University of Michigan Press Blog

Press Author Jill Dolan Wins Prestigious George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism

Congratulations to Jill Dolan, author of The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1991), Presence and Desire (1994), and Utopia in Performance (2005) and editor of A Menopausal Gentleman (2011), for winning the prestigious 2011 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. The award, administered by Cornell University, carries a $10,000 prize and was bestowed upon Dolan for her insightful essays on her blog, The Feminist Spectator. This marks the first year the award has been given to a blog.

Read the full award announcement here. The Guardian also published a great spotlight on Dolan and the significance of such a major award going to a blog.

The Chronicle Revisits a "Rogue Scholar"

Richard W. Bailey's 2003 book, Rogue Scholar: The Sinister Life and Celebrated Death of Edward H. Rulloff, has inspired a post on the Chronicle of Higher Education's Lingua Franca blog. "Edward H. Rulloff was so well-known in his time that he was the subject of two contemporary biographies," blogger Alan Metcalf notes, but Rulloff's name has been scrubbed from the field of linguistics due to his other career--a life of crime--which ultimately led to his execution, cutting short his research on what Rulloff promised would be a revolutionary new philological theory.

Read the whole post over at the Chronicle, or check out Bailey's book for the whole sordid story!

Duderstadt Weighs In as New York Times Debate Over College Sports Continues

Sunday's New York Times featured an article titled "How Big-Time Sports Ate College Life," which examines long-simmering issues of commercialization in college sports--a topic the paper recently reignited with two controversial opinion pieces by columnist Joe Nocera. This time, education writer Laura Pappano compared prestigious universities' academic renown with those same universities' famous football and basketball teams. "Ohio State boasts 17 members of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, three Nobel laureates, eight Pulitzer Prize winners, 35 Guggenheim Fellows and a MacArthur winner," Pappano writes. "But sports rule." She also discusses how the extraordinary popularity of sports leads to coaches receiving multi-million-dollar salaries while professors struggle to receive funding for travel.

In this context, Pappano quotes University of Michigan President Emeritus James J. Duderstadt, author of Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University: A University President's Perspective, which continues to be every bit as relevant today as it was upon publication in 2000. Duderstadt told the Times, "Nine of 10 people don't understand what you are saying when you talk about research universities. But you say 'Michigan' and they understand those striped helmets running under the banner.

Also relevant to the debate over the proper role of sports and treatment of college athletes is Brian L. Porto's The Supreme Court and the NCAA: The Case for Less Commercialization and More Due Process in College Sports, published this month by U-M Press.

Hair That Touches Heaven

University of Michigan Press author Bill Talen presented his unique brand of evangelism last week at Busboys & Poets in Washington, DC. Previewing the event, where Talen discussed his Reverend Billy persona and recent book, The Reverend Billy Project: From Rehearsal Hall to Super Mall with the Church of Life After Shopping, the Washington Post's free daily Express looked at Talen's history as a performer.

"Reverend Billy has hair so high it practically touches heaven," the Express article begins. "He wears a white suit and a collar that marks him as a man of God." But the sins Reverend Billy preaches against are not the usual fare, but rather the modern trangressions of rampant consumerism and corporate malfeasance. Talen, as Reverend Billy, has been active in the Occupy protests and has staged demonstrations in malls, bank lobbies, Starbucks outlets, and other locations where the presence of a sizable choir singing gospel music and chanting slogans are likely to have their message amplified. Reverend Billy's shows are "part worship service, political rally and performance art," Express says, representing a "satiric continuation of the tradition of oration and preaching in America."

The Reverend Billy Project is available now, and be on the lookout for the Elvis-haired preacher at a venue near you.

Duderstadt comments on NY Times college sports op-ed

New York Times columnist Joe Nocera sparked no small amount of controversy with his January 1 opinion piece, "Let's Start Paying College Athletes." Nocera argued that the current system, in which student-athletes are forbidden from accepting payment of any kind under NCAA rules, "enables misconduct to flourish" because players feel that the universities, conferences, and NCAA are taking advantage of their skills. Unlike most intercollegiate sports, the columnist said, college football and men's basketball are a big business, with sometimes millions of dollars paid to coaches and billions paid for advertising on televised tournaments. Nocera notes that "having universities in charge of a major form of American entertainment is far from ideal" but says the best approach is to acknowledge, rather than deny, the commercialization, "pay the work force."

James Duderstadt, President Emeritus of the University of Michigan and author of Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University: A University President's Perspective--which is highly critical of the commercialization of college sports--offered the following response to Nocera' op-ed.

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I had several conversations with Joe Nocera during his development of this article.  Actually, I think that he believes that the best solution for higher education is to reject the commercial entertainment business of big-time college sports and return to an Ivy model.

But the question is how to get from here to there. By first making a powerful case that the current model is built on the exploitation of young student athletes–-they live in poverty, less than half will ever get a college degree (and those that do usually get a meaningless degree), and they put their future health at great risk–-all for the obscene wealth of coaches, ADs, presidents, the NCAA, the networks, and others and then proposing that if you are going to exploit them, you at least ought to pay them, the hope is that folks will realize just how crazy it is to depend on colleges to offer this public entertainment.

Nocera's proposal to pay college athletes could light a backfire to control the further spread of commercialism in big-time college sports by suggesting that the real "stars" of this entertainment industry are being exploited and deserve some compensation from greedy coaches, ADs, NCAA brass, and university presidents. By suggesting that  big-time football and basketball are really commercial entertainment industries based on a "plantation" philosophy (aka Taylor Branch) of exploitation, Nocera might create an Occupy-like groundswell of demands that the players deserve their fair share (which certainly isn't the current model of athletic "scholarships" controlled by the coaches, which amounts to indentured servitude. )

One would hope is that this possibility is terrifying enough to the current forces controlling the enterprise (ADs, presidents, perhaps even governing boards) that they will be receptive to throttling things back a bit.