Saturday, October 20, 2007

Faculty are anti college sports?

[Salt Lake Tribune - Monson: Professors show their annoyance with college athletics]

Monson's citing a reputable study, so he's probably on the right track. But I wasn't surveyed in the study and I just want to go on record as saying that as a college professor myself, I love college sports. In my department, lunch conversations alternate between football and "other stuff" almost all of fall semester.

Then again, in our department, Computer Science, we don't see players from marque sports like football and basketball. I've had a men's diving diver and a women's tennis player. Both were good students and seemed to enjoy the challenge of doing both school and sports.

I suppose that if I were in an, um, easy major like the humanities or public broadcasting, that I might see more marquee sports players in my classes. Ok, easy is probably the wrong word. Let's go with "less time consuming."

If you know any football or basketball players or cheerleaders in a technical major, I'd love to know who they are. So far, I know 0.

I should add that I knew a Utah scholarship football player and met a BYU scholaship basketball player. Both starters. Both very smart impressive people. Seriously. Just don't have a lot of time for demanding majors.

3 comments:

dawnawanna said...

I know a gymnast on scholarship at BSU. She is a brilliant biochemistry major. Both gymnastics and biochemistry are very time consuming. Once taught 2 cross country/track athletes in chemistry class, both very smart and dedicated and majoring in chemistry. Also knew of a situation where a starting football player at BSU didn't get to play in a bowl game because he couldn't get a C in general chemistry, but a lot of people can't pass chemistry...

At BSU, I think most faculty are intelligent enough to realize that a good football team is good for everyone at the university.

I also thought that any major with "science" in the name is soft and therefore less time consuming... ;)

Mike Jones said...

Ha ha, not funny.

Did you recognize the conquistador picture? That was from our trip down to the swell in the Winter with Kent and Angela.

Anthony Barney said...

I knew a male swimmer in the engineering program while I was a student, but when the cheerleaders came to the engineering building to hold some kind of rally or whatever, they caused quite a stir...we don't get very many pretty girls in the engineering program (there are some, I married one) and when they do appear, it's almost like a randomly appearing chunk of anti-matter in our universe: they are instantly paired with a chunk of regular matter from our universe. In fact I am sure that none of my fellow engineering students even knows why the cheerleaders were there, or what they said, only that they were there.