New Nike Order

Sometimes this spawns a cataclysm - college students chained to nuclear plants, Kent State violence.

And other times it is Santa Claus in spring crying "No Nike, ho, ho, ho."

Boxes of rejected Nike sneakers dumped in the university president's office by students driven to fight because the university they were supporting with their tuition dollars, the university whose name would be printed on a diploma they must keep for life - the University of Arizona was selling its name and its reputation.

Cataclysm enough for the University of Arizona whose students are often more remarked upon for their blissfully oblivious taking of all on the college plate - beer, good sex, good times - rather than their Ivory Tower intellectualism or social activism.

For the order among both the University of Arizona as an educational institution and the students as an infamous apathetic bunch was being subverted, slowly and painfully converted.

The many apathetic still walked shrugging by.

But Nike's offer of tainted money in exchange for UA laundering the loot with its reputation was churning up the fundamental principles of this school.

And when the foundations are heaved apart, all kinds - the brave, the fringe intellectuals - come out with the ugly.

Then this week, the polar shift concluded and the UA-Nike contract was signed. The needle now points south and south, of course, is nothing but a metaphor for the corporate, corpulent face the university has taken directly in opposition to the classic ideal of an educational institution.

For if education is the shaping of mind and character, as administrators always say, then the UA with the signing of the Nike contract divorced itself utterly from that ideal with their oblique acknowledgment that the instinct of any uneducated child holds reign over the UA. That is, if given a little grease for sacrificing some scruples, then to hell with the scruples.

Of course, the university said to hell for very little grease, considering.

Considering that Nike this week agreed to pay only $7 million for the right to package its name, which increasingly has come to stand for exploitation of economically trapped workers, with the name of a university that for more than a century has stood for higher education and a path to a brighter future for much of Arizona's youth.

We can shrug and say truly, the agreement is innocuous, for it mandates only that athletes from 16 UA teams wear the Nike symbol. Let Nike borrow the glory and good name of the university for a couple of games.

But reputation is as akin to a soul as a college can have. And the University of Arizona sold it.

And Nike purchased with it the right to cloak its stains under the UA's name. But no blots are covered without transferring the stain.

Once lent as a cloak to Nike, the University of Arizona's reputation is no longer wholly clean nor wholly in its control.

No amount of promises that the UA can cancel the contract if worker exploitation continues will change the fact that if and when Nike has been found to yet again be violating human rights, the UA will be guilty of shielding a notorious exploiter.

And that it overturned its principles to do so.

The apathetic may kick back with a beer and say forget it and let me watch the game, let the protesters pass defeated.

But it is a whole new order. And for better or worse, oblivious student or not, we will all have to reckon with it.

Mary Fan is perspectives editor and an international studies and journalism senior. Her column, Skyfall, appears every Thursday and she can be reached via e-mail at Mary.Fan@wildcat.arizona.edu.