Malone Drops Football -Immediately

[boatcapt]

Funny how that works, huh?

Given how my university needed me far more than I could ever need them, I didn't mind having a little fun with the powers that be on occasion. I don't recall it ever really impacting me academically - the most I'd get is a strongly worded email about how I knew nothing or whatever. Once, I even critiqued a professor on a graded group evaluation assignment because I didn't like how she handled the project. She was not pleased - but I sure enjoyed it.

This particular instance - a literature professor was teaching a summer online course. It was something to the effect of how society hates higher education and is actively working to bring it down, the reasons for such were never given. She'd tried explaining to me that a "non-profit" corporation doesn't make money on their goods/services (specifically, our book publisher). Looking back, that class was so bizarre anyway. Personally, I stopped caring about the superficiality of the college hierarchy around my junior year. Since I was paying a lot for it, I was the most important person in the room in my own mind. My grades rose quite nicely too.

That all being said, all of my interactions with the athletic side were the complete opposite for the most part - they understood that there is only so much money to go around and they had to use it wisely.

The Prof's are showing their ignorance when they say or imply that "non-profits" don't make money. Nothing could be further from the truth!! If you wanted to immediately prove them wrong, you could have pointed to Harvard which is a non-profit that makes MILLIONS (probably even billions!) every year.

As for college and professors generally, my limited experience showed me that they WANT independent thinkers...as long as they think the right way!

[SW_Mustang]

The Prof's are showing their ignorance when they say or imply that "non-profits" don't make money. Nothing could be further from the truth!! If you wanted to immediately prove them wrong, you could have pointed to Harvard which is a non-profit that makes MILLIONS (probably even billions!) every year.

As for college and professors generally, my limited experience showed me that they WANT independent thinkers...as long as they think the right way!

Yes, that's a sad fact. I'm working on another program at a different university and it's even worse because of how inherently political the program is - and I maintain no affiliations either way.. To bring it back to football - I think a lot of them don't understand why universities are funding football teams when they could be funding -their- department/major instead. If they stopped funding our football team, we'd lose a ton of students overnight. I'm willing to bet we waste far more money on nonprofitable and generally useless majors. There's really no reason we need to be teaching philosophy here - let them go to a bigger university for that. We need to be focusing on Agriculture/Teaching/Exercise Science/Technology. The fact of the matter is, a university operates more like a lot of quasi-independent units under one umbrella. If they'd work together with proper negotiations and adult conversation, they may be able to find a middle ground. I actually have the same critique with athletic supporters who seem to want to forego education spending to focus exclusively on their sport.

It's really a bummer to hear that Malone shut their program down - I think D2 is a tough spot to be in as it is. Don't get the luxuries of D1 budgets, don't get the luxuries of D3 tuition. I hope it's not a trend, but it sounds like it might be.

Harvard would have been a great one! I believe they have a ridiculous amount of money - I think I read it's the largest for any university? Anyway, we were talking about our book publisher. The class was really anti-capitalist, and being a (pro-capitalist) business major, I just floated out there how it works - I, Pencil and whatnot. I used the example of our book in lieu of the pencil. She responded by saying capitalism doesn't work because the publisher is non-profit or something like that. I responded by saying that "non-profit" is a tax classification and that even NP's really need to maintain an accounting profit as well if they wish to stay afloat.

Not to fluff my own ego or anything - I actually take the stance that I don't know much and try to soak in knowledge anywhere I can. Disagreements are always welcome, too ;)