Margaret Mary, Bo Pelini, and America's Failing Universities

Bo Pelini

Online social media, which historically overlooks its own ironic juxtapositions, went bananas over two painfully apropos stories this week. In one, Margaret Mary Vojtko, a Pittsburgh-area college teacher, died under ignominious circumstances after a distinguished career that sadly included little pay and no benefits. Simultaneously, fans hotly debate the implications after Nebraska head football coach Bo Pelini said “fuck” six times on tape while dismissing mercurial fans.

Pelini, who has taken Nebraska to six bowl games in six seasons, makes $2,875,000 dollars annually—making him Nebraska’s highest-paid public employee, and the NCAA’s third-highest-paid football coach. Adjuncts like Margaret Mary earn a fixed salary per course per semester, and are generally limited in how many courses they may teach per year. Margaret Mary may have made $3,500 per course at private Duquesne University, twice what I made at a regional public university.

While Pelini's rant had justification—fans who walk out because he hasn’t secured victory before the half deserve some f-bombs—the attendant outrage suggests disproportionate priorities. Nebraska’s performance in a non-conference game, and fans’ calls for his ouster (again), imply that football somehow matters outside the stadium. Lack of outrage regarding Margaret Mary’s death implies that classroom learning doesn’t matter.

Statistics indicate that, unless your school is a BCS qualifier, your football program probably bleeds money. Even qualifiers like NU struggle to cover costs with tax abatements, advertising, and alumni donations. Universities justify these expenditures by saying that winning championships enhances enrollment and retention. Such assertions usually come without backing evidence, since football and enrollment are too divergent to easily study together.

Many recent books explore the lack of correlation between university expenditures and classroom outcomes. Football, once the darling of academic ire, now competes with lush campuses, extensive recreational opportunities, and resort-style residence facilities, especially at private universities. No wonder for-profit schools, once mocked, have become attractive options for poor students, adult students, and others who cannot benefit from adolescent largesse.

Duquesne University, Margaret Mary's school

Meanwhile, over half of university instructors find themselves locked at adjunct level, without benefits, job security, or official standing. Adjunct instructors generally teach general studies, like Freshman composition, introductory science, and basic math. They have little hope of achieving tenure-track status, and without it, no hope of watching their students progress throughout their academic career. Their ability to be good, lasting, influential teachers is stunted.

Yet educational theorist Gerald Graff makes a persuasive case that the gen-ed courses which schools disdain and fob off on adjuncts, are actually the most important in any school. The ability to translate thoughts into words, and arrange those words in an informative and pleasing way; to reason scientifically; to compute algorithmically—these aren’t nuisance courses distracting from specialization. These are education’s beating heart.

Highly educated people become adjuncts because they love teaching and believe in education. Lushly appointed Duquesne University let Margaret Mary Vojtko essentially starve while floating an NCAA Division I athletic program, because its leadership believes in prestige. This contrast between the university’s self-effacing workhorses and glory-seeking administration provides a glimpse into modern university policy.

It’s tough to imagine any way such disconnected values won’t distort universities’ educational mission. I had students finish the semester by shaking my hand, thanking me profusely for my dedication, and exiting my office, never to be seen again. Though they may not articulate it, students cannot miss the inherent subtext: academic effort doesn’t really matter. Nothing’s really worth pursuing beyond Finals Week.

Meanwhile, entire classes of students never know any coach but Pelini, whose persistent presence throughout their college careers emphasizes what really counts. Even Pelini’s subordinates get treated like royalty. Running back coach Ron Brown gets red carpet treatment at speaking engagements, including many at churches, where he is an outspoken opponent of gay rights. NU has become, essentially, a football academy.

Go Big Red

Many schools, like Boston University, Hofstra, and the University of Denver have discontinued their football programs. Some cite financial reasons: they’d rather spend that money on education. Some cite health concerns, especially amid current controversies about concussions and their lingering effects. And some schools just consider football’s popularity distracting. Such discontinued programs, however, remain rare outliers and front-page news.

