TO THE EDITOR:
The language, protestation and reassurance in the chancellor’s editorial is one that we’ve heard before.
He, like the rest of the University community, faculty, staff, students and alumni are prisoners of our academic and athletic history.
Excellence in academics and national football championships are inherently incompatible goals. Though achievable in basketball, where fewer players are needed, the much larger football teams present an apparently insurmountable challenge.
Duke recognizes this by offering scaled-down expectations. Our only realistic hope of freeing ourselves from this Gordian Knot is to either make lesser demands on our coaches or to abandon Division I football and compete at a lesser Division level.
I have long thought that this would work out well for Duke and may be in our interest as well.
Athletic teams can compete with the same level of intensity at all levels. A football victory of Harvard over Yale tastes no less sweet than that of Carolina over Duke!
The continued pursuit of improbable goals and the inevitably corrupting nature of trying to serve two masters needs to be addressed at the highest administrative levels.
Can we give serious consideration to a course of action that will preserve the University’s academic integrity and free us from the dollar-created scandals?
