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September 29, 2007

Racism at Rutgers - never criticize the athletics program

Yesterday, Jeff Goldstein touched on the O'Reilly 'racist' kerfuffle. There's also another "controversy" over Rush Limbaugh, in a segment with a caller, using the term phony soldiers -- also snipped out of context because four remarks later, still in conversation with the same caller, Limbaugh discusses "fake soldiers" like "Jesse Macbeth".

At a lower profile is the troubling story of Rutgers' English Professor William Dowling. The good Professor has been a thorn in the administration's side for some time and has recently published a book

For more than a decade at Rutgers, Dr. Dowling has stood as an idealistic absolutist, an intellectual convinced that the thunder of big-time athletics was crumbling the ivory tower of academe.He has been the conscience, the Cassandra, the crank, the nag, the pain, infuriating opponents and, at times, exasperating allies. Enough years of being the whistle-blower, after all, can make even a tuneful musician sound shrill.

But now, just as Rutgers’s recent triumphs in football and basketball might seem to have justified the university’s investment of tens of millions of dollars, Dr. Dowling has answered in his own subversive way. His memoir of the decade-long campaign against high-stakes athletics at Rutgers, “Confessions of a Spoilsport,” has just been published by Penn State University Press. It is his valediction, and its tone, far from mournful, is defiant.


Bureaucracies don't take kindly to gadflies. Especially if such gadfly is challenging the program that puts butts in the stadium seats and new buildings, suitably dedicated, on campus.
“I wanted this book to be a monument,” Dr. Dowling, 62, said after class. “I wanted it to be a monument to the kids and the faculty who rallied around this issue. We tried to take on the monster of commercialized sports, even if it swallowed us up and passed us out the other end. Someone should know that we fought the good fight. And because I believe in literature as a form of symbolic action, I want readers to see the possibility of another way. Think about the impact of a book like ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ on slavery.

”Naturally, Dr. Dowling’s thesis has many detractors, particularly of late.


This is where the fun starts. The article on Dr. Dowling concludes with the following short paragraphs:
Dartmouth also instilled in Dr. Dowling an appreciation for what he calls now “participatory sports” — sports without scholarships, separate dorms, team tutors, product endorsements, television contracts, reduced admissions standards, easy classes and so many other tropes of Division I-A sports.

Rutgers, in turn, provided a striking example of before and after. For more than 100 years after playing Princeton in the first intercollegiate football game in 1869, Rutgers had competed against schools like Lafayette and Colgate with which it shared academic standards. Then, in 1991, Rutgers joined the Big East Conference, making it a peer of ethically challenged football factories like Miami.

Dr. Dowling grew convinced that the shift was degrading the caliber of students, indeed the entire communal culture. A self-proclaimed “academic traditionalist” who doesn’t drive and still thinks Bob Dylan betrayed folk music by going electric, he became the hub of RU1000. And while he enjoyed teaching many members of the track, swimming and crew teams in his courses, he vociferously resisted the notion that athletic scholarships offered opportunity to low-income, minority students.

“If you were giving the scholarship to an intellectually brilliant kid who happens to play a sport, that’s fine,” he said. “But they give it to a functional illiterate who can’t read a cereal box, and then make him spend 50 hours a week on physical skills. That’s not opportunity. If you want to give financial help to minorities, go find the ones who are at the library after school.”


It is that last quote, now taken out of context and unmoored from the utterer's intention that has the Rutgers' administration engaging in public character assassination of Dr. Dowling.

Weapon of choice? The charge of racism

Rutgers Athletic Director Bob Mulcahy told local newspapers that Dowling's comment was "a blatantly racist statement."

In a statement released by the university, Rutgers President Richard McCormick called it "inaccurate and inhumane."

"It also has a racist implication that has no place whatsoever in our civil discourse," McCormick said in the statement.


To his credit, Dr. Dowling isn't backing down
Dowling defended his statement, saying that Mulcahy and McCormick had taken it out of context, that he was directly answering a question related to minorities."

If someone has a way to answer that question without mentioning race, I would like to hear it," said Dowling, who called the officials' accusation of racism the "cheapest rhetorical ploy I've ever heard."


Maybe Dr. Dowling has spent a little too much time in his ivory tower. This particular cheap, rhetorical ploy is beloved of "movement builders".

Both O'Reilly and Limbaugh will survive. As long as O'Reilly and Limbaugh bring in the audiences, they'll be having their say each and every day and they can wrest the narrative back.

What is worrisome is the vagaries of faculty fortunes rarely make the news. Rutgers' cynical use of the racist card against Dr. Dowling has already been picked up and spread by others invested in one way or another in slapping down someone who doesn't play well with the university's investment.

William Dowling, a Rutgers English professor, was once leader of the "Rutgers 1000." Its goal was to have the school de-emphasize sports. Suffice to say he's not a fan of the new-and-improved football team. [...]

Dowling should Google Don Imus, who lost his talk-radio job last spring after making disparaging racial comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team.


Larry Summers' has come to the realization he is now judged not for his work, words or even character but he is a "symbol" of "gender and racial prejudice". Now Dr. Dowling is being touted as the new Don Imus.
Dowling's remarks were thought on a level next to Imus, who called the women's basketball team a group of "nappy-headed ho's." [...]

"Imus was making a joke. What got him fired was referring to nine specific women," said a faculty member, who did not want to be identified. "Dowling's remarks were much more racist, but he didn't attack specific people."


This is bunk, of course. Mulcahy and McCormick have defended the overarching narrative that individuals of pallor may never comment, criticize or hold The Other to any standard by slandering Dr. Dowling to the press.

The irony of the explicit bigotry of such a narrative is lost on people like Mulcahy and McCormick but, hey, gotta keep the endorsement dollars rolling in and if many of the athletes never graduate or get a degree that qualifies them for an assistant sales manager at the local Kia Dealership (to be trotted out to greet and impress the customers) at least they tried to help. Right?

crossposted at Protein Wisdom

Technorati: Rutgers, Dowling,

Posted by Darleen at September 29, 2007 09:12 PM

Comments

This is a bit much, coming from someone so eager to throw the anti-semitism smear around.

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