There have been criticisms and political attacks on the two flagship universities in Texas (Texas A&M and UT Austin) since at least 2008. Here I present a recent commentary piece I wrote with pertinent information and with links to other commentaries by Gov. Rick Perry and Gail Collins of the NY Times.
These are followed by selected reader response.
I have received permission to circulate these comments from the people who sent them to me.
They are worth reading.
TGP
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Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/palaima-universities-spending-on-sports-undermines-their-mission-1409458.html
COMMENTARY
Palaima: Universities’ spending on sports undermines their mission: education
Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Monday, April 18, 2011
Since 2008, I have represented the University of Texas on the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics (COIA), the only faculty organization in the country monitoring National Collegiate Athletic Association programs within institutions of higher learning.
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Find this article at:
http://chronicle.com/article/The-NCAAthe-Athletes-It/127181/
COMMENTARY
The NCAA and the Athletes It Fails
Thomas G. Palaima
Chronicle of Higher Education April 17, 2011
How we treat the young people on our campuses whom we often euphemistically call “student athletes” is essentially a moral issue. Some of those students, after all, generate millions of dollars for their coaches, athletic directors, and institutions, yet we have failed, in turn, to make sure they have legitimate experiences as students.
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http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=416350&c=1
The Lure of the Arena: Social Psychology and the Crowd at the Roman Games
By Garrett G. Fagan | Cambridge University Press | 374pp, £60.00 and £22.99
ISBN 9780521196161 and 185967 Published 17 February 2011
Reviewer : Tom Palaima is professor of Classics, University of Texas at Austin in the US.
Times Higher Education 2 June 2011
Blood flowing, hordes roaring
Tom Palaima agrees that people’s fascination with watching violence against others doesn’t change
Readers who are lured to Garrett Fagan’s The Lure of the Arena for graphic descriptions of violent acts will not be disappointed. Given the universal questions about human nature and human societies that Fagan poses in trying to explain the phenomenon of the Roman amphitheatre, they will be rewarded with catalogues, drawn from many societies and periods of human history, designed to prove that “the Romans were by no means alone in finding the sight of people and animals tormented and killed both intriguing and appealing”.
Cultures closer to our own in time have been more creative in devising forms of violence for their men, women and children, poor and simple-minded or wealthy and well educated, to witness and enjoy together.
Fagan devotes a long chapter, judiciously illustrated with woodcuts of 16th- and 18th-century public executions, to sampling the “vast corpus of comparative evidence for violence staged before spectators”. Crucifixion, castration, stoning, clubbing, flaying, burning, boiling alive in oil, decapitation, burial alive, drawing and quartering, branding, flogging and other kinds of mutilation cannot match being “braided” on a wheel for gruesome cruelty.
Practised in France until 1787 and in Germany into the 1840s, this manner of execution pulverised the prisoner’s limbs, threaded his body through the spokes of a wheel, and then set it on a pole for public viewing. An eyewitness describes the victim eventually as “a sort of huge screaming puppet, writhing in rivulets of blood, a puppet with four tentacles, like a sea monster of raw, slimy and shapeless flesh, mixed with splinters of smashed bones”. This makes Martial’s description of the Sicilian bandit Laureolus, who was ripped apart by a bear in the arena so that “in his body there was no body”, Continue reading
Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/palaima-pair-hope-31-000-images-will-help-1565908.html
COMMENTARY
Palaima: Pair hope 31,000 images will help spur social change
Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Monday, June 27, 2011
It is easy to feel powerless about changing the world we live in.
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Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/palaima-we-the-people-are-losing-civility-understanding-1667192.html
COMMENTARY
Palaima: We, the people, are losing civility, understanding
Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Thursday, July 28, 2011
This Fourth of July, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Jim Leach, spoke on “Civility and the American Spirit” in Chautauqua, N.Y. (Read the text of his speech at http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/speeches/07042011.html.)
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Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/home-where-they-take-you-in-no-matter-1775334.html
COMMENTARY
Palaima: “Home, where they take you in, no matter your challenges”
Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Tuesday, August 23, 2011
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.”
