Distracting the public eye

Dear Dr. Brehm,\nAs you prepare to take on the duties of Bloomington chancellor, I feel the need to tell you I can't imagine IU without basketball -- try as I might, I simply cannot. \nWhen I came to IU from Lexington, Ky., (home to another university and basketball team), I had to defend my choice to dozens of kind folks afraid that I would develop an opium-like addiction to red, white and Bobby Knight. \nAs anyone who has read my columns can tell you, that certainly hasn't been the case. But even though I haven't become the rabid fan my friends feared was the product of a Hoosier education, sports have been a part of my IU experience.\nAnd although you'll be our new vice president of academic affairs, Dr. Brehm, you probably won't escape the scary side of Hoosier Hysteria. This week, panic-stricken administrators will be praying not too many people die in the havoc wreaked by the "Greatest College Weekend Ever." So, like a gerbil trying to raise its voice above the lion's roar, I thought I'd let you know that some of us didn't riot.\nI'm sure you saw the chaos on CNN. \nYou might have tuned in to ESPN for Mr. Knight's farewell speech. And if you had been reading the IDS at the time, you would have noted that some students came to Bloomington to be closer to their beloved General.\nDr. Brehm, this is not another column about Bobby Knight's pitiable behavior, his lamentable mode of departure or the despotism of his 29-season reign. \nI don't want to beat a dead horse. But you've got to hear from the thousands of us whose hearts are filled with regret. We're the ones who watched in horror as the reputation of our fine institution stumbled into the gutter of exploitative cable coverage. We're also the ones who said to ourselves, "Dear God, what must the rest of the country think of us." \nI'll admit that this line of thought wasn't limited to admirable concern for our community. I can remember a few people saying to me, "I don't want to put IU on my resume if this place is synonymous with rioting basketball nuts." \nGoing to IU is a bit like living in Kentucky. Whenever there was a natural disaster in the Bluegrass state, most of us would mumble a collective prayer:\n"Please, God, if this makes the national news, do not let Peter Jennings and his cohorts interview some ignorant hillbilly standing in front of a decimated trailer. I know that Appalachian culture is rich, and that not all mountain folk are ignorant. But God, I am tired of leaving the state and telling people that yes, we do wear shoes and use the subjunctive. Amen."\nSimilarly, some of us say a certain prayer for the Cream and Crimson:\n"Please God, let people know that IU is not home to 30,000 sports maniacs who devote themselves to a false-god coach and who riot instead of reading "King Lear" or learning about mitochondria. Can you engineer an ABC news story about IU's participation in the Human Genome Project? Or perhaps compel USA Today to print a story about the Lilly Library? It's not that I'm a snob, God. It's just that I don't want to go to graduate school, meet a smart and sexy girl, tell her where I went to undergrad and hear her say, 'Oh, you mean the place where they had the basketball riots?' We're pretty smart people, and some of us care more about 'Middlemarch' than March Madness. Amen."\nWe're not asking much, Dr. Brehm. Just a complete revitalization of the national reputation of this university. Our best-kept secrets are scholarship and excellence. A professor friend of mine who once taught at an Ivy League school told me that students here more than hold their own when compared to our counterparts back east. And whenever we welcome guests like Dean Catherine Stimpson of New York University's Graduate School, these educational insiders always call IU one of the nation's finest universities. \nUnfortunately, ESPN didn't listen to me when I pitched a two-hour special called, "Indiana University: Academic Excellence and College Sports on One Campus." \nSo in the meantime, I'm still praying: \n"Dear God, You and I know this school is not full of vacant-eyed basketball fans who shave the letters I and U into their chest hair. Just tell that to the world"