The University of Chicago and Big10 athletics are not a match.
Notre Dame and the Big10 are a match.
Why not just give the Chicago Bears new uniforms with “University of Chicago Bears” lettering. That should generate some publicity.
This emphasis on freedom of expression (which implies both rights AND responsibilities) was a big part of the appeal to my daughter when she applied a few years ago. The college that was most in competition for her early application was Columbia, another rigorous school in a big city. But this was the time of Mattress Girl, a woman whose sexual assault allegation was rejected by both the school and I believe by police as well. But she went ahead and publicly destroyed the reputation of her alleged assailant, and had the support of much of Columbia’s faculty in doing so. That killed Columbia for her.
So while I agree that freedom of expression is critically important, I separate it from academic rigor. Both UChicago and Columbia are academically rigorous, but their views on appropriate expression are poles apart.
@Zoom10 , the model you’re imagining is one in which a mighty academic university recruits and sets aside a special class of nearly professional athletes, who would not otherwise want to be at the school or be capable of getting in to it, for the purpose of providing entertainment for the actual students and branding for the general public. None of this has anything to do with education. It does have a lot to do with decadence. It is anathema to the spirit of the University of Chicago.
- Cue attends Chicago admit and recruitment events so might be making suggestions there.
- While I don't concur with UChicago's participation in Zoom's idea to create a Midwestern athletic conference that trumps the Ivy League, I totally admire his tenacity and scope of vision. They would have to kick out Nebraska, though.
- Amen to that last paragraph. Couldn't agree more!
Marlowe, your blanket description of D1 athletes as “nearly professionals” who have no interest in attending a serious academic school is off the mark. First of all, this characterization, at best, applies to some athletes in basically 2 or 3 sports: football and men’s basketball, maybe hockey and to some degree baseball. With respect to all the other varsity college sports, there are no professional leagues to aspire to or athletes in those sports typically bypass college altogether to pursue their professional sports careers thru clubs (eg, soccer) or individual training (golf, tennis). Are you saying that tennis players or soccer players at UChicago or any of the Ivy’s are just a bunch of silly pre-professional athletes who are not there to earn a real degree to position them in life after college?
As I said earlier in my proposed approach, Chicago can enter D1 sports in a gradual, staged fashion. There is no need for Chicago to immediately try to field a D1 football team to play against a football factory like Ohio State. But why can’t Chicago support a D1 tennis or swimming team and see how that goes before expanding further? Are you saying Chicago would have to drastically lower its academic standards to recruit D1 caliber tennis and swimming athletes who could care less about school? If so, then I guess the Ivy’s and Stanford have it all wrong, yet somehow their prestige hasn’t suffered because there are too many professional swimmers on campus competing for NCAA championships.
@zoom10 you want UChicago to follow Liberty University’s plan? Sure the B1G has academic standards. However, if the University of Texas said that they would be willing to join the B1G but they don’t like Northwestern, a nice parting gift would be given to NU as they are escorted out of the conference.
@JBStillFlying - why will the “where fun comes to die” mantra be so hard to shake?
Also, how come other rigorous schools don’t have the same rep? I’ve never heard “where fun comes to die” with MIT, Johns Hopkins, Swarthmore, heck, even St. Johns, Reed, etc.
I still assert that the mantra springs not from academic rigor, but the lack of any other support surrounding Chicago student life, for so long.
Eeyore, sorry, I’m not very familiar with Liberty University’s athletic program or plan so can’t really comment on that.
However, in your scenario where Texas wanted to join the Big Ten, which I would welcome, the first school that would be kicked out would not be NU, it would be Nebraska as JBS stated LOL.
MIT has the inscription “IHTFP” on its class rings. Here are two interpretations on what this means, depending upon the student.
- I have truly found paradise
- I hate this f****** place.
@hebegebe - I’ve never heard of that! Is “IHTFP” a generally known phrase at MIT?
The only rigorous schools that I’ve heard receive as much vitriol (e.g., “where fun comes to die, I hate this place, etc.”) as Chicago are the military academies - West Point, etc.
Do Swarthmore, Reed, etc. have similar mantras?
Again, the only big (outwardly negative) trope I’ve heard, that seems to stick, has been Chicago’s “where fun comes to die.”
Nondorf must be kicking himself that this still sticks.
@Zoom10 - even if started in an incremental way, we’re talking about huge expenditures needed. To start a squash program, from scratch, would cost what - $40M? To start a crew program, that’d be what - $30M? To upgrade the soccer program would be what - $50-60M?
(For any of those sports, we’d either need to build or upgrade existing facilities. Also, Zoom10 - if you want Chicago to be excellent at these D1 sports, you need to attract recruits top flight - this is going to cost money, across the board.)
