Prof Thatcher questions SMU's entry into the Big East

[EastStang]

The Publishing world has changed 180 degrees in the last decade. Blogs now replace journals. SMU understood that and moved on to more positive pursuits. The prof should get himself a blog and he can write all he wants, and if anyone wants to read what he writes, there you go. If enough people read it, he'll even make money on his blog.

[PoconoPony]

What he fails to recognize is that The College of New Jersey has over the last decade or so consistanly been a best buy and offers a significantly better college campus atmosphere. Rutgers has an awful looking campus that is extremely spread out and feels like a commuter school. My guess would be that has more to do with the best students looking elsewhere. Also, as a state school facing hard economic times, this most likely is the reason few structural improvements having been made to the campus.

PM has captured some of the Rutgers issues. I lived 15 miles from Rutgers for over 20 years and attended many sporting events on campus. Most of the kids in NJ never considered Rutgers in their choice of colleges. Most HS kids did not even know it was the state university until the football program started getting recognition 10 years ago. The school has a reputation for total arrogance from the attitudes of the faculty and administration and has historically not been student friendly. Roughly 50% of the faculty does not teach and consider themselves to be research assigned only. When challenged by a new president roughly ten years ago a huge confrontation ensued as the president was insisting that all faculty teach. The president and some politician even threatened to review and legally abolish tenure if they could not teach. Bottom line is that Rutgers College is a top notch jewel of the university. The rest of the university colleges are credible, but nothing special and spread out over a 5 mile area making the scheduling of classes a nightmare. The faculty hates the president and some of the administration for spending so much money on the football program which included a 120,000,000 unfunded upgrade to the football stadium, new work out facilities....etc. at the expense of cutting 6 Olympic minor sports. In many respects Rutgers mirrors the growing pains now being experienced by SMU the difference being that SMU actually has a sports history and Rutgers had none. Rutgers uses tax dollars and SMU private contribution. I could go on and on, but you get some of the picture.

[Stallion]

What kind of scholar repeatedly points to unidentified studies witout citation. A lot of conclusions that I don't really think are based in fact. Another school whose reputation was built on athletics-is USC for sure-not to mention Notre Dame. Duke in Basketball. I think Stanford has helped its reputation too since it annually ranks among the Top schools in All-Sports rankings-its the anti-Ivy League/non-Egg-Head choice. And while not national academic powerhouses I think schools like the University of Oklahoma ("We want to build a University our Football team can be proud of") and Texas A&M have certainly made strides and have raised their academic profile partly based on the traditions of a strong Football program. Especially Texas A&M which is much more difficult to laugh at these days (we still can but it has a much better reputation these days.)

[jtoutloud]

The Publishing world has changed 180 degrees in the last decade. Blogs now replace journals. SMU understood that and moved on to more positive pursuits. The prof should get himself a blog and he can write all he wants, and if anyone wants to read what he writes, there you go. If enough people read it, he'll even make money on his blog.

Agreed. Sports didn't cause the demise of the SMU paper, the internet did. Just like it has many other papers.

And this isn't the first time a new medium has made its predecessor obsolete; video killed the radio star.

[EastStang]

If America needed an enema, New Jersey is where they'd stick it. Or as another NJ resident put it, if America cut the cheese New Jersey is where it would come out.

[Pony ^]

Liberals hate anything successful and everything about life. Lay off old man Thatcher.

[MustangSTATS]

As SMU athletics becomes more successful, people like this will try to leach onto SMU in an effort for themselves to seem relevant. I doubt this guy or the last guy to attack SMU really care about what SMU is doing, they just want to bait alumni that are pro-sports into an argument so they can seem relevant.

Don't let people like this put you into a mindset that athletics are in an adversarial position with the faculty of our university. This guy along with the last guy are not professors or in anyway voices of the faculty. We need to be sure to continue moving forward and not letting irrelevant writes like this cause us to fall into old cliches. SMU is moving up in all fields together.

[Digetydog]

Thatcher doesn't understand that different schools need to offer different things to prospective students. He could probably care less about football or basketball. Thus, he finds it incomprehensible that "smart" kids would care about college FB and BB.

Syracuse and Boston College thrive b/c they offer a college experience that the SUNY schools, UMASS, Vermont, UNH, URI and (until recently Uconn) cannot match.

As an experiment, we should track the academic success of SMU and Tulane over the next 10 years. Does anyone want to bet on Tulane? Anyone??

[MustangSTATS]

As an experiment, we should track the academic success of SMU and Tulane over the next 10 years. Does anyone want to bet on Tulane? Anyone??

Not the fairest comparison seeing how Katrina effected Tulane.

[Digetydog]

As an experiment, we should track the academic success of SMU and Tulane over the next 10 years. Does anyone want to bet on Tulane? Anyone??

Not the fairest comparison seeing how Katrina effected Tulane.

I meant going forward from where they are now.

Assuming we don't want to compare our school to a public school, the other options would be Tulsa (not really in SMU's class) or Rice (again, not really in SMU's class).

[lwjr]

From the small bio at the end of the article I am led to believe the "professor" has never spent a day outside the cozy confines of academia. Like most of those in his world, they think their theories are always 100% correct and reality does not play into the equation.
Applications to the school are up, thanks to the exposure of the football programs and I think we wil see more impact from Larry Brown's hiring. These are the faces of the university the country sees, not some pointy head teacher. He questions a schools spending and the return in athletics, well I question schools who pay professors to teach students but instead the professors publish books, perform research to supplement their income while T.A.'s teach classes they are suppose to be teaching.

Go back to the library!