tried to make the point that although he may personally have an extreme view on the athletics v academics debate, that he deserves to have a voice in it. Maybe I was attempting to defend the poor guy, as I know that plenty of faculty members feel the frustration of seeing that the U of O has managed to create a top-tier athletic department, but cannot do the same in the academic sphere.

    As a member of that horrible institution called academia, I would actually argue that many professors see the merits of a good football team, and know that in today’s world athletics and academics actually rely on each other for success. Without the educational institution, there would be no university. Without this university, there would be no football team. And as Tim pointed out, without the football team and other successful athletic programs, the viability of the educational institution would be diminished.

    I just think that many professors feel that while the merits of football have been championed in this balance, the merits of the academic side of this equation have been shadowed, creating a situation where athletics thrive, and academics kind of wither away. While some dimwits like Earl see that as a direct threat to the educational institution because football is “evil”, I still think he is touching on the periphery of a real rift that is clearly seen at the U of O.

  5. Timothy says:

    There’s also the whole “UO athletic department is independently funded and makes a lot of its own money from being popular” angle. Should they donate some of that to the university? Maybe. But keep in mind that if UO didn’t have a nationally recognized athletic department it’d be just another third tier academic backwater that very few people paid attention to. The PR associated with athletics is probably a net gain.

    And, despite claims otherwise, it is always going to be difficult for a school like UO to attract top-tier academics. There are some quality folks, and I had a lot of them in my day, but it’s not MIT and it’s not exactly located in the center of the universe. Tyler is right about this, it’s a different set of priorities than Harvard or UPenn or Rice. Eugene is a town of 150,000 in the dead center of a state nobody cares about: not everyone is going to want to live there, and all the money in the world won’t change that.

    As for learning, you get what you give. If you’re a lazy jerkoff, you end up in a cubicle like me :-).

  6. Wubba Wubba says:

    I had Earl for a class. He was kinda pompous. I’d suggest taking someone like Jeff Hanes. Much better.

  7. Vincent. says:

    He comes across as that crazy professor who seems to think that Universities should still be all about the contemplative arts of higher learning

    Quite to the contrary, he seems to think that universities should be all about indoctrinating students about violence and force being wrong, life not being a contest, and that beating the other guy isn

  8. T says:

    Blaser: I don’t think anybody is “busting a nut” over Earl’s recalcitrant attitude toward sports. Books are his thing. Hey, they’re my thing too, actually.

    But to prattle on, as Earl does, in such a dismissive tone about how modern society, like, sucks is a little too much to take — especially when the guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

    “You know, the relation of football to higher ed isn’t exactly natural or obvious. After all, the values of the football field are the exact opposite of the values they learn in class. In class they learn that violence and force are wrong, that life’s not a contest, that beating the other guy isn’t the goal

  9. Blaser says:

    “As a stodgy professor who admits to knowing very little about sports, why is he even in this debate.”

    Come on, Ossie. Academics like Mr. Earl get involved in the debate because, shockingly, they actually care about academic institutions. They see kids barely being able to afford college, academic buildings that are leaking water and are poorly heated in the winter, and they see that they are some of the lowest paid professors in the country. Contrast this with the flat screen televisions every five feet within any building that is used by the athletic department and million dollar salaries for coaches, and you can see why traditionalists like Earl are pissed.

    While I know the next argument would be that a lot of the money for these extravagant expenses comes from private donors, you have to remember that that is made possible because the whole school focuses on athletics as a selling point, which means that major donors are more likely to give to the athletic department rather than start a scholarship or pay for a new academic building. In order to get more students to enroll here, they have used the logic that a good football team is better for business than a strong academics program. Professors like Earl see this as counter intuitive, as it feeds the sports machine and does nothing to advance academic programs at the school, even though Das Frohn and Moos have been telling people that for years.

    The thing is that Profs have to accept that athletics will always be an important part of student life at the U of O, but they refuse to accept that it is a higher priority than educating students who are spending thousands of dollars for the privilege. They don’t want to see the school they work at become a so focused on bringing in new students through athletic success that they forget to take care of the students that are already in attendance, not getting the quality education that they deserve.

    Let’s just put it this way kids … the fact that you are busting a nut over a professor not taking kindly to football and basketball being put on the front burner at an institution of higher education tells you something about how things have changed over the last 20 years. College is officially the new and improved high school: there is more alcohol, no adults, and way better football teams. Too bad I’m paying out the ass for it, under the assumption that I’m learning something.

  10. Ossie says:

    As a stodgy professor who admits to knowing very little about sports, why is he even in this debate. Making the statement “football doesn’t teach us anything” is narrow-minded I can’t believe a professor would admit to saying it. Actually, yes I can. No Earl, we don’t all want to sit by ourselves and read a book to pass all our spare time. Yes, we do like to get out and engage in human interaction. At the end of the week, I do not give too much of a shit about who won and who lost, but I do care about that great conversation I had with my high school English teacher, who tail-gates at every Duck football game like it was a Grateful Dead concert, at half-time about the novel he is writing – about the characters, the motifs and the symbols. Learning comes from outside the classroom as well.

    The cover story is a nice narrative, but it’s not news-worthy and not too thought-provoking, fitting along nicely with most of the Eugene Weekly content. Earl, meet me in the parking lot on Saturday, first round is on me. Maybe we could talk about Beowulf and how it celebrates heroism, violence and aiming squarely at “the lowest common denominators in human nature.”

  11. niedermeyer says:

    To be fair, Earl doesn’t portray himself as a neutral observer. He makes it clear that he is a stodgy professor, and that he would rather read a book than watch that local sports team. He also doesn’t seem to have any illusions about where his opinions place him vis-a-vis his fellow Americans. He comes across as that crazy professor who seems to think that Universities should still be all about the contemplative arts of higher learning, rather than four years of babysitting and the pursuit of near-fatal blood alcohol levels.

    Wacky old coot.

  12. Timothy says:

    I was watching the Falcons’ press conference about Michael Vick and it sort of surprised me how well spoken his teammates were. Then I started thinking about it: most of them have at least a couple of years of college under their belts, and even if you’re getting more slack than a regular student you’ll probably learn something. I think it has a lot to do with the NFL’s age requirement.

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