From cm-life.com

How about improving grades of the football team, which had one of the lowest GPAs in the MAC last year?

How about challenging academic departments to be national-level, a la the Physician’s Assistant program? (Which is a better PA program nationally than CMU is a football team by a factor of like a million)

Sports teams always try to win, do you think that is was lack of effort that caused them to fail last year? ‘Why don’t you actually TRY to win this year guys ’cause you let us all down last time!’ I think losing to Purdue coming from CMU is not a bad place to be.

If you’re going to pick three things that need to be changed on campus, make them things that administrators and students can change, not things that less than one percent of students (and even then just a fraction of the student-athletes) can do.

How about action on the proposed revision to general education guidelines that effect every single undergraduate at CMU and have been stalled for nearly two years?

What about getting students graduated in four years? Better financial and academic advising? Recycling off campus at apartments? Political activism during an election year?

The first two suggestions are great, I just wish that CMU and CM Life would lavish proportionate attention (and proportionately high expectations) on academic programs and students.

And I’m unclear on why we “need” to beat a “Bowl Championship team” (or why it is capitalized). Will the football team cease to exist if not? Lose recruiting, because I don’t think star high schoolers would choose CMU over Purdue even if we had won. And isn’t saving the MAC a little presumptuous and a little beyond the goals CM Life should be setting for CMU and its students? Why not just save the whales and be done with it?

But significantly, why is a winning football team a “need” while the more pressing concerns that effect everyone (not just athletes, fans and sports editors) received nothing but the pretty-please, oh-it’d-be-great-if-you-could-but-if-not-that’s-cool-too treatment. Twenty years from now without significant additional investment in infrastructure CMU will be in a major mess, twenty more years of bad football and we’re just where we are now. Sounds like the “need” isn’t MAC championships to me.

Hypocrisy check: CM Life did the same thing last year when I was an editorial board member and I didn’t agree then with setting goals for sports teams (except that they should always try to win, but they do that anyhow) when there is so much else to strive for. I objected last year, I object this year and I’m pretty sure I’ll be doing my best to object next year too.

Mike Ellis commenting on “Top three changes” Aug. 21.

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