Sweatervests and bowties

So Jim Tressel has been hired as the new president of Youngstown State University. Sports Illustrated has already addressed the sports angle in a way that sums up lots of my feelings, so no need to rehash that here, I suppose.

Tressel--and lots of other coaches--clearly has some great qualifications for a position like this. He's glad-handed donors to raise funds, served as the public face of a university--even if he had to share the spotlight with E. Gordon Gee, the actual president at Ohio State (and a dude who--gasp--had been a professor, and burnished his credentials with a ludicrous bow tie)--he worked for, and been involved with running major departments with huge budgets and myriad employees. He may turn out to be a great fit, and incredibly adept.

But can we also take a minute to ridicule whoever edited Tressel's Wikipedia entry to identify him as "an educator and former American football coach"? I'll acknowledge that coaches can teach their athletes a heck of a lot, but the lessons Tressel has imparted...seem not to have been consistently those most of us would want college students to learn. And I'll acknowledge that most professors are the last people you'd want running anything of substance that involves practical approaches to complex problems, quick action over careful discussion, and meeting deadlines within cost constraints, nor are they always models of virtue.

Tressel may prove to be great at this job. He may recognize that he needs to delegate key duties to people with more experience in higher education, may realize that he needs to use his position to bolster a strong academic vice president's work and vision, may take seriously his responsibility to various components of his university--including athletics, of course, but also academics, and student services, areas in which he has less experience.

Many university administrations have already moved toward a business model, and many have expanded rapidly in the last few decades to extend new services to their "customers." Some of this is positive--some of the business approaches are efficient and practical, while some of those additional services make possible the success of students who would have struggled far more, if they even attended college, a few years ago--but some of it also draws resources away from universities' central mission of education. I can think broadly of a college education as involving far more than academics, but I also worry that that component is being increasingly marginalized. And in the case of Tressel, who will be expected to uphold Youngstown State's Code of Student Conduct, I can't help but think that important parts of that larger education--academics and otherwise--are being compromised.