Do You Still Care About College Football If The College Is Destroyed?
Happy Fourth of July everybody. Instead of telling you a bunch of half-baked mostly-lies about how glorious this country is and the righteousness of the violence committed in its name, I want to talk about what the country is right now. You may have a glowing image in your head of what this nation can be at its best, but ask Nebraska football fans how it goes when what you see goes against everything you believe should be true.
In the latest flurry of action in America's War On Its Own Education System, Indiana University and other Indiana schools were targeted by their state government with a precision strike that would eliminate hundreds of degree programs.
, The Indianapolis Star
The stated reasoning is that the enrollment is low enough at each program that it doesn't reflect "strong market demand" for these degrees. The omniscient Market currently believes Tesla is worth 20 times as much as General Motors, but the Market is the only god the current power brokers of our country believe in. Purdue has an excellent soil science program which is now on the chopping block. Perhaps Market Forces can save this program?
I doubt it, because even if that argument passed muster, a soil science program is the kind of thing that might fall under the label of "Woke Research." This label has unfortunately been applied to all of the climate research being done by NOAA. That's all going away starting this afternoon when the big beautiful president signs his big beautiful bill.
These direct attacks on science do not even include the massive indirect attack that is the animosity towards foreigners of any kind. The Trump administration has made repeated threats to remove all foreign students from American universities. I graduated from a world-renowned research institution in the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois. In my engineering fraternity, which never had much more than 40 people at any one time, I counted among my brothers students from no fewer than ten foreign countries.
Imagine this all comes crashing down. Imagine they eliminate your degree program. Imagine in ten years time your beloved school becomes a destination training program where you learn to wave the flag and install HVAC systems at AI data centers.
Will you still care about the football team that wears its colors?
Is there still college football without college?
Where does your pride actually come from?
I wish we weren't on the road to finding out those answers.
