The University of Misery

Saturday night I posted on Facebook an ESPN clip, a video retrospective of the University of Missouri Golden Girls, a group of dancers who perform at football games, that is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year. One of the girls featured in that clip is now my wife. She was 19 at the time.

The clip was presented under the title, “SEC Nation,” part of an ongoing series of sidebars produced by EPSN to give football fans insight into the traditions of teams that belong to the Southeastern Athletic Conference. 

Missouri didn’t belong to the SEC when my golden girl was a Golden Girl. It belonged to the Big 8, a conference of Midwestern universities that included Iowa State, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Kansas. The Big 8 became the Big 12 in 1996 with the addition of four Texas universities.

Missouri is an anomaly among American states. It was admitted to the union in 1821 as a slave state, settled by southerners who wanted to bring with them slaves to pick the tobacco and cotton they intended to plant. At the beginning of the Civl War, when other slave states were seceding from the union, Missouri, whose legislature had decided to join them, was kept from doing so by President Lincoln, who ordered its lawmakers arrested and jailed. Relations between blacks and whites in Missouri have been tense ever since and, on occasion, flare up spectacularly, as they did in Ferguson last year.

In 2011, the Board of Curators of the state’s university made the decision to withdraw from the Big 12 and to join the Southeastern Conference, comprised of universities located in states that were part of the Confederacy -- schools like Ole Miss, Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina. Many if not most northerners of a certain age will tell you that the first thing that comes to mind when you mention schools in that part of the country isn't football prowess. They're remembered primarily for refusing to admit African-Americans in the 1960s. Ole Miss famously tried to block James Meredith. Alabama Governor George Wallace attemped to prevent African-Americans from enrolling at that state’s university. Missouri wasn’t that far ahead in terms of accepting black students. Its first had been admitted in 1950 but Mizzou, by and large, escaped the notoriety the Deep South schools received.

What made the University of Missouri’s curators abandon the Big 12 for the SEC?  Money. SEC schools rake in millions made possible by advertising dollars. SEC fans live and breathe college football, enabling networks like EPSN to charge huge bucks for advertising which they share with the conference’s member schools.

As I write this, the University of Missouri campus is imploding. Following a series of race-motivated incidents to which many students felt the University president’s response was inadequate, Mizzou’s football players announced on Saturday, about the time I posted the Golden Girls clip, that they are refusing to play until he is fired. Faculty members, academics who have long resented that the president wasn’t “one of us” (he is a businessman rather than an academic) have joined in and are refusing to teach. It’s a mess, the lead story on the news, and an embarrassment for everyone associated with the school, my alma mater.

If the University of Missouri curators, who are scheduled to go into an emergency session momentarily to address the situation, really want to understand some of the reasons Mizzou is imploding, one of the first things they should do is look at the athletic department’s bank account. 

Today that bank account is overflowing because they, in their wisdom, decided the University of Missouri would be better off being known as a Southern college rather than a Midwestern one.