Site Ed. Note: We do not yet have the News pages for
the first part of 1948 and so until we obtain those, we shall
present only the columns by Drew Pearson, the Alsops, and Samuel
Grafton, as they appeared in the St. Petersburg Times. We
shall then plug in the regular News pages.
On the editorial page, Drew Pearson, in Naples, tells of
people in France, from which he had just come, no longer wishing
"Happy New Year", but rather stating that they hoped the
year would be no worse than the previous one. They had lost hope.
And war was easy to start when people had lost hope.
During wartime, Congress appropriated money rapidly, but in
peacetime, things suddenly became more frugal. The present period,
he posits, was as important as the period prior to Pearl Harbor,
when isolationists such as present House Ways & Means Committee
chairman Harold Knutson and former Congressman Hamilton Fish of New
York voted regularly in support of obstruction of the Roosevelt
foreign policy.
Based on his talks and correspondence with the American
people during the Friendship Train's course across the continent
collecting food, he had formed the opinion that they were ahead of
their Government in understanding the need to work as hard to win
the peace as they had to win the war.
In Europe, the people appeared impressed with the
people-to-people aspect of the Friendship Train. Even the Communists
had treated it with cordiality as, politically, they could not
afford to do otherwise.
It had provided hope to Europeans when they realized that the
reason Oswaldo Aranha, Ambassador to the U.S. and the U.N. from
Brazil, had come to Philadelphia to see the "Friend Ship"
off to France was his feeling of good will toward the Europeans.
The notion of appealing to brotherhood had thus worked.
He suggests that there were many other ways which would
communicate this feeling and the surface had not yet been scratched.
Undefeated Michigan played Southern California this date in
the Rose Bowl and Alabama vied with Texas in the Sugar Bowl. We just
thought you ought to know.
You will note that the names of the bowls registered only a
state's produce, as was the case until some bright entrepreneurial
genius decided that free advertising of specific products superseded
any form of dignity for college athletics sometime in the middle to late
eighties and started naming the bowls accordingly, such that you can
hardly keep up with which one is which anymore.
Let us be clear: we don't care about your tire, your
restaurant chain, your stupid, rotten, pasteboard tasting chicken
fillet sandwich not fit to eat, or any other thing you throw up on
the marquee from year to year for cheap advertising. That is fine
for professional sports. But get it out of college. Take it and go
back from whence you came. And we know that place isn't pretty, but
you must endure the circumstances handed you by your own greed and
not try to inflict them on the rest of us.
We fully expect the Chewy-Cheese Chips Al Qaeda Bowl to come
along sooner or later, provided enough money is on the table.
The point is that if you sell everything out, why would you
expect a college athlete to aspire to a college education of quality
and not cheat on tests and not submit papers not of their own
authorship, and the like?
It is the overall commercialization which is ultimately at
fault in college sports these days. It has for long been there, but
not so omnipresent as in the last 25 years, in derogation of
anything which remotely resembles the old college spirit of yore,
which used to remain despite occasional efforts at temptation,
properly resisted.
But then some bright bastard decided to give in and let the
hucksters buy and sell the colleges and universities of our land and
make money off of them. That is where the trouble began and that is
where, when an end is put to it, it will cease.
It is fine to pick on one school which is exposing some of
the mess in its own house and trying to clean it up. But you had
better first look at your own shack before casting too many stones.
For all of major college sports is under the same penumbral dome in
these times. And if you think otherwise, then you are either an
incredibly dumb son of a bitch or a liar or both. So stop adopting
your supercilious stance and start scrambling to uncover the
academic "scandals" at your own school. You will find, if
you bother to look, that it is just as bad, possibly worse, as at the
one which has become the object of scrutiny in the past year.
What message does it send to others if, when the effort is
made both to reveal and to rectify the situation, the society
condemns the revelation?
