While he enjoyed teaching many members of the track, swimming and crew teams in his courses, he vociferously resisted the notion that athletic scholarships offered opportunity to low-income, minority students.
"If you were giving the scholarship to an intellectually brilliant kid who happens to play a sport, that's fine," he said. "But they give it to a functional illiterate who can't read a cereal box, and then make him spend 50 hours a week on physical skills. That's not opportunity. If you want to give financial help to minorities, go find the ones who are at the library after school."
Now, the school administrators react
Rutgers Athletic Director Bob Mulcahy told local newspapers that Dowling's comment was "a blatantly racist statement."
In a statement released by the university, Rutgers President Richard McCormick called it "inaccurate and inhumane."
"It also has a racist implication that has no place whatsoever in our civil discourse," McCormick said in the statement.
...
A Rutgers alumnus who was part of Dowling's failed effort to scale back the university's athletic programs, defended the professor.
"I've never known him to be a racist. I can tell you the quote smelled of it, but the man I know is not capable of it," Richard Seclow told the Home News Tribune of East Brunswick for Thursday newspapers.
More proof people use "racism" as a catch-all to punish anything they don't like to hear? Freedom of speech be damned.
James Taranto wrote:Dowling is not disparaging athletes because of their race; he is, in response to a question specifically about minorities, saying that the university should help academically promising ones rather than unpromising ones.
Even so-called affirmative action programs, which seek to increase minority students' numbers by holding them to a lower standard, hold them to a standard so as to favor those with the greatest likelihood of success. In the Orwellian world of higher education, those who believe that race should have nothing to do with admissions decisions are routinely branded as "racist."
In defending their emphasis on sports over academics, the Rutgers administrators now seek to take this one step further and claim that it is racist to hold a minority student to any standard at all.
) anyway, an athlete...lets say a star basketball player: needs an 840...let us remember you get 400 for putting your name on it...so lets play a probability game here, if said dumb as rock puts his name on paper he's at 400, then gets 1/4 of them right he's got 700...if he even can understand the easy questions (which if he gets out of high school, he should be able to) factor that in as he possibly get 1/3.....we're at the 800 mark already. There are plenty of people who get into this school who dont belong here solely on that fact. I'd love to see smart inner city scholars get all this money aside from just athletes whose only dream is to go pro and if they dont make it, they always have a backup in sport management....
