Tapsearch Com EditorTom Palaima challenges UT sports program
By Tom Palaima,
Thomas G. Palaima
Chad Oliver Teaching Award, Plan II Honors Program, University of Texas at Austin- resume
Tom Palaima's bio
Football versus Education - it's not a level playing field
Palaima: No more excuses for UT's excesses - sports program
Tom Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman
Tom Palaima questions the power of sports versus the
quality of education and the news reporting about it.
Way back in 1990, the sage Bob Dylan wrote a song
about a character in London's Hyde Park who gives
passers-by some advice about television: "It's
all been designed to make you lose your mind. /
And when you go back to find it, there's nothing
there to find. / It will scramble up your head
and drag your brain about. / Sometimes you gotta
do like Elvis did and shoot the damn thing out."
It took me 20 years - and not that I'm following
Elvis' lead exactly - but I am now living without
a television and relying on print media, mainly
the American-Statesman and The Daily Texan for my
information.
Most world languages have words for "newspapers"
that stress how ephemeral they are. The modern
Greeks, in fact, call newspapers ephemerides -
"things for a day." Still, by reading the news in
print carefully, it is possible to make
connections and see what goes unsaid. This is one
advantage over televised news entertainment that
disappears once the images vanish.
Let's start with something that has many people
worried. Last December, the regents and the
president of the University of Texas at Austin,
over the strong objections of many members of the
Faculty Council, gave head football coach Mack
Brown a $1 million raise, making his annual
salary $5.1 million. The Longhorns were about to
play in the national title game. Brown was
praised as a coaching genius, as was his anointed
heir apparent, defensive coach Will Muschamp.
The Longhorns have been coached this season to a
subpar record while playing a style of defense
few coaches would want to take credit for. So I
kept waiting for a journalist to question whether
we were getting our extra million dollars' worth
of special coaching acumen.
In the Statesman, Kirk Bohls pointed out in his
Nov. 13 column that the players are of the
highest quality: four recruiting classes ranked
in the top five nationally since 2005. Brown was
quoted on Nov. 10 as saying "It's all on me." And
Brown gave himself and his coaches a grade of "F."
UT has the best facilities in the nation. It has
a full team of blue-chip players. Its head coach
publicly admits that the coaching staff has
failed. So when will the regents and president,
who wasted so much money, be held accountable or
hold the coaches accountable? It is not against
any law I know to lower salaries to meet
performance levels.
Several other cases of playing with donated
money, even as budgets for important social
programs, public services and education are
slashed, were fit to print. In The Daily Texan, a
Nov. 10 front-page story laid out the amounts
that regents are reimbursed from "discretionary"
funds to cover travel to and attendance at
football games while they stay in the poshest
hotels.
The practice will not stop anytime soon because
the current chairwoman, Colleen McHugh, viewed it
as vital to higher education in our state that
she spend $950 to stay at the Montage Beverly
Hills Hotel in the Golden Triangle near Rodeo
Drive when UT lost to Alabama in the national
championship game. Its website,
Really Long Link advertises "a
mélange of luxurious décor," so she could at
least get some practice accenting French words
correctly. The industrious Texan reporter even
found a former student regent and an anthropology
professor who defended this shameless waste of
public funds.
Lastly, in the Nov. 7 Statesman, lifestyle
columnist Michael Barnes reported on the gala
held at the former Byrne-Reed House. It has been
renovated with millions of dollars from private
donors and the National Endowment for the
Humanities because Humanities Texas, our state
affiliate of the national endowment, decided it
"needed a higher profile home to go with their
higher-profile mission."
When Barnes was covering the project in 2009, he
referred, without irony, to "The Great Gatsby."
Indeed, to lavish so much on remodeling even a
historic building when authors, writers,
film-makers, artists, historians and educators
need grant support strikes me as Gilded Age
priorities that do little to further the
organization's stated goal to "strengthen Texas
communities and ultimately help sustain
representative democracy by cultivating informed,
educated citizens."
Even in the newspapers, human beings entrusted to
serve the public good just won't stop doing
stupid, foolish, sordid or selfish things.
Palaima is a professor of classics at the
University of Texas at Austin. He may be reached
at tpalaima@sbcglobal.net.
