Puttin' on the Fitz

 The whole affair around the firing of longtime Northwestern football coach Patrick Fitzgerald has an odor around it.  Frankly, I am very torn. There are indicators that point in different directions on this. 

On one hand, I am mindful of the Penn State situation.  You just didn’t want to believe that Papa Joe Paterno allowed his assistant to do the things he did right under his nose.   Similarly, the abuse of women athletes by Larry Nassar went on unabated under the noses of coaches, the AD, the president of Michigan State and even the FBI.  I’d hate to stay in a state of denial about the athletic program of NU.. 

But something doesn’t smell right about any of this.  There are signs everywhere that something else is going on here.  There was no indication that Fitzgerald had any knowledge of inappropriate behavior.  None of the behavior rose to a criminal level, nor was there any indication that any of it could have caused physical injury.  It was mostly guys doing stupid, tribal stuff.

Fitz himself has a sterling reputation among coaches.  He is a real NU guy, bleeds purple and all that.  He has taken a bottom rung program, and usually puts a credible team on the field, even though his kids actually have to meet certain academic standards and pass classes.   None of the student athletes that I came into contact with ever had regrets about playing there.  Northwestern’s football program boasted a 98% graduation rate last year,  and placed first or second among FSB programs in the nation.  Compare that to almost any other program in the country, where players are treated like chattel.  NU players

What has my Woke detector going off are several factors.  First, this started with the school newspaper, a notoriously leftist bunch. Second, it was an attack writ large on the entire athletic program.  It was not focused on a single incident or set of incidents, and the allegations were unspecific, and stitched together from disparate corners.  The baseball coach was criticized as creating a “toxic atmosphere” (a/k/a demanding hard work and consistent performance).   There were allegations of racist and sexist comments.  One coach was quoted as saying that he didn’t want a young, pretty assistant on the sideline because it would be distracting to the players (oh, recognizing the horrors of healthy, athletic young men acting, like, well, normal healthy, athletic young men).  Most suspicious was dragging a Mr. Diaz, a kid that graduated in ’08 to claim he had PTSD from his treatment at NU.  They couldn’t dig up old claim of sexual impropriety on Fitz himself (see the experience of Joshua Katz at Princeton and Roland Fryer at Harvard) so they fingered his players instead. 

The weird way the president handled the whole affair raises suspicions.  Michael Schill had all the facts available to him and decided to give Fitz a two week suspension.  Then, apparently under some pressure from somewhere, he reversed himself WITH NO NEW INFORMATION and fired Fitz, consistent with the cowardly responses to Woke pressure that is the norm in academia. 

And now, the slip and fall lawyers have gotten into the act.  One notorious race baiting lawyer is representing 8 players in a suit against the school and Fitz.  Another, Pat Salvi has said he’s going after the women’s programs.

When you put all the pieces together,  the attack on NU athletics has all the markings of a well-planned, coordinated effort to take down the entire athletic program at NU.  Who is leading this?  We may never know.  The lawsuits will all likely be settled quietly and will not reveal much.

What do I think is really going on?  Leftists hate competitive athletics.  And they are sneaky.  If you wanted to reduce NU’s athletic presence to DIII, the proper thing to do would be to take it through the trustees and have a vote.  But that would have met with resistance from some large donors.

So they decided to take this route.   Attack the entire program with a potpourri of Woke bugaboos:  stitch together allegations of racism, sexism and abuse to paint a picture of an inchoate “toxic environment”   with relatively minor incidents. Drag out resentful people that graduated long ago.  And then bring in the artillery- the plaintiff’s lawyers to destroy the program.  Of course the big game trophy was the new planned football stadium which will now never be constructed.

Yet another academic institution has allowed the radical Left to take control because of the lack of backbone in its president. 

 

 

Culture Club

 “Culture is- it is a reflection of our moment and our time.  Right?  And present culture is the way we express how we’re feeling about the moment and we should always find times to express how we feel about the moment.”

It this short post, I’m going to find time to express how I feel about the moment.   But that has absolutely nothing to do with culture.

