Sports & Scholarship
Remember when we were kids, and the meatheads never ever got along with the eggheads? Okay, neither do I, but our parents might. Regardless, I know a few people who seem to think that sports and academics don't belong together. Being the sports loving law student I am, I tend to disagree, as do the incomparable late Stephen Jay Gould and the always long-winded Gregg Easterbrook, two authentic brainy types. Gould, better known for his thoughts on evolutionary biology, was actually quite the proponent of sabermetrics, and a profound fan of baseball. Easterbrook, a contributing editor for The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly and The Washington Monthly, and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, is also known as the Tuesday Morning Quarterback over on Page2.Academics have long had a flirtation with sport - not all academics, natch, but still - and one entertaining tidbit I've noticed with these two is their connection to their times. Gould grew up in New York in the mid-20th century, when baseball truly was America's Pastime. In his age (which butts right up against our own), academics loved baseball. Thus the whole sabermetrics thing. Easterbrook, of course, is a football guy. Football is now king in American sport, and arguably also in American academic communities - at least those that follow sports. If you read TMQ's latest column (which actually inspired this post), you'll notice the scientific analysis of statistics that is creeping its way into football, as well - not that you can always tell by the coaches' calls.
Another thing both of these men embody mirrors something one of my professors at Purdue said to my class. It really stuck with me, what he said. He lamented the loss of the true scholar, the interdisciplinary genius. Back in the day, Aristotle was a mathematician, a political theorist, an astronomer, a philosopher and more; Leonardo was an engineer, a sculptor, a painter, a master of anatomy (and if you believe certain novels, the head of an underground organization); Newton was a mathematician, a physicist, an astronomer, an alchemist (and the head of that same underground organization). Today, my professor argued, everyone is a specialist. There are physicists, there are chemists, there are philosophers and painters and writers of prose, but there are no true scholars. If nothing else, Gould and Easterbrook are evidence to the contrary, though certainly not the only ones. (Modern physics actually is the source of some really interesting modern philosophy, and it must have taken some kind of interdisciplinary skill to gather that, right?) Gould and Easterbrook are masters of statistics, philosophy, popular psychology, and of course sports fandom and general geekiness - all admirable disciplines. They are both also enjoyable writers, and I recommend them to anybody interested in some good reading.
posted by The AMT @ 9:37 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home