Comments on: What would happen to faculty if we failed 80% of the time? Or, being a $1.5 million coach means never having to say you’re sorry.

By: THE PRISONERS DILEMMA THAT IS COLLEGE SPORT. | star sport

THE PRISONERS DILEMMA THAT IS COLLEGE SPORT. | star sport — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 09:52:30 +0000

[...] comes Historiann, with an observation from Colorado State in the same vein. The football program underachieves, and there’s accumulating evidence [...]

By: Baa Ram U. featured again on NPR : Historiann : History and sexual politics, 1492 to the present

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 13:55:13 +0000

[...] this is how you build a national reputation–prominent and flattering placement in free media, rather than building $250 million stadiums. NPR’s Renee Montagne aired two interviews yesterday and today on Morning Edition featuring [...]

By: Susan

Susan — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 03:12:06 +0000

Wrong. Swarthmore doesn’t have a grad program. (But, ironically, my father played football for Swarthmore. He will still — even with dementia — talk about the Swarthmore honors program.)

By: Tenured Radical

Tenured Radical — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 02:09:42 +0000

Susan: I’m guessing you went to Swarthmore.

By: Susan

Susan — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 18:33:33 +0000

Where I was in grad school, the faculty used to cheer a losing football season, because it meant the admissions office was doing its job. Most of my profs had never taught a football player == they didn’t take history classes.

By: LadyProf

LadyProf — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 17:44:48 +0000

Loveable Losers, even.

By: LadyProf

LadyProf — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 17:06:04 +0000

Although I would never defend D-1 football, its measure of success isn’t goals scored or games won. The Chicago Cubs management has giggled all the way to the bank with its payroll-saving Loveable Lovers motif in a big city whose fan base could support high-paid players.

With college football, if alums and apparel manufacturers and TV networks and the NCAA are happy, the program is successful and should enjoy lots more $. Retch.

By: Julia

Julia — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 16:31:10 +0000

I heard that interview with Professor Straayer– (we were always shocked as his students to hear that he was registered as a Republican even though he works at a public university.)My boyfriend and I were both Political Science majors at Baa Ram U, and were horrified by the physical state of the classrooms. Clark was falling apart. In our capstone seminar, there were times we couldn’t even hear our professor speak over the buzzing of the light fixtures, and he had to show videos from the 1980s because the TV had only a VHS player. The drop in ceiling tiles were falling down, and it was all very distracting. We would walk past the newly remodeled recreation center on our way home from this class and grumble about the university’s obvious priorities. This doesn’t go unnoticed by students. I don’t know why there aren’t riots at the Oval.

By: Indyanna

Indyanna — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 16:23:53 +0000

@Janice,

I know where your school could get a lightly-used, lovingly-tended university hockey arena that has also been previously used as a practice facility by a Stanley Cup NHL team. Fairly brutalist in its design elements, so your architecture school might or might not like it, and also, of course, the acquiring school would have to figure out how to uproot and transport it to its new location. It’s still used for recreational skating, but it seems destined to be demolished for a “Money Without Excellence” campus expansion program now underway.

The elimination of the hockey program decades ago saw one of the great examples of stakeholder confrontation that did not end well. The hockey team and their girlfriends charged the admin building and barricaded the president in his office. They waited until the campus radio station got there to broadcast it and then began presenting their “unconditional demands.” The team captain first insisted (at length) that the hockey program be reinstated and the building occupiers get complete immunity from punishment. After this awkward soliloquy he said: “How do you respond to that President _________?. Will you agree to our first demand?”

After what seemed like twenty minutes of dead air on the radio the president emphatically said “NO!!!” The negotiation unravelled from that point on, but suffice it to say that it was not Columbia or Harvard in 1968. The team stayed disbanded–thus the availability of the arena–and I think the girlfriends got new boyfriends.

By: Historiann

Historiann — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 15:14:56 +0000

Ugh, Janice: we're in the same boat (or rink.) I don't know if any of you heard this interview on Morning Edition, but Renee Montagne was just in town and she interviewed my colleague John Straayer about Colorado & the election. He talks about something at the end that neither Dems nor Republicans want to talk about: public investment in education and infrastructure for the public good. BTW, she mentions that she talked with him in the "political science" building. That dept. doesn't have its own building--they're just down the hall from us in History, in the spectacularly awkward Clark Bldg.