“At best moronic, at worst an epic swindle”

That’s how this article from The Dallas Observer describes college football’s bowl system. The point of the article, believe it or not, is not that the BCS is a terrible way to decide a champion or that the bowl system is a diluted shell of what it traditionally has been. Instead, it makes a very cogent argument that the entire bowl system constitutes a giant transfer of funds from university budgets to marginally non-profit entities paying exorbitant salaries to a handful of executives.

As an academic and a college football fan, I’m obviously conflicted. This is one more arrow in the quiver of those who despise the emphasis on athletics in higher education, particularly at large state-funded institutions. Now, I’ve always found those arguments to be premised on ludicrous assumptions about the role of the academy. However, a situation like this one shows certain institutions actually losing money on the pursuit of nominal athletic glory, inevitably (although no one will admit it) at the expense of more worthy pursuits. I think college athletics – even big time, big money college athletics – have a place in the life of the university. I am finding it harder and harder to justify the financial sinkhole that constitutes the traditions of my favorite sport at the same time tenure-lines are being cut and tuitions are skyrocketing. Eventually, something’s going to have to give.

Also, Nebraska has lost its last two bowl games. That makes me dislike the system, too.

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Against Utility


There is something of a cottage industry in publishing tracts on the “crisis in the humanities,” usually as a smaller but more fervent sub-crisis of the “decline of higher education.” Often in apocalyptic tones and always accompanied by disturbing charts – oh, those charts! – these essays and books point to the ascendance of corporate values in the governance and teaching of institutions of higher learning, ideals that devalue and ultimately displace traditional teaching in the humanities. Enrollments of English and history majors decline as students look to paths that lead more directly to post-graduate employment. This becomes especially true, as David Brooks points out, during periods of economic turmoil (like, you know, now). Lower demand for humanistic education leads to budget stresses in humanities departments, stresses inevitably rectified by swelling the numbers of contingent faculty and the cheap labor of graduate students. As any newly-minted humanities PhD can tell you, the greatest casualty of this crisis is career opportunity for young humanists.

Stepping into the debate about proper responses to the crisis in the humanities are Paul Jay and Gerald Graff, with a new essay on Inside Higher Ed entitled “The Fear of Being Useful.” » Read the rest of this entry «

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The Ballinest-Outta-Control Picture Ever

Diamonds are forever. And expensive.
Warren Buffett at the re-launch of the 40/40 Club.

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TV of the Future

One of my favorite podcasts, Stop Podcasting Yourself, joined with old friend Ben Mills to develop a list of possible reality TV shows. Many of these will be coming soon to a flat screen near you.


Personal favorite: “Are You Smarter Than a Holocaust-Denier?”

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Isengard is Too Big to Fail

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Everything Right About College Football, Part II

Paul Rhoads is the coach of the Iowa State Cyclones. This past Friday, his team beat Oklahoma State, the second ranked team in the country at the time. This was his speech to his team after the game. Coaching is about teaching. Coaching is about modelling. Paul Rhoads can coach my team any time.

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This Is A Thing

One of my favorite things about the internet is the preponderance of things that may or may not be a thing. This is definitely a thing. What type of thing, I cannot say.

  • The dog-person in me loves the pooch’s reaction about 58 seconds in. He doesn’t know what’s happening either.
  • The scholar in me wants to know who’s in the picture hanging from the door. That has to matter.
  • The former music critic in me likes that it uses a track from an obscure British trance label.
  • The globalist in me likes that that label is named for a backpackers’ beach in India.
  • The Luddite in me loves the use of a banging ghetto-blaster for the music.
  • The sartorialist in me likes the use of coordinated, not matching, outfits.
  • The aesthete in me likes the balanced presentation: grandma downstage right, dance party upstage left.
  • The Midwesterner in me likes that he brought grandma a beer.
  • The absurdist in me loves the whole damn thing. And it is a thing. Certainly.

