subject: What's completely hot is flashy University Athletic Programs | What not really hip, A Good GPA [print this page] What's completely hot is flashy University Athletic Programs | What not really hip, A Good GPA
Let me restate the above, What's in vogue is disreputable College Football Programs and what seems not in vogue, Schooling. Let me combine two College Athletic -related subjects I've been promising to write about -- special online courses for athletes, which I've called the poor white trash of brainwashing, and student/professor affairs.
These subjects, seemingly unrelated, might be considered together under the heading Live Souls, the working title of a book I hope to write this year during my sabbatical: Greedy Souls: Selling to the sports devil.
What's striking about the contemporary American university isn't this or that flashy scandal -- drugs at San Diego State(Frank Cuenca and others) , professional basketball players at USC, Reggie Bush at USC. It's that many American campuses still put education behind College sports programs
Put your ear to the American campus. Listen. The pulse of the cellphone, the click of the laptop. The drone of the headset.
The quiet of the grave.
Students take meals together hunched over their plates while television screens mounted on the wall across from them tell of Britney.
"What if death is nothing but sound?" one character asks another in Don DeLillo's White Noise..
"Electrical noise."
"Uniform, white."
The white noise of the American university is the sound of souls subdued throughout the day by a succession of screens. The screen is in the classroom and in the diningroom. It is the dorm room and on the quad. Its pacifying effect deepens with iPods, cell phones, and Blackberries.
Because of all American cultural settings, the university's specifically designed to break through the nothingness, to nudge you awake, toward enlightenment. The form of vitality intrinsic to an university is intellectual bliss, the condition of being engrossed in new thought. Not abstract thought. Thought embodied, vitalized, in another human being, a professor.
There are forms of vitality university campuses share with sports arenas and bars, but the distinctive nature of the university is that it offers intellectual vitality, that it offers a faculty which includes people who adore the play of the mind as it takes up this and that element of the world.
And why? Because they recognize these as essentially love stories. They're not about people downloading lecture content and tapping inquiries to an online ghost. They're about two people who share a passion for clarity and self-transformation. One of them, a teacher, delights in the discovery of an eager intelllect, receptive to the ideas that excite him. The other, having found a sympathetic human being who has thought about the questions that fascinate her, spends every day charged with cerebral energy.
A friend and fellow blogger puts it like this:
Studying is exciting. Eros is part of that excitement. Feeling your mind expand is exciting. You can do it fitfully, with LSD, or you can do it in a more disciplined way. Feeling a respected professor's interest in you - even admiration for you - as you receive, absorb, and respond to important ideas is heady stuff.
Be assured that the professor is also excited -- excited to have connected with a student about things that matter enormously to the professor.
John Kenneth Galbraith, a Harvard Magazine obituary notes, "wrote to Dean Rosovsky about the rules prohibiting romantic
liaisons between instructors and their students of the opposite sex (having himself married a Radcliffe graduate student, he favored a more liberal stance)."
Our lives are more and more online, silent, self-absorbed, and, in our preference for customized websites, provincial. The university should be a counterforce to dulling, lulling screenlife, a place that arouses our passion for lightning bolts.
