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<td width="343" valign="bottom"><p class="date"><!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="date" --><a href="default.html">2/23/04• Vol.
128, No. 13</a><!-- InstanceEndEditable --></p></td>
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<p><a href="nookie.jsp">So where's the nookie for the chess team?</a></p>
<p><a href="welfare.jsp">Welfare reform only one or two reality checks
away</a></p>
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<h1><font size="5" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><strong>So where's the
nookie for the chess team?</strong></font></h1>
<h1> </h1>
<h1 class="byline"><img src="priorities.jpg" width="368" height="317" border="2" align="right"></h1>
<h1 class="byline">Mental Floss</h1>
<p class="byline">By Gregg Deslauriers</p>
<p class="byline">Art by Monica Meza</p>
<p class="storyText">Recent developments at the University of Colorado
got me thinking about the priorities of universities across America.
For
those of you that live in a protective bubble that has no media source,
the University of Colorado football program is under investigation for
using strippers and booze as recruiting tools. </p>
<p class="storyText">Apparently exotic dancers
and keggers may have been offered up to young high school students
that showed promise on the football field in order to promote their
football team. I for one am outraged.</p>
<p class="storyText"> Like many students here at Fresno State, I busted
my hump to put together a substantial GPA in order to get into an institute
of higher learning.
Where are my lap dances? Several high schools boast chess teams with
captains with mad crazy castling skillz. </p>
<p class="storyText"> Where are their drunken nights sponsored by an astute
academic institution? And why shouldn’t a female debating team captain get a night of
sipping good Napa Valley Shiraz with a Johnny Depp look-alike when she
applies to a university?</p>
<p class="storyText"> The reason this doesn’t happen is the same reason why students
and professors have to fight their way through traffic jams on and around
campus during basketball games.</p>
<p class="storyText"> If American universities weren’t too busy chasing sports dollars
and catering to those same sponsors, they could get around to creating
a learning environment that would attract aspiring minds. </p>
<p class="storyText"> When our university was hit with budget cuts, some
people were crying out for justice for the soccer and swimming programs.
Never mind the
cuts that will stunt growth in the curriculum and professorship at Fresno
State. </p>
<p class="storyText"> Because of academic cuts, advances in scientific
research and technologies on campus are probably going to be hit pretty
hard, as well as new courses
that would explore growing areas of academic interest. Recently, funding
for this newspaper that you are holding in your hand was threatened.</p>
<p class="storyText"> I can’t blame universities for trying to gain publicity and money
through sports, but it shouldn’t be such a priority that 18-year-old
boys are brought to strip clubs. The words college and university should
have a closer semantic relation to learning and growth than to slam dunk
and touchdown. </p>
<p class="storyText"> When was the last time Brown or Harvard won anything
in sports (outside of water polo and rugby of course)? MIT is too busy
trying to win artificial
intelligence competitions with Turing machines and hiring more profs
like Chomsky to be concerned with sports. Obviously not every university
can be Ivy League caliber, but that doesn’t mean they should turn
their university into a sports moneymaker.</p>
<p class="storyText"> Of course I could just be jealous that I never got
to go to a Romanesque orgy because I can’t tackle anything but a math problem.</p>
<p class="storyText"> —
This columnist can be reached at collegian@csufresno.edu</p>
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