So many good things to unpack here. I'm a former sportswriter, covered three Division I programs. One -- Washington State -- is currently $100 million in athletic debt. I'm not lying about that number. The former A.D. spent like a drunken sailor ($80M football facility when half that would've been fine), put the school in debt and fled to the University of Nebraska (sorry, Josh). Today, they still play the games at WSU, pay the coaches obscene amounts of money, and continue to build up debt, while the university cuts things like theater.
The other schools I covered had similar issues, except Oregon which was saved by a billionaire booster. Otherwise they'd be in the same boat.
I'm a sports geek, love college sports, ran cross country in college, all that. I'm changing my tune on all this with the insane money being tossed around, mostly for facilities and college salaries. It's rather obvious that Alabama will pay all their football players millions, while other schools that can't do it think they have to keep up with the Crimson Tide.
If my college offered a cross country club instead of intercollegiate team, I would've joined. We could've coached ourselves or found someone better than the lazy coaches I had. We could find local races, drive ourselves there. I would've been good with all of that. Perhaps the model that needs to be put in place, from major college to small college.
The WSU example is, indeed, painful -- and all too common. The boosters are now playing an outsized role in the NIL conversations. It's just not clear to me what academics has to do with any of it, though all of this presumably falls under the university brand.
Like you, I was a college athlete. I attended an NAIA school in Tennessee that gave out athletic scholarships. Funding for the program was minimal, and we had to raise money by cleaning the NASCAR stands after the Bristol 500. I'm not sure I've ever done anything more disgusting. I enjoyed the sense of belonging, but by my junior year it was clear that missing my upper-level classes in the afternoon to travel to small Appalachian towns for games was not worth the tradeoff. So I actually chose class over the away games, which naturally irked the coach to no end. But he had literally no connection to academic life on campus, and I think that's true for many college coaches. Aside from a handful of exceptions, a college coach's priorities typically work against academic life. I'm not sure there is an easy way to solve it, though the club model is an appealing option.
I remember sitting in the knot-hole section at Memorial Stadium when I was in grade school, and back then I believe those end zone tickets cost about a buck. It was thrilling. And when I was fifteen, I remember sitting with my friend whose dad had 50 Yard Line seats, watch Nebraska beat Army. Wow! That was a big deal in 1960, and years later when I was a senior at Nebraska I managed to score some seats high and away, still in the end zone, and it was still thrilling. And even today, when I happen to catch the Huskers on TV, I can still feel a bit of an adrenaline rush, though admittedly the feeling has lessened in the last years.
But why has any feeling presisted at all? Why do I have a physiological and emotional reaction to a game I never really played by a team I don't even know? Josh, you got me thinking about the complex interplay between sports, Big Time Sports, and the academic institutions that seem to house them. The money involved in Big Time Sports is, as many of the commentors here explain so clearly--insane, both staggering and irrational. We need sport to recruit students but most sports programs loose money.
So why do "we" keep on spending the kind of money that might finance several endowed chairs in the humanities on a scoreboard? I guess there are more or less "rational" reasons in Alabama where football can save a school, but mostly the irrational spending has gone beyond entertainment to something else, but what? A kind of religion (but more important), as some have suggested. Or perhaps it is one of those rituals that brings people together and gives us a sense of place and security as I heard a Greek anthropologist say on NPR today.
I get the way that sport is inflected with money and the conflicted feelings that everyone seems to have about sport and academic institutions or even academics. But it's hard to fight that spine-tingling sensation at the kick-off, the adrenaline rush when you see the football in flight. I even bought a Vikings shirt this year.
I agree, Walter. There's nothing quite like playing a sport, either, and my attraction to fandom draws from that rich well of memory, too. As I say in the piece, it's not sport that's the problem. The adrenaline, the belonging -- all of it was true before the scale of the enterprise grew so large. I have less of a problem with it in professional athletics, since those organizations are not tethered to academic institutions. But even then there are questions of scale that affect communities: how stadiums get paid for, who benefits from tax breaks, etc. Even if players are compensated handsomely, the business of management trading a player away is uncomfortably close to trafficking (I told my daughter that one baseball team "sold" a player to another team, and her jaw dropped, but it still was basically true).
Some defend athletics as civilized substitutes for war, which can also bring its share of adrenaline and belonging (as Cather's Claude Wheeler felt). I suppose that is true. But even then we are participating in something with an evolutionary root in violence and tribalism that I think education is meant to counter. I suppose we live with the contradiction the way we learn to live with our reptilian brains as part of the same organ that composes symphonies?
Sep 12, 2022·edited Sep 12, 2022Liked by Joshua Doležal
Unusually balanced discussion of a lightning-rod topic--thank you.
In 2014 I found myself in a unique situation: professor at a university, but also an alum of a different university in a different state where the president terminated a bowl-eligible football team, in December, just as bids were about to go out. (That was a first, the first of many firsts in this saga.) I had it on the authority of a former member of the Board of Trustees of the system that oversaw my alma mater that the termination of football was a first step toward the Board's curtailing of the entire 10,000-student undergraduate presence of my alma mater.
This sounds completely insane until you know that the driving force on the Board of Trustees were boosters of the flagship campus in the system, and they have long wanted the other campuses to shrivel up so that the flagship can get all the students and all the tuition money. It also makes more sense when you know that these boosters were football boosters, and are from the University of Alabama--which has completely redefined at an industrial scale what a "football school" looks like. The Bama boosters on the Board hire and fire presidents at the campuses they oversee, and they finally got one at my alma mater, UAB, who would do their bidding. (There is minimal representation of UAB grads on this board, and zero representation of UAH grads on this board. The board is crimson and white. It's a board overseeing three universities but only really representing one university. Oh, and the board is self-perpetuating, with minimal oversight by anyone, even the governor. Can't make this stuff up.)
