Opinion: Jocks vs. nerds — a peace treaty for UNC

A big thanks should be given to Roy Williams and his student-athletes, and to a lesser extent Larry Fedora and his — their winning records have arguably done more for the health of UNC-Chapel Hill than any serious research or teaching ever could given today’s political climate.

Tar Heel pride gives this board a thrill in saying this, but as properly trained critical thinkers it is troubling as well. Athletics are constantly trotted as a peripheral concern of the university mission. Yet we doubt that many people would have come to campus to get a memorial Daily Tar Heel copy of our paper celebrating the Nobel Prize win of a researcher, or a lifetime teaching award of a gifted pedagogue. The serious question is why do college sports motivate public support of the University in a way unattainable by research, teaching or student thought?

We may as well admit it. For all the recent valorization of nerd culture, America is a society that needs and yet continuously hates nerds. 

Richard Hofstadter had it right: Americans despise intellectual experts yet seem to have no problem exploiting their labor. Yet get a winning season through a winning score, and there will be no shortage of fans at TOPO willing to tell you how awesome you are.

There is no logical reason for this. Both athletic and intellectual ability are gifts made good by support and disciplined practice. Our university nurtures both. One gets national headlines and the other back page whispers. Why?

The mind is a mysterious thing, and abstractions are the trade of any serious intellectual labor. The abstractions one thinks on are largely invisible affairs of the lab and the page. Yet the winning play is relatively immediate, something that all concerned with the grand venture can affectively share in.

We do not pretend academic indifference to a UNC win. We all enjoy the visceral surf we collectively ride when a Tar Heel brings a win or a trophy home. A research grant in biology or a good lesson from one of our professors is simply a less numerically and emotionally significant phenomenon.

This could change in a distant future, but for now it is extant political reality. This board has debated several times as to what role athletics does and should play at UNC. We all roughly agree, however, that athletics provides an ideological link to the vast population of the state in a way that no academic venture can. Rather than denigrate sports, maybe they should serve as an example of how to emphasize our importance to the citizens of North Carolina.

The judgment of any intellectual should be how their ideas affect the real. Love them or hate them — Freud, Marx, Rand and Einstein all managed to articulate ideas that could be retained by many average people, much in the way that the national championship win last Monday can be retained by average people in the state as well. The question to intellectuals may be how to characterize your discoveries as triumphs for the people of N.C. and the world.

Make no mistake. The wins of UNC teams serve as armor against the worst of the anti-intellectual forces in the state. The national disgrace of no less than our federal Sen. Jesse Helms never let an opportunity pass to denigrate his home state’s most storied institution of higher learning. He once suggested fencing around UNC in the manner of the state zoo. What he intended once the fence was up is open to question, but history shows that those who are fenced in by others tend not to meet good ends.

Our proud community has many enemies in Raleigh. Our teams garner support from far flung and much less privileged corners of the state. Take them away, and we become a less effective garden of thought that, while helping our state, has a much less immediate or visceral impact on its citizens.

Thought cannot materialize reality on its own. It needs the labor of bodies to support it. Sport should not and cannot sidestep the intellectual integrity of the university to win. But its role in giving access to pride in our endeavors should not be discounted either. Go Heels!