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Title: De La Religion Revelee (1813) (French Edition)
WonderClub
Item Number: 9781120588135
Number: 1
Product Description: Full Name: De La Religion Revelee (1813) (French Edition); Short Name:De La Religion Revelee
Universal Product Code (UPC): 9781120588135
WonderClub Stock Keeping Unit (WSKU): 9781120588135
Rating: 5/5 based on 2 Reviews
Image Location: https://wonderclub.com/images/covers/81/35/9781120588135.jpg
Weight: 0.200 kg (0.44 lbs)
Width: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Heigh : 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Depth: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Date Added: August 25, 2020, Added By: Ross
Date Last Edited: August 25, 2020, Edited By: Ross
Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
$99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub (9296 total ratings) |
Karen Freimark
reviewed De La Religion Revelee (1813) (French Edition) on September 05, 2015Excellent, daunting, myth-exploding book.
500 pages, 177,000 words. A taxing read but written in a plain, direct prose style. The authors have something interesting to report on every page, in nearly every paragraph.
This book is ostensibly about college sports but it left me with a disheartened view of the higher-ed industrial complex, and of how that industry has morphed over the last 50+ years. This book practically predicted the inevitability of the recently revealed college-admissions bribery scandal.
I was spurred to read this book after reading Louis Menand's 4,000-word rave review in The New Yorker (Jan. 22, 2001), which unfortunately is behind a paywall.
Here are excerpts from Menand's review:
Shulman and Bowen are foundation officers by occupation . . . and statisticians by inclination. They are the sort of people who think that no observation is so intuitive that it can't be improved by a regression analysis. The Game of Life contains almost two hundred charts and tables, and its prose is cautious, methodical, and somewhat repetitive. But it may be one of the most important books on higher education published in the last twenty years. It is certainly one of the most interesting.
[The authors] gathered comprehensive information about the entering classes of 1951, 1976, and 1989 at thirty-two institutions: four large public universities, including Michigan and North Carolina; four Ivy League schools; nine other private universities, including Tulane and Stanford; seven coed liberal-arts colleges, including Swarthmore and Williams; four all-women's colleges; and four historically black colleges.
In 1998, Bowen and Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard, used [the same database that undergirds The Game of Life] to produce The Shape of the River, a study of affirmative action in college admissions, which provided empirical support for the claim that the benefits of affirmative action (such as the professional advancement of non-whites) outweigh the costs (such as the disadvantaging of white applicants). The Game of Life is drawn from the same database, and although affirmative action is barely mentioned in its pages, it is a kind of companion to the earlier book [The Shape of the River].
in 1997-98 (the most recent year for which complete enrollment data are available) there were six hundred and sixty-six varsity athletes enrolled at the University of Michigan and seven hundred and fifteen enrolled at Williams—and Michigan is more than ten times as big. Thirty-six per cent of Williams students play intercollegiate sports and only three per cent of Michigan's do. Princeton has nine hundred and forty-two athletes, half again as many as Michigan.
For many years, the Harvard-Yale game was what the Super Bowl is now—a national event for football fans. There was college football long before there was professional football.
The reason Princeton has half again as many varsity athletes as Michigan is that Princeton competes in half again as many sports: Princeton fields teams in thirty-one sports, Michigan in twenty-one.
Twenty-seven per cent of Ivy League students are athletes today; twenty per cent were athletes in 1951. What has changed is the relation of the athletes to the rest of the student body. In 1951, the academic profile of a varsity wrestler or swimmer at a place like Princeton or Williams was indistinguishable from the academic profile of his non-athletic classmates. By 1989, the varsity athlete at every type of school except all-women's colleges was highly distinguishable from the rest of the class—not only in terms of academic aptitude and achievement but in terms of values and interests as well.
. . . the S.A.T. scores of the typical varsity tennis player at a coed liberal-arts college are also much lower—a hundred and forty-three points lower—than his [non-athlete] classmates'.
Today, all college sports—not just sports like football, basketball, and hockey . . . —are played by students who have been recruited specifically to play them. In 1951, the Princeton squash player was an academically qualified man who happened to enjoy competitive squash. He was a sports "walk-on": he simply showed up for tryouts one day and made the team. Now there are almost no varsity-sports walk-ons....
[In 1999] Among men, if you were black you had an eighteen-percent better chance of getting into this college than a white student with the same S.A.T. scores had. If you were what is known in admissions talk as a "legacy"—that is, the child of an alumnus—you had a twenty-five-percent better chance. But if you were an athlete you had a forty-eight-percent better chance. If you were a female athlete, your advantage was fifty-three percent.
