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Something I enjoyed about teaching in The City was the relative lack of organized sport at the school where I taught and the schools where my wife and her friends taught. I grew up in the Texas Hill Country, where high school football is the national religion (a quip I remember hearing, although not where or when or from whom), and I was not seldom the target of that faith's inquisitorial practices--until I was part of its slave labor class as a bandsman. (We did not have songs this entertaining.) Even during my undergraduate days, when the school I attended did not have a football team (a blessed state from which it has since fallen), football permeated the campus and broader cultures, and I still found myself the subject of zealotry and proselytizing that I did not care to hear. My graduate school had a football program whose funding came often at the expense of such things as the library and professorial salaries, but in The City, I was blessedly free from such concerns. Some of the students would talk about the games shown on television, and when a team from New Jersey won the Super Bowl, there was (an annoying) celebration in the streets. But such were rare and minor occurrences; the people I met in The City had other things to do, by and large, and were very much about getting them done.

Then I left The City to come to what I have heard called the Buckle of the Bible Belt and teach at a school that rents itself out to the football fandom. Tents are pitched and cars and RVs parked for the weekend, interfering with students getting to class and instructors getting to where they can teach their classes despite those classes still being in session. Following my normal practice, I want to make some comment about prostitution and the blooms of various sexually transmitted infections; it would be apropos, if impolitic. I should not be surprised, of course; I was here last year and saw the same damned thing, and it is not as if I did not expect to face something of the sort when I reached this place where Red Dirt began. Nor ought I to be shocked that a school would make it harder to do that thing for which the school ostensibly exists in favor of 1) bringing in money to pay the bloated salaries of those whose salaries are bloated (which is neither me nor anyone in my department) and 2) setting up a spectacle to pacify the teeming masses of students and draw their minds away from study. (A cynical part of me thinks the latter either to distract them in the hopes of encouraging failure and thus paying again for classes or to keep them from unifying in a way detrimental to entrenched structures of power. But it is unlikely; it requires assumptions being in place that I do not think are.) While the point of school ought to be the development and dissemination of new knowledge and the skills used to do those things, it is not--and long has not been.

I have known this. But it still saddens me.