BigWoof31;1746675; said:
This thread just boggles my mind.
Maybe it's because we don't really have anything like this in Georgia as both Tech and UGA are on fairly equal footing in terms of funding from the state and relative competence in Athletics.
To make a bit of a far fetched analogy, it seems as if Ohio State is sitting at the head of the table at Thanksgiving Dinner. A massive spread of anything the heart desires is laid out in front of you. Everything and anything imaginable.
And yet...
You're fussing about the little kids sitting at the table with broken chairs in the corner who are sharing a bowl of Captain Crunch?
Why do you give a shit?
In 1904 Ohio State was made the flagship college -- probably when the The Ohio State University got it's start. Restrictions were placed on duplicating programs thus eliminating many of the Masters and Doctoral programs at the smaller schools. The presidents of these schools didn't like the slight.
Somewhere along the way we had a convergence between an ambitious Governor and a president of Miami, one Thomas Schriver. Gov. Jim Rhodes had floated the novel idea of something for nothing in his campaign -- every kid who graduated from an accredited Ohio high school was guaranteed admission to Ohio State and there would be a dorm room waiting for him and if he didn't want to go to OSU Rhodes would make sure he had a dorm room in any other state college. All of this building was to be paid for without raising taxes.
Cranes appeared all over Ohio and dorms were built and then the presidents of OU and Miami discovered that due to the fact that though all roads in Ohio eventually led to Columbus, very few led to Athens and Oxford. Their enrollment numbers weren't going to fill the dorm space they had just created.
Schriver came up with the notion that Harvard-on-the-Hocking and Oxford-on-the-Miami should be allowed to become the state schools with selective enrollment and the rest would be wide open. Rhodes bought the plan.
Thus, from the late 1950s through the 1980s, Ohio State was where you sent your son or daughter for two quarters if they couldn't get in anywhere else.
I should add that like most of what Rhodes "did for Ohio," the plan was of limited vision. Ohio State's capacity to house and feed shot from 20K to 45K, but there was no money in the tax free scheme to pay for more professors, build more class rooms (kind of like the cancer research center he wanted to build near Athens -- the buildings were budgeted but not the doctors, researchers, lab equipment, etc.) and his school plan certainly contained no money to create the kind of programs that might have kept "at risk" students in school for more than one hell raising freshman year. So you had a campus of 45K and an academic plant designed to serve 20K.
Something on the order of academic sausage ensued.
It took two far sighted presidents -- E. Gordon Gee especially -- to re-transition Ohio State into the lead school in the state system, end grad program duplication, and restore many of the top academic/research programs to Columbus and the academic folks in Athens and Oxford have not taken kindly to it.
Therein lies the history of anger between the schools.
