I think it’s much different for many people in different parts of the US. I went to The University of Alabama largely because I grew up an Alabama football fan. The majority of kids who go to Auburn were Auburn fans growing up. Sometimes people will attend schools they weren’t fans of because they offer different/better programs but many go the school they were a fan of when they were young.
Never been to UCSC, except brief visits to the campus. According to all I think I know of its reputation, it’s certainly more academically oriented than sports oriented. (UCSC students and alums, is that correct?)
The history I recall reading (it was in all the papers for miles around at the time) was, there was an election to choose the school mascot. The sports fans (and I think the administration too?) were all gung ho for UCSC Sea Lions. The academics uprose and responded (facetiously, sort-of) by nominating the Banana Slug. (Note: This wasn’t entirely off-the-wall. UCSC is located in a fabulously beautiful mountainous redwood forest setting, and there really are banana slugs all around.)
Banana Slugs won.
I teach a course on the history of higher education. One thing the students learn is that the growth of colleges and unis in the U.S. had a lot to do with football. Now even if you weren’t involved as an alum you had a reason to care about Chicago, Michigan, or Yale. And you had an understanding of these schools, so a generation later, you’re telling your kids to go to Yale. Or a few generations later, you’re using GI Bill benefits at Ohio State, and so on.
Also, note that the powerhouse schools have changed. The Ivy League was created as an athletic association. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were once the top schools for football.
People can’t be serious if they are using top 100 lists. 100? Hardly excluding any school most people have heard of. Virtually all the big football schools are going to be on such a list by default. Good grief.
They say the job of a good college president is ensure sex for the students, parking for the faculty and football for the alumni. Why do they care about keeping the alumni happy and connected to the school? Money, pure and simple. It brings in money. (Which is why people keep bringing up Penn State lately.) Take the money out of the equation and the NCAA would evaporate in a flash. Many schools are more and more putting the athletic boosters associations at arms lengths. Even separating the school mascot, etc. from the school itself. It’s a messy business that all too often hurts the image of the school. College presidents would much rather it all go away, except for the money.
It is amazingly corrupting and generates bad press for the schools involved. Look at what just happened to Cal Tech. Cal Tech? Why does Cal Tech need even Division III sports let alone allow cheating? And now they have egg on their face.
Oh yeah, that’s helping their identity.
Collegiate athletics and the academic enterprise have a long-standing, symbiotic relationship. They have to be in balance - that is, collegiate sports can be revenue generating, rally the alums and community, but student athletes need to be students first, athletes second. Truthfully, most sports are like this. Think about the golf team, swimmers, soccer team, etc. The only sports where this sometimes isn’t the case are football and basketball (and occasionally baseball). But most collegiate sports programs carry dozens of sports, most, if not all, that do not generate revenue. Football and basketball typically pay for the others.
It’s a pipe dream to disentangle collegiate sports for college life. It is an important aspect of the college experience for many students, and traditions that create a lifelong affiliation with the institution. Certainly, there are many examples of the balance going to pot. But having worked with a number of student athletes, mostly those in sports like women’s golf, diving, swimming, softball, and tennis, I have to say that they are among the most diligent and hardworking students I teach and supervise. I think the need to organize their lives is an essential life skill that I wish more students had.
In my institution’s case, our football program generates so much revenue - it’s one of the few that earns money - that we have scholarships and endowed chairs funded through the athletic department. They do contribute to the academic side of the house. I credit the AD staff on the women’s side. Since Title IX came through there has been an expansion of women’s sports - and very few professional opportunities for the athletes after they have used up their eligibility. So they have to earn degrees for the experience to be worthwhile. I have a colleague who runs the academic advising department in Athletics and she and her staff are terrific - the standards are extremely high and the student athletes know it. We regularly place students on dean’s lists and academic All-American honors. Again, I do think football and basketball trail the other sports, but we had a starting point guard drafted in the NBA lottery who earned a 4.0 GPA one semester, and left with a 3.7 overall. That’s well higher than this college professor earned. Many of the student athletes who enter the professional ranks come back after their careers, or even in the offseason to take classes. (Case in point - running into Vince Young in the bathroom in my building a few summers ago.)
A caveat to my experience is that I have worked at selective institutions - so our athletes are admitted (for the most part) under the same standards as any other student. I know that there are exceptions in some of the revenue generating sports.
Just wanted to make it clear that all academics are not virulently anti-athletics.
I think you will find, at any college, and especially the better ones, that almost all the faculty and most of the grad students (i.e., the people who really constitute the academic community) don’t give a rat’s ass about the sports program (or actively despise it).
Outside of the US, college sports programs (with few exceptions) are little, if anything, other than recreation facilities for students, and nobody at all cares about them except the actual players and maybe their boyfriends or girlfriends.
The school I went to (NYU) didn’t even *have *a football team, and sports really weren’t a part of campus life unless you played them. As opposed to my sister who went to the University of Michigan, where football was central to everything.
Personally, one of the reasons I went to a small private women’s college is to avoid the revolting display of quasi-professional sports put on by a supposedly academic institution.
For better or worse, I think sports are very important in a school’s identity.
There are thousands of colleges and universities in the United States. And if you were to list the ones that had a national reputation, you’d have a handful like the Ivy Leagues or MIT or West Point that were known for academic reasons. But ninety percent of the time, if you’ve heard of a college outside your home region, it’s because of its sports program.
