My cousin Kathryn is a big fan of the University of Michigan’s football club. Michigan has a 107,000-seat stadium,. It cost $258 million to renovate that stadium. That’s a lot of money that could have gone towards something a little more educational than a football stadium. While the football club likely has revenues in excess of the money it cost to renovate, the stadium, does that revenue go towards real educational facilities and equipment?
A university should be a place where the intellect is developed, where ideas are exchanged, and where knowledge is enhanced. It should have not be a place to see a football game. It would be cool if the stadium were used as a lecture hall, however. The only thing that matters in life is intellectual accomplishment, which is something that I wish somebody had told me when I was younger. Sports have no place at an institution of higher learning, or even in secondary school.
These kids — student athletes — are being cheated by a school system that offers distractions from learning. If you have time for football or partying, then you have time for a second or third degree program. If a school has money to fund a sports program, it should instead use that money for more laboratory equipment.
Kathryn vehemently disagrees with me on all these points, and truth be told, she has a point, because I admit that a university is more than a knowledge factory. There is a lot that goes into university life; the word university comes from the Latin universitas, which referred to any large corporation long before it referred to a large college, and it’s hard to define exactly what a modern university is or had ought to be.
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