- Joined
- Dec 25, 2011
- Messages
- 7,181
- Reaction Score
- 8,747
PPS – Found a transcript of a Mansfield town meeting on the on-campus football stadium proposal in the pre-UConn days. There is a lot of good stuff in here. One surprising discussion was lead by Provots Emmert. Yes, that Mark Emmert. While his comments showed his vanity (I attended a black tie affair, I went to the NBA all-star game, I met with the chancellor of Stanford, Duke, etc.), his general point was spot on that athletics are tied to academics. He even mentioned UConn interest in getting into the AAU and that UConn should be aiming to be a Michigan, UNC, etc.
“MARK EMMERT: Representative Schiessl, Senator Looney, thank you for providing me an opportunity to speak before this body. I'm Mark Emmert and I am the Chancellor of the University which means, among other things, I'm the chief academic officer at UCONN. In many ways, that makes me an unlikely advocate, frankly, for 1A football given the assumed antipathy between athletics and academics. There is a curious assumption that building one always comes at the cost of the other and vice versa. And I happen to be one of those people that completely believes the opposite is true. And rather than be redundant and repeat many of the comments you've heard already, I want to make two simple points with two simple anecdotes. Last night I was at a black tie gala in Manhattan that attracted a large crowd, about 1,200 people, beautiful and important people. I was there for contrast.
REP. SCHIESSL: I doubt that, Mr. Emmert. I'm sure you were mixing in just fine.
MARK EMMERT: And it was an event to celebrate the best NBA performances of 1997. Now had that been the National Basketball Association and had the UCONN representative been Ray Allen, you would all know about it already because you would have read about it in The Courant this morning. But the fact was it was a National Book Awards which along with the Pulitzer Prize are the two most important awards that any American writer can receive. And last night a wonderful, wonderful poet named Marilyn Nelson was recognized as one of the 20 greatest writers in America. Now Marilyn Nelson is a professor at the University of Connecticut and I dare say that this is the first time you've heard of this fact. I suspect it's not in The Courant today. I apologize for The Courant reporters. I haven't read the paper this morning, but I suspect it's not in any paper in Connecticut except maybe The New York Times, Connecticut edition. The reality is that in the United States for any number of reasons, we tend to pay much more attention to athletic performance than scientific and artistic performance. I don't happen to like that, by the way. It just happens to be a fact. And if we want to tell a story of the University of Connecticut, if we want to generate excitement, enthusiasm, and draw attention to all the things we're doing as an academic institution, one, not the only, and I believe not even the most important, but one of the very important vehicles for doing that is to utilize our success in academic programs. As President Austin said, "our athletic programs are ancillary to our academic programs". They allow us to bring attention, excitement, build community. They don't build academic programs. But they surely do not come with the cost of academic programs, quite the contrary. They help us tell that story. The second point I want to make is one that we all learned as kids and that is that you're known by the company that you keep. I was chatting last week with a very dear friend of mine who is the Chief Academic Officer of Arizona State University and I was talking to him of all things about football and I was chatting about what we're trying to do at the University of Connecticut and he laughed and he said, "Mark, I have to tell you something. The single most important thing that's happened in the history of Arizona State University is that Pack 10 let us in. Because when that happened, that day, you could talk about Arizona State University and Stanford University in the same sentence without laughing." And you can talk about the University of Arizona that costs state rivals of extraordinary magnitude. Without comparing them other than to say they are peers. It is critically important that people recognize when you say this institution is a Big Ten institution, you are not just talking about athletics. To be a Big Ten institution means every bit as much academically as it does athletically. They just happen to play football against each other. When you say you're in the ACC it means you play with Duke. That's important for those schools. When you play in the Pack Ten, that means you're a peer with Berkeley, with Stanford, with UCLA. The University of Connecticut needs that device. We need that tool. A 1A football program can, in fact, provide that opportunity for us. The most exclusive club in American higher education is the Association of American Universities, the AAU. We are not a member of the AAU. We would like to be a member of the AAU. It's a 64 most prestigious academic institutions in the country. Of those, half are public universities. All but two play 1A football. The two that don't, don't because of very peculiar circumstances that we could talk about. But it is almost a certainty that you cannot move into the AAU and be recognized as an institution at that level unless you are at the top of your game and everything you do including athletics. Again, whether I like that or not is sort of irrelevant. It just happens to be the realities of American culture. It is very important to me as a University Chief Academic Officer that we be able to compare ourselves to peers that we're most proud of on a national level and we have mechanisms for telling our story to reaching the public of Connecticut and beyond to generate an excitement and enthusiasm for the University. That's why I'm supportive of 1A football.”
