UMass ready to tackle big boys?
It's impossible to write about the love-hate relationship between academe and big-time football without invoking former University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins's famous line: "Football has the same relation to education as bullfighting has to agriculture." Hutchins eliminated UC's loss-plagued football program in 1939, ceding the oval "C" logo and the sobriquet "Monsters of the Midway" to the Chicago Bears.
UMass is thinking of doing the opposite, upgrading its successful, money-losing, I-AA football program to the big time, I-A. That's where the Boston Colleges and the UConns play. They have the big stadiums, they have the TV contracts, they get end-of-season bowl swag, and -- in theory anyway -- football can make money for the university.
At a private UMass trustees' dinner last month, reports student trustee Mishy Leiblum , "one of the most disheartening parts was that 25 percent of the time was taken up talking about athletics, and specifically football." Raising the profile of UMass football has been talked about for years -- when Myra Kraft was on the board, Foxborough was bruited as a possible venue for I-A football games -- and again last fall. "It got killed pretty quickly," Leiblum says. "It's a ridiculous proposal that would cost a tremendous amount of money that would be better spent on the core functions of the university."
Now football is back on the table as part of UMass's controversial "one university" centralization plan. UMass board chairman Stephen Tocco says he is awaiting the athletic subcommittee's report on football. "I have an open mind," Tocco says. "Right now, there is a limited opportunity to make money with the team. There's no conference money, there's no bowl money. Any plan would have to place us in the top tier of the I-A teams. There's no point in being mediocre at that level."
What would it cost? I've heard $70 to $100 mil. UMass would probably have to build a new stadium to meet NCAA attendance guidelines, and it would have to increase the number of football scholarships. Shaking down the Legislature for megabucks to bring double-wide bruisers into the five-college system sounds like a non starter. Maybe there is a private donor with tens of millions to fritter away. Who knows?
Faculty skepticism is running strong. "I'm a big fan of I-A football," says Carol Barr , co chair of the faculty athletic council. "But there are three huge hurdles here: You need a much larger operating budget, you need a top-notch facility, and you need a conference that will welcome you. You can't just jump off a cliff."
Ernest May , secretary of the faculty senate, isn't waving the pom-poms, either. "In I-A, only the top 25 percent of teams make money, and the chances of getting into that top one-quarter approach zero," May explains.
Comes now "The Guardian: The History of South Africa's Extraordinary Anti-Apartheid Newspaper," which Zug started researching 17 years ago, for his senior thesis at Dartmouth. The Guardian, at times a down-the-line Stalinist propaganda organ, was shuttered by the government in 1963. To own a copy of the paper, even after it was banned, was punishable by three years in jail.
British journalist Anthony Sampson wrote of the white-edited paper: "Africans hated the 'white hand ' (i.e. white-run 'black' papers). They suspected a white man's trick to keep them quiet. 'A dog with a bone in his mouth can't bark,' says a Shangaan proverb. The only paper for Africans which had their confidence was the Guardian, an outspoken Communist weekly."
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 
