Monday, September 10, 2012

Conservative George Will, critique of football as industrial liberal plot

George Will on football sounds a lot like people we know:

College football became a national phenomenon because it supposedly served the values of progressivism, in two ways. It exemplified specialization, expertise and scientific management. And it would reconcile the public to the transformation of universities, especially public universities, into something progressivism desired but the public found alien. Replicating industrialism’s division of labor, universities introduced the fragmentation of the old curriculum of moral instruction into increasingly specialized and arcane disciplines. These included the recently founded social sciences — economics, sociology, political science — that were supposed to supply progressive governments with the expertise to manage the complexities of the modern economy and the simplicities of the uninstructed masses. 

Football taught the progressive virtue of subordinating the individual to the collectivity. Inevitably, this led to the cult of one individual, the coach. Today, in almost every state, at least one public university football coach is paid more than the governor.

In the Washington Post, Sept 7 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-college-football-and-big-government/2012/09/07/66f77a8a-f84d-11e1-8b93-c4f4ab1c8d13_story.html

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