Reminder: UK is neither a football nor a basketball school. It is KY’s academic flagship.
What could be more fun in the dog days of summer than to grab some popcorn and gather round to watch an ego death match between two multimillionaires who teach kids how to throw balls?
And what could be more dumb? I don’t know or particularly care if the University of Kentucky is a football or basketball school; long ago I succumbed to the idea that sports are extremely important to many people, especially UK sports. I don’t think they should be more important than academics, and I don’t think the athletics arms race is a good one, but once President Eli Capilouto forced athletics to start contributing to academics with some of that hard, cold cash they make — $3.7 million a year over 30 years to help pay off the new Jacobs Science building — I stopped complaining. It’s the brand, stupid.
But let me once again be the unpopular school marm who has to point out that there is something deeply wrong with our society when coaches like Mark Stoops and John Calipari are arguing about who has nicer multimillion-dollar practice facilities. (Also, as an aside, when you win championships all the time, the quality of your facilities tends to matter less. A chicken and egg problem to be sure, but let’s point out that Harvard doesn’t waste time with fancy dorms because they don’t have to.)
Let’s talk about life outside the athletics rabbit hole. The University of Kentucky is neither a football nor a basketball school; it’s the state’s flagship academic body, charged with educating thousands of our young people every year. It hosts the research that solves Kentucky’s numerous problems in health, energy and the economy. UK’s medical centers and medical schools teach our future doctors and take care of our deeply sick population. Its College of Education turns out our children’s teachers. Its business school incubates new companies. But all this gets done without much fanfare because people don’t seem to care about the rankings of UK’s engineering school up against a new basketball recruit. Can you imagine if a chemistry teacher made headlines because his lab wasn’t as nice as the one in physics?
That there even are new chemistry labs is thanks to President Eli Capilouto, who created a juggernaut of academic construction across campus since he arrived in 2011. But UK still suffers from a lack of state funding, too many adjunct lecturers paid too little, too many students in too few classes. UK is increasingly unaffordable in one of the poorest states in the country, so instead of $30 million for new sports facilities, how about that money goes to more scholarships?
Athletics do bring attention, students and acclaim to universities, but donors are zealously guarded, and very little spills over to academics. So if I were Capilouto, I’d say to Stoops and Calipari — “guys, I appreciate how worried you are about facilities and what kind of school UK is, and so we’re going to let you pay off the bonds for another new academic building. We’ll name it the CaliStoops Hall of Rhetoric and Debate.”
College sports are bread and circus, they are fun and entertaining and provide a welcome relief from our heavy lives these days. But they also distract from real problems and real blessings and the real work at hand. Yes, I’ve been known to joke that UK is a professional sports franchise with its own medical school. But it’s actually a real university to which sports should take a back seat. Neither Stoops nor Calipari realize how utterly absurd it is that they’re arguing over millions more dollars into athletics instead of academics because they went through the looking glass many years ago and that absurdity is their reality. It’s up to the rest of us to keep perspective.