The next American university that axes its football program, and redirects that money into creating secure, good-paying classroom jobs may face blowback. It may lose its alumni endowment. It may get mocked on ESPN. But it will also signal to current and prospective students nationwide that education, personal development, and long-term thinking matter. It will signal its identity as a school.

Three Straight Ways to Conquer Your Waist

This holiday eating season, many will squander limited energy worrying about their beltlines. In my last weight-loss book review, I said different people gain weight for different reasons, so we must lose it through different tools. Maybe that isn’t scientifically rigorous, but it certainly resolves the issue to my satisfaction. But that doesn’t stop the book industry from printing money by insisting why every other weight loss regimen in the world is wrong.

Take, for instance, Jonathan Bailor’s The Smarter Science of Slim, and Mike Schatzki’s The Great Fat Fraud. Both authors claim to sort mountains of scientific research, and both have the uncountable source notes to prove it. Both claim the truth of real weight control has been stifled by a monolithic corporate conspiracy that would rather sell us a million pills than see us get permanently well. That’s where the similarities end.

Bailor builds his book on the thesis that we should “Eat more. Exercise less. Smarter.” For him, the problem stems from habits that short-circuit natural metabolic processes. High-starch diets and workouts that inefficiently distribute benefits leave us more hungry, more tired, and more obese than when physical fitness went mainstream forty years ago. His solution lies in more carefully choosing what goes into our bodies, and how we use them.

Schatzki, however, sees the focus on weight as a canard. The problem, for him, is “fitlessness,” widespread inattention to core wellness that extends beyond mere weight issues. Humans evolved in unsteady circumstances, forced to eat whatever came to hand, even if it wasn’t balanced. Fitness, for Schatzki, croses all weight classes. Instead, we should focus on whether we work our muscles in the way for which our bodies are optimally designed.

I suspect that, if Bailor and Schatzki sat on the same panel, they would be at each other’s throats constantly. They have different solutions because they favor different issues. What one sees as the real problem, the other sees as a mere subset. Though I doubt they’ve read each other’s books, each takes a sneering attitude toward the other’s solution. Here’s the kicker: I suspect they’re both right. By which I mean, they’re both wrong.

Where Bailor presents a fine-tuned diet and exercise regimen, stressing protein and focused effort, Schatzki sees such approaches as sauce for the gander. Humans evolved to walk fourteen miles per day, and if we want to keep our health, we should do so, no matter our weight. Both solutions are more complex than that, of course, and you should not undertake either without consulting your doctor. But that’s their respective positions, in a nutshell.

Both systems make sense, because both stress how the body is engineered. Human physiology exquisitely demonstrates purpose-built design, for hard work, feast-or-famine food supplies, and long haul endurance in hardship conditions. Unfortunately, starchy diets and sedentary lifestyles short-circuit those advantages. Thus both systems are perfectly correct, and woefully lopsided.

That’s why I like Don McGrath’s Dream It, Live It, Love It: Beyond Well, Beyond 50. Where Bailor and Schatzki name ways people should improve weight and fitness, quoting stats and research, McGrath interviews people past fifty who, at an age when many settle into comfy ease, have continued, or even newly begun, competitive athletic careers. No abstractions for these heroes; they’re too busy living to hypothesize.

McGrath interviews runners, cyclists, rowers, triathletes, mountaineers, Special Olympians, and even a competitive dancer. Most are in their fifties and sixties, though some maintain top form into their seventies, eighties, and beyond. Banana George Blair, McGrath’s cover model, remains a top-ranked barefoot waterskier past ninety. The accompanying photos showcase trim figures with great skin and bright smiles. Nobody would mind turning fifty if age looked like this.

The patterns McGrath sees among these heroes, salted with a hint of science, support a three-part system to identify the difference between competitive masters and the rest of us. But these aren’t rare saints. They emphasize that, with determination and the right mindset, we could achieve the heights they have. The effects our culture associate with age reflect inactivity and poor choices more than actually getting old.