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Landmarks in Cultural Criticism: Coldplay

More than six years ago, John Parles penned “The Case Against Coldplay” for the New York Times. I don’t disagree with anything he says. In the intervening half-decade of music-for-moms-who-shop-at-Target, Coldplay has only grown more into the band whose sound is bigger than its ideas.

But I think Parles takes Coldplay too seriously, even on the terms the band establishes for itself. There has always been a characteristically English schoolboy cheekiness to Coldplay that its claimed ancestors (U2 most obviously, but also Wings, REM, Oasis, even a-ha) never really had. Make Trade Fair advocacy aside, Chris Martin isn’t self-serious in the way Bono and Noel Gallagher are. So it strikes me as a misstep to criticize his band by those standards.

That’s why my preferred landmarks in cultural criticism are Sasha Frere-Jones’s self-aware list of Cold play pros and cons and Amanda Dobbins’s fanciful imagining of the narrative spanning the band’s latest album, Mylo Xyloto. Both cover the same terrain as Parles – the distance between Coldplay’s “bigness” (in both sound and sales) and its inability to fill the stage it sets for itself – without resorting to the standards of “very serious rock criticism” for what is essentially a band your mom likes.

What both highlight is Martin’s fundamentally poor songwriting. The big sound of the opening arpeggios of “Clocks” is wonderful; the lines that follow (“Tides that I tried to swim against / Brought me down to my knees”) are trite and non-specific. They apply to everyone and no one at the same time. They wouldn’t sound out of place in a high school poetry class. The best pop songwriting – the best writing in general – takes the specific and expands it. “Where the Streets Have No Name” makes Belfast an existential battleground. “Nightswimming” makes a teenage vignette into a mournful lament. Even something as Top-40 friendly as Rihanna’s “Umbrella” is rooted in a concrete, almost tactile sensibility. Chris Martin’s lyrics go the opposite way, trying to begin with the abstractions and cram them into whatever vessels will fit them. It’s why they always sound better when recontextualized, whether by a choir of schoolkids or an old man on a respirator. New voices make the music about something in a way the lyrics themselves are not.

That’s why Dobbins’s imagined narrative is so wonderful. Given the insistent vagueness of Martin’s writing, her story is almost plausible. Frere-Jones gets at the same idea when he refers to “Coldplay’s inability to inhabit their time in any convincing way.” They’re the band that wants to capture the zeitgeist without watching the news or talking to people on the street.

Frere-Jones ends by saying Coldplay just love a parade, even when its confetti is unearned. I’m not sure that’s the right tack. Pop music is nothing if not the respite of confetti for confetti’s sake. Coldplay fails because they want to spend an album telling you how great the party was without ever saying who was there or what happened.

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England is Always Second-Best

The English will not be amused. Turns out the most recent evidence concerning the origins of football (or ‘soccer’ to us cretins stateside) place the game in Scotland in the 15th century. I’m sure English footy fans will receive this news with their usual grace and charm.

Why are the best managers Scottish? Cause they’ve got a century’s more worth of history to draw on than their English counterparts.

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The Professor Wears a Tie

Nate Kreuter, an assistant professor of English at Western Carolina, mounts a defense of the professor wearing a tie similar to the argument I made here.

I’m increasingly convinced this is a significant generational difference. Older colleagues fled to academe as a respite from the corporate world, and increasingly they bemoan the corporatization of higher ed. Those of us who are younger are no greater fans of this encroachment than they are, but we still have to play its game. If a university’s values dictate a code of dress (and I, for the record, think they should) and that code coincides with corporate dress, we who are younger really have no choice but to meet those expectations. We don’t have the luxury of turning up our noses at the tenure-less young’uns in their suits and ties.

(The picture is neither me nor Professor Kreuter. That’s “NewYorkRanger,” one of my favorite StyleForum posters. He’s a Brooklyn history teacher who shows us all what classroom steez can look like.)

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  • About Me

    I am a professor of literature and writing in Chicago, where I write about Catholic Literary Modernism and Globalization Theory. This site is my mental clearinghouse.