Punt, Pass, and Kick

Congratulations to the Master and Staff of Kirkland House for being the first to usher in a new mockery of scholarship. Kirkland House has pointed us in the right direction before its penchant for debauchery and food-fights (where else is the ethos of Animal House cultivated and glorified?), but never before has it voiced so clear a call for a return to the Cave. By offering academic credit for a course on the logic of a particular football strategy, taught by no less a scholar than the venerable Harvard quarterback himself, the House has announced to us that its intellectual leaders can see no essential difference between the pursuit of wisdom and the pursuit of trivia.

Master Vogt is a tenured university professor. Joe Restic is a football coach. Vogt signed his name, and the academic prestige of his title, to a course on the Thought of Joe Restic on how to win at football. And 20 students at Harvard University are enrolled in this course for academic credit. Shocking though this might seem to the uninitiated academic, our scenario is not inconsistent with the logic of recent tendencies at this university. Suffice it to mention two related phenomena: (1) the clamoring over-subscription of famous "gut" courses: and (2) the top-heavy enlistment of "pre-professional" (read: "pre-wealth") tutors in the Houses, so as to dampen any remaining spark of misconception that the purpose of a university is to instill a love of wisdom rather than the trades of artisans.

As to the future of academics? Ah--let us see courses on Astrology, on Sooth-saying, and on Winning-at-Checkers. Let us follow in the footsteps of Master Vogt, abdicate from our quaint conceptions of intellectual obligation, and capitulate spinelessly to every rebellious whim of newly-pubescent adolescents who wish to pursue nonsense in the name of knowledge. Let us heed the words of Mr. Restic, who cautions us that "You won't begin to cover the multiflex in one semester," and so let us in all haste fire our existing faculty and offer tenure to the valiant young men of the Harvard football team; let us replace our Professors of Philosophy, Physics and the Classics with Professors of Passing, Punting and Catching. And with Joe Restic as Dean of the Faculty, Harvard University just might stand a chance of catching up with the University of Oklahoma at Stillwater.

In Book VI of the Republic Plato teaches us something about the difference between Greeks and barbarians. Congratulations to Master Vogt for liberating us from such a foolish conception. John G. Daugman '76   Winthrop House Resident Tutor