Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Scouting the Territory

My topic idea is still the same as it was when I wrote my first blog. I think sports would be an interesting topic to do and I have purchased the book Confessions of a Spoil Sport. I'm still not exactly sure what in sports I want to focus on, but I think I want to talk about the overall effects on the University. I know that is a pretty broad topic, but I'm sure once I start researching it and looking further into it, I will find a few topics to focus on and narrow down my focus in the paper. After I did a google search on effects of sports of Rutgers, I found an article on some criticism of the big time sports investment that Rutgers made when deciding to expand the football stadium and try and become a premier division one program. When I just searched sports at Rutgers, the football team page came up, as I expected it would. I came across a few other results when searching google scholars and I think this may be a useful tool in my research. I can't say I got any specific ideas about my topic from this, but I did find a few decent articles about my topic. The two sides of the debate about my topic would be whether or not a school, like Rutgers, should devote the time and money to sports as they have and take away from academics in the process.
This is one link I found: http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=JpS3OnBpcDMC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=sports+in+college&ots=TqELaOszCT&sig=ZzwRQLOicWCp6uHA9z37lWzd1ZU#v=onepage&q=&f=false

I think I still need to find out which side I am going to take on this debate.

1 comment:

  1. I think that is a big question and worth pursuing. And there are definitely two sides of the debate -- though, as Dowling discusses, the pro-Sports side is not usually out to defend their opinions so much as to stifle debate. You should read the Rutgers Review interview that is an appendix to the book -- and the story of Fraidy Reiss. Fascinating. But there are definitely more articulate defenders of the sports regime and, at least, people who can tell you the logic (which is partly a response to privatization forces).

    Now that you have the counter-argument in hand, try to find the best logical arguments in favor of college sports at Rutgers.

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