Great Moments in Higher Education

Great Moments in Higher Education
By James Taranto

Administrators at Rutgers University have launched a campaign of
character assassination against an English professor who is a critic
of the university's emphasis on "high-stakes athletics." William
Dowding, author of a new memoir on the subject titled "Confessions of
a Spoilsport," was profiled in Wednesday's New York Times by Samuel
Freedman, a professor of journalism at Columbia. Freedman's profile
ended thus:

While he enjoyed teaching many members of the track, swimming and crew
teams in his courses, he vociferously resisted the notion that
athletic scholarships offered opportunity to low-income, minority
students.

"If you were giving the scholarship to an intellectually brilliant kid
who happens to play a sport, that's fine," he said. "But they give it
to a functional illiterate who can't read a cereal box, and then make
him spend 50 hours a week on physical skills. That's not opportunity.
If you want to give financial help to minorities, go find the ones who
are at the library after school."

The Associated Press reports on Rutgers administrators' reaction:

Rutgers Athletic Director Bob Mulcahy told local newspapers that
Dowling's comment was "a blatantly racist statement."

In a statement released by the university, Rutgers President Richard
McCormick called it "inaccurate and inhumane."

"It also has a racist implication that has no place whatsoever in our
civil discourse," McCormick said in the statement.

A Rutgers spokesman said Thursday he did not know if Dowling would
face any sanctions. . . .

Dowling . . . called the officials' accusation of racism the "cheapest
rhetorical ploy I've ever heard."


Mulcahy and McCormick cannot possibly be making these charges of
racism in good faith. Dowding is not disparaging athletes because of
their race; he is, in response to a question specifically about
minorities, saying that the university should help academically
promising ones rather than unpromising ones.

Even so-called affirmative action programs, which seek to increase
minority students' numbers by holding them to a lower standard, hold
them to a standard so as to favor those with the greatest likelihood
of success. In the Orwellian world of higher education, those who
believe that race should have nothing to do with admissions decisions
are routinely branded as "racist."

In defending their emphasis on sports over academics, the Rutgers
administrators now seek to take this one step further and claim that
it is racist to hold a minority student to any standard at all.

This, on the Other Hand, Does Sound a Bit Racist

The lovely and talented John Edwards recently participated in an MTV
forum in which a young lady asked him what he would do about inner-
city violence. Before listing a predictable menu of liberal policies,
he made this eyebrow-raising comment:

We start with the president of the United States saying to America,
"We cannot build enough prisons to solve this problem." And the idea
that we're just going to keep incarcerating, keep incarcerating--
pretty soon, we're not going to have a young African-American male
population in America. They're all going to be in prison--or dead, one
of the two.

Does Edwards really mean that all young male blacks are criminals? Or
is the idea that the purpose of the criminal justice system as
currently constituted is to imprison young black men regardless of
guilt?

Either view is plainly false. The former would be one of the most
racist statements uttered by a major American politician in the past
40 years; the latter, one of the most irresponsibly demagogic.