I've always considered the maxim "a healthy mind in a healthy body" to be one of the few which hold true in any occasion...It seems, however, that I was a bit wrong...
When sports, money and education mix together the meaning of the maxim gets blurred and one of the three has to take a leading position before the other two.
The cause for this post is a problem which recently occurred in the media, namely a problem in many US universities and their craze about college sports and keeping the above-stated maxim up to date for most of their college students.
The problem is that by following the sports craze, many universities in the US forget their chief goal - to educate and to reach academic achievements.
Sports in American colleges are well embedded in their curriculum. Almost no other universities or colleges in the world have so many sports facilities or such a great variety of sports offered. Such diversity in sports makes the US colleges envied a lot.
I remember that when first came to my Dutch college, I was a bit disappointed from the fact that I had to choose taking sports which I never did before in my life - field hockey, basketball, swimming, and rowing. The sports in which I felt stronger at and willing to do (volleyball and athletics) were not much competitive and in the case of athletics - not offered at all.
But as I see now, being offered many sports at a higher than just a hobby level, can be also detrimental for some universities.
William Bowen, a former president of Princeton University, who's done research on college sports and educational values, says that sports in universities are educative but very often a too much focus on sports gets universities astray from their chief goal - to effectively educate at an academic level.
Many students who are accepted to universities because of their sports achievement continue to be good at their sport but do not pay much attention to their academic life.
Many of the students who've been accepted mainly because of their "healthy bodies" do not even happen to graduate university.
What is more, many alumni from certain universities give shit loads of money to support their ex-college team and in some universities in America you can also see that the richest universities (sponsored mainly for their sports achievements) have twice less numbers of books compared to the poorer, not that famous at sports, universities. The sports-oriented universities are also amongst the richest in the US and at the same time, the least focused on academic prosperity.
Sports in American universities bring a lot of money and without money not many university can offer its students everything needed in their academic environment. On the other hand, in order to be the best college in sports you need a lot of practice, good instructors and most of all a lot of spare time and devotion to the sport...In the cases in which this was achieved, education and academic training went to the background. The top priority shifts from the one pole to the other.
The problem with US colleges is that plenty of them have sold their soul to win.
"Individual institutions that decide to invest more money in their sports facilities and instructors in the hope of raising more funds or improving their applicant pools may be throwing good money after bad, and would be wiser to spend the money in other ways" the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics reported several years ago.
It is a lot easier for alums to rally around the basketball or football team than the classics department.
Very few are the colleges in the US coped to develop both sports at a professional level and a good academic reputation. Duke University is a good example, where basketball have enjoyed considerable success without violating the integrity of the institution.
Unfortunately, the institutions which can handle the combination of sport and education effectively without making compromises on behalf of the one are very few.
By reading about this trend the maxim which comes to my mind is that excess leads to regress and I start holding to the idea that sport in university has to be nothing much than a hobby, something which you do just to forget for an hour or so about all the academic load you have to finish by midnight :)
