Keeping bowl fever in perspective

Twice a year — in early January and again in late March — the nation turns its attention toward higher education with a joyous passion.

The current attraction is the onslaught of football bowl games — there were six on Monday alone, and we’ll have two more this week, culminating in the so-called National Championship Game next week. The excitement will regenerate just a little over two months hence in the form of the aptly named March Madness tournament to crown a men’s and a women’s national collegiate basketball champion.

The twin furors have an interesting effect on our image of the higher education system. For many people, they overshadow the view of colleges so darkly as to nearly obliterate the fact that their core mission is to educate the next generation of the nation’s citizens. For many others, that overshadowing is a distortion so pervasive as to invite condemnation and disgust.

As with most things, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

Without question, our fixation on college athletics can have consequences deleterious to the goals of education. Witness this season’s shocking child-sex scandal at Pennsylvania State University, a tragedy rooted, it would appear, in the combined fears of staining the reputation of a renowned football program and alienating coveted donors.

And those who use high-profile college sports as an opportunity to satisfy their gambling interests or simply their lust for competitive entertainment certainly can distract the rest of us from the larger message that our colleges and universities have to offer.

But we must resist the temptation to get lost in the distraction.

The fact is that in colleges at every level, athletics play a valuable role in the educational experience. The diving meet at a Division 3 private school may attract only a comparative smattering of fans, but its lessons in discipline and the thrills of competition are still as valuable for the participants as the explorations into the mysteries of the universe are for students in the school’s most arcane physics class. The mid-sized state university’s basketball team may fall just short of making the NCAA tournament, but the quest still provides a source of pride and excitement that energizes the learning experience for the entire student body. The quality of the football team may have nothing to do with the goals of a major university’s mathematics program, but it certainly can help lure some of the brightest students to the program — and help pay for the materials they’ll need to pursue their passion.

So, yes, as we lose ourselves this week in the excitement of the collegiate bowls, let’s remember that there is more to a college education than sports. But let’s also not overlook how much less of a college education there is without them.