Brand's speech self-serving

Tuesday, IU President Myles Brand stood before gathered members of the National Press Club in Washington, to preach about the state of academics in universities. And preach he did. \nThe only reason Brand was put in the national spotlight was because he was the man who fired men's basketball coach Bob Knight. Without that credit to his name, Brand would just be another face in the crowd of university presidents complaining about the quality of academics. Brand knew he had to live up to his infamous reputation for firing Knight and delivered a sensationalized speech to entertain the media, rather than talk about real solutions. \nIn his "Academics First" speech, Brand said the academic situation at universities, including IU, has reached "crisis proportions." \nYes, academics is fast becoming a problem at IU. Last semester, another chemistry professor left. State funding to the University is being frozen by Gov. Frank O'Bannon, which might lead to problems with faculty retention in the near future. All of these are serious threats to the health of academics, but creating a better academic environment was not the focus of Brand's speech; attacking athletics was. And the result was a publicity stunt.\nBrand focused mainly on basketball and football, IU's two most prominent sports -- the two sports with the largest budgets. They are also the two sports which bring in the most money. Brand discussed "extreme solutions" to the problem that came from many academic advocates across the country, but fail to answer realistic problems. \nBy suggesting that the sports programs become professionalized or down-graded to club sports, Brand made it seem that eliminating athletics was the way to a better academic environment. Brand said these solutions are unlikely to be implemented, but presented them anyway, as they were adverse to public opinion and would gain attention. By saying "the inertia and tradition of the current situation makes radical change implausible, at best," Brand solidified that his arguments are not valid, and that his view of athletics had nothing to do with making academics at the university level any better.\nBrand said the IU community and the press did not pay nearly as much attention to the grant IU received in November -- used to fund the Indiana Genomics Initiative -- as they did to the Knight firing. Sure, it would be nice if people could cheer for DNA -- imagine it, a stadium-seating laboratory packed with people wearing "Go DNA!" sweatshirts, but it's not going to happen. \nBy attacking athletics, Brand sought to make himself the savior of academics. Instead of giving practical solutions that will help IU's academics in the long run, Brand made his position clear: IU isn't oriented toward "Academics First," we're being oriented to "Brand First"