McGrath doesn’t contradict anything Schatzki or Bailor say. In fact, he proves them right. How we eat and exercise makes a difference. But instead of treading the rare air of scientific research, he shows us real people who incorporate these principles into their own lives. McGrath provides inspiration; Bailor and Schatzki provide tools. Now it falls on us to make the difference in our own lives.

Fathers, Sons, and the Art of Sport

Fathers and sons have long bonded over sports.  I remember playing catch with my dad for hours.  Sure, I never fulfilled his dream of becoming a professional ballplayer, but a part-time blogger is almost as good, right?  So, with Father’s Day coming up, several sports memoirs have hit the rack in recent weeks.  No one should act surprised.

Davis Phinney says he’s won more professional cycling titles than any other American.  But that helped not one whit when, at only forty, the first Parkinson’s tremors halted his post-professional entrepreneurial career.  The Happiness of Pursuit details, in an unusual convergent fashion, the career that led him to the top, and the sources of strength guiding his decline.

Phinney’s father, an engineer whom he calls Damon, resisted his son’s career in “mere” athletics—until young Davis proved he had the grit to outpace seasoned professionals on road and track.  But Phinney didn’t realise how much he learned from his father until cancer started eating Damon’s body.  Damon’s refusal to let cancer run him is an inspiring tale in its own right.

But determination runs in the family.  Just as Phinney’s body crashed, his son Taylor discovered he, too, had meteoric cycling talent.  Phinney might have let the disease steal his ability to walk, talk, and care for himself; but his son needed him.  So he dug deep, found the humor and grace to keep fighting, and sat in the stands when Taylor raced in the Beijing Olympics.

You or I might feel resentful, losing our bodies to a disease that usually afflicts men two decades Phinney’s senior.  But he unlocks the passion and grace to keep living.  Now an advocate for Parkinson’s victims, he’d be a hero even if he hadn’t raced in the Los Angeles Olympics.

Chris Herren fell faster and harder than Phinney, and worked even harder to pick himself up.  Herren was only sixteen when Bill Reynolds’ Fall River Dreams made him a celebrity, hastening his decline into self-destruction.  Basketball Junkie describes how far Herren fell, and how he found spine enough to reclaim his life.

When the mills left Fall River, Massachusetts, only the high school basketball team unified the community.  Chris Herren scored over 2,000 points in his high school career, and was courted by America’s best universities.  But he never wanted to play; his father and community chose basketball for him.  So he fled his success by drinking and drugging his body into submission.

From high school, through college, the NBA, and a steady decline into minor league ignominy, Herren used drugs to assert his autonomy against a succession of dictatorial father figures.  Jerry Tarkanian and Pat Riley became Herren’s appointed “bad fathers.”  And when Herren married and started a family young, his drugs punished his life’s final father figure: himself.

Herren’s writing style runs rocky—by his own admission, he was an indifferent student.  But if dedicated readers persevere through the occasionally distracting English, Herren tells a sober, affecting story of struggle.  And more important, he provides hope that, although a young man begins a spiral of self-destruction, he can still reclaim control and rejoin the human race.

Steve Friedman didn’t overcome disease or drugs.  He just found himself facing fifty, looking in the mirror, and realizing he needed to better understand the man he’d come to resemble: his father.  Driving Lessons describes Friedman getting to know his father through golf, the one skill his dad most wanted to teach, and Friedman most dreaded to learn.

Come on, men, you know it: we hope to be half the man Pop was, even as we fear living his faults and repeating his errors.  No matter the age, nobody makes a man feel ten feet tall, or smaller than a bug, like his father.  Friedman feels both as his dad teaches him to chip from the green.  A simple three-day golf holiday walks Friedman down a highly conflicted memory lane: joys and disappointments, hope and disappointment.  His parents’ love, and his parents’ divorce.

In a personal e-mail, Friedman told me that “Rodale publishing asked me expand a magazine article I had written for Travel & Leisure Golf about seven years ago,” and you can tell.  Know before buying that this is a very short book for its price.  But it’s also compact and tightly knit, telling an engaging story in a voice any grown son will immediately recognize.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go call my dad.  We have some important catch to play.

Also in this review: Bill Reynolds, Fall River Dreams.