Anti-Intellectualism Toward Athletics

Read carefully the headline before proceeding. I find more and more an attitude toward collegiate athletics that reflects a pretty strong bias (thus the "toward" rather than "in"). Granted, my recent encounters are personal, but I was surprised at how open, how "honest" some academics have been.

I'm beginning to understand just how truly platypus it is to have a doctorate in a "hard" liberal arts field (in my case, history) and engage in a career in athletics. Certainly, there are plenty of academicians who have their PhDs, but live in the administrative world. They're deans, and technical specialists -- like registrars, student life, media relations -- that never touch a classroom, or teach the occasional single class.

But no one questions their credentials to their face.

When we bemoan the decline of the media as the centering point of society -- that we only seek the news that reinforces our own previously established opinions -- is that some new trend brought about by the physically fracturing, virtually uniting nature of the internet?

Perhaps it is more a reflection of ourselves than we want to admit. To that end, we expect "ah-thu-leah-tix" be a bunch of dumb jocks; the assumption is you can't be very bright. I mean, really; if you were, you'd be in [fill in the blank].

That may be in part because we in athletics don't take the time to cross over; to illustrate the intelligence side of the sport; to demand it from our athletes and ourselves.

To that end, I'd urge any professor to ask to see the playbook for their college or university football team; the scouting report for their basketball team's next opponent. We ask those young people to memorize and internalize those mounds of information. The difference between the winners and losers is often as much the mental acumen as it is the physicality. (Of course, this would beg the counter point of -- they can master cover-two, why not hikous?)

One of my students at the area junior college where I teach history as an adjunct came up to me about halfway through the course. He wanted to let me know how much he enjoyed the course, how much he now understood the parts of history we had covered and that he was curious what other courses I taught so he could sign up.

"You know, I was afraid you wouldn't be very good when you said you worked in athletics."

I smiled and admitted, yes, when you've come from a high school where good old Coach was sent down the hall to teach American history as his academic assignment, that can be the case. And I thanked him for his compliments.

That reaction is one I've become accustomed to -- I have to prove to the students, be it the history ones at the community college or the journalism ones here at UA, that I really can teach, really do know the subject and really aren't in this room trying to make a little extra money on the side.

Little more disappointing when your peers have the same approach.

So, as we head into the holidays, my New Year's wish is that perhaps both sides of the equation will do a little more to tamp down the anti-intellectualism toward sports. In return for a little more respect from the academic side, we need to demand and promote more the "student" in student-athlete.