With so much discussion about what we’re going to do about university athletics, this piece of satire from the Onion a few years ago is rather refreshing:
Bowing to pressure from alumni, students, and a majority of teaching professors of Florida State University, athletic director Dave Hart Jr. announced yesterday that FSU would completely phase out all academic operations by the end of the 2010 school year in order to make athletics the school’s No. 1 priority. “It’s been clear for a while that Florida State’s mission is to provide the young men and women enrolled here with a world-class football program, and this is the best way to cut the fat and really focus on making us No. 1 every year,” Hart said. “While it’s certainly possible for an academic subsidiary to bring a certain amount of prestige to an athletic program, the national polls have made it that our non-athletic operations have become a major distraction.” FSU’s restructuring program will begin with the elimination of the College of Arts and Sciences, effective October 15.
Eventually some school is really going to try to do this, I swear.
After a few years a college is going to figure out that it’s just trying to do too many damn things, and it’s time to just cut a few functions of the university and concentrate on its “core strengths.”
There are complicated legal issues here, but at least a few schools are going to realize that the core strengths probably aren’t academics.
