The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 85, No. 26, Ed. 1 Friday, April 24, 1998 Page: 3 of 16
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IHi.RKI • l-HKESIIhR
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I like college basketball. It's fun to
watch still-developing players play
on smaller courts with less public-
ity. Similarly, 1 love going to minor
league baseball games.
The smaller scale adds to
the excitement and to the
feeling that you. as the fan,
are part of the game.
We are in the time of
year, though, that makes
me wonder whether next
year's March Madness
won't be more like watch-
ing my high school'^ bas-
ketball team take on its
rival school.
In the last lew years, more and
more high school players have been
foregoing college to enter the NBA
draft. There are a few typical re-
sponses to this problem. Some say
they are too young for the pros and
should go to college first. Others
say they should go ahead and make
the money if they can. Neither of
these arguments deals with all the
issues at hand, and therefore, nei-
ther can save the NBA from becom-
ing t wo leagues — one for veterans
and one for teenagers — in one.
The pro'blem comes from the lack
of alternatives. Talented players
coming out of high school can go to
college or the NBA. While the occa-
sional young player comes to the
NBAthrough the European leagues,
these occurrences are too rare for
Anne
Kimbol
Europe to appeal to the most tal-
ented young players. The idea prob-
ably never occurs to most of them.
They are surrounded by scouts from
various universities and
from the NBA. As far as
the players are shown,
those are the options.
Why that is, I have yet
to comprehend. Baseball
has the minor leagues,
which provide an inter-
mediate league for those
not quite prepared for the
pros. The players get the
experience of proles-
sional competition with
others who are either past their
prime, not as talented or not yet fully
developed as athletes.
With all the money being thrown
around in the world of sports these
days, there must be a group of
wealthy investors somewhere who
would be willing to found a league
for the growing number of basket-
ball players deciding against the
college route. 1 have no problem
with that. There are a large number
of people who should be both stu-
dents and athletes. But there are
also people with great athletic abil-
ity and no academic drive, just as
there are people like me, who can
compete in the classroom but are a
waste on the sports field, Different
people have different talents, and
they should be free to follow their
hopes and dreams, whether or not
college is included.
College athletics are important
— a society where higher education
is increasingly necessary for ad-
vancement should continue to sup-
port athletics whole-heartedly. The
problem here is that college athlet-
ics is undermined when athletes who
have no interest in scholastics feel
forced to pick between school or a
premat ure NBA career. No one wins
in that situation. The player can ei-
ther go to the NBA arid face chal-
lenging competition, stress and the
harsh publicity which awaits him
there, or he can go to school and be
forced to take classes when all he
wants to do is play basketball. As all
of us know, an unwilling student
learns nothing.
Basketball needs a minor league,
Now is the time to establish it, be-
fore the NBA and tlx- increasing
number of athletes neither physi-
cally nor mentally prepared suffer
needlessly. A basketball minor
league would combine the
professionally of the NBA and the
years of training and development
of college basketball into a new
choice from which the sport, the
schools and the athletes will all ben-
efit. Until then, sports players and
fans will all pay the price.
■Anne Kimbol is assistant advertising
manager an <1 a H a k e r (0 II ege se nior
Guest columnist
Curriculum reform well-meaning, misguided
When the Ad Hoc Curriculum
Review Committee's initial proposal
for the General Education program
was brought before the faculty sev-
eral months ago, my first
reaction was disappoint-
ment. I find nothing in the
revised proposal (re-
leased Monday) that
changes my opinion.
The proposed system
seems to me, from both
the text and its illustra-
tions, greatly inferior to
the curriculum currently
in place, ft would give our
students far less general
education than they now
have and far less than they deserve.
What current curricular free-
doms students must sacrifice to the
new curriculum are readily appar-
ent. Students now can, in part, sat-
isfy their Group HI requirement with
two courses in mathematics and
their Group 1 requirement with for-
eign language courses below the
:i()0 level or with courses in the fine
arts. Under the proposed curricu-
lum reform, they will no longer be
able to do so.
The committee has backed away
from voting on a foreign language
requirement until a later time. But if
that is subsequently passed, the lan-
guage courses that most students
will have to take will be over and
above distribution, greatly restrict-
ing free electives and imposing an
onerous and extra burden on stu
dents in science and engineering,
(What is perhaps less onerous —
and would hardly seem to serve the
interests of general education — is
that science and engineering stu-
dents who are now required to take
eight courses in humanities and so-
cial sciences will only be required to
take six.)
