My piece about whether collegiate athletes ought to be paid (see ”Throwing in the towel,” Aug. 1, 2013 was merely a course-summary version of a complex argument. Readers interested in learning more about that argument might find these interesting: “The Shame of College Sports” by Taylor Branch. Atlantic Monthly, Oct. 2011 “College sports reform needed, […]
James Krohe Jr.
Posted inOpinion
Dancing around the issue
“It wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast.” – King Kong The Motor City finally ran out of gas. The recent bankruptcy of Detroit’s municipal government has been explained and re-explained. It was a single-industry city, the equivalent of the mining camp, that failed to diversify its economy. It was badly run, meaning […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Life after football
In “Throwing in the towel,” I discussed recent proposals to reform big-money collegiate sports. Good sense reforms are unlikely to ever be adopted to the extent that are good sense reforms. So interwined are sports and the American college experience, most alums university leaders believe, that curtailing them in any way would cripple fund-raising and student recruitment, […]
Posted inOpinion
Throwing in the towel
It’s mid-summer, but the thoughts of every red-blooded Illinoisan are already turned to autumn. The fields resound with the satisfying crunch of pads against pads, helmet against helmet, brain against skull as college football squads go through their two-a-days. College football, like basketball, is a tribal thing, and I’m not of that tribe. It isn’t […]
Posted inOpinion
Hoping for a humdinger
In May, George Ryan’s son revealed that his father, late of the Executive Mansion and the federal pen, was writing his memoirs. Ryan fils promised it would be a “humdinger,” a “no holds barred book” that will “tell it like it is.” We can only hope. It can’t be easy for a politician to plainly […]
Posted inOpinion
Too afraid to talk about death
This morning Ezra Klein of the Washington Post adds more than two cents’ worth to the not-quite debate about end-of-life medical decision-making. Klein discusses the legislation proposed by Oregon rep Earl Blumenauer that I described yesterday. The problem with Blumenauer’s legislation isn’t that it goes too far. It’s that it doesn’t go nearly far enough….We […]
Posted inOpinion
Fighting financial felons
In “Short arm of the law” I addressed the failure of federal prosecutors to go after financial criminals with the same zeal they show in pursuing political insiders. “Why do not our protectors seek to return us to the day when businesspeople made and traded things rather than stealing what others made?” I asked. “The […]
Posted inOpinion
Manufacturing mediocrity
In July the National Council on Teacher Quality, a D.C.-based reform group, issued a study that concluded that the nation’s teacher-education colleges have turned into an “industry of mediocrity.” Oh, the Council thought well enough of most the central Illinois’ colleges of education, specifically those at Eastern, U of I’s Champaign campus, Southern’s two campuses […]
Posted inOpinion
Makers
In “Three strikes and you’re in,” I endorsed the idea that what Springfield needs to make its economy perk is the entrepreneurial energy and enterprise that immigrants supply. Turns out that the Small Business Administration commissioned a report on that idea in 2012. Robert W. Fairlie, an economics professor at the University of California at […]
Posted inOpinion
Taxing work
In 2011, the General Assembly, kicking and screaming, did what was good for it and ate its spinach. Members raised the rate at which the State of Illinois taxes the income of its citizens, thus forestalling a revenue crisis. That tasted so bad that they could not swallow it; the rate will have to be […]
Posted inOpinion
Quotes for the day
While I’m in a patriotic mood, I thought I’d pass along a few quotes from the Founding Fathers, courtesy of David Atkins over at Hullabaloo. Among them: James Madison: “The growing wealth acquired by [corporations] never fails to be a source of abuses. Thomas Jefferson: I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy […]
Posted inOpinion
America
Ah, another Fourth is gone – the ritual burning of dead animals, flags made in China waved by just folks celebrating our glorious victories over the world’s peasant armies, speeches by people convinced that if the Founders were alive today they sit at their table in the cafeteria and not yours, all experienced through an […]
