Sunday, March 13. Did you remember to reset your clock?
Fact Checker is expanding. We are testing frequent posts of shorter items, called Fact Checker Too, in addition to our major essays. Tell us what you think! Duke.Fact.Checker@gmail.com
✔ Salman Rushdie (scroll down, FC for 3-9-2011) won't be the only speaker at Duke this spring who is highly controversial because of a nexus to the Muslim world. Imam Feisal Abdul-Rauf will speak on Thursday.
Whoops, a day earlier he is delivering the Weil Lecture on American Citizenship at UNC, so they got the jump on us.
The Imam became the target of right-wing talk radio when he announced an effort to build a Muslim Cultural Center called Park 51 (also called Cordoba House) near the site of the World Trade Center in New York.
The radio right wingers dubbed this the "Ground Zero Mosque" -- accuracy be damned -- and said it was inappropriate since we all know it was every Muslim who joined in the September 11 attacks and besides, the Trade Center grounds are now "sacred" and "hallowed." The right wingers did not seem to mind that a strip club, major porn store selling videos and toys, and even a city-sanctioned horse betting parlor are right there too.
And FC got the biggest laugh when the conservatives said "the mosque" should not be built because it would attract inappropriate, loud demonstrations. You know, bunches of conservatives. And indeed a group from the late Jerry Falwell's hometown of Lynchburg, Va, calling itself Christian, plans to picket the Imam in Chapel Hill -- no plans for Duke yet.
✔ We are monitoring developments in the armed robbery on campus Friday night. The victim a graduate student who also took one or more punches. A gang of four thugs was involved. We have received an e-mail from VP Schoenfeld which is a poor response to our inquiry about the level of Duke Police protection.
✔ ✔ FC has new internal documents from the Brodhead Administration about Kunshan. Explosive. We plan on publishing ASAP.
✔ It's getting crowded around here. US Census figures show Durham County with 267,587 people, up nearly 20 percent in a decade. Similar growth statistics statewide, population now 9.5 million.
✔ Duke research: humans While humans age much slower than most animals, we're not so special for we age at the same rate as other primates, like chimps and gorillas.
✔ Survey of 450 law firm partners who hired new associates nation-wide. Understand, please, that these firms have a corporate and high level business practice, rather than anything involving human beings. Harvard #1. Usual suspects follow, with Duke in a five way tie for 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12.
✔And if all the talk about China were not enough expansion in one gulp, Triangle Business Journal has just featured Duke's aspirations in India. Fuqua again. Talk of a whole campus, not just an outpost.
✔And if you are wondering what people in Fuqua do when they do not talk expansion... try this. A team of Fuqua researchers analyzed 57,293 Major League Baseball games between 1952 and 2009 -- roughly 4.5 million at-bats to see if weather played any factor in the pitcher's beaning the hitter. Yep... if the weather is in the 50's the risk is much less than when the temp hits the 90's. Researchers in Tennessee and Texas helped Duke figure this one out. This was in a Duke press release; while our PR stories usually note who paid for research and how much it cost, this time the name of the fool or fools were omitted. My guess: federal government.
✔ Grant Hill, Duke basketball legend, erstwhile NBA rookie of the year and now filmmaker. His debut about Duke's long-time (try 45 years) track coach Al Buehler will be screened at the March 31 opening night of the Phoenix Film Festival. Title: "Starting at the Finish Line: The Coach Buehler Story".
✔ ✔ We've lifted from the Raleigh News and Observer the following commentary by Professor Charles Clotfelder of the Sanford School on big time athletics.
Buckle up. It’s time for that annual 21-day wild ride known as “March Madness,” a media event so lucrative that the name is actually copyrighted. For the next three weeks, millions of Americans will talk nonstop about brackets, seeds and upsets, and then remain glued to their TV or computer screens to see how their predictions hold up.
This 68-team tournament is a spectacular illustration of why commercialized sports, with all its problems, has an unshakeable hold on American higher education, and why universities do little to rein in its influence.
Universities with big-time ss are like the man in the old joke who complains that his brother thinks he’s a chicken. Asked why he doesn’t have the brother committed, the man explains, “I would, but I need the eggs.” Like this man, these universities choose to live with the contradictions inherent in big-time college sports rather than get out of the game.
For the last three years, I have been doing research to understand how and why big-time sports has become so deeply embedded in many American universities. Not surprisingly, I found that sports often dwarfs the intellectual side of universities. For instance, I looked at news coverage of 58 universities with leading athletics programs. Of the 600 articles that appeared over a year in The New York Times, 87 percent were about sports.
In addition, the head basketball coaches at these universities had more than three times the number of Google hits than their presidents. Again this is hardly surprising, considering that the basketball teams of these universities appear on television an average of 27 times a year.
Add to this mix intense fan loyalty and it is clear that millions of Americans are hooked on college sports. In Lexington, Ky., for instance, a third of those surveyed agreed that the following statement best described their own level of interest in Kentucky basketball: “I live and die with the Wildcats. I’m happy if they win and sad if they lose.”
College basketball’s popularity comes to a climax during March Madness, which begins on the Monday after “Selection Sunday” with the widespread ritual of filling out brackets for the office pool. To see if the widely reported estimates of lost productivity due to the tournament are fact or urban myth, I gathered daily figures from 78 research libraries across the country on the number of articles that patrons viewed on a widely used Web-based archive of academic journals. I found that usage dropped about 6 percent immediately after Selection Sunday. And, at universities with teams in the tournament, usage remained below normal as long as their teams kept winning.
