Alumni Clubbing
Meg’s running sort of a blogger’s hootenanny this week, and go take a look, it’s a lot of fun. She asked for a subject for today’s entry, and, being the helpful fellow I am, I remembered a caption to a picture in my wife’s college alumni magazine (Carnegie Mellon). The picture accompanied an article about the chemical engineering department, and showed a shiny contraption with many hoses and valves. The caption read, “The ultra-high vacuum surface analysis chamber is used to study the enantioselective adsorption of chiral molecules on chiral metal surfaces.” So I suggested that the subject of Meg’s blog entry be “The enantioselective adsorption…etc.” In retrospect, it was sorta cruel. I rock!
By way of contrast, my own recent alumni magazine (Ohio State) featured an article of several pages detailing what an alum can and can’t do for student-athletes and recruits. A former Heisman trophy winner is our alumni director. Several incidents over the last year made the article germane and essential, including a head basketball coach who paid a recruit’s family $5,000 and a booster who left an envelope of cash at his business’ reception desk for the starting quarterback (who actually showed up and took it). These things lead one to believe that the university community’s understanding of the nuanced definition of the term “student-athlete” has eroded somewhat, and perhaps a review of some major points is necessary.
