[washingtonismoney]

But to allow the football team to hold the school hostage over the political issue de jour sends a terrible, terrible message about the place of athletics on campus. It would be like saying, "Yeah, this stuff didn't matter so much when it was just affecting the peasantry of the student body. But if the football-team royalty is upset, that's different."

Others can talk about the other aspects of the argument, but this doesn't fit the facts. There are multiple students, I believe, holding hunger strikes over this. So it's not as if the football team has unilaterally decided this is a matter of concern and are forcing the university to go along. In fact it appears to be of broad concern to the black community of Mizzou.

Indeed if anything this shows society's somewhat poor weighting of what opinions matter -- fewer people were paying attention before the football team got involved. (Indeed, I didn't know about the whole situation until the football team decided to get involved -- and it appears awareness of the situation in the elite mainstream media is splintered. The Washington Post has written about it but not, say, Vox, who I'd expect to be all over it. Instead the Yale fracas appears to have dominated attention, probably because the situation is more clear-cut.)

[washingtonismoney]

But to allow the football team to hold the school hostage over the political issue de jour sends a terrible, terrible message about the place of athletics on campus. It would be like saying, "Yeah, this stuff didn't matter so much when it was just affecting the peasantry of the student body. But if the football-team royalty is upset, that's different."

Others can talk about the other aspects of the argument, but this doesn't fit the facts. There are multiple students, I believe, holding hunger strikes over this. So it's not as if the football team has unilaterally decided this is a matter of concern and are forcing the university to go along. In fact it appears to be of broad concern to the black community of Mizzou.

Indeed if anything this shows society's somewhat poor weighting of what opinions matter -- fewer people were paying attention before the football team got involved. (Indeed, I didn't know about the whole situation until the football team decided to get involved -- and it appears awareness of the situation in the elite mainstream media is splintered. The Washington Post has written about it but not, say, Vox, who I'd expect to be all over it. Instead the Yale fracas appears to have dominated attention, probably because the situation is more clear-cut.)