Goodbye, College Football

Tonight, the 2012 college football season gets underway, and in past years I would have been very excited, ready to start another fall of having the sport in the background each Saturday, each Thursday night, and sometimes on other evenings as I worked.  I feel that excitement again this year; however, I won't be watching.

After some deliberation this summer, I've reached the decision that I just can't justify watching, going to, or otherwise following college football, especially at the NCAA Bowl Subdivision level.  There are, of course, concerns about football injuries that have been voiced prominently in recently years that have me similarly questioning consumption of football at any level.  Indeed, I may choose not to follow the NFL either, though I haven't followed that as much as college football in the past three or four years, so that might not be as difficult to give up.  Yet, for as important as that is, the determining factor in my decision not to consume college football is that I've come to the conclusion that it's being given too high of a place of importance at institutions of higher education, especially at the NCAA Bowl Subdivision level.

In July, I wrote that I thought Penn State University's football program should be shut down because if the head football coach is in a position to influence the president of a university to do something illegal (and in this particular case rather inhumane) that the president was otherwise prepared not to do, then the football program occupies too powerful a position in the organizational structure of the university.  Shutting down the program and reorganizing its place in the institutional structure seems, to me, to be the most appropriate decision.

Yet, I think we'd be naive to think that Penn State is alone in offering such prominence to its football program.  Universities around the country invest significant time and energy in their football programs, while their academic programs and student services programs -- you know, the things that are much more fully tied to the institutions' missions -- continue to suffer and suffer and suffer, from lack of funding, from lack of acknowledgement, from lack of exposure, and from other lacks as well.  Meanwhile, football programs continue to grow -- in funding, in expenses, in exposure, and so on.

These concerns are not particularly new.  Consider, for instance, what Jan Kemp went through 30 years ago after voicing concerns when administrators at the University of Georgia enabled nine football players to pass a remedial English course that they had otherwise failed so that the players could retain their eligibility.  And, of course, questions about the prominence of college football programs predate Kemp's ordeal by plenty of decades as well.

So maybe I've just been fooling myself for a couple decades as I followed college football, finding ways to justify being a fan or excusing its excesses for some selfish consumption.  And maybe I'm now being hypocritical or jumping on a bandwagon by making this decision this year.  I'm willing to self-reflect to interrogate those possibilities; indeed, that has been part of the self-reflection process that has gone into this decision.

I suppose, though, I do think things have changed.  The academic programs and services to help students succeed academically -- remember, though things that are more fundamental to universities' mission statements -- have very recently taken an unprecedented backseat at institutions of higher education.  State funding has dwindled substantially in recent decades and even just in the past few years, and folks such as me are told at my institution to expect this as "the new normal."  Programs at universities are being asked more than ever to rely on the market for their sustainability.  Get donations, raise funds, convince people to send their money your way, all of us are told repeatedly and with increasing force.

And that is what I think ends up making such a crucial difference to me.  If academic programs and student services are going to be forced by university administrators (and the political forces that are heavily influencing those administrators) to "market up" and join the competition for consumption against other entities at the institution, then I cannot in good conscience support an entity that I think is getting entirely too excessive of a share.  As I argued on the Agon about the gift of $88 million by Terrence and Kim Pegula that created self-sustaining Division I men's and women's hockey teams at Penn State, this is a matter of priorities.  Football should not be the priority that it now is, in terms of its financial power, in terms of its institutional power, and in terms of its cultural power.

It doesn't have to be like this.  Sports can have a place at universities as community activities.  Cooperative models in place of our contemporary hypercompetitive models of community structure and development are available.  Unfortunately, we seem unable and/or unwilling to explore those models in ways that would allow for greater diversity, democracy, and humanity.  In seeking to work with efforts to push toward exploring those alternative models, particularly as those models might be applied to educational institutions, a useful step appears to be refusal to take part in an institution that seems to stunt diversity, hinder democracy, and ultimately -- particularly in the Penn State case -- devalue humanity. 

So, goodbye college football.  Perhaps one day we can be friends again, but I fear it might get worse before it gets better.  And to men's college basketball:  You're officially on notice.

This Used To Be My Playground

Exactly twenty years ago, Madonna hit number one on Billboard's Hot 100 chart with her single "This Used To Be My Playground" from the film A League of Their Own. The song's title seems to be a fitting way to begin a blog updating the situation regarding the Popular Culture Building at Bowling Green State University.

As I noted in my previous blog entry, efforts have been afoot to try to save the building.  Those efforts have produced a wealth of new information about the house.  Most significantly, thanks to the work of kit homes expert Rosemary Thornton, we have learned that the house is not just a standard Montgomery Ward kit home, as had been believed.  Rather, the home appears to be a kit home produced by Montgomery Ward but in a special request to look like a Sears pattern.  For more on the home and its history, please check out Thornton's Sears Homes blog, which features several posts about the Popular Culture House and other Sears homes in Bowling Green, Ohio.  Also, check out other folks (such as here and here) who know about kit homes and have weighed in on the matter.  In all, the apparent history of this house has made it so much more rarer than initially believed that it's becoming increasingly more difficult to argue against its historic value.

At the beginning of efforts to save this house, I said that as a piece of popular culture, the house was a symbol of the kind of work that popular culture studies does and, thus, as the kind of work that occurred in the home for nearly four decades.  Now, the attempts to save the house have made it more than a symbol.  It is now a physical embodiment of that kind of work, as the attempts to save it have shown just how worthwhile having physical examples of cultural artifacts can be.  In this case, the ability to go into the house and identify characteristics of the house and markings within the house helped provide the basis for reinterpreting the story of the house and its significance.  This a key aspect of popular culture studies, and it's a key component of the importance of material culture to the study of history, culture, and society.  We can learn from interpreting material artifacts, and we can learn even more by having them available for reinterpretation.

Unfortunately, decision makers at the university feel differently, and as you can see in the picture above, the process of removing the house has begun.

Twenty years ago, while Madonna was hitting number one, this building was my playground, while I was a student at Bowling Green State University working on my Bachelor's Degree in Popular Culture.  Several years ago, it would be so again, as I was a faculty member in the department for two years.  It has been one of the places in which my intellectual play has met my intellectual work, where my imagination was able to grasp new connections in the study of culture and come to thicker understandings of the many phenomena that I witness.  And I am not alone, as many other individuals studying popular culture have passed through it on their journeys of intellectual play as well.

It still could be a playground.  Indeed, some of the proposals that have been offered for saving the house have suggested setting up a museum and/or center of popular culture studies in the building.  Yet, again, these proposals have been met with little, if any, consideration, and so this, in all likelihood, will soon cease to be the kind of wonderfully productive playground it has been for folks like me for several decades.

The 1989 song "Open Letter (To A Landlord)" by the band Living Colour begins with the lines "Now, you can tear a building down, but you can't erase a memory.  These houses may look all run down, but they have a value you can't see."  The Popular Culture House has many kinds of value, for the reasons I have indicated here as well as other reasons.  In a fashion that is so severely disappointing that saying so doesn't seem to do it justice, some folks apparently don't even want to see that value.