I have spent the last month going deeper into the concept of American Exceptionalism and also reading more commentators on Turner. I am just about done with a The End of American Exceptionalism by David Wrobel.

The book looks into the era surrounding Turner’s development of and presentation of his Frontier Thesis. The end of the frontier was the end of a 300 year period of expansion and Turner was not the only person concerned with what it meant. From sociologists and politicians to economists and media outlets, the end of the American frontier received great amounts of investigation.

Beyond the academics and policy makers thinking, speaking, and writing on the ‘end of the frontier’, much of the American public reacted to this fundamental shift in America’s development and also its view of itself and its uniqueness. From calls for expansion abroad to demand for Western novels and art, the ‘frontier anxiety’ was real for decades after Turners presentation at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, Il.

“Calling all University of Maryland student entrepreneurs and recent graduates! Do you own and run your own business? Do you think YOU are one of the best UM entrepreneurs? Tell your story to the whole University and to one of UM’s most successful entrepreneurs, Kevin Plank, CEO of Under Armour. If you convince Kevin that you are the best, in addition to a great connection to Kevin and other prominent alums, you will take home the Cupid’s Cup, an annual award to the best UM student entrepreneur, and $15K in cash!” –  from UMD.

I am fortunate to live near UMD and visit their great b-school periodically. I recently attended one of their Pitch Dingman contests (a weekly event for students to pitch new ventures; the end of month session awards $2500) and will be posting on the event later this week. They have put a lot of thought and time into building an entrepreneurial eco-system and there is much to gain for campus entrepreneurs in College Park, MD.

Check out the Cupid’s Cup Website to see how an entrepreneurial business school puts it together.

A college sports edition of campus entrepreneurship for y’all. Yesterday, the WSJ feature an article by Neal E. Boudette exploring the life-long rivalry between the current Boston College and Boston University men’s hockey coaches. Here is how the story opens:

On New Year’s Eve in 1962, Jack Parker and Jerry York lined up against each other in a high-school ice-hockey game — and started a rivalry that has become one of the most extraordinary in college sports.

After high school, Mr. Parker played at Boston University and Mr. York at Boston College. Mr. Parker later became the coach at BU, and Mr. York at BC.

Now, after nearly half a century of going toe-to-toe, each man’s success is unexcelled — and they are still fierce competitors. Mr. York has accumulated more wins — 827 — than any other active college coach. Mr. Parker is only seven wins behind him.

The piece goes on to detail the intensity of the rivalry and some of the amazing feats of each man and his respective University. It also reminds us of the important role that athletics play in the modern campus marketplace.

One of the reasons that the campus is the frontier of entrepreneurship in the US is that it is a huge market in its own right and can either support full ventures or serve as a proving ground for various products (Gatorade) and services (FedEx & Kinkos individually, though now joined together as FedEx Kinkos).

The sports submarket of the campus market is huge in its own right, complex, and based on passion that sports can and does inspire in fans and from time to time the masses of casual observers.

In related campus sports market news, Boston College and Under Armour (founded by one of the most succesfull campus entrepreneurs of the last 15 years, Kevin Plan) have inked a deal whereby UA will become the schools exclusive and offical athletic apparel provider.

This is the latest aggressive move by Under Armour in declaring its goal to be a global sports brand. Reebok, which is based in Boston, is currently the exclusive provider for BC and can be none too pleased by Under Armour’s move into its backyard — not to mention taking a high profile partner.

From an article in the Boston Herald by Christine McConville,

Under Armour has scored a touchdown in the collegiate apparel game – and beaten out a local company on its home turf.

The Baltimore-based athletic gear company topped Canton-based sportsgear maker Reebok and won a lucrative, six-year deal to outfit Boston College’s athletes.

In July 2010, Under Armour – that tight-fitting, moisture-wicking clothing preferred by very fit athletes – will become the exclusive official outfitter for BC’s football and basketball squads, and 29 other varsity teams.

Just received an update from Sparkseed, a social venture fund/accelerator that provides “offers a comprehensive program for collegiate social innovators.” Ten students will be chosen to participate 

Sparkseed Innovators receive:

• Six months of comprehensive support, including:
  • Mentoring from entrepreneurs and executives
  • $20,000 in pro-bono services, such as legal counsel, accounting, design, etc.
  • $1,000 in seed money and up to $10,000 in follow-up funding
  • Skill-building webinars on topics such as writing a business plan, managing a team, pitching to investors, leveraging social media, and measuring impact
  • A four-day summit including networking, skill-building, and strategic planning.
  • A national network of young social entrepreneurs

What else you need to know…

• Applicants must be college students, but not graduating seniors.
• You can apply individually or with a partner.
• This is not simply a grant; this is a social innovator development program. While we do provide seed funding to our social innovators, you should not apply for this reason. The training, tools, and connections that we offer are the real value-adds.

