… in the dictionary of obsolete phrases. What Goldman Sachs has done to client-based, America’s sports factories have done to student-athlete. A philosopher thinks it’s time to dump the latter.

[A]ccording to another N.C.A.A. report, the graduation rate (given six years to complete the degree) for football players is 16 percent below the college average, and the rate for men’s basketball players is 25 percent below. Even these numbers understate the situation, since colleges provide underqualified athletes with advisers who point them toward easier courses and majors and offer extraordinary amounts of academic coaching and tutoring, primarily designed to keep athletes eligible to play.

Extraordinary amounts is something of a euphemism. If University Diaries were really serious about chronicling all of the university-sponsored cheating for athletes, she’d write about nothing else.

[The phrase ‘student-athlete”] is a falsehood institutionalized for the benefit of a profit-making system, and educational institutions should have no part in it.

The deeper harm, however, lies in the fact that, in the United States, there is a strong strain of anti-intellectualism that undervalues intellectual culture and overvalues athletics. As a result, intellectual culture receives far less support than it should, and is generally regarded as at best the idiosyncratic interest of an eccentric minority. Athletics, by contrast, is more than generously funded and embraced as an essential part of our national life.

When colleges, our main centers of intellectual culture, lower standards of academic excellence in order to increase standards of athletic excellence, they implicitly support the popular marginalization of the intellectual enterprise. It is often said that the money brought in by athletics supports educational programs. But the large majority of schools lose money on athletics, and the fact that some depend on sports income confirms, in monetary terms, the perceived superiority of athletics.

Even at schools that (sometimes) make a sports profit, most of the money goes right back into sports. Another school has a bigger Adzillatron (go here and scroll down for UD’s Adzillatron posts) and you’ve got keep up. The coach to whom you’ve been paying six million dollars has been beating up his players and has to be fired, which will cost you tens of millions of dollars in legal fees, ’cause he’s gonna sue. That sort of thing.

***************************

UD thanks dmf.