Academic Stratification – What’s Wrong With This Picture?
October 20th, 2008 by SocProf and tagged Academia, Social Stratification
Posted in Academia, Social Stratification | 3 Comments »
3 Responses to “Academic Stratification – What’s Wrong With This Picture?”
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October 21st, 2008 at 8:14 am
Truly sad that they pay football coaches more than us poor academic folks who are employed in the knowledge and expertise sector. I guess that this also perfectly relates to the power of culture capital and the cultural contradiction of ideology and knowledge in advanced capitalist society.One would assume that an advanced industrial society that prides itself with academic performance and superior knowledge would put its money in those areas that it preaches. However, we have the reverse tendency here in which monies are put into places that have no real significance in the promotion of academic knowledge and expertise. That stated, I am not trying to say that there is no societal value to football or other sporty things we seem to cherish in our society, Rather, I think that the cultural reproduction within sports is much more related to the dominant ideology than actual things related to the overall economy. Just some noise from me as usual
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October 21st, 2008 at 9:32 am
Ok, well… There’s 1 head football coach per big university. If you look at the set of football coaches as a whole (including high school, small liberal arts schools, etc.), you’d get numbers closer to professors. There’s just a celebrity set of football coaches, and they run the programs at the places that many professors teach. It’d be like arguing that ‘baseball players’ make too much many by only counting major league players, and ignoring all the minor league-rs barely getting by. That there aren’t celebrity profs making hundreds of thousands is a little sad, but the overall story would not change even if there were, would it? It’s not like academia is suffering from a lack of competition as it is.
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October 23rd, 2008 at 9:33 am
Dan,
In defense of the graph provided by christine ,I guess your are correct when claiming that Baseball players make way more than football players. It’s also true that there is usually only one well paid football coach in most division I football programs. Also,the amount of money circulating in the professional football is something that all citizens should be questioning in an age of rising unemployment and social programs being cut from state and federal budgets. The high salaries of most professional football players often go through the roof without any noise or protest from anybody anymore.As an example, I live in Texas and I still don’t comprehend why the Dallas Cowboys still have the majority of NFL related License sales when looking at their actual game/playing performances “WINS” in the last few years and their diminishing image as America’s team.This appears to be a contradiction when looking the the so-called economic claim and ideology of “accomplishement” and “merits” which meant to justify the extreme amount of differences in player salaries and team assets because of talent and performance. The argument that sports also function on the idea of “accomplishemnt” and “talent” are parallel to the holy cow of capitalist ideology(sorry if I m going a little critical here).Cowboys Team-owner Jerry Jones has also managed to convince both political and economic leaders in Texas build a large stadium in the Arlington area which is estimated at bringing $100- 200 million monies poured into area for the next twenty years. I really want to say that this is starting to sound like there are hidden reasons why sports sell so well because they are part of the new sports-industrial-complex.
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