The Sparkseed Competition’s first round is open until Feb 7, 2010. You must submit a video pitch and also fill out a profile on the Sparkseed page.

I have been working with some students on business plans over the past few and it became clear that ‘class work’ often gets in the way. Many of the students put in enormous amounts of time over the Thanksgiving break and it became obvious that making use of school vacation’s is crucial for students considering launching a business.

While many student entrepreneurs sometimes psychologically check out of their coursework, there is work that must be completed, deadlines to meet, and peers to support, often on group projects.

As the first semester comes to an end, we implore student entrepreneurs to start thinking ahead to your upcoming winter break. Depending on the campus, students will have between 3 and 6 weeks w/out coursework obligations.

The academic calendar often provides multiple chunks of ‘free time’ for student entrepreneurs to put into their ventures. Take advantage of this asset of the entrepreneurial frontier in America: its system of higher education.

Drop us a line and let us know what your plans are for an entrepreneurial winter break.

Its that time of year again: Global Entrepreneurship Week. The organizers have done an amazing job this year and there are events all over the place. Get out and get active — there are over 5200 events that are listed on the website.

Entrepreneurship is the most powerful human activity and its great to see people celebrating, expanding and supporting it this week. Good one Kauffman Foundation and Make Your Mark for putting this together.

In addition to teaching New Venture Creation this week, I will be celebrating this week by giving a guest talk in Zoltan Acs Social Entrepreneurship Graduate Seminar at GMU’s School of Public Policy and will also be attending one of the events taking place as an ‘official’ Global Entrepreneurship Week event. I will blog and tweet that one (@campus_entre). (I am still choosing between two events, will let you know when I finalize the schedule)

Before there was Kevin Plank and Under Armour — Phil Knight was using his learnings, contacts, and education from Oregon and Stanford to launch Nike (originally known as Blue Ribbon Sports). Knight and Nike’s staying power can be witnessed by the recent controversy surrounding Marcus Jordan (son of Michael and Juanita), the University of Central Florida, and Adidas.

Basically, Marcus is an 18 year old basketball player at UCF and refuses to wear any shoe other than Air Jordans (produced by Phil Knight’s Nike). UCF has an apparel and shoe contract with Adidas and as long as Jordan wears the his dad’s shoes, the school is in breach of the contract.

The most recent update is that Jordan won’t budge and he wore the Nike shoes during UCF’s first game. Adidas is therefore not going to pay UCF. The school stands to lose $3 million.

BTW, Marcus Jordan scored 1 point in the opening game, he was 0-3 from the field and 1-2 at the free throw line. He played 23 minutes.

Newmark’s Door has a great blog entry offering a compilation of criticisms of higher education in the U.S. Those quoted included professors, entrepreneurs, and . Those targetted include law schools, humanities, and computer science departments. There is something for everyone in this piece. Here are a few snippets and who they are attributed to.

Joel Spolsky (Entrepreneur):

Many universities have managed to convince themselves that the more irrelevant the curriculum is to the real world, the more elite they are. It’s the liberal arts way. Leave it to the technical vocational institutes, the red-brick universities, and the lesser schools endowed with many compass points (“University of Northern Southwest Florida”) to actually produce programmers. The Ivy Leagues of the world want to teach linear algebra and theories of computation and Haskell programming, and all the striver CS departments trying to raise their standards are doing so by eliminating anything practical from the curriculum in favor of more theory.

William O’Neill (Professor Emeritus at Rutgers)

As state support for public universities, who produce the great majority of college graduates, has declined so has the size of the permanent faculty in relation to student enrollments. About half of all undergraduate courses are taught by part time instructors, usually known as adjuncts, who receive pitiful salaries, no benefits and no job security. As the wretched serfs of academic life they have little incentive to teach well and every reason to inflate grades, as most students will forgive a teacher anything so long as they receive at least a B—except for those who seldom show up and never study, who will accept a C, although such low grades are rare. In addition to buying off trouble for doing such a poor job, the entire teaching force, from adjuncts to tenured professors, is tempted to win glowing student evaluations by bribing their classes. Widely derided when first introduced several decades ago, student evaluations have become a standard component of faculty promotions.

Newmark points to a great critique of the humanities by Harvard Professor Louis Menand. The article, The PhD Problem appears in Harvard Magazine this month.

