Gazette sports columnist Matt Vautour is incapable of reasonably considering the failure of the UMass football (“UMass faculty senators are hung up on football,” Gazette, April 28). I’ll try to help him do his job with this letter.
The Faculty Senate members who made the motion offered a carefully considered argument for why we should leave Division I football, and maybe college football altogether: We have growing knowledge of the dangers of football to the health of our students; the costs of the program continue to mount and divert millions of dollars from the core academic mission of the university; and after four seasons with weak and declining attendance, the once-proud UMass football tradition (which won national championships at the FCS level), has become an embarrassing weekly ritual of huge loses before empty stands.
Ironically, on the day that the chancellor and his army of administrators voted down the resolution (we have a bizarre system whereby administrators whose jobs depend on the chancellor get to vote, at his direction, in the Faculty Senate), the president of the University of Idaho decided that his university would leave Division I football. “What attracts students to our institution is the quality of academic programs,” he said. Not a big-time college football program. Idaho is returning to the FCS, the same division that UMass once competed in.
The Idaho president’s actions are a profile in courage. Something we need more of at UMass. And on the Gazette’s sports pages.
Max Page
Amherst