Birmingham-Southern College

The number of closures has, has been a steady drip, and, and sometimes, sometimes the closures happen for reasons that you really can't generalize from.

In Birmingham, Alabama, uh, for example, Birmingham Southern College, a, a college I was very fond of.

I've done several workshops there, visited a great deal.

It closed in part because of a massive financial mismanagement and then a failure to get the state government to support it.

That was a growth moment.

So then two weeks later, I got offered a division one assistant job at Birmingham Southern back when they went from NAIA to division one.

Then they quickly went to division three.

But like it all happened at once.

He was a populist in the mode of William Jennings Bryan and a racial moderate by the standards of the South, which meant that in the 1920s he denounced the Klan while voting against an anti-lynching bill.

Throughout his career, Black people were denied the vote in Alabama, allowing him to take radical positions on behalf of Birmingham's white working class while avoiding the true test of courage in Southern politics.

He had a diminutive Southerner's resentment of bigness, a political philosophy he called Jeffersonian, and he spent his whole career on the losing side, against America's entry into World War I, against banks and railroads in the 20s, and against the New Deal, which led to his defeat in 1936.

He retired, bought some property, and became a hardcore Dixiecrat.

He sold out all his principles and became very reactionary, my mother said in 1947, when she was 22 and still living under her father's roof.

Mrs. Roosevelt, for example, was an abomination on the face of the world.

But when she was 17 in the fall of 1942, something happened that changed her life.

She had just enrolled at Birmingham Southern College, a Methodist school that all her siblings had attended.

Yes, I have.

I was calling a Birmingham Southern basketball game.

It was courtside.

And my designer jeans ripped.

Our defensive coordinator coached college football for 30 years.

He was the head coach at Birmingham Southern, coach at Georgia Southern, Jacksonville State.

What's his name? Eddie Garfinkel.

Okay.

with the hair superstition.

You know, I go to college, I swim at Birmingham Southern, a little D3 school, not a big deal.

NCAA athlete, people forget.

I do the same thing.

I grew up an Alabama fan, just to be in all candor.

But my dad went to Alabama, but I went to Birmingham Southern, so neither Alabama nor Auburn.

Go

Panthers.

And so I am spending a lot of time going to Auburn games now.

But I also pull for Alabama as well.

But like I said, having gone to Birmingham Southern, I don't have a – I'm not an alumnus of either college, but, you know, with my money going so many years to Auburn and I, of course, you pull for your kids.

And like I said, my wife's been a longtime Auburn fan.