Why would a school place athletics on an equal or even higher footing than academics?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In law school they saying is that the A students end up working for the C students. The C law students wind up being the rainmakers.

I heard it a little differently when I was in law school: the A students become law professors, the B students get appointed to judgeships and the C students make partner. It was pretty lame even back in the day and, of course, is totally off the mark now given the state of the legal profession.

[Anonymous]

Interesting thread.

Just read a snippet on ESPN-W that said that 82% of the female executives at Fortune 500 companies said that they played sports in middle or high school.

There has to be some long range professional benefit to it.

[Anonymous]

Well, I bet 80 percent of the entire workforce could claim they played sports in middle or high school.

[Anonymous]

I doubt that pp -- you must be very young. Most middle-aged women executives didn't have many pre-Title IX sports opportunities in h.s. or m.s.

Sports are very important -- don't know why so many people knock them and try to argue around their value.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I doubt that pp -- you must be very young. Most middle-aged women executives didn't have many pre-Title IX sports opportunities in h.s. or m.s.

Sports are very important -- don't know why so many people knock them and try to argue around their value.

It's the nerdy brains who feel threatened by bright jocks. Who says high school ends at high school?

[Anonymous]

Stupid athletes with "team" skills are not contributing to the world. They don't invent things, they aren't creating businesses, leading corporations, making a difference - they are just louts and followers, drinkers and philanderers. Maybe you like them so you can boss them around - maybe that's the "team" aspect.

Exercise is good, and goals are good. But after 4-5 hours per week, high school athletics are just making kids less educated, less prepared, less well-read. And that's why the world's more focused students are starting to eat our lunch.

If you got C's, I'm not going to hire you. If you got B's, I don't want you either.

And there's a new study, by the way, that says extroverts are not the best sales people. So don't bother with that argument.

Signed,
99+ percentile, 3 Ivy degrees, executive

I know many who will not hire Ivies undergrads. The sense of entitlement and lack of understanding anything out of their small circle is crippling. PS "stupid athletes" do invent things, they creating businesses, leading corporations, making a difference. In fact a lot of non Ivies do the same. You sound very bitter. Do you work for someone below your station or class?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:When did FDR play football? He went to college around 1900. Besides he was far too handsome and too much of dandy to ever play college football. Maybe you're right but it seems unlikely to me.

Even if he did and even if Ike and Gerry Ford played for West Point and Michigan, the one thing being neglected here is the fact that athletics in those days were single season sports. The players arrived about two weeks before the seasons began and play about 10 football games, 20 basketball games, and about the same number of baseball games. There was no such thing as off-season training in the weight room. After the season was finished the students were off for the next nine months unless they played more than one sport.

Today, college athletes are expected to weight train and condition 12 months a year. Everyone needs to exercise, but from my perspective, unless the kid is so amazing he'll be able to receive a lucrative professional contract off which he'll be able to live comfortably for the rest of his life, well then I think the sacrifice is too great.

Sorry, it seems I have no horse in the race, but I am interested.

FDR played football at Groton. At 5' 3" 105 lbs he wasn't very intimidating or good. His parents and the faculty worked hard to make sure he wasn't too "privileged." Here's a picture of FDR and he Groton football team in 1899.

If the image does not work, try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FDR_with_Groton_football_team_Oct._1899.JPG

[Anonymous]

http://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-education/

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.

I’m not talking about curricula or the culture wars, the closing or opening of the American mind, political correctness, canon formation, or what have you. I’m talking about the whole system in which these skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs, the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away from it. The message, as always, is the medium. Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated. As globalization sharpens economic insecurity, we are increasingly committing ourselves—as students, as parents, as a society—to a vast apparatus of educational advantage. With so many resources devoted to the business of elite academics and so many people scrambling for the limited space at the top of the ladder, it is worth asking what exactly it is you get in the end—what it is we all get, because the elite students of today, as their institutions never tire of reminding them, are the leaders of tomorrow....

[Anonymous]

Is it charming or absurd that people are using FDR as an example of scholar athlete? Aren't there more recent examples from like last year's graduating class. I guess its both - charming and absurd.

Kind of like this board.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Is it charming or absurd that people are using FDR as an example of scholar athlete? Aren't there more recent examples from like last year's graduating class. I guess its both - charming and absurd.

Kind of like this board.

Hahahahahaha good one.

[Anonymous]

Just ignore this post as it's irrelevant in relation to the overall topic of this thread, but he was a pretty amazing individual. Child of privilege groomed to be president from a young age. Ran for Vice President as an able bodied young man and lost. Shortly after he was paralyzed by polio shortly thereafter.

Just at the moment when eugenics was reaching its zenith both here and abroad he was elected governor of New York. He served as president through the Great Depression and 99% of WWII.

It's almost as if his handicap made him a stronger more compassionate man. Perhaps he would have been a compassionate man even without any hardships. Nevertheless it amazes me the way he was able to calm and unify the nation during such difficult times.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Is it charming or absurd that people are using FDR as an example of scholar athlete? Aren't there more recent examples from like last year's graduating class. I guess its both - charming and absurd.

Kind of like this board.

Not absurd in context. A PP's point was how many president's played HS sports. Another poster said she did not believe that FDR could have played high school football. The photo shows that he did play football in high school.

But if you know some recent post- or even pre-Title IX female execs who played HS sports, by all means, chime in.

[Anonymous]

Irene Rosethal, CEO of Kraft played four different sports in high school before going to Cornell to play basketball. She chose Cornell because it had a great sports program. Another dumb jock, I guess.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-08-07/business/ct-biz-0807-phil-20110807_1_intramural-sports-corporate-game-field-hockey

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is it charming or absurd that people are using FDR as an example of scholar athlete? Aren't there more recent examples from like last year's graduating class. I guess its both - charming and absurd.

Kind of like this board.

Not absurd in context. A PP's point was how many president's played HS sports. Another poster said she did not believe that FDR could have played high school football. The photo shows that he did play football in high school.

But if you know some recent post- or even pre-Title IX female execs who played HS sports, by all means, chime in.

A couple of interesting articles:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennagoudreau/2011/10/12/secret-power-woman-play-team-sports-sarah-palin-meg-whitman-indra-nooyi/

http://athenaeum.libs.uga.edu/bitstream/handle/10724/11744/wentworth_craig_r_200912_edd.pdf?sequence=1

[Anonymous]

George Will had a lovely column in the late 1990s about how, when the glass ceiling was broken, he believed it would be by young women wielding field hockey sticks.

There is a physical confidence from playing sports -- and not just at the collegiate level -- that will stand women in good stead. Gotta have the brains and work ethic first, but the sporting background can be a nice plus.