#1583 College Football as Cultural Lens

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 22 January 2024

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Clay is joined by two guests, David Nicandri the West Coast Enlightenment correspondent for Listening to America and Dr. Kurt Kemper of Dakota State University in Madison, South Dakota. Kemper is the author of College Football and American Culture in the Cold War Era. Kemper and Nicandri believe that larger themes in American culture find expression in the world of sports. Much of the discussion surrounds the famous 1962 Rose Bowl—in which the faculty of Ohio State University voted not to send the football team to the celebrated New Year’s game because it would distract from the academic mission of the university. The result was a riot in Columbus, Ohio, with lots of property damage and in which faculty members and the university president were burned in effigy. In the end, UCLA played the University of Minnesota in the Rose Bowl. The program also explores the ways in which the Civil Rights Movement roiled college football in the 1950s and 60s.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Happy New Year's everyone and welcome to the special edition of
0:05.4	listening to America. I have the joy today of having two guests, our old friend
0:10.5	David Nacandry, our West Coast Enlightenment correspondent, and also Dr. Kurt Kemper,
0:14.8	historian at Dakota State University in Madison, South Dakota,
0:18.2	where I had the chance earlier last year to give a talk on the future of
0:21.9	education in the era of artificial intelligence.
0:25.6	Kurt Kemper, among other things, is the author of two really important books,
0:29.6	college football and American culture in the Cold War era and then more recently before March
0:34.2	madness the wars for the soul of college basketball.
0:37.1	So first welcome Kurt.
0:38.7	Thank you, happy to be here, happy new year.
0:40.7	Listening to America is different from the old Thomas Jefferson Hour in that our brush is
0:44.5	wider and our lens is wider too and we're going to be looking at all sorts of American
0:49.4	phenomena as we approach the 250th birthday of the United States on July 4th
0:54.7	2026. So David McHenry you brought Kurt's work to my attention. Everybody who
0:59.2	listens to our program knows that one of your secondary interests or maybe it's primary by now is
1:04.7	sports and that you are, I'm sorry to say, a frequent caller into Mad Dog Russo's National
1:10.5	Radio program, we won't hold that against you. But tell me why you found
1:14.9	Dr. Kemper's work so compelling. Well this has been an unusually interesting football
1:19.6	season for me as a lifelong fan of both college and professional football, in particular because I'm a fan of Oregon State University, and along with Washington State University, those schools were marooned by the dissolution of the PAC-12
1:36.3	conference. In many respects, I was following the legal front as much as the play
1:41.2	on the field all fall.
	...

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