On New Year’s Day I awoke to find I was famous. Friends congratulated me, acquaintances envied me, family members marveled over our newfound renown. My dad phoned to say tennis cronies in far-away Florida were lining up to buy him Cel-Ray soda, while my in-laws now look on me with a respect I had never before known.
Phew! I’m still trying to catch my breath. Frankly, I had never expected to become, as my employer has announced, “nationally relevant.” What could be less relevant, after all, than a professor of modern French history?
How, you might ask, did I achieve this sudden celebrity? Elementary, my dear reader: I work at the University of Houston. The very same university whose first-year football coach, Tom Herman, led the Cougars to the Peach Bowl, where they crushed the Florida State Seminoles, 38-24.
It was a remarkable game. The Seminoles were seven-point favorites — a spread, truth be told, that should have been even wider given the fearsome company the Seminoles keep in the powerful Atlantic Coast Conference and the collection of cream puffs joining the Cougars in the American Athletic Conference.
And yet the Cougars, led by the quarterback Greg Ward Jr., showed tremendous poise and focus. Ward’s heroics not only collapsed the point spread, but also accomplished what no other team had done against the Seminoles’ storied defense: Score more than 25 points.
So, yes: The UH football team is nationally relevant. So relevant that our administration, upon learning that other teams were wooing Coach Herman, spun into action and renegotiated his contract. From the modest million-dollar salary he had been earning, he is now bringing home $2.8 million a year.
A rough calculation on my napkin reveals that Coach Herman now earns more in a day than one of my TAs earns in a year. But I don’t begrudge the coach his praise or paycheck. If only I could turn around a class of freshman-comp students the way he turned around our football team. (I dream of my students’ pouring a barrel of Gatorade over my head as, hunched over my desk, I grade their flawless essays.) Besides, as a transplanted New Yorker living in Houston, I’ve been waiting almost 50 years for my New York Jets to be nationally relevant once again.
Still, leave it to an academic to wonder about the hoopla and hosannas.
Many of us have long worried that, when it comes to the sway of athletic programs on college campuses, it is a classic case of the tail wagging the dog. But we were wrong: Our football and basketball teams have become a Clifford-size dog, and it is wagging the increasingly frayed tail of college academics. John Cardinal Newman’s idea of the university has been squeezed into minute spots aired during timeouts, replete with shots of bright-eyed students taking notes and sharp-eyed scientists peering through microscopes.
There are, of course, the well-honed arguments that winning football records make for winning financial and recruiting feats at universities. To be sure, many studies do reveal an uptick in student applications to universities whose football or basketball teams achieve “national relevance.”
Yet other studies cast doubt on the value of those claims. For example, the statistical work of Andrew Zimbalist, the college-sports economist at Smith College, questions both the yield and quality of student applications in the wake of a successful football season. In a landmark work, Unpaid Professionals: Commercialism and Conflict in Big-Time College Sports, he concludes: “The common arguments frequently made to justify committing large resources to college athletics do not stand up to empirical scrutiny.”
There is, as well, the Faustian nature of this particular bargain, one that persuades university administrators to turn a blind eye to the recruitment, academic, and disciplinary practices of their athletic programs.
‘While university administrators seem to believe relevance is a good and great thing, the word is in fact value-free.’
Consider the Cougars’ opponent in the Peach Bowl. Over the past half-dozen years, Florida State’s athletic program has shown itself to be a morality-free zone. While the staff has been repeatedly penalized for recruitment violations, dozens of its players have been accused of a variety of criminal violations. From 2009 to 2014, some 20 Seminole football players were accused of violent crimes against women, including assault and rape, according to one report.
The tawdry happenings in Tallahassee are perhaps exceptional. But they are nevertheless as relevant to the national conversation on college sports as, say, a successful football team. Herein lies the relevance of the word “relevant.” While university administrators seem to believe relevance is a good and great thing, the word is in fact value-free.
As Merriam-Webster reminds us, “relevant” means having something to do with the matter at hand. When it comes to the traditional vocation of the university, what matter could be nearer to hand than its athletic program?
One doesn’t need a Ph.D. in future studies to know that current trends will not change, and all that we can change is our attitude. But as we readjust our idea, and ideals, of the university, we can still dream about other ways for our institutions to become nationally relevant. By offering a living wage and health-care benefits to adjuncts, say, and requiring all undergraduates to learn a second language. Perhaps even by bustling off faculty members and administrators to writers’ colonies where they can discover the pleasures of clear English prose.
Unrealistic? Perhaps, but then again, who would have thought UH would win the Peach Bowl?
Robert Zaretsky is a professor of world cultures and literatures in the department of modern and classical languages and the Honors College at the University of Houston. He is the author, most recently, of Boswell’s Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2015).
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