By Sick and tired of the ever-rising cost of college education? It turns out its your fault, college water polo fans.
That according to Deseret News national politics and policy columnist Erik Schulzke, who surveys current thinking on the ever-expanding and increasingly costly bureaucracy at institutes of higher learning.
In his January 14 piece (whose since-changed original title was, “Tuition is rising because colleges are shoveling money to programs like water polo”) he critiques the proliferation of employees hired for “student services” jobs, mammoth infrastructure projects, and plenty of other functions not core to the mission of teaching. But not before writing this anecdote as his bizarre introduction:
Not long ago, political science professor Ben Ginsberg welcomed a freshman and his parents to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. As they talked, the parents confided that one reason they chose Johns Hopkins was because of its strength in water polo.
“Now, I confessed I didn’t know we had a water polo team,” Ginsberg said, “I said that was nice, but don’t take too much time with that because it could affect your grades.”
The parents were quite shocked. A dean at the advisement center, they responded, had urged the incoming students to “pursue your passions.”
“Well if one of your passions happens to be calculus,” Ginsberg answers, “then you should pursue it, but water polo is another matter.”
Four years later, Ginsberg related, the kid was graduating. “He had an abysmal grade point average, though he was quite a star on our water polo team, and the parents asked me, ‘What should we do now?’ ”
In Ginsberg’s mind, that water polo player captures a core problem with American higher education and a key reason why tuition has skyrocketed…
To this we’re supposed to nod our heads knowingly: of course, water polo is frivolous, and a well-known hinderance to serious studies – at Johns Hopkins, no less. So silly, in fact, that the parents had to “confide,” Schulzke writes, that their son had an interest in the sport. One can only imagine how hushed their tones when these shamed parents confess the boy’s love for rugby.
But no, this gratuitous anti-jock sneer isn’t really the problem with the anecdote. That lies in the complete disconnect between the athlete’s bad grades and the institution’s bureaucratic overreach.
We’re told that the poor student (“quite the star” on the water polo team [sniff]) is representative of the “core problem” in higher education? But how? By consuming valuable teaching resources? By diluting the purity of the academic mission? Who can tell? Schulzke never informs us.
Instead, he merely implies is that sports cause academics to suffer, hardly a new concept, but nothing to do with the main theme of the piece. To mention the student’s bad grades is just a cheap blow.
Leave aside that the most cursory online search reveals plenty of serious research that debunks this cartoonish view of the college student-athlete anyway. It’s beside the point. Of course there are plenty of athletes who waste their time in college, and many who get bad grades. And surely there are endeavors more worthy of funding than water polo. So go ahead, demolish the entire interscholastic sporting system. Seriously. Do you know how many self-funded college-based water polo clubs there are in the US? Hundreds: far more than there are varsity programs. Separating athletics from the college experience is fantasy. Your faculty will be stuck with the student-athlete no matter what. It’s what the American student wants.
College water polo hardly requires inoculation from serious critique as part of the larger crisis in American higher education. There are plenty of serious minds in the community who foresee – even advocate – the dismantling of collegiate water polo as it currently exists. And there is nothing to fear in debating the future of collegiate water polo, because change is coming with or without the hand-wringing of academia. But neither should fans be afraid to expose cheap and false critiques such as Schulzke’s.