Students will also have to give
up a part of their pass/fail option on
the grounds that "pass/fail is per
ceived by many faculty to inhibit
discussion and interaction." But the
committee offers a solution that
hardly addresses the problem it iden-
tifies, greatly limiting pass/fail, not
just to the small classes conducted
by discussion, but to almost all
classes, so that the humanities stu
tleni who might attempt physics«
Alan
Grob
fail option is now less likely to do so.
The freshman seminars do not
develop general education, as that
term is customarily understood, but
rather promote specializa-
tion at a prematurely early
age. To my mind, the only
real virtue that can be
claimed for Rice 101 is that
it guarantees freshmen a
small class in an educa-
tional environment in
which freshman classes
typically are much too
large. However, asit.be sec-
tions of 15 with the best
teachers and most inter-
esting topics fill up, many
freshmen, I suspect, will find them-
selves forced to take specialized
courses in areas about which they
care little.
But the most disturbing feature
of the proposal is the section en-
titled "Ways of Knowing," the expla-
nation of its basic distribution cat-
egories. At first glance, if sensibly
implemented, this proposal looks
very much like a freer version of our
old unrestricted distribution,
gussied up with fancier names than
Group I, II or III To be sure, there
are the omissions I have noted, and
some courses do not quite seem to
fit the designated categories.
From its title, the popular phi-
losophy course Contemporary
Moral Issues would seem to provide
neither an encounter with literature
or the arts nor a sense of the past.
However, it could probably be fitted
into the category "Interpreting Hu-
man Behavior." But then again, al-
though I thought that this category
was essentially intended for courses
in the social sciences, what courses
besides robotics could not fit there?
\Erom the illustrations proposed,
of courses that would merit inclu-
sion, we might also infer that we will
once again have unrestricted distri-
bution. After all, if I-at in-American
literature courses qualifies, why not
British, American. French or Chi-
nese Literature? And if 20th-Cen
tury Women Writers qualifies for
the English Department, why not
Romantic Poetry (with its male writ
ers) or Kith-Century British Litera-
ture, or Shakespeare, Milton or
Chaucer? .Strangely enough, there .
the new proposal to ensure that stu-
dents take their distribution require-
ments in a variety of disciplines.
I can find no reason why a stu-
dent should not satisfy the general
requirements in "Approaches to the
Past," "Encounters with Literature
and the Arts" and "Interpreting Hu-
man Behavior" with courses in En-
glish and American literature,
thereby taking nothing but litera-
ture to satisfy a general education
requirement.
But from all that I have seen and
read, it seems unlikely that the pro
posal will be sensibly implemented.
To determine whether courses are
suitable for distribution, they will
have to be passed according to some
as-of-now-incomprehensible criteria,
by the Committee for University
Wide Requirements at Rice (or
CURR.an unencouraging acronym).
I teach a large class on the plays
of Shakespeare that science and en-
gineering students now take for dis-
tribution. These plays seem ideally
Sec PROPOSAL. Pane t
It seems strange now, but five
years ago the Thresher consid-
ered Director of Student Activi
ties Sarah Nelson
Crawford the enemy.
Then, she seemed
to represent the hand
of the administration.
She would occasionally
ask the paper to get out
of debt (which it did,
once the business de-
partment came up with
the idea of billing ad-
vertisers;, and once in
a while she would pass
on an administration
comment about the backpage.
Back then, "Student Affairs"
was not really part of our vocabu
■ larv. Vice President for Student
Affairs Zenaido Canracho had yet
to be hired. In his place there was
Associate Dean for Student Af-
fairs Bob Sanborn, who wore
natty suspenders and acted im-
portant but was, as far as 1 can
determine, generally harmless.
(Mentation Week was run by slu
dents The Student Center stall
did basically building reserva-
l ions, and nobody tried to call the
Rice Memorial Center anything
but the RMC,
There's nothing like change
to make you realize how good
things used to be.
In the midst of all of this,
I rawford stayed put. Now she's
announced her retirement.
In retrospect, she's one of the
best friends the students have
ever had. Crawford's office was a
haven for student organizations,
small ones especially. Even when
she was in charge of bureaucratic
paperwork (alcohol permits, for
example), she made the forms
easy to deal with. Students went
in with ideas, and she figured out
how to help make them work.
