My 'Cello vs. Football

The first piece I ever published was a letter to the University of Alabama newspaper in Tuscaloosa fifty years ago in the mid nineteen sixties. I was a bit shocked to see fragments of that letter on the Internet yesterday, written long before the Internet came into existence, written with great passion, but true after all.

The great questions of those days are still very much with us fifty years later despite, or maybe because of, the reaction, the “Reagan revolution,” the hiding, since then. I read a remark recently about “the care-free 'sixties of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.” But that's not what I saw during those years.

The Viet-Nam war had become transparent; there were racial demonstrations, riots and murders right before my eyes; assassinations of King and the Kennedys; and the corruption and collusion of the educational establishment had become explicit and undeniable – definitely not “the care-free 'sixties.”

I was studying and teaching sociology in graduate school at Alabama at the time, but in the middle of it all I was also taking one class each semester in the music department, studying the 'cello. The faculty and students there were just inspirational. I remember that's where I was when I first heard of John Kennedy's assassination – I came into a music room for a 'cello lesson and my teacher told me that the President had been shot and then she talked of the extraordinary music that the campus classical radio station had been playing in response.

Well, shortly after that, the University closed down the classical music station. It was the money, they said. I was deeply offended, as were my friends in the music department. So I sent a letter to the University newspaper in which I wrote that music was far more important than football, and that money currently being spent on football should be reallocated so as to keep the FM radio station going for the university and the community. Football was a very big thing then at the University of Alabama, just as it is today. My letter was published, but no one congratulated me for speaking the truth or to say what a fine fellow I was, no applause from 60,000 in a stadium (it now seats 102,000 people), no awards, no beautiful Alabama girls, no name on the Walk of Champions, no respect.

There were then no black people on the Alabama football team, if you can believe it. So there has been some progress as a result of the excruciating truth-telling and consequent bloodshed of those years. Maybe there is or will be social progress in other areas at some time of which I have no guess. Fifty years, or one hundred years, seem now like nothing to me.

I've been reading lately Thorstein Veblen's “The Higher Learning in America; A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men” which he wrote one hundred years ago. We are still working on the issue. Here is just a short sample before I go. Old Veblen.

The underlying business-like presumption accordingly appears to be that learning is a merchantable commodity, to be Produced on a piece-rate plan, rated, bought and sold by standard units, measured, counted and reduced to staple equivalence by impersonal, mechanical tests. In all its bearings the work is hereby reduced to a mechanistic, statistical consistency, with numerical standards and units; which conduces to perfunctory and mediocre work throughout, and acts to deter both students and teachers from a free pursuit of knowledge, as contrasted with the pursuit of academic credits. So far as this mechanistic system goes freely into effect it leads to a substitution of salesman-like proficiency -- a balancing of bargains in staple credits -- in the place of scientific capacity and addiction to study.