The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 79, No. 22, Ed. 1 Friday, March 6, 1992 Page: 4 of 20
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4 FRIDAY, MARCH 6, 1992 THE RICE THRESHER
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May, Goldsmith could defend athletics
Mark David Schoenhals
Media critics have enjoyed
deriding Bobby May's re-
action to the ARC report In
the last issue of the Thresher, Amit
Dinesh Mehta questioned the con-
clusions that May drew from the re-
port. May, who directs a multi-mil-
lion dollar semi-professional athletic
program, probably did not suffer
much from this criticism—from a
student in a student newspaper with
a circulation of 6,000.
But Sports Illustrated seemed to
notice the same thing. They echoed
Mehta's criticism before a much
larger audience—and perhaps an
audience more important to May than
the Rice community. In a section la-
beled "Judgment Calls," the widely
circulated sports magazine gave a
"thumbs down"
To Bobby May, athletic director at
Rice University, who—after a univer-
sity report found that the school was
lowering its academic standards and
losing millions of dollars in its effort to
com pete in the South west Conference—
said, 7 think it's a positive report that
Points out we're doing exactly what we
need to be doing athletically, aca-
demically, and financially."
This is not the first or last bad
Mark David Schoenhals, opinion edi-
tor, is a senior at Lovett College.
publicity garnered by the athletic de-
partment this year. The many prob-
lems detailed in the ARC report will
continue to resound in the minds of
the community members for some
time. Earlier this year, star basketball
The athletic
program is
killing itself.
May and Gold-
smith should set
the tone for a
rational defense
of the athletic
program.
player Chase Magg was suspended
for academic reasons. An unprec-
edented Honor Council case involv-
ing many athletes stirred up consider-
able controversy. This may not be the
last such case we see.
This week the Thresher reports
two credit-card scandals in which
four athletes were charged with third-
degree felonies. Worse, ayoung man
claiming to be a supporter of the
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athletic program placed a threaten-
ing phone call to a prominent critic
of the athletic program, who has been
forced to concede at least temporary
defeat to the threatened violence of
his opponents. (See news stories on
pages 1 and 8.)
Maybe if May and Goldsmith had
set the tone for a more constructive
rebuttal of the prevalent criticism—
and a rational defense of the athletic
program—this wouldn't have hap-
pened. Instead, however, May en-
gaged in name-calling of the worst
kind. The names he called were sim-
ply unfounded.
The young man who threatened
the critic learned from the athletic
director that it is easier to issue an ad
hominem attack, as May did in a letter
published here last week, than to
support your case with arguments in
the realm of reasoned debate. May
called those who made "negative
statements...the uninformed, the
misinformed, or the misguided."
Rather than refute the claims made in
newspaper articles, he dismissed their
authors as "either ignorant of the facts
or purposely trying to cast aspersion s
on" the athletic program. Further-
more, according to May, all those
who "love this institution" support
athletics. He attempts to define the
situation so as to make it impossible
for a true member of the Rice com-
munity to oppose athletics.
The young man who threatened
the critic has done the same thing,
but in an even less reasonable way. In
both cases, the attacks on the critics
avoid the sphere of rational debate—
and by doing so destroy it May and
Goldsmith are to be praised forrefus-
ing to resort to threatening violence
in their attacks. However, they are to
be condemned for collapsing our
public space by refusing to engage in
rational debate about the advantages
and disadvantages of big-time athlet-
ics for Rice.
The origin of this mistake can be
found in a confusion of what a univer-
sity is primarily and what it is coinci-
dentally in the modern world. The uni-
versity is most fundamentally a com-
munity of scholars—a faculty—which
supports itself by teaching students.
- Of course, the university has
evolved far beyond this simple model.
The faculty no longer perform ad-
ministrative tasks. Many no longer
teach. Universities like Rice exist in-
creasingly to perform research. Nev-
ertheless, the fact remains that a
university is a community. It is gov-
erned largely democratically by the
faculty, with long-term oversight by
the board. In the modern age, the
university happens to bea workplace,
but it is not a workplace in any conven-
tional sense of the word.
If May and Goldsmith understood
this, they would take a different ap-
proach to the debate about athletics.
Instead of understanding themselves
as members of the community, they
feel that they are merely employ-
ees—professionals, hired guns, who
have specific jobs to do as dictated
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Zitterkopf, Ann & Howe, Harlan. The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 79, No. 22, Ed. 1 Friday, March 6, 1992, newspaper, March 6, 1992; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth245807/m1/4/?q=iraq+reconstruction: accessed July 4, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.