March Madness

Ah, March madness.

How much is wrong with this, let me count the ways.

First, what's right: These are amazing athletes who can do things with their bodies in mid air which defy imagination. And, unlike many football and baseball players, they are all superb cardiovascular specimens.

But what do these teams, these twenty something males, have to do with college?

The tournament is, after all, the NCAA tournament. And what does NCAA stand for?  National Collegiate Athletic Association.

But these young men who wear the college colors are not really students at these colleges. They are hired professionals whose ultimate fate in their chosen profession is, for all but the top two or three percent, failure, which is to say, they will never play professional basketball.

So it cannot even be argued these players, (unlike students in cooking school, or technical colleges) are really being prepared for a profession. They are being used, then discarded once their usefulness to the college as income generators is done.

It is striking how seldom the athletes are interviewed, but when they are I compare them to the college student I know and it may be a case of camera tongue tie, but for the most parts, these kids do not sound like kids who have the intellect to make it through any college. And, for the most part, at most of these programs, they do not.

I once had a beer with a medical school professor from Duke, which is very proud of its graduation rate for it's basketball and football players. And I asked him how many pre medical students were among those graduates and he said, "None." Pre meds have laboratories and need to study a lot and you simply cannot do that and do your job on the court or the gridiron.

At my college, the quarterback is now a radiologist, the linemen became doctors (one is head of Urology at the National Institutes of Health) one was a physicist and one a professor of psychology. And those were just the guys I knew.

Of course, none of these people could have played in a big time college program either then or today. But this was the Ivy League. These were real student athletes. Not all players in the Ivy League, even then, were real scholars. This was the time of Brian Dowling, and Yale and Harvard both admitted a number of ringers to win championships. But at least some of the players during the 1960's and 1970's could go to class, did go to class and not embarrass themselves or the admissions committee.

None of what I'm saying is new.

All I'm saying is here is another example of America perverting an institution, in this case college, with commerce. Integrity may be a quaint virtue, no longer valued. But academia is still one place the idea of opinion which owes no alleigance to who pays you to have it is supposed to be important. 

We see all that dissolving--Dermatologists, MD's on TV shilling for skin care products. Do you believe they are giving you the benefit of their reading of referee'd journals or do you think their opinions have been bought?  We expect Congressmen to be paid to have opinions. But do you expect the professor, the PhD and the MD to sell his name and opinion to the highest bidder?