The popularity of the tournament is easy to exploit for commercial gain, of course, since broadcasters are happy to sell advertising time and businesses want to advertise their products to as wide a viewership as possible . Ads accounted for more than a third of the 65 hours of TV coverage of the 2009 tournament. There were 2,600 conventional commercials, plus another 650 product placements, including sponsored game summaries and “brought to you by” announcements. Among the most heavily advertised brands: Chevrolet, McDonald’s and Bud Light.
The tournament’s commercial success has generated rapidly growing revenues for universities, by way of the NCAA. Earnings from TV alone, corrected for inflation, have increased by more than 400 percent over the last 20 years. Universities have eagerly taken these earnings and used them, as they have income from bowls and regular season telecasts, in a relentless effort to remain competitive in the revenue sports.
In order to field winning teams, universities have made clear-eyed decisions to compromise some traditional academic values. They relax admissions standards for revenue athletes, so that a third of the teams in last year’s tournament had graduation rates below 50 percent. They place enormous demands on athletes’ time, often playing games in distant cities or late at night. They require players to display logos for apparel companies and they sell replica jerseys bearing the numbers of star players in their bookstores.
For universities, these compromises are simply a cost of getting into this wildly popular, and lucrative, business. Don’t just blame market forces for the commercialization of college sports. It’s also the result of complicity by the universities, who are convinced they need the eggs.
Charles Clotfelter, a professor of public policy at Duke University, is the author of the forthcoming book "Big-Time Sports in American Universities," Cambridge University Press.
Researchers in Tennessee and Texas helped Duke figure this one out. This was in a Duke press release; while our PR stories usually note who paid for research and how much it cost, this time the name of the fool or fools were omitted. My guess: federal government.
Grant Hill, Duke basketball legend, erstwhile NBA rookie of the year and now filmmaker. His debut about Duke's long-time (try 45 years) track coach Al Buehler will be screened at the March 31 opening night of the Phoenix Film Festival. Title: "Starting at the Finish Line: The Coach Buehler Story".
We've lifted from the Raleigh News and Observer the following commentary by Professor Charles Clotfelder of the Sanford School
Buckle up. It’s time for that annual 21-day wild ride known as “March Madness,” a media event so lucrative that the name is actually copyrighted. For the next three weeks, millions of Americans will talk nonstop about brackets, seeds and upsets, and then remain glued to their TV or computer screens to see how their predictions hold up.
This 68-team tournament is a spectacular illustration of why commercialized sports, with all its problems, has an unshakeable hold on American higher education, and why universities do little to rein in its influence.
Universities with big-time ss are like the man in the old joke who complains that his brother thinks he’s a chicken. Asked why he doesn’t have the brother committed, the man explains, “I would, but I need the eggs.” Like this man, these universities choose to live with the contradictions inherent in big-time college sports rather than get out of the game.
For the last three years, I have been doing research to understand how and why big-time sports has become so deeply embedded in many American universities. Not surprisingly, I found that sports often dwarfs the intellectual side of universities. For instance, I looked at news coverage of 58 universities with leading athletics programs. Of the 600 articles that appeared over a year in The New York Times, 87 percent were about sports.
In addition, the head basketball coaches at these universities had more than three times the number of Google hits than their presidents. Again this is hardly surprising, considering that the basketball teams of these universities appear on television an average of 27 times a year.
Add to this mix intense fan loyalty and it is clear that millions of Americans are hooked on college sports. In Lexington, Ky., for instance, a third of those surveyed agreed that the following statement best described their own level of interest in Kentucky basketball: “I live and die with the Wildcats. I’m happy if they win and sad if they lose.”
College basketball’s popularity comes to a climax during March Madness, which begins on the Monday after “Selection Sunday” with the widespread ritual of filling out brackets for the office pool. To see if the widely reported estimates of lost productivity due to the tournament are fact or urban myth, I gathered daily figures from 78 research libraries across the country on the number of articles that patrons viewed on a widely used Web-based archive of academic journals. I found that usage dropped about 6 percent immediately after Selection Sunday. And, at universities with teams in the tournament, usage remained below normal as long as their teams kept winning.
The popularity of the tournament is easy to exploit for commercial gain, of course, since broadcasters are happy to sell advertising time and businesses want to advertise their products to as wide a viewership as possible . Ads accounted for more than a third of the 65 hours of TV coverage of the 2009 tournament. There were 2,600 conventional commercials, plus another 650 product placements, including sponsored game summaries and “brought to you by” announcements. Among the most heavily advertised brands: Chevrolet, McDonald’s and Bud Light.
The tournament’s commercial success has generated rapidly growing revenues for universities, by way of the NCAA. Earnings from TV alone, corrected for inflation, have increased by more than 400 percent over the last 20 years. Universities have eagerly taken these earnings and used them, as they have income from bowls and regular season telecasts, in a relentless effort to remain competitive in the revenue sports.
In order to field winning teams, universities have made clear-eyed decisions to compromise some traditional academic values. They relax admissions standards for revenue athletes, so that a third of the teams in last year’s tournament had graduation rates below 50 percent. They place enormous demands on athletes’ time, often playing games in distant cities or late at night. They require players to display logos for apparel companies and they sell replica jerseys bearing the numbers of star players in their bookstores.
For universities, these compromises are simply a cost of getting into this wildly popular, and lucrative, business. Don’t just blame market forces for the commercialization of college sports. It’s also the result of complicity by the universities, who are convinced they need the eggs.
Charles Clotfelter, a professor of public policy at Duke University, is the author of the forthcoming book "Big-Time Sports in American Universities," Cambridge University Press.
✔ That's FC for today.