The incomprehensible mishmash that Kamala Harris vomited up to attempt to define culture is not just an indictment of her and her profound ignorance, but of our entire educational system—top to bottom. Kamala Harris, a heartbeat away from the presidency,   Harris attended Howard University and then the University of California Hastings College of Law.  Harris is a seasoned lawyer but it is rare to catch her uttering a coherent phrase.  Her statement on culture was her piece de resistance—complete and utterly meaningless drivel, followed by her signature cackle.

But this week highlighted the profound ignorance not just of her, but of two more high profile figures of the regime—White House spokeslesbian Karine Jean-Pierre and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who never fails to induce a forehead slap.   KJP, as she is known, who adroitly dodges most questions that penetrate deeper than asking what flavor ice cream Biden favors this week, asserted that the Supreme Court took away a “fundamental Constitutional right” when it determined that affirmative action was unconstitutional and a violation of equal protection.   AOC has been barking about investigating and issuing subpoenas to SCOTUS judges all week.   Taken together, the three of these miseducated Marxists demonstrate a shocking lack of coherence in their rhetoric and a complete lack of understanding of how the Republic functions.  If they had any dignity at all, the institutions that educated these half-wits would offer to turn in their accreditations.   I have for several years served as a judge for a speech and debate event for homeschooled high school kids, and I am not exaggerating one bit when I say that the least of those 15 and 16 year olds would run circles around the Vice President, KJP and AOC.  I know.  I grade them out.  KJP struggles with basic sentence construction and subject-verb agreement, a flaw that would not get her out of the first round at our event.

But let me give Kamala a hand with culture, and what she should have said.

Culture is an amalgam of human behaviors and practices that are distinct to a subset of people.  It is manifested in their language, their song, religion, lore, their literature, their cuisine.  It is made up of hundreds of mostly unwritten rules that govern how they relate to each other.  It is most certainly NOT, as Kamala said, a “reflection of our moment” (whatever that means).  It is not the here and now, but is deeply rooted in our past, connects us to past generations, and we should seek to pass it on to future generations.  It binds groups of people together.  It provides a person with stability and a way of viewing the world.  It is often the glue that holds people together because it is a basis for predictability of behavior.

As a nation with a large immigrant population, most of us have been exposed to a variety of cultures brought here from their home countries.  Before we got heavily into the corrosiveness of identity politics, it was one of the best features of this country.  In many large cities, like my own, you could drive a few blocks and get authentic Chinese, Jewish, Italian, Soul Food, Mexican, or Indian.  To be sure, some cultures blended together better than others.  Mexicans and Poles do well and there is a lot of intermarriage between them.   Greeks and Lithuanians tend to be a little more insular.   And we know that culture implies certain behavioral tendencies.  A Jewish deli in Chicago’s North Shore proudly sells t-shirts with their logo on the front and that proclaim on the back, “We’re Italian Jews.  That means we’re into food AND bickering.”  It’s funny, because everyone knows there is some truth to it.  That’s culture.

While we are an amalgam of many different cultures, they have been, and need to be, subordinate to American culture.   And this is the point.  There is a distinctly American culture that Kamala and her posse are fighting against.  It is rooted in our unique past, and despite the attempt to deny and dilute it by people like Kamala, it still burns within us, although the globalists are working overtime to erase it.

American culture is fiercely independent, defiant, go-it-alone.  This is why we have a great entrepreneurial spirit still.   We have a rough and tumble culture—and a violent one, at that.   We do not depend on the State for our protection.  And despite attempts to erase or supplant it, we are rooted in a great religious tradition.   We are risk takers.  It’s in our genes.   Our pioneer spirit won’t be shackled.  It is a can do spirit.

 We are an optimistic, forward-looking people, not stuck in the past.  That’s why reparations won’t work and victim culture will eventually wither and die.  Because it’s not us. 

And when it becomes intolerable, we move.   We don’t wallow in our misery.  We moved across an ocean when Europe became intolerable.  When the East Coast became crowded, we said, “Go West, young man.”   Today, as certain states become more totalitarian and less responsive to its citizens, we migrate away to freer places.  California, New York, Illinois, and New Jersey are draining themselves, leaving for Utah, Tennessee, North Carolina and Florida.

Kamala couldn’t be more wrong.  Culture is not a reflection of our moment and our time.  It is who we have been, the legacy of our forebears propelled into the future  .