"No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows."
-J. Robert Oppenheimer
I've spent this morning listening to bubbling pipes, trying to figure out if the drain backup can be resolved with a plunger, which we seem not to have, or if a plumber needs to get involved. We leave tomorrow for Florida, and I don't want to leave this problem for P to handle without me if she brings home a plunger tonight and we are left with the same ominous gurgling and failure to drain. I guess I'll call a plumber later.
Dean seems relieved to walk out into the first day of December and find that the snow we watched fall most of yesterday has melted.
Unlike his "litter mate" Slane, Deano hates the cold, and does a little paw shaking dance whenever he encounters snow. With this morning's temperatures above freezing, he took off down the stairs for his first outdoor frolic in several days.
I have to say I'm a little relieved at the warming trend, as well. Tomorrow we plan to fly south to Florida, and the flight weather for the last couple days has included a broad swath of icing from here all the way to the Pennsylvania-Maryland line, from the surface up to maybe 20,000 feet. One can pick through that, but I'd just as well forgo that character-building exercise, particularly with P sitting next to me asking, "Should I be worried?" She does that sometimes.
But today my thoughts aren't entirely distracted by gurgling toilets, cats, and rime ice. Peering across the country at my alma mater in Los Angeles, I see good news (well, sort of good news, as I'll explain) and bad news.
First, the good news: the Trojans have a new football coach, Lincoln Riley, late of the OU Sooners and the pride of Muleshoe, Texas.
Riley seems like a nice young man, only 38 years old and bringing a squeaky clean persona my school's frequently sanctioned football program could use. He's also going to be stunningly rich, apparently, with a base salary of around $10 million a year and a total contract package worth $110 million. Take that, Nick Saban!
And all this while SC spends another $10 million to buy out the contract of the guy they fired after getting whacked at home by Stanford a few weeks back.
Actually, it makes me a little queasy, all this money being thrown at the top tier college football programs. Where is it all coming from? Maybe I shouldn't see it this way, but spending the GDP of a third-world country on a game strikes me as a massive opportunity cost, sort of like invading a country on false pretenses and then blowing $2 trillion over the next decade on military adventures while claiming that universal healthcare or fixing our bridges would break the bank. It's all about choices, and our choices say who we are and what we value.
USC, UGA, Alabama, Ohio State, UT (either one)--the list of the usual suspects collectively spends jaw dropping sums on football, while providing undergraduates with survey classes in which a thousand are enrolled at a time.
My son Jim, and son in all but DNA PT, both went to a school with no football team, New College of Florida, and both received an education I would've loved to experience. I think their largest class had less than twenty students. They graduated speaking two foreign languages, after completing a senior thesis and defending it in an oral examination by faculty. The school gave Jim a grant to go to Stanford because he wanted to do research for his thesis using records only Stanford could provide.
NCF's mascot is the empty set,
and they offer t-shirts down there in Sarasota that proudly proclaim they are still undefeated in football, having never fielded a team.
Did I mention Jim graduated with no debt? It's all about choices. And students develop a different set of values when they see their schools dump wheelbarrows of cash into gladiatorial contests instead of scholarship and helping their student body grow into successful adults.
Which leads to the other not-so-great news from the Land of Troy. It seems that as the Trojans were losing yet another gridiron battle last Saturday night, this time to BYU, a chant of "F*ck the Mormons" could be heard coming from the student section.
We can't blame alcohol for this one--although the 32 ounce "Super Beer" was a staple of my years there watching SC football at the Coliseum, it's been long banned because of boorish student behavior at the games. The chant itself seems to have metastasized from the now-ubiquitous "Let's Go Brandon" chant one sees on t-shirts and hears at SEC football games and in church pews in Texas. Of course, that's not what they're saying, as we've discussed before.
Once we've decided it's okay for a thousand voices to chant "F*ck" . . . well, anyone, it's only a matter of time before moments like this emerge, and we're directing that expletive en masse at whoever draws our ire. I am not deflecting blame from the students at my alma mater, and frankly am terribly disappointed that this spoiled little group would behave so repulsively and make us all look like schmucks. Rather, I'm suggesting this is just a reflection of the age in which we find ourselves, an age as crass and stupid as any in human history, ironically situated at the dawn of the greatest informational explosion since the dawn of time.
And the spectacle of our universities directing their fortunes at cultivating winning football programs instead of leaders and scholars is just a reflection of who we really are as a society. I say that as an unindicted coconspirator, who'll no doubt be annoying everyone at the Elks Lodge on Saturday evening barking for the Dawgs as they play for the SEC Championship. Am I still a hypocrite if I acknowledge I have the same disease as my neighbors, even as I criticize it?
As a postscript, I was pleased to see that the LDS crowd has taken this incident at the Coliseum in stride. The Deseret News even ran a story about USC's pioneering history of teaching its students about the LDS faith in an effort to broaden their understanding of religion.
SC's starting quarterback is a Mormon, for Pete's sake. We need to do better than this. All of us.
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