… is that it flushes out comrades in arms — people like the eminent sociologist John Shelton Reed, a man who was there (extremely well-positioned, in fact, at the now-notorious University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) long before UD stumbled onto the corrupt university athletics scene. Long before UD began wondering what to do about coach salaries, perks, and buyouts bankrupting schools, for instance, Reed was on the case, as in a 1997 Wall Street Journal piece, where he wonders why professors don’t run amateur student/athlete sports:
It shouldn’t be hard to find professors — or to recruit “professors” — willing to work with the varsity teams. This would be in addition to their regular teaching loads, of course, and there’d be no extra pay — no more than for faculty members who work with other student organizations.
And there’d have to be restrictions on outside income. Just as we hold athletes to higher standards than other students, so we’d have to expect more of their coaches than of other faculty members. If we’re really going to keep college athletics amateur, student-athletes should be served by “teacher-coaches.” Better yet, let’s not call them coaches at all. Let’s call them “faculty advisers.”
Only trouble is, how do you get rid of a losing coach if he has tenure?
Reed sent me another “golden oldie,” as he called it, this one from way back in 1987. It’s an essay in which he evokes the special something in the air down south during football season.
Like the other piece, it’s mainly about farcical levels of corruption down those parts when it comes to keeping hopeless students academically eligible, dealing with team criminality, etc., etc.
But it’s also got some great local details:
People used to alter the road signs around here to read things like “Interstate 85/Wake Forest 0.”
And it ends with words of wisdom:
For a college or university, assimilating semi-professional athletics is like building a perpetual-motion machine: some do better than others; but the undertaking is impossible in the first place.
November 30th, 2014 at 11:37AM
Wow! Prof. Reed’s thoughts really slap down the notion that big-money intercollegiate sports is an expression of amateur sportsmanship, or well-roundedness in education. If institutions believed that, if faculty believed that, you’d expect to see, if only rarely, a “professor-coach” somewhere. (FWIW-I roughly favor spinning off big-money college sports into royalty-paying corporations.)
November 30th, 2014 at 3:21PM
Most universities actually have both–professional minor league sports teams masquerading as amateurs and club sports, which are student organizations, typically with a faculty adviser/coach or a fellow student serving as coach.