As more proof that the wonders of the college football beat never cease, let the record now show that in consecutive days this blog has concerned itself with both a) The model for the new "Ken" doll by Mattel, and b) The earnest consumer advocate, perennial presidential candidate and all-purpose political punching bag Ralph Nader, who wandered onto the path today by publicly calling for the elimination of athletic scholarships to "de-professionalize" college sports:
Nader's League of Fans, a group aimed at reforming sports, proposes that the scholarships be replaced with need-based financial aid. He says that would help restore academic integrity to college sports.
The Associated Press obtained a copy of the proposal Thursday, ahead of its official release.
Nader, a former presidential candidate, argues that his plan would also help reduce the "win-at-all-costs" mentality in high schools, by reducing the incentive of college scholarships.
No word on the hypothetical mentality of athletes whose pursuit of an athletic scholarship is the only reason they stay in high school in the first place.
But perhaps a reformer of Nader's idealism, persistence and maniacal work ethic shouldn't be dismissed so easily. (That's him above, overseeing an airbag test in 1977.) Previously, the League of Fans has blasted corrupt NBA officiating, theorized on how to overthrow the BCS and replace it with a 16-team playoff, called on LeBron James to help improve conditions in Nike's overseas factories, pleaded with George Steinbrenner to preserve the original Yankee Stadium, lobbied Gov. Tim Pawlenty to veto a plan for a taxpayer-funded baseball stadium for the Minnesota Twins, and so forth. You can grasp the pattern here: Gadfly asks people to do the right thing instead of the profitable thing, gadfly gets absentmindedly swatted against the wall.
In the case of abandoning athletic scholarships, it's an idea whose time came, oh, around World War II or so, when the rising cost of and emphasis on fielding a top team started to force some academic-leaning schools to reevaluate their priorities. First it was the University of Chicago, a one-time powerhouse and founding member of the conference that would become the Big Ten in 1896, which dropped its football program in 1939 as "an infernal nuisance" to becoming "the kind of institution it aspired to be." Fifteen years later, the eight university presidents of the Ivy League, cradle of American football, signed the "Ivy Group Agreement," reaffirming their commitment to ban athletic scholarships and keep athletics firmly under the foot of the universities' "academic authorities." That is, they voluntarily abandoned the arms race to preserve their longtime gridiron dominance (Princeton had just won a national championship in 1950, Cornell as recently as 1939) for their top priority: Preserving their hoity scholastic rep.
And there they've stood as a gleaming beacon of academic integrity for the football-obsessed barbarians for more than 65 years, and still hosting rousing gridiron derbies all the while. I wonder why, in all that time, not one single other major athletic program has thought to follow their example?
UPDATE, 10:11 a.m. ET, 10/25] The NCAA has issued an official response to Nader's proposal, conservatively titled "Ralph Nader's got it all wrong."
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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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