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Wednesday, March 08, 2006
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Harvard National Scholar-Athletes Fund Frank Deford, on National Public Radio this morning, has an idea UD has heard before. Why not respond to the farce and larceny of university basketball and football by letting players major in their sports? As music majors major in music, he suggests, so ball players should be able to graduate based exclusively upon what they do on the field. It’s Deford’s …libertarian solution [to the] academic fraud of college athletics. [E]liminate all standards… Let colleges suit up for four years any able-bodied player whether or not he bothers to see the inside of any classroom … Universities as fine as George Washington [have] accepted clearly unqualified players… [whose] term papers [are] written for them [by] jock loving enablers on the faculty. …Why don’t we make honest men of college athletes? Some simply aren’t capable of college work. Under this approach we couldn’t really call these people “majors” because music majors have to take many other courses to get their BA -- college-wide requirements, distribution requirements, non-practice courses (history of music). Football and basketball -- call them concentrators -- would just play games. They would be exempted from all academic activity. Players who wanted to get an academic education could take the traditional route and become some other sort of major, but football and basketball concentrators would shake rattle and roll their way to a degree. UD would go further than this. F & B Concentrators would also be paid. Highly. The pretense of academic/athletic “scholarships,” routinely illegally supplemented by alumni boosters from the local business community, would be replaced by salaries. These salaries would come from the same place administrative and faculty salaries come from -- tuition, state aid for public universities, and ticket sales and other revenue generated by the sports programs themselves. Football and basketball players would, in other words, be employees of the university, supported by students and faculty and administrators, all of whose salaries and tuitions and fellowships would have an annual sports fee subtracted from them, because these… what’s that word corporate types like so much… “stakeholders” love the game, the school spirit generated, the publicity and corporate attention, the higher number of applications the school receives - all the goodies that accompany a winning team. UD would go yet further. As this new approach to bigtime university athletics introduces itself to the country, Harvard University, our most high-profile and (despite all its problems lately) most esteemed institution, would lend it prestige and legitimacy by establishing the National Scholar-Athletes Fund. This $10 billion fund, which Harvard would draw from its $26 billion endowment, would represent the country’s first real commitment to the first-rate higher education of some of our most promising and least advantaged undergraduates. It would be targeted at a very specific group among university athletes: those who are students at reasonably good universities; those who wish to major in an authentic academic subject; and those who are willing to invest the extra time it will take for them to get a real education. These students would have to be willing to be enrolled at their universities for up to eight years in order to balance a game schedule with a course schedule. They would have to be willing to assume, some semesters, lower-profile roles on their teams as their academic obligations evolved. In exchange for their patience and seriousness, these players would be guaranteed an up to eight year Harvard National Scholar-Athletes Fund Fellowship on top of their university salary. Known as the “Harvard Players,” they would constitute the aristocracy of the team and receive enormous media attention and national acclaim. Those admitted to graduate school would be guaranteed a continuation of Harvard Fund support. Frequently Asked Questions: What if significant numbers of people at a university refuse to subsidize the salaries of their basketball and football players in the way you suggest? This would indicate insufficient commitment to bigtime athletics on the part of the university. If your university is in the wrong level of sports league, a correction is in order. What sorts of undergraduate majors would be ineligible for the Harvard Fund? Leisure Studies, Human Kinetics and Leisure Studies, Spa Studies, Sports Psychology, Travel and Tourism, Casino Studies, Exercise Studies, Sports Therapy Studies, Sports Management. |