Our National Priorities - Circuses Űber Alles

George Rebane

While Bill Gates was imploring Congress to raise the cap on H1-B visas that let us import the scientists and engineers needed to keep the nation afloat as a first world country, we have the other view of what actually concerns our colleges and universities as they turn into diploma mills and finishing schools for circus performers.  Our schools no longer graduate the technicians needed to maintain our standard of living or keep us in the forefront of science. 

As we import people to pick our lettuce, we also import people (through the H1-B visa program) to invent our next generation of technology.  However the honorable dummies (I prefer to characterize them as ignorant instead of evil) in Washington who have no trouble letting the borders leak lettuce pickers, maintain a ridiculously low limit on the number of brains we allow in.  Gates told the honorables that “Congress’s failure to pass high-skill immigration reform has exacerbated an already grave situation, … The current  base cap of 65,000 H1-B visas (per year) is arbitrarily set and bears no relation to the U.S. economy’s demand for skilled workers.”

OK, now drive your Tivo from C-SPAN to the NCAA basketball boob side of the tube.  There we see team after team of excellent athletes perform their tricks in the annual tournament - one of the major circuses that the public now demands.  These well-trained young men are hindered by little else than having to drag along a cumbersome, albeit watered-down, college curriculum as they sprint up and down the floor.

In the 19mar08 WSJ Mark Yost writes about the attempt at “serious academic reform” in the college athletic programs through application of a new set of standards called the Academic Progress Rate (APR).  This program is supposed to check that Mukasa is maintaining some minimum level in the grades department.  Starting with the university alumni, everyone knows that the collegiate football and basketball programs are nothing but the glorified minor leagues for professional versions of the sport – the big league circuses.  Any semblance of academic performance by the athletes is optional as long as the sports program maintains the required positive cashflow.

If it weren’t for the money, for which the universities are always willing to sell their soul, these athletes should be playing in the basketball and football equivalents of the minor leagues.  There they wouldn’t be distracted by things like APR which at best wind up complicating matters for the reward of a dubious sheepskin.  And the real good ones don’t even give a big rat’s asset for that diploma, and head directly for the big ring after a season or two of displaying the power of their mojo while wearing some school’s colors.

In the interval we have people like Dr. Nathan Tublitz of the Coalition of Intercollegiate Athletics going around the country and reminding university administrations of their duties as educators.  Yost goes on to report

And, of course, many of these kids are African-American. "It's no coincidence that basketball has the lowest APR," Dr. Tublitz said. "One of the major determinants of college success is socioeconomic status. Kids from privileged backgrounds, on average, do better. As educators, we need to make sure that those kids from underprivileged backgrounds are given the skills to achieve their potential. We need to put more resources into that group of students."

More resources!!??  These guys have about as many resources expended on them as modern civilization can muster – it just happens that none of these resources are used to promote academic performance for the simple reason that no one cares.  For book-learning, the only thing these athletes need is to redo high school and then study like other college students.  For this they need more than 24 hours in the day, a difficult feat no matter how much we’re willing to spend to keep calling them ‘college students’ without breaking out in laughter. 

By the way, speaking of political correctness, look at the nearby graphic that accompanies Yost’s article on the APR.  Even in a sport that is overwhelmingly populated by blacks, one may not hint at their academic underperformance, and the white male is again brought in as today’s defenseless standby dummy.  There are modern journalistic taboos that even the culture critics of the Wall Street Journal dare not confront.

Comments

[Gary Irving]

Complaining about the academic farce of 10 basketball players in a sea of 10,000 students(at any State U) is swatting at a fly. Every jock in American Universities could join a monastery (or change their major to Physics - not much difference) and it wouldn't solve our national shortage of trained technical talent. The solution lies not in shutting down all Athletic budgets either as most of those programs is self-supporting or profitable. The problem lies in a culture that makes rock stars out of lawyers on TV while featuring nothing about engineers, chemists or the lowly high school math teacher. These cultural values won't be reprogrammed with massive infusions of Federal funds either. The circus in is the court room and our litigious society.

[Wade Irving]

John Edwards made black athletes suck at physics?

*Fishes around for whiskey bottle under desk...*