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Columns::October 13, 2003
Weekly Reader
Prof tackles sports, education debate
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$19.95
University of Michigan Press |
It’s the great debate again: who’s winning, college sports or higher education?
For anyone passionate to settle that score, Football U. presents a new direction: that maybe it’s time for the two sides to shake hands and call a truce.
J. Douglas Toma, an associate professor in UGA’s Institute of Higher Education, makes a case for dialogue and mutual benefits.
In short, at some major institutions of learning, academics can learn a thing or two from spectator sports, particularly football, and vice versa.
Toma argues that football underscores the collegiate ideal, and highlights the unique forms in which some institutions express that ideal. He’s trying to heal an old wound, the separation of town and gown.
Spectator sports do this in part, he believes, by creating a “national brand” that adds distinctiveness to otherwise commonplace campuses.
“Teams and games,” Toma writes, “provide a convenient vehicle through which external constituents relate to institutions and thus identify with them; coming to think of the institutions as their own.”
Football U. may just breathe life into an old cliché: it’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.
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