Eye On Illinois: For insight on college athlete rights proposal, look west

While the sports department has comprehensive coverage of the ongoing problems with Northwestern University’s football and baseball programs, there’s a government angle as well. State Rep. Kam Buckner, D-Chicago, a University of Illinois football alumnus, has made the rounds regarding plans to update his proposed College Athletes Bill of Rights.

While we await statutory language, the adventurous reader can visit legiscan.com/CA/bill/AB252/2023 to peruse California’s College Athlete Protection Act (Assembly Bill 252) to get a sense for how Buckner’s bill might develop heading into November’s veto session. And remember, legislative “protection” often relies on the power of consequences.

ON THIS DAY: Though not a native Illinoisan, a moment please to acknowledge the 101st birthday of Leon Lederman, the famed American physicist whose distinguished career included directing the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia and the 1986 founding of Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora.

Lederman, who died in 2018, was a uniquely talented researcher but also devoted to education, from the most advanced classrooms to explaining the work of science to the general public. He taught at both Illinois Institute of Technology and University of Chicago, institutions whose science departments have benefited from Pritzker and Rauner family donations.

There’s an abundance of information online for the curious, but in this space it seems proper to spotlight a Lederman quote from a 1992 University of California San Francisco symposium, which speaks to the notion that government isn’t and shouldn’t be run like a for-profit business:

“Are we making more mistakes now? I don’t think so. Science is a high-risk activity. And when you do science – this is very important incidentally for the general public, and for policy makers – if you are not wasting some of your money, you are not doing good science. It’s a funny way to say this. You’ve got to back high-risk opportunities. And high-risk opportunities means some fraction of them are going to fail. And I think in any science funding scenario, you’ve got to say, 10, 20, maybe even 30% of your funds are going to be invested in failures.”

INBOX: Thanks to a Spring Grove reader for his take on a potential new state flag: “Besides the cost of a new state flag, who knows or cares what it looks like? I’ve been an Illinois resident for over 50 years and keep up with most of the news. I read two newspapers daily and watch TV and internet coverage of many things. I have no idea what our flag looks like now and the way it’s displayed, usually upright behind someone’s desk it’s not visible at all. I’m a patriotic citizen but can’t imagine any need for a new flag even if the cost were minimal.”

• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Media. Follow him on Twitter @sth749. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.