An editor at the Atlantic hesitates to join the crowd and call for the professionalization of college sports – paying players, dropping the whole goes to class thing, etc.
Why even keep the “student” in student-athlete? There’s really no reason players at a big program like Miami should take classes. After all, it’s not like they’re real students. They’re just football players, right? They’re pros. Aren’t they?
Ending amateurism sounds like a no-brainer. Maybe it is. But one inevitable consequence of it is that absolutely nothing would stand between college athletes and sleazy boosters like [Nevin] Shapiro. There’s something in me that hates that. Whether or not it’s rational or fair, there’s something in me that says we need a mechanism in place saying it’s not okay to take college players to strip clubs or buy them jewelry — just as something in me says, all evidence the contrary, it’s important for those players to be enrolled in classes.
Some thing… some je ne sais quoi… arrests this person on the verge of agreeing with everyone else that universities should house hundreds of people whose only function is to hurl their bodies around in ways that excite large numbers of people. Whose only reward is strippers who do the same thing. Some thing… some almost-forgotten, impossible-to-articulate inkling… some metaphysical scent has wafted to this person’s nostrils and whispered that it’s important for players to do something other than play for us when they’re at a college.
Something in this person “hates” “sleaze.” Strong words. But what’s really being said?
If you take the player out of the college altogether – if you place this person in the pros – the problem disappears. Which is kind of interesting. It suggests that the college as such represents a different world from … the world. The college seems to be a different world, with pressures of its own toward higher things, better and more serious ways of life. Remove the silently but powerfully remonstrating college from the totally familiar, totally unremarkable dissipation most people, given enough money, will want to live, and no problem.
No one cares, in other words, about the behavior of professional athletes (except when it’s really, really, really appalling) because we don’t expect anything different. People care about the behavior of university athletes — because they’re at universities. If the university has any distinction as a location – any distinction at all – it lies here, in its call to its students and faculty to think rather than instinctively act; to be serious rather than always be at play; to hate violence and to love reason; to prefer reflection to impulse.
To be sure, there are locations in America to whose name the word university is affixed – Auburn University, Texas Tech University – which we all recognize to be mere locations, quads in the sand, nothingness. Nothing but games and the scandals that accompany them. We don’t get upset about the scandals emanating from these locations. We barely cover them. If we cover them, it’s just to laugh at them.
But there are all these other places in our country, these universities, where we feel shame and sadness and confusion, where we feel, as the Atlantic editor writes, that it’s not okay when large numbers of well-organized, well-financed members of the university community dedicate themselves exclusively to games and greed.
Within this inchoate discomfort lies the beginning of personal and collective efforts to define university.
August 18th, 2011 at 11:51AM
The model should be minor league baseball. And there is minimal scandal around the minors, because it’s not fraudulently claimed to be education! These guys get a wage, they play in minor league stadia which are sources of pride for the towns they are in. What’s not to like?
August 18th, 2011 at 12:20PM
And, yet, even with minor league baseball, college baseball lives on, has its own share of scandals, recruiting violations, etc. It certainly doesn’t approach that of football, but then it doesn’t generate the revenue that football does either, so maybe it’s just scale. Minor league football might siphon off some of those individuals who have no interest in that “scholar” side of things, but I suspect it’s not a panacea.
August 18th, 2011 at 1:44PM
Your pardon, but it seems to me that all this current sturm und drang is just cover for UDs regional chauvinism: Auburn, Texas Tech here; Alabama, Clemson, Miami, and poor old Auburn again before. It’s almost as if she has forgotten Michigan, Ohio State and USC still exist.
But wait, there’s more! Georgetown basketball is up to some “smart diplomacy” http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/fight-ends-georgetown-basketball-exhibition-in-china/2011/08/18/gIQAs1zeNJ_story.html?hpid=z2
August 18th, 2011 at 2:50PM
Shane: I appreciate the reminder. Although this blog, you’ll admit, spends a lot of time excoriating Michigan, Ohio State and USC, I have a tendency, yes, to stress the southland, and it’s not fair.
And I think it’s only fair to add to your list other schools I’ve sturm und dranged: UNLV, U Hawaii, U Alaska, Montana, Colorado. As for the east coast — Rutgers, baby.
Ain’t my fault that George Washington University doesn’t have a football team.
August 19th, 2011 at 6:51AM
I of course agree with what you say here but would think that the ethical call of University might also get to issues closer at hand for profs like grade-inflation and other admin-retentive forms of treating students as customers which seem to be the market driven worms eating at the heart of the endeavor.