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Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/palaima-history-gives-us-guidance-in-dealing-with-1862859.html
COMMENTARY
Palaima: History gives us guidance in dealing with national tragedy
Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Saturday, September 17, 2011
The cover of the Sept. 12 Newsweek shows a solitary plane in the kind of spacious blue sky we praise in “America, the Beautiful.” On this background in white letters we read: “9/11 Ten Years of RESILIENCE.” Three words in black, “FEAR GRIEF REVENGE,” are placed vertically above the much larger word “RESILIENCE.”
This image conveys one take on a national moment of suffering and how we have lived through 10 years of history in reaction to it: the color-coded dark emotions of fear and grief fueling the equally dark human instinct to take vengeance. The Newsweek editors believe what we ourselves want to believe about what we have been through and where we are now. We are resilient. We have bounced back to where we were before.
I think all Americans have their own ideas about where we stand a decade after 9/11. Our opinions probably differ about whether we took the right paths as individuals or as a nation. Rather than discuss such potentially polarizing matters, I want to make some observations on how we use history and historical memory to deal with tragedy and the grief that stems from it.
It is a tricky subject. A senior honors thesis student, Abraham Callahan, recently asked me why Thucydides, the father of scientific history, had bothered analyzing the motives and causes of mass killings of human beings in civil wars and political revolts. Thucydides asserts that human nature is constant and will lead to such things happening again, presumably no matter how much history people have read.
Fortunately, intelligent human beings, from the Greek soldier-playwright Aeschylus to leaders of our nation after the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., have thought about the nature of collective grief after violent public acts, where our emotions want to take us, and what happens if we let them take us there.
One way we might confront an atrocity like the Holocaust is by placing it beyond human understanding. Claude Lanzmann, whose long documentary about the Holocaust, “Shoah,” focuses on personal testimonies Continue reading
http://www.dailytexanonline.com/opinion/2011/09/25/%E2%80%98me-firstism%E2%80%99-ut-athletics
Palaima: The ‘me-firstism’ of UT athletics
Thomas Palaima
The Daily Texan
Published: September 26, 2011
On the advice of a colleague, I watched the 30-second Bevo commercial online for the new Longhorn Network.
Then I watched the network’s opening sequence. He added, “Even you, cynical as you might be, will be amazed at what this University has become.” I am in fact dumbfounded.
The Bevo commercial for the network proves the old adage “seeing is believing.” It should have a disclaimer saying that no intelligent minds were abused in filming this commercial involving bovine and human animals.
We see a high-dollar flat-screen television installed in a livestock trailer so that Bevo, typecast as the mindless, inarticulate ruminant that he is, can gaze helplessly and blankly at ESPN sporting events pictured on the screen.
What a metaphor for what the network will do to further dumb down what is now known as the Longhorn nation. And this mindlessness is being promoted by the flagship institution of higher education in our state.
President William Powers Jr. declared in his State of the University Address that we were working hard to obtain the “widest possible distribution” for the Longhorn Network. He added that “everyone in the UT family can help the effort by contacting their providers and requesting the network.” He has been spending much of his time, according to news reports, flying to other schools to try to work out suitable arrangements for our sports programs.
Meanwhile, The Daily Texan reports, “The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board directed UT to eliminate its degree in Greek studies following this academic year. The board has suggested colleges cut certain degree programs with low enrollment in order to ease state-wide budget cuts to education.” The fact of the matter is that elimination of this degree option will not save a penny, and it comes at a time when our active religious studies programs in ancient religion are creating greater need for ancient Greek to be offered.
UT’s unilateral and single-minded greed in creating a major single-school sports network while a member of a conference that should be united in maintaining fair levels of competition among cooperating members hardly constitutes a lesson in the kind of good citizenship that the values and goals laid out for higher education on the Forty Acres are intended to instill.
The “me-firstism” of UT athletics has even led to our athletics director and upper administrators being satirized on YouTube as Adolf Hitler and spineless Wehrmacht officers. The video’s dialogue offers an uncanny analysis of how things have gone. One classic line in der Fuehrer’s rant is “OU is now gonna demand more money, and we have to find a replacement school we can win against.” Regardless of whether you think Hitler parodies are funny, the clip unfortunately gets across how far the spirit of sportsmanship has declined because of the inequality of resources among schools in the Big 12.
Finally, lost in all the discussion of which schools are bolting to escape UT athletics’ fanatical grasping at cable Lebensraum and other commercial revenues is what must be the worst perversion of American higher education caused by big-time sports madness. The academic side of UT will end up affiliated with whatever schools the sports program decides to form a conference with.