. . . virtually no college in the country makes money from football, no matter how successful its team. In 1998-99, the University of Michigan's football team had an average home attendance of 110,965 (a national record) and won the Citrus Bowl; the men's hockey team made it to the second round of the N.C.A.A. tournament, which it had won the year before; the men's gymnastics team won the national championship; and at the end of the year the athletic department had a $3.8-million shortfall. Still, for a school like Michigan or North Carolina, state pride is at stake. What is at stake for Stanford or Swarthmore? Why should colleges like those set aside slots for golfers, oarsmen, and badminton players in their entering classes? Michigan can make room for a hundred and fifty athletes in each class and still have more than five thousand places left. At Williams, which admits about five hundred students a year, more than a third of the places are taken by athletes.
It is not the case that having winning teams increases alumni giving; or that recruiting athletes enhances the racial or socioeconomic diversity of the student body
Since virtually every nonprofit college and university in the country is dependent on some form of federal aid, there is no escape from Title IX.
The Game of Life intends to make the case against intercollegiate athletics on their present scale, and readers not personally invested in college sports are likely to feel that it succeeds. Whether there are enough of these readers to lead to a change in policy is another matter. Shulman and Bowen are not optimistic,....
What's fascinating about The Game of Life, though, isn't the shadow it casts on college sports. It's the light it sheds, almost inadvertently, on college in general. Nearly everything Shulman and Bowen say about students who are athletes has implications for the way we think about students who are not. Many people believe, for example, that athletic virtues translate into social virtues. Shulman and Bowen are fairly certain that the main thing athletes carry off the playing field and into life after college is the belief that competition is good, which, as they point out, is not the belief a liberal-arts education was designed to inculcate.
One of the ways that Shulman and Bowen try to determine whether playing college sports makes people "better" is to distinguish between what they call "selection effects" and "treatment effects." They conclude that college athletes have the personal traits they do because they have consistently been selected—by admissions offices, by high-school coaches, and by the grownups who first encouraged them to play a sport—precisely for those traits. College athletes do not have team spirit because they play team sports, in other words; they play team sports because they have team spirit. There seems to be no evidence that actually playing the sport enhances the qualities athletes already have when they arrive on campus. Shulman and Bowen also find that the preference of male athletes for careers in business-related fields is present even before they start college, and that four years of liberal-arts education typically does little to change their goals or values. What Shulman and Bowen don't say, since it is not within the purview of their study, is just what "treatment effects" college has on anybody. Does a liberal-arts education make people more imaginative, open-minded, and humane, or is it that imaginative, open-minded, and humane people are the kind of people selected to receive a liberal-arts education? If the liberal arts genuinely liberalize, maybe there would be a greater social benefit if colleges recruited a class of bigots and highly intelligent dogmatists.
Today's athletes consistently outperform yesterday's in both professional and amateur sports. This, Shulman and Bowen believe, is the result of specialization. Athletes train more intensively, from an earlier age, to perform a particular task. People decide to become a goalie or a breaststroker when they are still in grade school, and they spend years developing a high level of expertise in that one small area of human endeavor.
. . . if you support a wrestling team you have to come up with at least one person in each weight class every four years.
. . . what is true of college athletes today is also true of college students generally. The admissions-office ideal used to be the all-around achiever—the Princeton squash player of 1951. Now the ideal is the gifted specialist. ... Instead of the well-rounded student, Shulman and Bowen explain, admissions offices now seek the well-rounded class.
In The Shape of the River, Bowen and Bok estimated that in 1976, at the twenty-eight predominately white schools in the Mellon database, a total of seven hundred black students were admitted who would probably have been rejected in a race-neutral admissions process. According to The Game of Life, in the same year twenty-four of those schools (leaving out the all-women's colleges) admitted approximately twenty-six hundred athletes. The male athletes' S.A.T. scores were, on average, ninety-four points lower than their classmates'. In 1989, those colleges admitted approximately thirty-three hundred athletes; the S.A.T. scores of the men averaged a hundred and eighteen points lower.
Many articles and books have been written to explain why admissions policies that take race into account are pernicious and ought to be abandoned. The University of California is now required by law not to use race as a criterion in admissions. That black Americans have historically been denied access to higher education is indisputable. That affirmative-action policies at élite colleges and universities have increased the number of black Americans in the higher-status professions is established by Bowen and Bok's book. By 1992, of the seven hundred black students who had entered selective colleges under affirmative-action criteria sixteen years earlier, seventy were doctors, roughly sixty were lawyers, a hundred and twenty-five were business executives, and more than three hundred had become civic leaders. How many crusaders against affirmative action in college admissions will now speak out against the preferential treatment of athletes?
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