I wonder what Thorstein Veblen would make of all the doings at Fresno State in recent years. It probably wouldn’t surprise him.
The Wisconsin-born economist accurately described what American colleges would look like if they abandoned the classical liberal education model and turned to the business world for organizational and philosophical underpinnings. His book, “The Higher Learning in America,” published in 1918, was remarkably prescient, and useful today in understanding how American universities work - or don’t work.
Veblen believed that using the business model would turn academic institutions into mere vocational or trade schools, a process that has largely been completed at the undergraduate level.
And he didn’t have much use for intercollegiate sports. “It has been said, not inaptly, that the relation of football to physical culture is much the same as that of the bullfight to agriculture,” he said in “The Higher Learning.”
He didn’t have much to say about women’s sports, of course, since there were none in his day. But I can’t imagine he’d be anything but jaundiced at the street theater being played out in courtrooms involving Fresno State and various women coaches.
There's really nothing that unusual about the CSUF situation. Large institutions get sued for discrimination all the time. Sometimes the plaintiffs win. Sometimes the results are overturned on appeal, sometimes not. You guys make it seem like this is all something extraordinary, when its really pretty commonplace. (Even before her award was reduced, SJK's verdict didn't even make honorable mention in the top jury verdicts for 2007 in state legal newspapers.)
While it's certainly news, it doesn't really rate the obsessive amount of interest we've seen from the Bee. Perhaps this is just because you're the hometown paper, and Fresno State is one of your favorite whipping-boys.
Not sure what the relevance is of what a dead man would say.
Maybe he would have lived longer to say more if he had participated in sports!
Mike: you ask the right question, but I think the answer is more subtle and serious that some inexplicable vendetta. Ironically, it is the degradation of the press to governance by the morality of the marketplace which is the source of the seeming obsession. The continuing and bilaterally-parasitic relationship between selected local attorneys and the local press threatens the integrity of the Courts and the public discourse. It is bad enough when reporters accept a ready supply of sensational storylines in exchange for loking the other way as to their biased and profit-driven origins; it is more sinister when a claimant harnesses the power of the Fourth Estate to argue her case while it remains pending before the Courts.