The Highest Honors

Rioters don't make Academic All-Ivy teams


I talk a lot about football and academics on this blog, but sometimes I forget that the athletes at Columbia truly are students first.

So that's what makes the three football players who were just named to the Academic All Ivy team that much more impressive.

They are:

Alex Gross, LB Economics Major (3-time 2008 Jakey Award Nominee)

Lou Miller, DL, History/Economics Major (4-time 2008 Jakey Award Nominee)

Phil Mitchell, DL Biology Major

Columbia and Harvard were the only schools with three football players on the team. Everyone else had two or just one.

These guys and the other athletes from Columbia and all the other Ivies who made this academic team are a credit to their generation.

I can't think of any other group of students who bring anywhere near as much honor, pride, and sheer entertainment to their fellow students and alumni year in and year out.

Some of us may really swell with pride when students protest a war or something... but honestly, what kind of commitment does that take?

Face it, no one is pressed into serving and representing their schools as much as the athletes. The fact that criticism of the worthiness of these young men and women is even tolerated by anyone at any Ivy school is totally unacceptable.

But the time crunch these student-athletes deal with keeps them from being able to speak out more on campus, run for student office, etc. Thus, they are underrepresented in the campus and external news media time after time. And that's a shame, because I am often just plain ashamed and embarrassed every time someone sticks a mic in front of a Columbia student's face these days. Some of the things some of the kids said during this current debate about bringing the ROTC back on campus have been downright laughable.

49% of the Columbia student body did vote in favor of returning the ROTC to Alma Mater, but that was way down from more than 60% in 2003. The campus media, and many others somehow made the ROTC referendum, (that was non-binding anyway), about gay rights instead, which appears to have been a brilliant political maneuver by anti-military elements who successfully made the ROTC vote about something else. (For example, one of the current students who portrayed himself as an aggrieved gay man was actually a member of the radically anti-military SDS).

Of course 49% in favor is probably not a bad number when you consider that if the faculty were asked to vote, it probably would be 80-90% against ROTC. And when you consider that the current students HAVE to sit and listen to these professors for several hours per week and rely on them for good grades, these young people are showing a decent amount of independent thinking!

I'm not really sure how this can be even debated among sane people. Columbia gets federal funds and benefits, and has benefitted repeatedly for years, from the sacrifices made by our armed forces. To force off campus the handful of Columbia students who seek to give back to their country while finding some way to reduce the huge costs of attending this school is shameful and possibly insane. To do so to "protest" the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" rules is almost a joke... especially when the U.S. military is currently confronting the world's most violent and murderous anti-gay regimes in the history of the planet. What's next? Will we exclude the military because we don't like the color of its uniforms?

It was the athletes who stepped up in 1968 and risked their safety to protect several Columbia buildings from the student rioters, (when will THEY be given the same recognition as the rioters by the way?). It's the athletes who follow strict rules of public respect and conduct that most American college students abandoned years ago. And it's the athletes who bring more honor and cash flow back to their schools as alumni than any other group.

Anyway, something tells me that the large majority of our student-athletes have not fallen victim to this insanity, or the insanity of professors who wish for "a million Mogadishus." And I echo the comments made on this blog by documentary filmmaker Erik Greenberg Anjou, who talked about how our athletes must find a way to become more visible and audible on campus as campus leaders. They must do so not to save athletics, but to save the schools themselves.