Friday, August 03, 2007

Academic hero Jim Harbaugh

Not that my status as a Michigan State alumnus has anything to do with this, but my new favorite Michigan grad is Jim Harbaugh, current coach of Stanford. What did he do? He pointed out that the University of Michigan keeps its football players eligible by enrolling them in lightweight courses.

Now it's not surprising that Michigan players and administrators today would take offense to this, but the ugly reality is that it's true. When I was at State, everyone knew that football players who couldn't make it academically went to Comm. Arts, and Michigan players went into "general studies." Neither group was especially likely to get a decent job upon graduation. Or graduate at all, for that matter.

Read the article carefully. They're not arguing the allegations are false. They're arguing that it's somehow "elitist" to refuse to give someone a useless "general studies" degree. They're arguing that telling the truth about Division 1 football is somehow a betrayal.

Pathetic. You would figure that a university that likes to call itself the "Ivy League of the Midwest" would teach enough logic to let them know that they're engaging in base personal attacks. However, it appears that "logic" is not offered in the "College of General Studies."

Thanks, Jim. This makes up for a lot of what I saw when you were playing for Da Bears.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think you have the intersection of a couple of things here. First is the holy world of Division I sports, where the system depends on pretending that what everyone knows, ain't so.

The other is the American worship of the four-year degree. Doesn't matter what the degree's in, what the student put into it, and what he got out of the four years at the institution, he has a DEGREE, and that is a ticket to all the good things in life. It's almost blasphemy to speak of a four year degree as something potentially trivial or useless.

Which sort of circles back to the Division I thing again. For years we've heard that no matter what way being going on, Division I sports and all that goes with it is a good thing, because it allows kids who otherwise wouldn't have much of a shot at success "to go to college." If you point out that the college professor has no clothes because the athletes' opportunity to "go to college" doesn't actually provide any of the things that going to college is supposed to provide, you strike at two of the major articles of faith of American society.

Bike Bubba said...

Bingo. I'd actually advocate closing about half to two thirds of the public colleges and universities in this country for this very reason.