The author of the much-discussed long Atlantic article about paying college athletes sends a comment to University Diaries:
Big universities are addicted to sports money, but not because it helps the academic budget. Nearly all athletic departments have such enormous expenses that they run deficits, not surpluses, covered partly by involuntary student fees. I quoted unversity presidents saying forthrightly that sports are an unsustainable obsession at the expense of academics.
We are the only country in the world that hosts big-time sports in higher education. You seek to divorce sports from academics to preserve the latter. The two may well be incompatible, but we have not yet even begun an honest debate on that question because the NCAA has reform efforts mesmerized by phony issues of amateurism.
UD thanks Branch for the comment. She agrees that in important ways her railing against big time sports is a kind of throat-clearing for the real argument that can only ensue when things get de-mesmerized.
September 21st, 2011 at 9:51AM
I think that Branch is absolutely right, in the quotation above. But the arguments for paying college athletes all turn out to be diversions from the real issues as well. After all, the value of a full athletic scholarship (for simplicity’s sake, let’s look at private institutions – Notre Dame, USC, Duke, BC etc. to avoid the state subsidy issue) is actually more than minor leaguers are ordinarily paid in any pro sport. The most valuable college athlete today is probably Andrew Luck at Stanford, and he chose to stay in college rather than go to the NFL this year. (Admittedly, his father is a well-paid AD.)
This is not to say that college athletes aren’t mistreated; the shift to year-to-year scholarships 45 years ago was the big step backward. But the point is that it’s not about the athletes, and it’s not about the money, it’s about the universities.
September 21st, 2011 at 10:25AM
did you catch the bizarre doublespeak tangential ‘defense’ of amateurism on PBS newshour the other night?
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/sports/july-dec11/ncaa2_09-20.html
September 21st, 2011 at 1:18PM
I do not follow the causal inference issued in the final sentence of Branch’s comment. How is it the case that we cannot have an “honest debate” over the dominance of budget-sucking, resource-swallowing major athletics programs until we resolve the NCAA’s ludicrous and wholly disingenuous arguments about amateurism?
To be sure, the latter is of course an ethical issue invoking past legacies and present structures of colonialism, racism, and exploitation. But I fail to see how calling attention to these matters is a necessary prerequisite to addressing the larger question of how it is that major athletics programs can swallow so much of universities that basic missions like, you know, paying for teachers and not increasing fees on some of those least able to afford it (students) are utterly compromised?
Though these two phenomena are obviously connected in time, space, and history, I see no reason why we cannot address them both simultaneously. In my view, we should institute parallel efforts by which we both seek to expose, undermine, and reform the sham amateurism that drives colonial mentalities in major college sports, and at the same time initiate a larger conversation about the injustice of abandoning core missions to fund athletics programs.
September 21st, 2011 at 7:05PM
I would also argue that Mr. Branch’s “solution” to the problem of phony amateurism by paying athletes does little more than lead to a simplistic transfer of funds from students (who subsidize sports through athletic/student fees) and taxpayers (who subsidize these sports through tax preferenced donations) to a few athletes. It will also add fuel to the existing fire, by adding to the momentum for an even more centralized and powerful ESPNUniversity, as it drives the smaller, less competitive, smaller schools out of the market.
I have no doubt that the market value of the entertainment provided by some of these athletes far exceeds what they currently get in side payments and in-kind benefits. But, the appropriate order to solving the problems does not begin there. It ends there, after the tax preferences and hidden subsidies from the rest of the university are removed.
September 24th, 2011 at 7:50AM
UD:
Branch is being disingenuous at best. Does his article make at all clear the point he makes in his note to you, that sports do not generate an institutional profit but usually a deficit? I don’t think so. He claims he quotes presidents to that effect and, while I don’t doubt he may have heard privately from some about their concerns, unless I am mistaken (and I have gone back over the long article several times) those financial caveats are not in the article. What you find when you read the article are quotes like this, delivered prominently at the outset of the article and clearly intended to develop its tone: “Educators are in thrall to their athletic departments because of these television riches . . . ” and “(w)ith so many people paying for tickets and watching on television, college sports has become Very Big Business. According to various reports, the football teams at Texas, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, and Penn State—to name just a few big-revenue football schools—each earn between $40 million and $80 million in profits a year, even after paying coaches multimillion-dollar salaries.” No, the financial effect on universities of big-time sports is just not on Branch’s rage radar screen. So we move on to the core of the argument, dealing mostly with the unfairness to the players. Branch only comes round to his player-centric view after couching it in institutional terms: “(f)or all the outrage, the real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the “student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes.” But he does not then argue to re-institute amateurism but rather to give up the ghost, meaning to accept the essentially commercial nature of big-time sports, a move that in turn justifies his morality-based argument for paying the players. It is a good position to take and is argued with appropriate moral fervor. But how is it again that by ditching amateurism first, presumably as an act of moral cleansing, we get to a better place relative to *higher education*? Where will the new money come from? And even if the money is found without recourse to increases in tuition and pressure on academic budgets, what in God’s name would the resulting enterprise have to do with a college? It would be a junior NFL. That might be a good thing, necessary for the moral reasons Branch outlines. But it ain’t higher education