Racist Fraternity Matches Cheating in College Sports

3/11/2015

I bet the frat boys cheered black players on the Oklahoma football team

Colleges seem to have lost their way. I think about that as I follow the blatant breaking of rules at so many schools – North Carolina! Notre Dame! Syracuse!

But it is not just football and basketball. More and more, college seems to be a highly expensive country club, forcing less affluent students to mortgage their futures for the right diploma, the right contacts (never mind the right education.)
The food services. The pools and health clubs. The exotic “study” programs abroad.

Now we are reminded that colleges can also be a breeding ground for prejudice and arrogance. Fraternity boys and their girls (I deliberately do not use the words “men and women”) at the University of Oklahoma chanting vile (and apparently traditional) doggerel about African-Americans while in formal wear on a chartered bus.

What a caricature of America, no doubt leading to the racist scams of places like Ferguson, Mo.

These privileged fraternity louts and city officials take their cues from the highest court in the land:

“Our country has changed,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote with smug assurance in the 2013 Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act.

Fortunately, David L. Boren, president at Oklahoma, came down hard on the punks and punkettes who rode the charter bus. He shut down the fraternity house, which should be razed, just to exorcise the bigotry, and he has ordered two ringleaders expelled. Boren’s righteous anger was appropriate, but there is a broader question:

Why have colleges become a haven for rich boosters to underwrite powerful basketball and football teams that have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with education?

Yet at the same time, less affluent students cannot keep pace with the tuition and luxuries at the landmark schools? It’s all connected, you know.

In the Times on Monday, Joe Nocera discussed better ways to deliver actual education at a reasonable price. There needs to be a way for qualified students to learn from the best schools and teachers, via the web at times.

Three separate articles and columns in the Times on Monday, all describing higher education out of control. But now it’s time for March Madness, prime athletes shoehorned into “college” for a year – I’m talking about you, Kentucky -- another gross caricature of higher education.

Have a good bracket.

Brian Savin

3/11/2015 02:19:43 pm

Dear Saint George,
I don't know where to begin. I think it appropriate to start with thanks for incredibly insightful commentary on the state of so-called big time college athletics and the context within which it festers and breeds bad things. This is one of your commentaries that gives me an epiphany about larger societal conditions and how sports can breed the worst in us, as well as the best. True amateur athletics is a truly exciting activity and admirable spectacle. But you describe here its aberration.

I wonder if "big time" college sports provides one of the last still acceptable safe havens to unleash despicable feelings and behavior -- despicable not by some contemporary and transient political correctness measure, but by basic moral humanity standards. What you describe here strikes me in the gut. Big time college sports looks like panem et circenses without as much nutrition and only somewhat less blood. It won't stop until the NCAA is abolished as disgusting and immoral by the standards to which we hold the function of education. The outrage you properly express needs to be translated into actionable demands for change. You make me think about what we all can do. I will. Thanks.

George Vecsey

3/11/2015 03:36:27 pm

Brian, thanks so much. When I was covering sports all those years, I knew that the rancid link between "education" and FB and BKB gave me the creeps but I did not think I could approach it with total disdain. (I was an abolitionist toward boxing and basically loved boxers...I had no problem with that position.) But since stepping away a few years ago, I am in touch with my contempt for the degradation of colleges through big-time sports, and other bread and circuses. I went to a college that made its athletes pass regular courses -- Hofstra College, late 50's. I'm very proud of my athlete friends who have had good lives. GV

Brian Savin

3/12/2015 12:08:52 am

Working hand in glove with the poison pill of big time college sports, I believe, are the university and college Marketing Departments, now euphemistically called admission departments. Staffed mostly by folks who couldn't get into the schools to begin with, or did but couldn't find a real job, the mission of these folks seems largely to find and produce class after class of future Funding Mechanisms, aka "students." The tools given to them are sports teams, pools, glorious gyms, golf courses, and palatial living spaces. As a rule, they couldn't judge an academic mind if their collective lives depended on it. But who cares?
Once upon a time, slightly later than the Middle Ages, professors administered entrance exams and choose students on the basis of their desire to learn. And it didn't cost much. I think the place to begin reform is to ditch the Marketing Departments and gIve the teachers who have devoted their lives to their loved honorable profession the control over their environment that they deserve. If we do that, maybe the Colosseums and Roman Baths will crumble in time from disuse, and student doggerel with intellectual content will once against be graffitied on beautifully cracking walls.

George Vecsey

3/12/2015 02:07:21 am

Brian, totally agree.
I was very impressed with the journalism students I met at the Univ. of Texas, Austin, a few years ago -- the definition of "flagship school." I also felt the atmosphere on the central campus was sedate, serious, calm, something like this. Somebody explained:
"There's no football game this week."

Thor A. Larsen

3/13/2015 10:02:36 am

George, I am 100% behind you in your comments about college students today and the distortion of 'advanced education' by such enormous focus on sports and making sure the students 'enjoy' college life. As mentioned in previous discussion, I am a strong advocate of separating NCAA sports from the colleges.
Mr, Boren became my hero when I heard him on TV. Schools need tight discipline in behavior and in academic demands and accomplishments. Since so many students receive students loans from Uncle Sam, we, as taxpayers, are subsidizing pooer academics and behavior as well.
The costs of college education and how dleivered eed major changes. ON-line courses should be a significant portion of the total education and can reduce the annual tuition significantly and still rovide quality education if adequately delivered and reviewed.

George Vecsey

3/13/2015 10:13:26 am

Thor, thanks, man. Marianne, as a teacher, has been saying that for years -- the web is so available, particularly to young people. Kids already keep up on details from teachers that we could not have imagined. But lectures, assignments, can be aimed toward larger and willing audiences. Then "colleges" can provide Kentucky-style basketball teams and health clubs and gourmet food for those who want it. But call it something else. GV

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---Vic Caretti, 47, whose father recently died of Covid at 85.
---From an article by Paula Span, who covers old age for the NYT, which currently has 2646 comments, the majority criticizing the American public – and public officials – for acting as if the pandemic is “over.”
Classic wishful thinking, at a lethal level.
Please see:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/11/health/covid-pandemic-seniors.html

Racist Fraternity Matches Cheating in College Sports

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