> When we have a desperate need like football bleachers that have to be replaced, or turfgrass that isn’t up to par, we somehow find the money. We — through pub

> When we have a desperate need like football bleachers that have to be replaced, or turfgrass that isn’t up to par, we somehow find the money. We — through public or private avenues — meet those needs. Why can’t we find funds to address the areas that seem more pertinent to our primary mission? > Stop by the high school for a sporting event (and I love sports) and you’ll be impressed with the attendance and enthusiasm. Stop by the high school on a parent-teacher night and you’ll see tumbleweed blowing through the halls. Living in China, the expat community often criticizes how parents are fixated on trying to make sure their child does well; for most Chinese children, every waking moment of their life from elementary school on is focused on trying to get into a university. Childhood often consists of going to class, coming home to eat, going to class, coming home to do homework, and then sleeping. The irony in the critique is that most Americans (I float around with a mostly American expat community) are unaware how weird their own sports fetish is. I'm American and I love sports too! But it wasn't until recently (like in the last 10 years) it dawned on me how weird it is that Americans love sports so much. Look at our university system. The university system is just a proxy for a professional sports league, except the participating athletes are not paid and are not allowed to hold jobs. Instead many of them are required to study things they have no interest in, in the hope that they can get by long enough to be able to graduate to a real professional league to begin making a living wage. Meanwhile many schools go bankrupt trying to field a winning team, while the teams that do win make millions that go to university officials. When a university is mentioned in the news, it is most likely in the context of some sporting event. Imagine what would happen if, instead of focusing on sports, people focused on the actual mission of the university. I think this is a microcosm of American culture and the way we treat education needs to change dramatically. All of these tests and metrics smack weirdly of "sportsification" or "athelitis", where we try to turn education into some sort of game because it makes it easier to understand even when there is little correlation with the original mission. I don't know if the situation is as dire as I write it to be. This rant is the result of years of incubation in my mind. Hopefully things will change so I don't seem so grumpy or anti-social (like seriously, it's hard to make friends with other guys unless I can say something intelligent about the Big 10).