Blog 2: Essay Topic

As for the essay topic that I was supposed to choose for class, I chose an article in our textbook called "Professor's Liberalism Contagious? Maybe not."  The article digs deep into the popular notion that colleges and universities around the country promote liberalism more heavily than conservative ideas.  It is also believed that student's political beliefs are often swayed by their professors.  According to the author of the article, these are simply urban myths and there is no solid evidence to prove any of these accusations.  Through his research and the research of many others, political orientation has been more heavily linked to one's upbringing and home environment; two factors that mainly shape one's political beliefs well before reaching college.  This has been the subject of a very heated debate between liberals and conservatives for years, and it has even gotten to the point where the conservative party is calling for "supervision" over colleges and universities in order to ensure political diversity on our campuses.  The author then goes on to argue that even with such supervision, the opinions of students would rarely change, as their minds have been made up about what they believe long before reaching college.  I chose to do an analysis of this article because I am a Political Science major, and I find this debate to be very interesting due to the fact that I see evidence of this debate everyday both in class and in outside social situations.

Blog 1: EPL's 25-Man Roster Rule

For my first blog post, I read an article on ESPN.com regarding the new “25-man roster” rule for England’s professional soccer league, known as the English Premier League or the “EPL.” The article went into discussing how this new limitation on team rosters would affect the potency of the league and the success of individual teams when the new rule comes into effect on September 1, 2010. The rule also puts restrictions on how many “international” or “non-English born” players are allowed on each team’s roster. The author of the article argues that this addition to the rule has caused quite a controversy due to the immense amount of foreign born players who are already previously signed with teams. He went on to talk about how over the first two weeks of the new season, team managers have had to play domestic players much more often over the already proven foreign players in order to fill the quota and to abide by the new piece of legislation. He argues that while this may affect the success rate of the teams within the EPL, it may eventually become a positive catalyst in the future success of the English National Team. As someone who has played the game their entire life and follows the EPL very closely, I would have to agree with the author. It takes some background knowledge of the game and all its facets, but it has most certainly been proved over time, in my experience, that the push for more “homegrown talent” does make the national side much stronger as time goes on.

Article: http://espn.go.com/sports/soccer/blog/_/name/young_mark/id/5492745/epl-25-man-rule-benefits-english-soccer