Letters to the Editor
Buffalonian
Published Letters: 371 Editor's Choice: 74
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Don B: what if...
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What if your imaginary all-A student wanted to be a computer scientist and had tremendous potential to be a brilliant one, but the only way he could become a computer scientist was first he had to spend four years working as an automechanic for no pay while also working full time writing code that he wouldn't own any rights to, because the university would own the rights.
Of course, he was getting free training as an auto mechanic and he was required to live (free of charge) in special automechanic dorms. Now, a lot of people would really like to be given four years of free technical training and a lot of people would be happy to trade four years of indentured unpaid labor for free room and board but our imaginary programmer here isn't one of them.
He doesn't want to be an automechanic and he doesn't want to subject himself to four years of arbitrary rules because Bill Gates and the Google fellows are each vying to offer him millions of dollars to come program for them. However, because there is a monopoly on the employment of computer scientists your student is stuck, working for nothing as a coder for the university, plus being required to do something he doesn't want to do for four years, while others get rich off his talent.
Is that a fair system? Most big time college athletes want a college education as much as your superstar computer programmer wants four years of autoshop. The fact that other people want a college education or mechanical training is irrelevant.
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"Immoral" was probably too strong a word
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I suppose for me the difference between sports and music or art scholarships lies firstly in the fact that music and art are recognized academic departments and disciplines. The people running these departments are faculty members with terminal degrees and (ideally at least) a shared purpose in education.
I don't believe that coaches, even the best coaches, really share this mission. Nor can they. You don't remain employed for graduating your students and building good character. Ask Tyrone Willingham.
As a faculty member of at a large state university, I find myself having less and less patience with the entire exercise of intercollegiate athletics.
It is nothing against physicality. Kinesiology, physical education, physical therapy, even dance are all concerned with and involve physicality, but remain clearly academic subjects. Students who have arts scholarships aren't being given free tuition primarily to perform their art in front of paying customers while studying something else. If they have scholarships (and these are usually much smaller than athletic scholarships), it is to study the thing at which they excel and for which they are enrolled in school. This seems quite different -- and more defensible -- to me than athletics.
Personally, on the other hand, I wouldn't mind students having a physical education requirement as they use to.
Athletic competition in American universities grew out of the imitation of British universities and elite private schools (confusingly called 'public schools'). However, at those schools, games (as they were called) were compulsory because it was believed that they taught valuable lessons. This was called 'Muscular Christianity' and became all the rage in the mid-Victorian era at schools like Eton and Rugby. The point here is that everyone was required to participate. * Once that mutated into having not mass participation, but a representative team, then the educational value of the games was completely lost.
So, to conclude, I apologize for the 'immoral' as overly harsh, but as an educator, I wish universities would concentrate on educating. It makes me ashamed when my alma mater Rutgers cut the subscriptions to hundreds of academic journals which are necessary for the education of graduate students for literally a fraction of the recruiting budget of the football and basketball team. To what end? To make Rutgers into Nebraska? No thanks.
*for further reading on the subject, see Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School or The Games Ethic and Imperialism both by J. A. Mangan
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Johnalive: Better Tony Blair than Neil Kinnock
[Read the article: "They say it all starts in Iowa"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As for the comparison between Blair and Warner, let me just say from your mouth to God's ears. Say what you want about the toothy grin and the Clintonesque triangulation, I would take Blair in a second compared with Bush or Major or Neil Kinnock or John Smith (the two Labour leaders who preceded Blair).
Remember, the ideological purity of Kinnock and Smith, while so endearing to union leaders, also led to the longest period of Conservative rule in two centuries under Thatcher and Major. Purity for Labour had the exact same results it has for Democrats: they get to sit in Opposition, shouting into the wind and bemoanin what a cruel stupid world it is that doesn't see things just like they do.
You can only change the system if you get into power, and getting into power is not going to be achieved by howling against Walmart, a store at which something like 80+% of Americans have shopped in the last year.
If Dems insist that someone who deviates one iota from conventional party line is unfit to get the nomination, they will continue to lose ass-kicking contests to one-legged men like Bush and Warner et al.
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RE: What was the size of that mailbox?
[Read the article: Another Allen teammate recalls deer head incident]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I looked on the internet for your basic mailbox that you would mount on a post and found dimensions of 20.5"L x 10"W x 11.25"H.
Cabela's offers a whitetail deer skull replica (for taxidermists) which measures 10 3/4" Length x 4 1/8" Width x 2 5/8" Tall.
A doe's head could easily fit in a mailbox.
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Goose, not Pheasant
[Read the article: Is the homeland where America's heart is?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]He went GOOSE hunting, not pheasant hunting.
Maybe the Metros could make a start of trying to connect with the Homelanders by actually paying attention to important differences. What would the Metros say about someone who mistook Chardonney for Cabernet?