The lecture by National Collegiate Athletic Association President Miles Brand was indeed timely, and not only because of its coincidence with the Alumni Hall of Fame inductions but also the cloud hanging over Rensselaer’s hockey program. (See the September 24 issue of The Poly, “Brand gives lecture on ethics of athletics.”) The values fostered by athletic participation, their place in the mission of the university, and the problems that arise when intercollegiate sport becomes big business are subjects that call for a serious national debate. Brand’s proposal for an “integrationist view” that would place athletics more squarely within the mission of the university is a potentially interesting contribution to such a debate. It is therefore disappointing that he apparently prefers politically fashionable clichés to serious debate.

Brand attributes a bias against athletics that supposedly pervades the university to faculty and administrators, with particular emphasis on postmodernists. “Faculty,” he says, “aren’t about the body. They are about the mind.” A punchy sound bite that conveniently ignores two facts: Athletics aren’t exclusively about the body, but rather about the integral performance of mind and body. Secondly, postmodernism is, among other things, about the reintegration of mind and body.

To the extent that there is a faculty bias against physical performance, it is traceable to the thinking of early modern philosopher Rene Descartes, who made a radical distinction between mind and body that has influenced scholarship for generations. Postmodernism challenges the binary assumptions of modernism, including those that can be traced to the Cartesian mind-body split. In so doing, it opens up a space for serious academic consideration of physical performance, and numerous postmodern scholars have emphasized material reality and the body in their works.

As a former professor of philosophy, Miles Brand must have at least a nodding acquaintance with, for example, Michel Foucault, to name just one scholar whose work offers an opening in which to develop the sort of “integrationist view” of college athletics Brand professes to advocate. So why did he choose to point the finger at postmodernist faculty members in his lecture? Is it possible that he’s courting the political right wing, among whom it has for some time been fashionable to blame humanities faculty and postmodernism for social ills ranging from teen-age pregnancy to the decline of the English language? Is it an irrelevant coincidence that Brand took his pot-shot at postmodernism just a couple of weeks after Rush Limbaugh debuted as a TV football commentator?

I don’t presume to speak for my colleagues in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, but I encourage student athletes at Rensselaer to think carefully before buying into Miles Brand’s view of where their allies and enemies are to be found. Remember that the School of Humanities and Social Sciences chose to open the question of the place of athletics in the university for serious discussion here at Rensselaer. The President of the NCAA chose to use that opportunity to level a phony charge at humanities faculty.

Michael Halloran