Sunday, July 13, 2003
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A college athlete got special treatment in the classroom because he couldn't pass on his own? I can't believe it! I don't follow team sports of any kind at any level, but today at the gym I couldn't help but catch a few minutes of a televised press conference, in which Ohio State University administrators expressed their shocked disappointment that star football player Maurice Clarett received special treatment to avoid failing a class. Specifically, here is what the story that broke the scandal in today's New York Times alleges: "Clarett walked out of a midterm exam last fall in an introductory course in African-American and African studies without completing the exam. He never retook the midterm and did not take the final exam. But he passed the course after taking oral exams instead, an Ohio State official said." So he was passed without taking proper exams, and it was not even in a substantive course, but rather in a bogus "African-American studies" course of the sort created specifically to prevent football players and resentful affirmative action beneficiaries from failing out. The article continues: "The [class's] professor, Paulette Pierce, said she worked directly with Clarett and administered the two oral exams because she wanted to motivate him and because his lack of academic preparation required her to use unconventional means to test his knowledge." I thought the typical result of a "lack of academic preparation" was a bad grade? That's been my experience. All of this goes to illustrate how ridiculous it is that universities that expect to be taken seriously otherwise have football teams--or any athletics beyond actual courses related to fitness and wellness--at all. What does a football team have to do with anything else that goes on at a university? To my puzzlement, even my own University of Chicago is not satisfied to merely employ some of the most important academic minds in the world, but also perceives a need for a football team, although I do not know anyone who has ever been to a single one of their games. If an athlete, like Clarett, is good enough at a sport that people will pay to see him, then he should go to the pros. If an athlete also has academic potential (which certainly could be the case--I had a law school classmate who had played in the Super Bowl), he can always pursue that after his football days are over. It's too much to expect even good students to handle both at once. Besides, professors and administrators should have better things to do than to oversee this nonsense, and the scandals like this one that inevitably ensue. - posted by J. H. Huebert at 6:50 PM |
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Weblogs are nothing special... except mine. So far, I haven't been very impressed by the weblog phenomenon. Some people call them "blogs," but I don't, because "blog" is one of the least attractive-sounding word in the English language. If there's one thing "bloggers" seem to like to do, it's go on interminably about how wonderful this ostensibly revolutionary new form of communication is. But I don't think it's anything to get so excited about. And it's nothing new, either. Instant commentary on the issues of the day, immediately accessible to the entire world, and anyone with a computer can participate? Sounds just like the bulliten boards and usenet newsgroups that have been around for years to me. The only difference I can see in a weblog is that it's just one person, or a small group of people, doing the talking. Anyway, my time became too valuable for those boards somewhere around the end of high school. But wait, it's not that bad... it's worse! On good old-fashioned BBS's and newsgroups, people would talk directly back and forth to each other, and have public conversations organized around particular topic "threads." In the world of weblogs, people communicate ideas back and forth, too, but less efficiently, because you have to go around to every person's weblog to see what they have to say. And if you want to reply to what someone else said, you either have to recap what the other person said by quoting some of it, or make the reader go to another site and read it himself. Given that almost none of them are saying anything worthwhile anyway, it's enough to make me want to go back to calling The Jellybean Jar BBS with my Commodore 64 and 300 baud modem. So why am I starting a weblog? For one, it's become more clear to me recently that the weblog format can be put to productive use. After all, if Lew Rockwell has one, they can't be all bad. It's also because I have a lot of thoughts about current events, issues, and ideas, but my schedule lately has been too occupied to write the kind of full-length articles I would write about each one, if I had all the time in the world. So instead of keeping everything in my head, I'll post at least some of those thoughts on my weblog. Your comments are welcome. If you have any comments on anything that comes up, feel free to e-mail them, and I'll be happy to exchange ideas with you. - posted by J. H. Huebert at 11:51 PM |
© 2003 J. H. Huebert