8/9/2014: One of the big worries about UO Independence was that the Board of Trustees would end up dominated by athletics boosters, as has happened with the UO Foundation, now run by Steve Holwerda, whose life dream is to become Duck Athletic Director. So far, it’s been quite the opposite with the Trustees. Chair Chuck Lillis and the board have been focused on academic excellence.
Here’s the current count of occurrences of “Go Ducks”, a now notorious phrase which many on the academic side would like to ban from official use (except of course as allowed by our new hard won Academic Freedom Policy and Lariviere’s Free Speech Policy, which notes: “The belief that an opinion is pernicious, false, and in any other way despicable, detestable, offensive or “just plain wrong” cannot be grounds for its suppression.”) Out of respect for Trustee Connie Ballmer, I’m mixing in a little Bing:
UO Board of Trustees: Go Ducks count = 0:
UO Foundation: Go Ducks count = 23:
The fawning attention paid to athletics–both here at UO and generally–is indeed tiresome.
It may not fix deeply misplaced university priorities, latent corruption, unconscionable inequities between coaching staffs and players, or the arguably illegal (and immoral) machinations of the NCAA but–nevertheless–I find that “Sports Song”, a satirical take on school-centric sports fanaticism from Weird Al Yankovic’s new album, soothes some of the irritation (although perhaps not the frustration or rage):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq4K1N9XttY
Note that the LTD nutjob ejaculates “Go Ducks” to bracket his tirade against our local public transit. I have speculated that this is to deflect any possible animosity from those who listen. I mean, how can I be annoyed at this man, he *does* say “Go Ducks!” both before and after his hate speech. Gott’s send off sort of reminded me of that.