But quite often this increased recognition is not helping their identity at all. Penn State is currently one of the most famous schools not just in the US, but worldwide. Thanks to the football program. And not in a good way.
Note that football usually doesn’t add much, if any, money to the academic side directly. (Certainly none of the schools I’ve been affiliated with.) The schools tolerate it since it keeps the alumni and such involved and those people are then more inclined to donate. It was keeping these people in the dark that was what the admins at Penn State were thinking about.
Not exactly. The mascot had been the Banana Slug from the founding of the school. Chancellor at the time changed the mascot without any discussion, to the Sea Lion, I guess because he wanted to move away from the “UCSC is kinda weird and funky” rep. There was a massive outcry from, basically, everyone, and the slug was restored, after a struggle.
Meanwhile, the weirdness and funkiness was already being dealt with via a huge inpouring of money into the science programs/buildings at the expense of both the experimental programs like History of Consciousness, and all the humanities. It is a world class school for the sciences, but the time when they were cutting edge in any other department is long gone. The school is still “weird” in comparison to, say UC Irvine, but it is but a pale shadow of how interesting the place used to be in the 1970’s (but what isn’t?). However, their sports programs still suck.
Which is a short way of saying that you didn’t bother reading any of the arguments. There are approximately 1500 colleges in the NCAA and NAIA. 52 American institutions with undergraduate programs made the top 100 worldwide university list. That’s approximately 3% of US colleges and universities with athletic programs. (And this is actually quite an overestimation of the percentage, since junior colleges and many religious schools with athletic programs aren’t members of either organization).
Look at that list. Are there any schools that you think should be excluded from a top 50 list? I actually think some in the 101-200 range may have been ranked too low. At some point, a list of top academic schools is going to have to make some arbitrary decisions, and this is as decent of a list as any other.
My argument was that the top 50 US list has disproportionate football success. I’ll admit that I can’t be bothered to do a full statistical analysis, but the raw numbers were in my earlier post.
Absolutely not. Schools would still maintain athletic teams, at least at the club level. (Just as they maintain teams in Speech, College Bowl, and a number of other activities). These teams would still travel and compete both regionally and nationally. A sanctioning body would still be necessary, just as it is in many/most other activities.
Additionally, you do understand that most highly competitive universities despise the NCAA for being too restrictive, don’t you? There’s been rumblings that the 60 or so BCS conference teams might form their own organization. The NCAA is not the problem in these scandals.
Egg on their face? BS. This is hardly corruption. This is on the level of taking two pens from the supply closet at work when you only need one. There’s a thread on this in the Game Room. Short story: Cal Tech allows their students two weeks to course shop for appropriate schedules. The NCAA considers students not to be full time in those first two weeks. Technical violation, which Cal Tech themselves reported. Literally every NCAA institution makes these sorts of violations. Most of them make dozens of them annually and self-report. Nothing happens of it, because no one cares. No once cares because the violations don’t give any recruiting or competitive edge - they’re just honest mistakes. (Examples from Ohio State’s widely publicized secondary violation self-reporting this past spring: graduating seniors in women’s hockey were given letter-winner recognition that was $4 per student over the NCAA limit; a coach accidentally dialed a recruit rather than a current player on a cell phone; a coach responded to an email from a prospective student who happened to be a high school junior.) The rules are there in case schools try to obtain competitive advantage. As mentioned above, many schools find this to be ridiculous.
Not directly, but it does. And neither does the academic side add money to the athletic side. For instance, every Big 10 athletic program is self-sustaining, and the academic sides typically see funding increases correlating to major athletic success. Subtract college sports, and the visibility drops. This directly affects selectivity, as noted earlier in the thread.
This is not to say that there can’t be a dark side to athletics, but it’s not like all major university scandals are athletic in nature. We notice those because athletics are front and center. But there are plenty of purely academic scandals that occur regularly but aren’t noticed.
Depends on the school. Most of your storied programs werent storied at one time. It is history that labels them.
I never claimed a college’s sports program helped the college’s reputation or quality or finances. I said it created their identity and I stand by that. Nor did I say it would necessarily be a positive identity.
I’d use Penn State as an example of this. Virtually anyone who’s been talking about Penn State in the last year has been talking about their sports program not their academic departments. For good or bad, for most people Penn State is its football program.
I’ve attended McGill, UIUC and Michigan.
I am not a sporty person. I have zero interest in football. I held season tickets for both years of my MBA program and I feel like part of the Michigan community. It really is part of the identity of the school in a way I can’t explain.
I am more passionate about Michigan than I have ever been about any school. It was the school I wanted to go to for undergrad and then circled back to 14 years later. It’s the one I plan to give money to in the future. I am trying to pressure my fiance to go to Ross as well.
That said it’s probably not the football thing for me personally but I think being in Michigan stadium during a game is a really cool experience that I am pleased to have been part of. I think it’s that I’ve been involved with Michigan in some way since I was a teenager and my parents were sending me to summer camp there from Massachusetts. I got into undergrad there but couldn’t go. Didn’t get into law school, so didn’t get a chance to go. Then got into business school and did go. But I’ve gone to school with kids who have multiple (2 or 3) degrees from UMich and there is a strong love for the sports program (and I can’t blame them!)