In the sixties, the time-to-degree as a registered student was about 4.5 years in the natural sciences and about six years in the humanities. The current median time to degree in the humanities is nine years. That does not include what is called stop-time, which is when students take a leave or drop out for a semester or longer. And it obviously does not take into account students who never finish. It is not nine years from the receipt of the bachelor’s degree, either; it is nine years as a registered student in a graduate program. The median total time it takes to achieve a degree in the humanities including stop-time is 11.3 years. In the social sciences, it is 10 years, or 7.8 as a registered student. In the natural sciences, time-to-degree as a registered student is just under seven years. If we put all these numbers together, we get the following composite: only about half of the people who enter doctoral programs in English finish them, and only about half of those who finish end up as tenured faculty, the majority of them at institutions that are not research universities. An estimate of the total elapsed time from college graduation to tenure would be somewhere between 15 and 20 years. It is a lengthy apprenticeship. . . .

The effort to reinvent the Ph.D. as a degree qualifying people for non-academic as well as academic employment, to make the degree more practical, was an initiative of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation when it was headed by Robert Weisbuch. These efforts are a worthy form of humanitarianism; but there is no obvious efficiency in requiring people to devote 10 or more years to the mastery of a specialized area of scholarship on the theory that they are developing skills in research, or critical thinking, or communication. Professors are not themselves, for the most part, terribly practical people, and practical skills are not what they are trained to teach. They are trained to teach people to do what they do and to know what they know. Those skills and that knowledge are not self-evidently transferable. The ability to analyze Finnegans Wake does not translate into an ability to analyze a stock offering. If a person wanted to analyze stock offerings, he should not waste his time with Joyce. He should go to business school. Or get a job analyzing stock offerings. . . .

Put in less personal terms, there is a huge social inefficiency in taking people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get. Unfortunately, there is an institutional efficiency, which is that graduate students constitute a cheap labor force. There are not even search costs involved in appointing a graduate student to teach. The system works well from the institutional point of view not when it is producing Ph.D.s, but when it is producing ABDs. It is mainly ABDs who run sections for lecture courses and often offer courses of their own.

Under Armour and leading talent agency IMG have joined forces and among other things, will begin creating a standard of measurement for high school athletes looking to play in college.

As we all know, college athletics is a huge business and many global brands have come out of that part of the campus eco-system. Nike and Gatorade are two examples (as is Under Armour).

Both sides of the recruiting equation (athletes and schools) spend countless time, effort and money trying to find the right fit of student-athlete to school/program. Below are some interesting snippets from the article by Daniel Kaplan of the Sports Business Journal (article via Baltimore Business Journal).

The Baltimore sportswear company and IMG are planning more than 100 global one- to three-day combines for high school athletes next year at which participants will be scored on a range of metrics, including physical attributes, mental stamina and sport-specific skills.

IMG is already a leader in training young athletes at its IMG Academies, and Under Armour will now be heavily involved with that Bradenton, Fla., facility, including supplying apparel, footwear and accessories.

The venture puts Under Armour’s (NYSE: UA) brand in front of young athletes and fits with the company’s performance-brand mission as it moves into new areas of the apparel business. IMG, meanwhile, as an established player in the training business, has benefits to gain by partnering with a youth-oriented brand.

The article then explains, “the new index will be called Combine360 and the two companies plan to announce the venture today. It is uncertain at the moment what name the combines will be branded under,” and that “there will be three types of combines under the Combine360 concept. One will test core physical attributes; the second will test sport-specific skills; and the third will test a wide range of elements such as mental toughness, nutrition and reactive times. At the end of the testing, the participant gets a score, something that IMG’s Pyne said will be the athletic equivalent of an SAT score.“

Like SATs, ACTs, and other standardized tests were controversial enough. It is fascinating watching as Under Armour stays close to its roots on the campus in order to strengthen its relationship with its customers and bring innovative products to them (students-athletes, their families, administrators, & coaches).

In recent years we have heard about how entrepreneurial university administrators have become. Creating new models and charting new paths for their august institutions. A new study from the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that 23 Private University Presidents in the US are making at least $1 million a year. Hot Dog, bureaucracy pays! From an article by Mary Beth Marklein in the USA Today,

Here are the Chronicle’s findings, based on federal tax forms, of the highest-paid presidents of private non-profit colleges and universities. Compensation includes salaries, fees, bonuses, severance payments, deferred compensation, and health benefits and pension plans.

1. Shirley Ann Jackson, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N.Y., $1,598,247.

2. Davd Sargent, Suffolk University, Boston, $1,496,593 .

3. Steadman Upham, University of Tulsa, $1,485,275.

4.Richard Meyers, Webster University, St. Louis, $1,429,738.

5. Cornelius Kerwin, American University, Washington, D.C., $1,419,339.

Perhaps the real entrepreneurial opportunity is becoming a money manager for Private University Presidents?