Thomas G. Palaima
Chad Oliver Teaching Award, Plan II Honors Program, University of Texas at Austin- resume
Tom Palaima's bio
Football versus Education - it's not a level playing field
Palaima: No more excuses for UT's excesses - sports program
Tom Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman
Tom Palaima questions the power of sports versus the
quality of education and the news reporting about it.
Way back in 1990, the sage Bob Dylan wrote a song
about a character in London's Hyde Park who gives
passers-by some advice about television: "It's
all been designed to make you lose your mind. /
And when you go back to find it, there's nothing
there to find. / It will scramble up your head
and drag your brain about. / Sometimes you gotta
do like Elvis did and shoot the damn thing out."
It took me 20 years - and not that I'm following
Elvis' lead exactly - but I am now living without
a television and relying on print media, mainly
the American-Statesman and The Daily Texan for my
information.
Most world languages have words for "newspapers"
that stress how ephemeral they are. The modern
Greeks, in fact, call newspapers ephemerides -
"things for a day." Still, by reading the news in
print carefully, it is possible to make
connections and see what goes unsaid. This is one
advantage over televised news entertainment that
disappears once the images vanish.
Let's start with something that has many people
worried. Last December, the regents and the
president of the University of Texas at Austin,
over the strong objections of many members of the
Faculty Council, gave head football coach Mack
Brown a $1 million raise, making his annual
salary $5.1 million. The Longhorns were about to
play in the national title game. Brown was
praised as a coaching genius, as was his anointed
heir apparent, defensive coach Will Muschamp.
The Longhorns have been coached this season to a
subpar record while playing a style of defense
few coaches would want to take credit for. So I
kept waiting for a journalist to question whether
we were getting our extra million dollars' worth
of special coaching acumen.
In the Statesman, Kirk Bohls pointed out in his
Nov. 13 column that the players are of the
highest quality: four recruiting classes ranked
in the top five nationally since 2005. Brown was
quoted on Nov. 10 as saying "It's all on me." And
Brown gave himself and his coaches a grade of "F."
UT has the best facilities in the nation. It has
a full team of blue-chip players. Its head coach
publicly admits that the coaching staff has
failed. So when will the regents and president,
who wasted so much money, be held accountable or
hold the coaches accountable? It is not against
any law I know to lower salaries to meet
performance levels.
Several other cases of playing with donated
money, even as budgets for important social
programs, public services and education are
slashed, were fit to print. In The Daily Texan, a
Nov. 10 front-page story laid out the amounts
that regents are reimbursed from "discretionary"
funds to cover travel to and attendance at
football games while they stay in the poshest
hotels.
The practice will not stop anytime soon because
the current chairwoman, Colleen McHugh, viewed it
as vital to higher education in our state that
she spend $950 to stay at the Montage Beverly
Hills Hotel in the Golden Triangle near Rodeo
Drive when UT lost to Alabama in the national
championship game. Its website,
Really Long Link advertises "a
mélange of luxurious décor," so she could at
least get some practice accenting French words
correctly. The industrious Texan reporter even
found a former student regent and an anthropology
professor who defended this shameless waste of
public funds.
Lastly, in the Nov. 7 Statesman, lifestyle
columnist Michael Barnes reported on the gala
held at the former Byrne-Reed House. It has been
renovated with millions of dollars from private
donors and the National Endowment for the
Humanities because Humanities Texas, our state
affiliate of the national endowment, decided it
"needed a higher profile home to go with their
higher-profile mission."
When Barnes was covering the project in 2009, he
referred, without irony, to "The Great Gatsby."
Indeed, to lavish so much on remodeling even a
historic building when authors, writers,
film-makers, artists, historians and educators
need grant support strikes me as Gilded Age
priorities that do little to further the
organization's stated goal to "strengthen Texas
communities and ultimately help sustain
representative democracy by cultivating informed,
educated citizens."
Even in the newspapers, human beings entrusted to
serve the public good just won't stop doing
stupid, foolish, sordid or selfish things.
Palaima is a professor of classics at the
University of Texas at Austin. He may be reached
at tpalaima@sbcglobal.net.
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