Elite Collegiate Athletics and the Academy: Criticisms, Bene fi ts, and the Role of Student Affairs

College sports play a special role in higher education by promoting student unity on campus, maintaining connections with alumni, and enhancing the overall student experience. There are some who claim that college sports have lost touch with their origins and have been consumed by a “win at all costs” mentality. Murray Sperber (2000) has suggested that at many institutions, athletic programs are hindering the quality of undergraduate education. This article will explore the history of collegiate athletics and show how current sports programs play an integral role in supporting multiple facets of universities. Given the negative history, culture, and perception surrounding college athletics, it is important for student affairs professionals to consider opportunities to correct these problems. Finally, this article will explore how a more cooperative partnership between student affairs and athletic departments at institutions with elite sports programs can benefi t not only universities, but student-athletes as well

The Last Breakfast with Aunt Jemima and its Impact on Trademark Theory

The generally-accepted law and economics theory of trademarks fails to explain why a brand owner would ever walk away from a trademark that generates financially lucrative returns. In 2020, that is exactly what happened again and again as brand owners pledged to abandon racially explicit marks in the weeks following George Floyd’s murder. As citizens became more attuned to the experiences of those depicted in racial marks, the owners of Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben’s, the Cleveland Indians, the Redskins, the Dixie Chicks, Lady Antebellum and others announced these brands’ days were numbered. By evoking racist stereotypes, they became a moral liability. They could not be authentically unifying if they promoted values inconsistent with contemporary notions of equality and anti-racism. This Article situates the adoption of racially explicit brands in a historic context and explores the reactions of the targeted communities. It then explains why multiple legal challenges to these federal trademark registrations failed. The traditional law and economics paradigm used to justify and explain trademark law does not account for strategic trademark decisions driven by values and expressive community connections. While law and economics captures the essential message a symbol must communicate to function as a mark, it neglects to explain why some marks fail or, in spite of spectacular success, may be abandoned. When a theory cannot account for what is happening in practice, it is time to reach for new tools to help explain the significant role trademarks play in reflecting and leading cultural dynamics. The consumer investment framework is ideally suited to fill this theoretical gap. It accounts for expressive and value driven decision making. It embraces the many ways we engage with marks apart from the point of purchase. In addition to purchasing trademarked products, people invest trademarks with time, meaning, and money. Open dialogue between brand managers, influencers, and fans facilitates connections through shared values. By accounting for brand meaning, communities, and values, the consumer investment theory provides a better framework for understanding the abandonment of racist imagery in a way that traditional law and economics cannot. Where law and economics fails to function as an explanatory paradigm, the consumer investment model provides a theoretical framework for understanding how trademarks function if they are to succeed and what qualities make them resilient enough to remain resonant in a constantly changing cultural environment

The Rebel Made Me Do It: Mascots, Race, and the Lost Cause

Public memory is commonly tied to street names, toponyms, and monuments because they are interacted with daily and are often directly associated with race, class, and regimes of power. Mascots are not thought of in the same manner although they are present as part of everyday life. The childish or sometimes comedic nature of the mascot discounts it from many considerations of its influence, symbolism and history. Nonetheless this research focuses on the term “Rebel” as a secondary school mascot. The term possesses the trappings of race because the American vernacular ties the word to the Confederate States of America and its slave-holding foundation. The issue is that the images, terms, and iconography utilized by many schools with a Rebel mascot is sometimes similar to symbols adopted by many White supremacist groups across the country. The five chapters in this document are united under the topic of Rebel mascots in secondary schools addressing the 1.) distribution of the mascots, 2.) history of selection, and 3.) occurrence of removal. These studies use data from yearbooks, sports databases, newspaper articles, and various websites to construct catalogs of Rebel mascots from the past century. This research finds that Rebel is a term that still retains a connection to the Confederacy and a vernacular link to the American South. There are also significant regional and racial connections related to the term, particularly the Confederate version of the Rebel. Selection of the mascot can be tied to race and the removal or alteration of the Rebel mascot may be connected to racially charged events. The mascot still retains significant currency as a term tied to the Lost Cause and remains a hot-button issue due to the deep connections of schools to their identity through naming. The issue is further compounded by implicit bias and the fear of guilt by association, whereby schools attempt to reinterpret, rename, remove, or distance themselves from the Confederate version of Rebel to avoid controversy

Creating Cowboys and “Playing Indian”: Football and White Supremacy from 1890-1980

