Ranting for academics
posted 1-10-2009 - 2:56 am

 
I have friends whose kids are visiting high schools and colleges now, in anticipation of attending those same come autumn, and I've noticed something: they're increasingly feeling a very specific kind of rage, one fed by the harsh realities of ever higher tuition rates and a snotty streak of anti-intellectualism in this country that glorifies sport at the expense of academics.

It is a very normal and rational reaction to an absurd status quo, one that has to change, though you know the sports fans will go down fighting. Well, on second thought, perhaps that gets more complicated if the sports fans in question are also parents whose happily geeky kids turn out to be more interested in field theory than field goals. I hope so.

The backdrop for this, of course, is the worst economic recession since the Great Depression and the worst unemployment statistics in the last 16 years, courtesy of the December 2008 numbers released earlier today. These campus-visiting parents are bloody well pissed off, and justifiably so: not just about tuition costs in this economy, but about the indefensible favoritism shown to boys' athletic programs while math, science and engineering students (not to mention girls' athletics) go begging for scholarships and loans. Just who do the sports nuts think is going to pull us out of this economic disaster — football players?? Of course not!