Higher Education

Yesterday, Texas A&M fired football coach Jimbo Fisher, who exits with a $75 million parachute. Nice unemployment, if you can get it. Misplaced priorities by a public institution, if you get what I mean, Texas A&M being a public school and all. Even a Texas school is supposed to be about education, right? Then again, closer to home, my alma mater De Paul University wants to spend $60 million on a basketball practice facility for its men’s and women’s basketball teams. To the unenlightened, that might seem like a lot of money for some practice courts, but that’s why they pay college administrators, to better explain things, of course. Towards that end, De Paul trotted out athletic director DeWayne Peevy last week to address a community meeting to air residents’ concerns. According to Peevy, “We have to be a better front porch for this university to help attract students from all across the country. In the world we live in, sports gets attention, so we think, how can we turn that into something good to help everybody?” [story in 11-10-23 Tribune] I’d say Peevy thunk wrong. Funny how Georgetown has weathered the downturn in its basketball program. Oh, right, Georgetown doesn’t need sports the way De Paul does because Georgetown has always focused on academic excellence. De Paul has given up on that ideal to pursue the perfect-sized locker room. And if that means knocking down five hundred-year old buildings the school owns, so be it. For some odd reason, there were people in the audience skeptical of the plan. No doubt, highly uneducated people at that.