Texas A&M, Nebraska and the University of Colorado were the next three highest-ranked schools academically, after UT, in the Big 12. When schools like them leave, the faculty fellowship exchanges with them become defunct.
Cooperation in research and teaching among institutions depends on maintaining long-term relationships. This can be seen in the Big 10. These relationships are especially crucial as diminishing resources everywhere make schools more dependent on cooperative arrangements. Right now at UT, they are subject to the whims of the empire of about 500 student athletes and their opulently rewarded coaches and administrators.
Palaima is a classics professor and served for three years as a UT representative on the national Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics.
Times Higher Education
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=417130
How the other 60 million lived
Tom Palaima discovers the hopes, dreams and lives of ordinary people living under Imperial Rome
Published: 16 June 2011
Title: Invisible Romans: Prostitutes, Outlaws, Slaves, Gladiators, Ordinary Men and Women…The Romans That History Forgot
Author:Robert Knapp
Reviewer: Tom Palaima
Publisher:Profile
ISBN: 9781846684012 and 9781847654472 (e-book)
Pages: 384
Price: £25.00
The lowly and invincible of the earth – to endure and endure and then endure, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.” It takes writers with profound human sympathies, such as William Faulkner, to capture what the mass of humanity do with their lives in any period of human history. Faulkner’s short story Tomorrow, quoted here, is one of this earth’s most curiously moving stories about a father’s love for a son. Faulkner calls “invincible” the forgotten and nameless poor whom Robert Knapp calls “invisible”.
In Invisible Romans, Knapp finds ways of making the lives of the non-elite citizens, freedmen and slaves, men, women and children, who lived during the first three centuries of the Roman Empire, more than visible. In direct, almost storyteller-like prose, he makes us feel what life was like for ordinary people living between the ages of Augustus and Constantine, what troubles and sorrows they had daily, with what mindsets they faced their tomorrows, what joys they took from life, how they got by – or didn’t.
Knapp sometimes sacrifices rigour by referring generally to sources. For each of his nine chapters, however, he does give intelligent guidance to readable scholarly treatments. There is also a useful “who’s who” and “what’s what” of literary evidence.
Why is such a book called for? To answer that, one picture is worth a reviewer’s paragraph of words. Go to David Lebedoff’s 2008 parallel biography of Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell, The Same Man, and look at the photograph of the Bright Young Things who, one early morning in London after a Mozart costume party, commandeered jackhammers from a crew of nameless and, even in the photograph, all but faceless street workers.
As Knapp notes, some 50 million to 60 million ordinary people lived out their lives in a Roman Empire dominated by “a tiny, self-perpetuating elite that was limited and defined by wealth, tradition, blood and power”. The super-elite senators and equestrians and the lesser elite members of the decurial order who ran things in cities and towns taken together numbered no more than 200,000. Yet they controlled 80 per cent of the wealth of the Empire. How did we ever come to use the expression “how the other half lives”?
Knapp ferrets out how the other 99.5 per cent lived by mining inscriptions, mostly funerary; graffiti; papyrus letters; sources, such as magical papyri and the 1st century AD Carmen Astrologicum, that reflect the concerns of ordinary people seeking to ward off ever-threatening misfortunes, get love or vengeance, or grab hold of rare good luck; New Testament stories naturally directed at working-class (if they were lucky) Christian communities; the comprehensive collection of Roman legal materials known as the Digest; Greek romance literature; Apuleius, Petronius, Phaedrus and Plautus; and standard works from the canon that mention in passing how the other 60 million live.
Read Invisible Romans and you will be disabused of any fantasies of going to Roman baths. They offered, as Knapp describes, “for the ordinary and elite alike, not only social interaction but a dangerous lack of hygiene shocking even to contemplate”. You will also find out why, in an age of constant underemployment, a career as a soldier was coveted, despite the long-term commitment, danger, separation from family and the legal celibacy that it imposed.
A photograph of the signatures that two women slaves named Delftri and Amica, working together in a roof-tile factory, crudely scratched into the soft clay of one of the tiles alongside the imprints of their tiny shod feet speaks volumes about the todays and the hopes for tomorrows of Knapp’s Romans made visible.
This is a remarkably kind and thoughtful book.