dimitrig said:
Fyght4Cal said:
mbBear said:
maxer said:
Our donor base is significantly smaller, and our faculty is considerable more hostile to football. Mostly the first thing.
The faculty stuff/excuse is outdated. A post grad program was created to help the athletic program in terms of losing "grad" students. The chancellor has embraced athletics, and worked with the program to organize debt in a way favorable to the athletic dept. Faculty members have embraced the programs instituted under Knowlton which deal with life beyond football, et. al.
If you want to hunt for some engineering prof who isn't a big fan of sports, sure, you can find that if you want too...
First, Knowlton expends more effort trying to bring faculty around. But too many faculty are hostile to both athletes and Black students (esp those they assume are athletes). Of course this will bring reflexive defensiveness for many on this board. But anyone who has never been a Black student on campus, probably has lots of opinions, very little knowledge and absolutely no experience. Those fans, donors and coaches who have had this conversation with Black students on campus, excepted.
Is this a uniquely Cal problem? Don't Cal and UCLA (and Stanford) pretty much compete for the same faculty members?
It's a uniquely American problem, to the extent that the outsized role that intercollegiate sports play on American college campuses. Black students, athletes & non-, have voiced similar concerns across the country for many decades. Not to mention those decades that they couldn't participate in college sports, or had limited opportunities, outside of HBCUs.
UC Los Angeles is an interesting case. Unlike Cal, it began as a second school, both in the UC system and in Southern California. While building a leading academic profile takes a very long time, intercollegiate athletics is a shortcut to relevance and public acclaim.
Similar to Cal, the Los Angeles campus went through upheaval during the Civil Rights & anti-war movements. In some ways it was worse, as two young Black movement leaders were murdered on campus. Yet, the Bruins kept winning NCAA titles in men's basketball during the entire period & beyond. While Berkeley in the '60s & early '70s rejected sports as part of "the machine", Westwood embraced sports culture as a significant part of its identity and brand.
While Cal was choosing elitism and exceptionalism, UCLA was choosing populism.
And who knows, perhaps those opposite attitudes influenced a generation or two of scholars who applied for professorships at the two campuses. At Los Angeles, the serious pursuit of profitable/winning Athletics comes with the territory.
For at least 70 years, the Southern Branch has clearly asserted its support for big time college athletics from the top. In competition with SC for the hearts & minds of LA, it embraced bringing the region's wealth of highly talented black athletes to campus. During much of the same period, Cal Chancellors reject the modern model of college football & basketball built on the backs of Black athletes, choosing instead to shrink our athletic profile.
Even when I was on the Los Angeles campus years ago, they had 5 campus facilities named for African Americans, 3 athletes, and two non-. I believe that there are one or two more such buildings since that time. There is no question that the Southern Branch celebrated its Black alumni earlier and more enthusiastically than Cal.
So, perhaps over the same period UCLA's faculty accepted/tolerated the necessity of Black athletes on campus, more than its Berkeley counterparts. Certainly Black students/athletes encountered problems with individual LA faculty members. UCLA claims to have raised athlete admission requirements before Cal. But the push to abandon D-1 sports has, heretofore, been a marginal issue among LA faculty.
What will be interesting is what happens going forward, as the Southern Branch grapples with becoming widely-recognized as an elite university. Will the leadership turn their back on a hundred years of athletic excellence, similarly to Cal? As campus athletes begin to profit more and more from their athletic prowess, will the faculty reject this brave, new athletic model? It will be interesting how it all unfolds over the next decade or two on both campuses.
I can't speak specifically for 'furd, since I never attended that school. But it is public knowledge that significant portions of the 'furd campus community want to abandon D-1 sports and adopt an Ivy League model.
Edited to add: An interesting article in The Guardian about Black college athletes' views of the work they do and their place on campus.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/sep/07/race-money-and-exploitation-why-college-sport-is-still-the-new-plantation
