I'm not the one making a leap here. I'm presenting alternative possibilities, each of which is plausible. But ultimately, we just don't know how he received it. So to definitively claim he received it one way (and "withheld big gift as a result") and not another smacks to me of trying to push a certain agenda. Which is ironically being done in response to another group pushing an agenda. In the immortal words of Obi Wan, "You've become the very thing you swore to destroy."
College Sports (Football)
Battle89
- Cary-Grove, the better Trojan team
Sounds like you feel you have the high ground
ChiefGritty
- Chicago, IL
In a moment where sugar daddies are more important than ever to college sports, the Khan degree thing is an annoying bummer, it's pretty much as simple as that regardless of how you draw the hypothetical.
But the whole thing does and always has gotten wrapped around the axle of broader tensions and conflicts that are inherent to Illinois as a place, which is always what we're "really" talking about here. Go google "Kate Clancy Illinois" and it will confirm every stereotype you could ever dream of, and that notion that looney lefty faculty members and their political enablers are at fault every time we fail to convert a 3rd and 1 is deeply emotionally resonant and satisfying to certain people.
The only thing I always insist on butting into this conversation with is this:
The collected faculty at every FBS school would burn down the football stadium if they could, period, and that feeling is MORE intense, not less, at the biggest and most successful football factories. Hell hath no fury like a University of Georgia sociology professor asked about the Dawgs.
But the whole thing does and always has gotten wrapped around the axle of broader tensions and conflicts that are inherent to Illinois as a place, which is always what we're "really" talking about here. Go google "Kate Clancy Illinois" and it will confirm every stereotype you could ever dream of, and that notion that looney lefty faculty members and their political enablers are at fault every time we fail to convert a 3rd and 1 is deeply emotionally resonant and satisfying to certain people.
The only thing I always insist on butting into this conversation with is this:
The collected faculty at every FBS school would burn down the football stadium if they could, period, and that feeling is MORE intense, not less, at the biggest and most successful football factories. Hell hath no fury like a University of Georgia sociology professor asked about the Dawgs.
Thank-you, as always, for the broader context.
I did Google “Kate Clancy Illinois”. What is a “Reproductive Anthropologist”? Interesting CV for sure! Where might one of these ever hope to draw a paycheck outside the academic bubble?
I have commented about this on here before: I had the misfortune of having Kate Clancy as a professor, and she is a wackadoodle. I just don't understand why she cares so much about bringing up decades-old issues that are over and done with. The value Shad Khan has and will continue to bring to this university is substantially higher than hers or anyone else's.
Except it wasn't his best friend. It was a bunch of liberal arts deans and faculty, and not people in the College of Engineering.
So it's entirely possible that while he was rejected by gender studies majors, the dean of the College of Engineering still has a good relationship with him.
ChiefGritty
- Chicago, IL
Part of the reason I point out the universality of "the faculty hates the football team" in college sports, is that it probably cuts straight through the mystery here.
This faculty committee isn't objecting to awarding an honor to Khan DESPITE him offering riches to athletics, they're probably objecting in large part BECAUSE he's offering riches to athletics, and they don't like their little cool kids club being used in that way.
It is about power and control, as all things are.