Zoom - how much do you think it’d take to start a competitive D1 soccer program? We’d need to build some nice facilities to attract recruits - a great D1 soccer stadium and training venues, bring in top-class coaches, increase the recruitment budget (possibly to include more international recruitment), and much more.
That could be easily, what, $60M?
That’s a lot of money to put toward a team that has no guarantee of success. In fact, more likely than not, the teams will be mediocre or poor.
Dollar for dollar, Zoom, this just seems like a bad way to spend money…
Instead, how about we do this:
Spend $60M for a partnership with Manchester United. We set up a data analytics shop there, and have ads/pub during the matches (billboards, on the video screen, etc.). AND we send our D3 soccer teams to Man U every year, to train and take in some games.
I guarantee you this would boost our D3 soccer recruiting. We might even get some D1-caliber players on the squads (how many college teams boast a partnership with Man U? How many travel there to train?). We’d probably win some D3 championships, too.
Or, heck, with $60M, we could do this:
Spend $40M on the Man U (or Liverpool, or Arsenal, or whatever) partnership - I’m sure any club is interested in getting millions more dollars.
Spend $20M for a soccer-specific community center in the south side of Chicago. Develop academic programs connected to this center. Make this a training academy (like the one the Phila Union has). Have our UChicago soccer players work with these kids.
Even my ideas, as semi-outlandish as they are, constitute a much better way to spend $60M.
@Zoom10 , let me be a little more precise and provide some hard numbers. These are from the Peter Arcidiacono et. al. study of the Harvard data provided in the law suit by the Asian Americans. It was the subject of a lengthy thread on the Harvard forum. The study itself can be found at
public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf
That study deals with many aspects of the system of preferences in place at Harvard. Table 2 summarizes the data for Recruited Athletes as compared with all non-athletes who are not either legacy, development prospects, or children of faculty (all of whom also have their own preferences). Let me summarize these figures and then you can tell me whether this is what you want for Chicago.
Harvard assigns an academic rating to every applicant, ranging from 1 to 5 - 1 being stellar, 5 being marginal. Most recruited athletes fall into the middle category (3), where they are admitted at a rate of 87.21 percent. By comparison for non-athletes in that middle category the rate of admission is 2.4 percent.
In the next lowest category (4) 79.52 percent of all athletes are still being admitted; whereas hardly any non-athlete (only .02 percent) is admitted.
In the lowest category of all (5) 50 percent of athletes are admitted, and literally no non-athlete is admitted.
The numbers of athletes who enjoy these very large preferences is not a small one. In the admission years for which the data was provided some 1,343 recruited athletes were admitted while some 7,784 non-athletes (who were not legacy, etc) were admitted. That is, athletes comprise about 15 percent of the total of those two pools of admitted students.
I’m happy for Harvard to do what it wants to do. But is that what you want for Chicago? Ugh.
Yes. It’s even featured prominently on the Wikipedia page for MIT, along with the various definitions for it. But I just learned from that page that the letters were taken off the class rings after 2012.
@hebegebe - I’m curious, is there a lot of grumbling about the student experience at mit? I just don’t know much about the school.
But nice to know if I said IHTFP to mit students, they would get the reference!
Zoom10 writes:
Mom2Meics, it’s wonderful that some kids love music just like others love sports, debate, robotics, or whatever else motivates them to do something besides play video games all day. However, I don’t think offering D1 sports vs music is a mutually exclusive choice that a university must make. All the Ivy schools you cited have D1 sports so they are not choosing between one thing or the other. Also, didn’t UChicago just recently expand its creative arts programs with the Logan Center? https://arts.uchicago.edu/logan-center/about-logan-center. I’m not an expert on classical music by any means but doesn’t UChicago have a en esteemed music department? I know that the city of Chicago’s symphony orchestra is usually regarded as one of the Top 3 in the nation: and the world so I would think a classical music kid would be thrilled to attend school in Chicago vs New Haven or Princeton.
___________________-
First, my son played varsity football at his prep school (Phillips Exeter), where he also did crew and wrestling, and he is not an instrumentalist (he sings–poorly)–so I was not making this suggestion in a self-interested way. Second, I’m reporting my socio-educational observations based on (a) what I see at Exeter, (b) what I saw at Harvard-Westlake school, where I taught years ago, (c) my observations from my LA streetcar suburb, which sends a lot of kids to elite universities, (d) my observations as Yale (college and grad school) alumnae, (e) conversations with leading writers, scientists, academics, lawyers who were serious classical musicians in college.
From those observations I conclude that there are a huge number of Chicago-type kids (whip-smart, intellectually inclined, engaged in all sorts of activities at a very high level, genuinely interesting, very nice), many of whom have done substantial lab-related work in their fields of academic interest, who choose their colleges–specifically, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford–over Chicago because of their well-informed understanding that UChicago does not have the musical performance opportunities available to them, compared with the schools they chose. This is a significant number of students–and based on my observations certainly more Chicago-type kids are seriously involved in classical music than in any other single activity (sports, robotics, debate). From my observations, Chicago is loosing a significant number of the kinds of students it wants to attract owing to its relatively weak classical performance opportunities. What–if anything–the University would want to do about that isn’t my business.
