Northwestern went to the Rose Bowl in 1996. My strongest memory of that season is a co-worker, knowing that I’m an NU graduate, naively asking if I would be attending the big game in Pasadena.
“Well ...” I responded, amused that someone could imagine I might, “given that I never went to a football game in the four years I was a student there, it’s kinda late to start now.”
Why didn’t I go? The honest answer is: Going never crossed my mind. Campus culture in Evanston had a distinct hierarchy, with Greek life, sports and money at the top, and the rest of us, supernumeraries filling in the background. We were admitted, given a break on tuition and tolerated. But it wasn’t as if the university was about us.
Part of this might have been my personal outlook. I never went to games, didn’t own a Northwestern T-shirt. The school evoked in me a sort of lip-curled contempt that only got worse, in part thanks to episodes like the current Wildcat hazing scandal.
Indifference was the school’s business model. During my four years, I saw the president of Northwestern, Robert Strotz, exactly twice. At the opening prayer welcoming freshmen. And at graduation. The rest of the time I assumed he was busy attending to Northwestern’s primary purpose: building the school’s endowment. That was the entire point of the endeavor. The students were just afterthoughts, widgets, products on which the money was made.
This is a harsh view, and I know classmates who would disagree. Classmates who give money to the school, for instance, which to me is just unfathomable. I did have wonderful teachers, learned German literature from Erich Heller, international relations from Richard W. Leopold, magazine writing from Abe Peck.
The campus is lovely. I don’t want to tar the place with too broad a brush. I went to NU purely for the Medill School of Journalism; it served me well, and I must laud the reporters at The Daily Northwestern who revealed the “absolutely egregious and vile and inhumane” hazing that NU administrators winked at.
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NU's attitude towards its students (afterthoughts, widgets, products on which the money was made) is the same as its approach to the city of Evanston. Property taxes?? Community involvement?? Never. That might eat into their $16 billion endowment. Once in awhile they throw a coin out the carriage window for the rabble to fight over, but that's about it.
ReplyDeleteAhhh, my alma mater where fun goes to die. U of C will never go to any bowl, but so far no hazing scandals.
ReplyDeleteBack when I was pondering which colleges to apply to, my sister was attending Northwestern and dating a professor there. When the prof/boyfriend found out I might apply to Northwestern, he wrote a letter urging me not to. He called it a "third-rate school that's going to get worse." I did apply to Northwestern and was accepted, but ended up going elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteOTOH, consider the source. If you rolled your eyes a little at the thought of a professor dating an undergraduate, you were right to do so. The guy turned out to be a physically abusive, drunken asshole.
It's not all that uncommon, especially at some schools. My beatnik uncle married a woman who had been in the same situation at Oberlin. Her professor/boyfriend/husband was the same kind of jerk. She was 19. They were sort of hounded out of the community, and moved to Manhattan, whereupon she hit on my married uncle (who was 12 years older) at an art gallery.
DeleteThey had an affair, divorced their spouses, moved into a tenement in the Village, got married and moved to California,and then stayed together for another dozen years,..before becoming serial cheaters and then divorcing.
All this took place between 1960 and 1975.So it's nothing new. Undergrads dating and/or marrying professors is an old, old story...and one that seems to mostly end in disaster.
I've never had any dealings with northwestern but I have a son that is elite college athlete and I had a discussion with him about this and he literally laughed out loud and said of course it happens everywhere. Everybody I know has talked to me about hazing of one sort of or another and one of his friends plays at northwestern not on the football team but on the other team that's having a disastrous situation with its coaching staff.
ReplyDeleteI was like how do you put up with this crap he goes you have to and I'm like the coaches know and he's like hell. Yes I guess I wasn't really shocked. I mean I'm 65-year-old man. I remember many hazing scandals over the decades. People getting killed and stuff so why should northwestern be any different from any other school?
Thank you, Wilbur. I wasn't going to bother saying anything, but that's been my take about this scandal all along. This stuff is happening at a place like Northwestern, but not at the football factories in the SEC, Big Ten and elsewhere? I find that impossible to believe.
DeleteObviously, it's outrageous, they've handled it very poorly, and it deserves attention, but the feeding frenzy completely zeroed in on them makes me wonder whether the cleats might drop on a much broader "Me Too"-style situation.
It's likely. But at the same time the code of silence is so strong. I mean if you think about these young people who are at that level and the next level is professional. The last thing they want to do is jeopardize everything they've worked so hard to accomplish right on the verge of moving to the highest level of sports. The pressure is incredible to just ignore it and hope to move up as small as that hope is. It's the best odds that they've had so far. Sports may seem trivial to a lot of us but to someone who's only 20, 21 years old who's been working for 10 years already it's a pretty big deal.
DeleteI graduated from a similar school and felt like you did. I was amazed to get a request to include the alumni fund in my will when I was 24 years old and did not expect to die soon or have a fortune to bequeath. No mention of my student loan debt. Craven bastards.
ReplyDeleteThe biggest lie is a full-sports ride: NCAA rules say athletic scholarships are awarded by semester, per semester at a time at the sole discretion of the coach. It took a California state law to allow student-athletes to reap any long-lasting rewards of their fieldwork. They don't teach that in college.
ReplyDeletenot exactly.
ReplyDeletehttps://universitysports.com/n/the-truth-about-athletic-scholarships#:~:text=With%20the%20exception%20of%20major,no%20academic%20or%20conduct%20issues.