And we remind that at the institution in question, only four
percent of the student body are involved in varsity athletics, even
fewer in the revenue-raising sports. Thus, at least 96 percent of
that student body properly earn their grades and do not cheat to
play ball. And, it would appear, the practices were not pervasive
even among the four percent. So do not blame an institution for the
waywardness of the pitiable few.
Fifteen hundred and eighty athletes in 18 years receiving special
treatment on grades equates to about 87 per year out of an
undergraduate student body of 16,000. (We take the statistic from an interview conducted on PBS with the report's author. Another statistic, from page 47 of the report, states that between 1999 and 2011, 1,871 "student-athletes" took at least one of the "paper classes"—that is classes not requiring attendance of lectures but only submission of a final paper graded by an administrative official, not an instructor at the University—equating to a fifth of the student-athletes enrolled in those years, still an insignificant number in terms of the overall student body, even when supplemented by the 2,100 students not participating in organized athletics who took one or more of those courses during those years. Another statistic, reported at page 43, shows as example that, after 2009, a paper class exclusively comprised of student-athletes received an average grade of 3.43 while a similar class comprised solely of non-athlete students received an average grade of 2.74, indicating either better scholarship demonstrated by the athletes or a decided grading bias toward them.) Even making room for non-duplication and individuation during a two, three, or four-year tenure of the athletes, the percentage is not significant. What percentage receive
special treatment at your school?
Tell a young person in high school, or usually much younger,
that they are going to be rich and famous for playing ball and what
do you expect, society? The catch, of course, is that few ever
achieve more than fleeting fame or riches at any given sport, and
even those who do, achieve it for a very short while. And life is a
long process. And life is not sports.
Sports are supposed to be recreation, nothing more, certainly not an end unto themselves.
There is no substitute for a quality education. But 90
percent of that education has to come from within and be based on
self-motivation, not on expectation of prosperity and notoriety, rather
the insatiable desire to learn and to understand better each day the
world into which one was born and raised. It is never too late to
undertake it.
If you are over the age of 17 and still are feeling that the
court or the field is the place where you can go inexhaustibly,
while the classroom is a bore and merely something through which to get to hit the field or the court, your priorities are grossly out of whack
with reality. And you need to search your soul as to where you
properly belong at age 18.
No one can literally give you an education. You must have the
wherewithal to undertake it for yourself, relying on
teachers and professors only for guidance to the right syllabus for
the course work. Your teachers and professors are not the
responsible parties should you fail to achieve academically. You
are the problem. If you think a college course or instructor is
unsuitable to your nature or is too easy or too hard, then have the
audacity to go through drop-add and get rid of it fast.
College, properly undertaken, is not an easy task. It should
not be.
There is no better feeling than to go through five grueling
examinations in December or May, each one on four or five hours of
sleep, after studying for days on end in advance, and then find your
reward on the grade sheet on the wall or in the mail. It is far
better than netting 30 points in a basketball game, which no one
much will recall a year from now anyway, except you.
But that comes from years of discipline in achieving proper
study habits prior to college, which is when the scholar is
separated out from the person who could care less about academics
and would rather go play ball. Not everyone may be suited to college
right out of high school and that is fine. Go get a job and come
back later when you have the social maturity to accept the
responsibility of being a student, first, foremost, and last. Then
the recreation part will be much more satisfying anyway.
Colleges and universities are not baby sitters. And it is
quite tiresome to those able to pull their own weight right out of
high school to see some athletes and some others who can't perform
being coddled as nursery school students. You cannot manufacture
academic attainment or fake it. A world view informed by curiosity
shines through, just as does dull-pate ignorance.
A college education is not a gift. It is an achievement,
which continues to inform the rest of your life, regardless of
whether it ever earns you a penny or enables you to play in the NBA
or NFL.
Next time you run across a word or a concept with which you
are unfamiliar, take a little time, look it up, learn some more
about it, think through it, rather than asking someone what it
means or emoting your way into paroxysm over it. You may quickly become astonished at how much you can teach
yourself when being self-reliant. Academics is not a team sport.