This honors thesis argues that football is a location of leisure which reinforces and (re)creates a comforting white male supremacist American empire through its use of imaginary frontiers, distortion of Native imagery and culture, and its development of mythic cowboy-heroes— which serve as escapes from ubiquitous national anxieties. I use textual and visual analysis of primary sources from the 1890s, 1920s, and 1970s to describe how football developed as a comforting space of leisure for white people in the face of national crises of masculinity, rights movements, and disillusionment with America’s empire

Sport Stadiums and Environmental Justice

This book explores the local environmental impact of sports stadiums, and how that impact can disproportionately affect communities of color. Offering a series of review articles and global case studies, it illustrates what happens when sport organizations and other public and private stakeholders fail to factor environmental justice into their planning and operations processes. It opens with an historical account of environmental justice research and of research into sport and the natural environment. It then offers a series of case studies from around the world, including the United States, Canada, Kenya, South Africa, and Taiwan. These case studies are organized around key elements of environmental justice such as water and air pollution, displacement and gentrification, soil contamination, and transportation accessibility. They illustrate how major sports stadiums have contributed positively or negatively (or both) to the environmental health of the compact neighborhoods that surround them, to citizens’ quality of life, and in particular to communities that have historically been subjected to unjust and inequitable environmental policy. Placing the issue of environmental justice front and center leads to a more complete understanding of the relationship between stadiums, the natural environment, and urban communities. Presenting new research with important implications for practice, this book is vital reading for anybody working in sport management, venue management, mega-event planning, environmental studies, sociology, geography, and urban and regional planning

The BG News March 31, 2008

The BGSU campus student newspaper March 31, 2008. Volume 98 - Issue 129https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/bg-news/8905/thumbnail.jp

The Parthenon, December 5, 2013

The Parthenon, Marshall University’s student newspaper, is published by students Monday through Friday during the regular semester and weekly Thursday during the summer. The editorial staff is responsible for the news and the editorial content

Sport Stadiums and Environmental Justice

This book explores the local environmental impact of sports stadiums, and how that impact can disproportionately affect communities of color. Offering a series of review articles and global case studies, it illustrates what happens when sport organizations and other public and private stakeholders fail to factor environmental justice into their planning and operations processes. It opens with an historical account of environmental justice research and of research into sport and the natural environment. It then offers a series of case studies from around the world, including the United States, Canada, Kenya, South Africa, and Taiwan. These case studies are organized around key elements of environmental justice such as water and air pollution, displacement and gentrification, soil contamination, and transportation accessibility. They illustrate how major sports stadiums have contributed positively or negatively (or both) to the environmental health of the compact neighborhoods that surround them, to citizens’ quality of life, and in particular to communities that have historically been subjected to unjust and inequitable environmental policy. Placing the issue of environmental justice front and center leads to a more complete understanding of the relationship between stadiums, the natural environment, and urban communities. Presenting new research with important implications for practice, this book is vital reading for anybody working in sport management, venue management, mega-event planning, environmental studies, sociology, geography, and urban and regional planning

Random rerouting for differentiated QoS in sensor networks.

Sensor Networks consist of spatially distributed sensors which monitor an environment, and which are connected to some sinks or backbone system to which the sensor data is being forwarded. In many cases, the sensor nodes themselves can serve as intermediate nodes for data coming from other nodes, on the way to the sinks. Much of the traffic carried by sensor networks will originate from routine measurements or observations by sensors which monitor a particular situation, such as the temperature and humidity in a room or the infrared observation of the perimeter of a house, so that the volume of routine traffic resulting from such observations may be quite high. When important and unusual events occur, such as a sudden fire breaking out or the arrival of an intruder, it will be necessary to convey this new information very urgently through the network to a designated set of sink nodes where this information can be processed and dealt with. This paper addresses the important challenge of avoiding that the volume of routine background traffic may create delays or bottlenecks that impede the rapid delivery of high priority traffic resulting from the unusual events. Specifically we propose a novel technique, the "Randomized Re-Routing Algorithm (RRR)", which detects the presence of novel events in a distributed manner, and dynamically disperses the background traffic towards secondary paths in the network, while creating a "fast track path" which provides better delay and better QoS for the high priority traffic which is carrying the new information. When the surge of new information has subsided, this is again detected by the nodes and the nodes progressively revert to best QoS or shortest path routing for all the ongoing traffic. The proposed technique is evaluated using a mathematical model as well as simulations, and is also compared with a standard node by node priority scheduling technique