This is the Front Porch: In Defense of Collegiate Independence
Look, I don’t really want to write this. I’d prefer to think about pretty much anything else. But here we are. Here we go.
Collegiate sports are the proverbial front porch of the university system. For good or ill, they are the loudest, most vibrant, and most immediately recognizable part of any school. We don’t know the world-class medical researchers developing cures for cancer or the engineering professor designing the future of bioelectronics, but we know the name of the Iowa Hawkeyes punter. 70,000 people don’t crowd into Econ 101 lectures, but crowds fill stadiums across the country every Saturday in October. College sports are just a tiny sliver of what universities do, but they stand out in a way that no other academic component can.
The system of academia itself is under assault, and we as sports fans are obligated to stand in support of colleges, of open and loud and messy campuses, of universities full of ideas and people and viewpoints from across the world. The goal is to break higher education upon the wheel, to shatter multiculturalism and pluralism and decency and openness at every college campus that they can reach. It began with the Ivy League. It will not end there. It has already spread to our Big Ten brethren with a freeze of nearly $800 million in funding to Northwestern.
Columbia took the route of appeasement. It didn’t work; yet more demands on their academic freedom were immediately issued after they capitulated. Harvard stood up. Just today, their right to admit foreign students was threatened. Their tax-exempt status is on the chopping block. Their federal funding remains frozen. It will not end there.
Senate faculty bodies at Indiana, Nebraska, and Michigan State have followed Rutgers’original call from earlier this year to create a Big Ten mutual defense compact. Per the Rutgers resolution, “the preservation of one institution’s integrity is the concern of all, and an infringement against one member university of the Big Ten shall be considered an infringement against all.”
Independent of your politics, independent of your personal views, you are here at this silly little college sports site. We continue to (sometimes) write words, and you continue to (sometimes) read them because we are all obsessives. We are obsessed with these games, these rivalries, these traditions, these institutions. We attended these schools. Our families went to these schools. We learned there, became adults there, taught there, lived there, loved there. These are our schools as much as anyone else’s.
If colleges are pulled down into the undertow, collegiate sports will go along with them. As obsessives of the front porch, we must defend our universities.
Call your schools, call your faculty senates. Ask that they issue resolutions endorsing the Rutgers Plan.
To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin: we must all punt together, or assuredly we shall all punt separately.