The point isn't that she en-
joyed working with students —
just about everyone in Student
Affairs does. It wasn't that she
cared about making life better
for the student —most people in
Student Affairs do. The essential
thing was that she empowered
the students
1 started working with the Stu-
dent (. enter Advisory Board not
long after 1 first dealt with
Crawford. I found an entirely dif-
ferent attitude, 1'lie staff was try-
ing to serve the student body,
and they wrote wonderful mis-
sion statements to that effect. In
the end, though, the ideas were
theirs, not ours. We were there to
do the work to make them hap-
pen It had the air of an appren-
ticeship program to it.
Christof
Spieler
That's the question: Is it "What
can we do for you'" or "What can
you do for us?" That has a lot to
do with the mission of
the whole Student Af
fairs division. It is some
thing like a horse ere
ated by committee, a
bunch of different fum
tionsthat the university
decided were necessary
at one time or another
Some of those are im
port ant student ser-
vices like Academic
Advising, Some are
vaguely paternalistic of-
fices designed to make us better
.-people (Multicultural Affairs),
Some are miscellaneous
That's fine. The problem is
when people try to tie the whole
thing together. It sounds good,
but the students get lost.
Amazingly, there are gradu
ate programs all over the country
that give degrees in student af
fairs. The graduates of (hose pn >
grams —- who call themselves
"Student Affairs Professionals"
are increasingly in control
The problem is, having that
degree seems to make you think
that you know student affairs bet-
ter than the students do. That
seems to me to be an oxymoron,
but what do students knovC'
So Student Affairs becomes
the friendly right hand of the ad-
ministration, keeping the stu-
dents happy with bread and cu
cuses while keeping them out of
the real decision-making process
()n top of it all is Camacho. the
center of a remarkable cult of
personality. He knows everyone s
name; he's everyone's friend. Ev-
erybody loves him, but nobody's
quite sure what lie does. If the
students like it, it's Camacho's
doing>if they don't, it's blamed
on the "administration."
It's putting a pleasant face on
the unpleasant. It's saying, "We're
your friend," without acting the
part. If stalking about how unique
Rice is while making it just like
every other school.
Like it or not, Crawford never
pretended to be anyone she
wysn't. She just helped students.
How quaint
We will miss her.
Erratum. I goofed. I said that F <">.
Wilson won a Nobel Prize tor find
ing cosmic background radiation
I meant Robert Wilson. Apologies
all around.
Christof Spieler (Sid '97) is design
co nsulta nt an d a gradu ate stu den t
in civil engineering
chemistry backed by the old pass/ would seem to be no mechanism in
the Rice Thresher
Joel Hardi
Managing Editor
Brian Stoler
Editor in Chief
Summer Durham
Business Manager
Jill Thompson
A d vert is ing Ma naffer
NEWS
Susan I'.geland, Editor
Greg E Norman. Editor
Usman Babet . Asst. Editor
OPINION
Joseph Blocher, Editor
Michael Sew Hoy, Asst Editor
ARTS « ENTERTAINMENT
Marisa levy, Editor
Jett McAlister, Editor
CALENDER
Amy Ktivohlavek, Editor
SPORTS
Kathleen Corr, Editor
Jose I .uts Cubria, ,4ss/ Editor
Leslie Anne Carter, test Editor
Carter Brooking. Page Designer
BACKPAGE
.Joel Hardi, Editor
STYLE
Parky Saunders, Editor
COPY
Jennifer I'razei, Editor
Marie) Tain, Editor
Sandy Anunts, Ant Editor
PHOTOGRAPHY
Beeca Hergqutat, Editor
Abi Cohen. *1 sst Editor
GRAPHICS
Joel Hardi, Editor
ONLINE
lace I'rev Editor
Parky Saunders, Ad Erod Manager
Anne Kimbol, Asst. Ad Manager
Sii Yin. ,4m/ Huttness Manager
Christof Spieler, Design Consultant
Summer Durham, Oflief Manager
Jctut11>rl:j a/e.i /,wtion Manage'
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Stoler, Brian. The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 85, No. 26, Ed. 1 Friday, April 24, 1998, newspaper, April 24, 1998; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth246622/m1/3/: accessed June 20, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.