RU serious, Milton Friedman?
Last night Rutgers University, where the first college football game was played in 1869, won the biggest game in its history and the biggest college game in the NY metropolitan area since the Army-Notre Dame showdowns at Yankee stadium in the late 1940's. Since the stadium is 10 minutes from my home and I received my Ph.D. from Rutgers, I have been a season ticket holder for the last 10 mostly dreary seasons--one of the few regular occupants of Section 116 in Rutgers Stadium.
Thus did I passed up the the opportunity to scalp my pair of $20 end zone seats for $200-$300 and attended last night's game. It was the most exciting sporting event I ever attended and the unending crowd roar was so loud I could not even hear my friend seated or rather standing--since no one sat the entire game--right next to me.
This is where Friedman comes in. He is an alumnus of Rutgers College, having studied there in the 1930's under Arthur Burns, who, alas, persuaded him to change his major from mathematics to economics. Besides bashing Mises, Rothbard and the Austrian school in general, Friedman's other hobby during his retirement years has been fronting a campaign to get Rutgers to drop big-time sports.
Friedman is the biggest name on the self-proclaimed Committee of 1,000 composed mainly of a hundred or so left-wing Rutgers professors and disaffected alumni who want Rutgers to downgrade its sports programs and pour more taxpayer money down the rathole of politically correct "educational programs."
The latest alumni magazine featured an interview with the nonagenarian Friedman in which he blathered on about the incompatibility of big-time sports and education. As the consummate economistic Knightian Friedman has absolutely no "feel" and no respect for the efficiency of socially grown traditions and institutions like college sports, which emerged and evolved in an era when government had little involvement in higher education. Furthermore in the past few years small colleges all over the country have been starting or reinstating football programs as a way of bolstering male enrollment and this has turned out to be a highly successful strategy.
Friedman's anti-social committee of politically correct educationists was on the ropes after the Insight.com bowl invitation the football team received last year. Hopefully RU's win last night put the final nail in its coffin.
Comments (5)
In my previous blog I neglected to mention that the Rutgers 1000 (not Rutgers Committee of 1000)officially dissolved itself in 2002, but maintains an active website at http://members.aol.com/rutg1000/.
Published: November 10, 2006 2:27 PM
In my previous blog I neglected to mention that the Rutgers 1000 (not Rutgers Committee of 1000)officially dissolved itself in 2002, but maintains an active website at http://members.aol.com/rutg1000/.
Published: November 10, 2006 2:27 PM
Hi, Prof. Salerno.
Actually, 1869 is in the era when government and government-connected insider elitists started to get ever more involved in schooling in the U.S. Particularly relevant is the extensive influence that members of the Order of Skull & Bones had upon the universities in that era, which still continues. For a good treatise on said influence, see America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones by Prof. Antony C. Sutton (Walterville, Oregon: Trine Day, updated reprint, 2002).
This is also the era when liberalism started to be perverted from a philosophy of liberty to a philosophy of total statism in a major way. Of which was by no accident, as the "liberal" philosophers who acted as intellectual bodyguards of the state were promoted to prominence and acclaim whereas the actual liberals who remained true to the liberal creed were ever more marginalized. Hence over time resulting in the present-day misnomer of "liberal" being the antipode of what it was originally, at least with the common U.S. usage of the word.
I would say that a much stronger case can be made that the prominence of sports in modern society functions in the role of the figurative (and sometimes literal) bread and circuses that governments have offered up to their subjects since ancient times. Certainly in our present era the bond between popular sports and government is incestuous, with, e.g., stadiums being built via taxpayers' money. The Olympic games, ancient and modern, share this close relationship with the state. Continuing in this vein, the popular sports even act as billboards for statism, with such vomitous promotions of totalitarianism as the recent retina-scan introductions of the Super Bowl.
Much as the Roman *circi*, modern popular sports provides the ruling establishement the much-needed function of channelling the amorphous discontent of the plebeians into a controlled threater of mock warfare, thereby providing a release-valve against the masses crystallizing their emotions and using that energy to rise up and throw off the source of their discontent.
As well, the connection between universities and their offerings of officially sanctioned sports seems pretty bizarre to me. I suppose one can attempt to make the case that they are businesses and hence simply offering their customers what they want (although they have long acted as if their actual customer *bene placito* is the state), but in that case why not official university amusement rides, official university discothèques, or official university whorehouses? In each case, people might find the activities fun, but I fail to see the connection to actual education. (Well, I suppose some could make the case of the latter example being educational.)
Published: November 13, 2006 1:41 AM
Yeah, I'm inclined to agree with Mr. Redford's account. I sense a lot of "...let's get people dumbed-down enough that they begin to feel more passionate about tribal sporting contests than civilized discourse--then we'll own them."
Published: November 13, 2006 6:00 PM
At least if Notre Dame wants to waste money on athletics, they are a private university, so that's their nickel. If New Jersey State U goes into the Scarlet over football, the taxpayers are on the hook.
Shouldn't good Austrians be teaching and thinktanking at private U's, anyway?
Published: November 16, 2006 7:39 AM