Second, a casual internet search reveals that HYPS have far more distinguished and intensive classical music performance opportunities than Chicago–Chicago doesn’t even show up on the rankings. (see, for example: https://www.onlineschoolscenter.com/20-impressive-university-orchestras-america/ )
On grumbling about student experience at MIT: I read a student blog on the mitadmissions about the places student cry on the campus. I initially thought its a toungue-in-cheek article, but based on the authors description and other students comments, it seemed like a pretty intense environment. Students seem to grumble while going through the experience but students who went past that phase seem to downplay it.
(this is based on spending a lot of time reading mit student blogs and talking to a bunch of current/former students - sample size is not huge though)
@Eeyore123: Regarding your post #85 above:
The University of Texas would have no say as to which teams remain in the Big 10.
Northwestern University is a founding member of the Big 10 Conference and NU won its division in Big 10 football a few years ago utilizing primarily 2 & 3 star recruits. Simply put, Northwestern has great football coaches who seem to get the most out of average players.
NU has recently invested in a magnificent indoor football training field on the shores of Lake Michigan.
Northwestern’s recruiting practices take academics into account. Would Chicago be willing to lower its academic standards to recruit football players talented enough to compete in the Big 10 ?
P.S. @Eeyore123: What is “Liberty University’s plan” ?
Marlowe, I’m extremely familiar with the Harvard lawsuit (and can’t wait for this to get to the Supreme Court) as well as the Ivy League’s overall approach to athletic recruiting which assigns an academic index (AI) number to each recruit based on his/her GPA and test scores. Basically, each sport at each Ivy must have a team average AI that is also calibrated to the overall student body’s AI number (cannot be below 1 standard deviation). Here’s a detailed article on how this works: https://www.fencingparents.org/college-bound-fencer/2019/2/26/how-do-elite-colleges-use-the-academic-index-in-the-athlete-recruitment-of-fencers.
What this means is that yes, athletes in general may have average lower AI than non-athletes at the Ivy’s, but I can speak from direct experience that each school also strictly informs all recruits what the minimum expectations are for GPA and test scores which is also a sliding scale based on talent. If you have the impression that Ivy athletes are getting in with SAT scores of 1200 or ACT scores of 26, then you are very mistaken. The majority of Ivy athletes have SAT scores above 1400 and above 31 on ACT. Your point from the Harvard lawsuit is that recruited athletes are admitted at far higher rates than everyone else. Of course this is true because these athletes are fulfilling an institutional need that is felt to be important that other kids aren’t.
Every school posts its 25%-75% midrange for SAT/ACT scores in its admissions student profile. By definition, 1/4 of the admitted student body has to comprise the lower 25% of this range, and who do you think that group largely consists of? You would only be partially correct if you said athletes. In fact, and this shouldn’t come as any startling revelation, this group also largely consists of certain other institutionally favored groups such as URMs, 1st generation student, low-income, and even some legacy kids and kids of important donors.
Now just like it would be unfair to stereotype all of these students as automatically comprising the bottom 25% of test scores, there are plenty of athletes at the Ivy’s with 1550 SATs and 35 ACTs and who have the talent to compete at the D1 level. In any case, there are no athletes who are admitted to Ivy schools who cannot complete the work and graduate. Yes, there many of these types at the Power 5 state schools, but not the Ivys.
My niece is a world-ranked athlete at an HYP and her ACT of 30 allowed them to admit others below 26 in her sport (I think the team average was in the mid 20’s). So it’s not the case - for her sport at least - that these kids are coming in with ACT’s north of 30. Obviously YMMV by sport; for instance, I have a friend whose son fenced for Columbia and he came in with a 33. IIRC, because he was a high-scoring athlete, he was asked to retake the ACT “for the team” to see if he can bump up the team average a bit, thus allowing others to squeak by with lower scores.
- This is true. And I don't believe there are any "list" classes such as exist at Duke. The Ivies have higher academic standards than that. As a group, however, D3 athletes at UChicago probably spend more time on their coursework than do D1 athletes at the Ivies.
UT is the proverbial 800 gorilla. Maybe they could ask for the removal of Maryland and Rutgers from the B1G. 
LOL, Rutgers is terrible at football and most other sports as well, but they are an AAU school and establish the Big 10’s footprint in the NY/NJ market which is why the Big 10 is the wealthiest athletic conference with the most lucrative media deals (and thanks to Maryland for establishing the DC market for Big 10).
The SEC might be best in football because they are shameless cheaters, but their economic markets don’t compare to Big 10.