Translating football fame into academic excellence

On the front page of today’s Oregonian, we learn the University of Oregon is reaping huge rewards from the massive media hype about the Ducks’ playing for the national collegiate football championship.

To quote the lead, the Ducks’ football superiority is “burnishing the UO brand and boosting revenue, recruitment and status.”

All of which triggers one of my favorite questions: Is there intelligent life on Earth?

What, pray tell, is the link between a school’s football success and its academic excellence and educational status?

The story quotes University of Oregon President Richard Lariviere as saying that applications to the university have risen sharply because of the media attention given the Ducks’ team.

Out-of-state applications are up 30 percent. In-state applications have grown 20 percent.

No fool he, Lariviere also tells the reporter that the high-profile team “gives us an opportunity to showcase what is really important to us, which is the educational mission. We are working very hard to translate this attention into awareness of what we do here.”

I don’t know about you, but my raw-boned interest in the Duck’s team has zero connection to numbers of Nobel Laureates, US News rankings, tuition costs, tenured faculty, student-faculty ratios, and graduation rates.

Yet presumably those are the very qualities Lariviere would like the “translation” to lead to. (If you do manage to make the translation, alas, UO doesn’t translate all that well in academics. But that’s another subject.)

I suggest the president consider exactly whom he is asking to make the translation.

In short, who are these applicants who suddenly want to attend UO because of the football frenzy in Eugene?

Could they be someone like Potential Future Duck over there. He’s in medialand, submerged up to his belt line on the sofa, beer or sugary beverage in hand, nachos within reach. He’s deep into Duckmania. The game and the Ducks glow on the screen.

“Wow, did you see that sack (or catch or run or touchdown)? Check out those cheerleaders!! I'm applying to the University of Oregon!”

I don’t know what kind of “translation” Potential Future Duck is doing, but I don’t think it is the one Lariviere has in mind.

I hope there’s a question on UO’s application form that asks: “Are you applying to the university because of the success of the Ducks’ football team?”

The forms of applicants answering “Yes! Go Ducks!” (or words to that effect) go to the bottom of the pile.

Now THAT could translate into academic excellence.

Mystery and ignorance reign in Knight's Duckdom

The Oregon’s public system of higher education is fomenting a mystery.

Billionaire Phil Knight is writing the plot and has no desire for the mystery to be solved — which is a mystery within a mystery.

Worse, the president of the University of Oregon, Richard Lariviere, considers Knight's machinations a mystery too.

Does Lariviere, who is supposed to know what's happening, care?

Not a bit.

It gets worse, as a front page story in today’s Oregonian describes. The entire state board of higher education is equally clueless.

In this know-nothing atmosphere, according to the story, Lariviere Friday browbeat the board into approving, on a day’s notice, a Knight donation (for an undisclosed, mysterious amount) to build a 80,000 square-foot operations center for ... what?

The Duck football team, of course.

How refreshing that Phil, the Beaverton sneaker mogul, has his priorities straight. His OWN priorities.

Oh, and the board agreed that Knight decides who gets the design and construction contracts for the facility, which will be built on public land.

Lariviere’s cudgel with the state board was this: If you don’t accept this gift, Knight may confer his bounty elsewhere.

Say it isn’t so.

Meanwhile, a story immediately above this one on the front page informs the mystified reader that students going to the seven Oregon University system schools next fall will be paying, on average, 6.2 percent more for tuition. That brings the cost of public higher education (including room, board, books and tuition) to about $20,000 a year per student.

And while the increase isn’t the highest in the nation, deep down in the story we learn that the Oregon University system has been judged as failing because it “skimps” on aid to low-income students.

Unless, apparently, they happen to play football.

And to think that all this is happening in the middle of a collapsed economy where intellectual breakthroughs are needed just a tad more than touchdowns and conference titles.

Inquiring minds might ask why the university is building grandiose football facilities while students, with fewer and fewer resources, are being forced to pick up more and more of the education tab and being saddled with greater and greater debt?

The answer and the values behind it remain mysteries, unless you happen to be one Phil Knight.