Anyway, I jumped all-in to the fight against the Bama boosters on the Board trying to kill off UAB via killing off the football program. I even got faculty at UAB who were utterly opposed to football to hold their noses and write op-eds against the move, because of the larger existential threat to the undergraduate programs at UAB. And I became one of the larger individual donors to the football program and one of the chief antagonists of the quisling-president of UAB (then and now) who did the bidding of the Bama boosters by killing off football. (The public uproar forced the quisling-president and his Bama-booster handlers to rescind the termination, and since its return in 2017 UAB football has been conference-championship caliber and bowl-eligible every single year. That's a first, too; no team has ever come back from a death sentence, externally or internally imposed, and been bowl-eligible and a two-time bowl winner the first five years after being reborn. Nothing close to that has ever happened in college football.)
So, this was/is a situation where "strange bedfellows" reign. At UAB we had to save football in order to save the university, which is pretty much the opposite of the situation at other universities where athletics bleeds the university dry. Only in a football state like Alabama, I suppose.
John, this sounds like a fascinating article. I hadn't understood the extent to which the flagship campus might cannibalize the branch campuses in this way. Your story of saving football to save academics is really remarkable. Maybe you'd be kind enough to email me some of those op-eds or other materials? Now you have me thinking of a pitch to The Chronicle, too...
Trustees are typically corporate barons of some stripe or another, and the corporate mentality aligns more squarely with commercial athletics, so I'm not surprised by their behavior (though there are some who still adhere to an older view of the scholar-athlete). I know that many coaches are frustrated by our current system, too. I've worked with some coaches as close partners in education, and it's possible that they feel hurt by what I've written here (if they've seen it). But really any coach whose top priority is nurturing young people rather than posting wins and raising money is just as much a victim of this system as a professor is. And your story shows how students are hurt by these large-scale moves with a single sports team.
But if I am right that you are now at Georgia, then it seems that you have traded the frying pan for the fire!
The question for me here at UGA is, will UGA follow the University of Alabama (that is, Tuscaloosa) model of catering to wealthy out-of-state students to the detriment of in-state students? UGA won a national championship by getting Alabama's top assistant (who was a UGA alum). Alabama's out-of-state student recruitment machine is so enormous and targeted at a certain few wealthy neighborhoods in the U.S., the map of their recruitment visits was the cover image for a scathing report by the Joyce Foundation called "Recruiting The Out-of-State University." Alabama's incoming freshman classes have been as little as 33% in-state (in 2017)... which is completely mind-blowing. At that point even Alabamians got somewhat concerned, because the only in-state kids getting into Alabama (who weren't athletes) were from the very wealthiest neighborhoods in Alabama. With pushback, Alabama's most recent freshman classes have been, get this, 37-42% in-state. Whoop-de-doo.
Meanwhile, this fall for the first time in probably forever, UGA's freshman class was less than 80% in-state. I haven't seen a final number, but it was supposed to be between 74%-75%. Last year it was 81%. Is this a one-off because of a national championship, or will UGA serve The Woodlands, TX and Highland Park, TX etc. and become like Alabama? I doubt it, but it's not impossible. All institutions are desperate for money, and milking the out-of-staters via tuition is a common strategy nationwide. Alabama has just done it more brazenly than any other state university.
I wrote a series of op-eds for a now-defunct alt-weekly in Birmingham that chronicled how the Board of Trustees had screwed up and screwed over not just UAB, but also UAH and even the Tuscaloosa campus itself. It's nearly two centuries of piss-poor leadership. The totality of the story, which I don't think anyone has really gotten their head around, is just how long and how badly the incompetence has been going on at the board level. UAB and UAH, which are both bigger research universities than the Tuscaloosa campus (UAB brings in about 6 *times* more research money than the flagship campus), both were created essentially over the dead bodies of bitterly opposed leadership in Tuscaloosa that also eventually swallowed up the UA System leadership, too.
In fact, before UAB had its football team terminated out from under them, an *interim* president at UAH who also just happened to be a former UA president terminated UAH's top sport, ice hockey, out from under the university! Yes, really.
Any more than this I can discuss with you offline. But, as I have told many people and many journalists over the past 8 years, the full and complete story of how University of Alabama and its political machine (literally called "The Machine") runs the state of Alabama all the way to the governor's office and interferes with progress so that Tuscaloosa and UA football can run the state... that full and complete story is a Pulitzer gold mine. Nobody would believe it, so your non-fiction account would probably win a Pulitzer as a novel, but it would still be the most jaw-dropping story of the year.
Quite a story, it sounds like. How deeply do I really want to stick my head into Alabama football and statewide politics??? :) Good food for thought, however.
I began teaching at an enormous public D1 university in California and finished my last ~15 years at a small Catholic Liberal Arts (CLA) university in Texas. I taught athletes at both, every year. One of the pricey line item costs that most people don't see is the academic support that the universities pour into the student-athletes.
Even at our relatively small CLA university, the student-athletes attended daily classes, for which they earned academic credit, focused on academic coaching. They had specialized study halls and minders who communicated with all of their professors regularly. I remember one particular men's soccer player who was in my senior Capstone course--great kid, all can-do attitude. If he'd been a freshman, the first assignment he submitted would have signaled an immediate move to the developmental writing course; there was no way this kid was going to be able to pass. I reached out to his coaching staff--because that's who you talk to with athletes, rather than academic advisors--to recommend that the student drop the course and get additional help before attempting it again.
After several rounds of trying to get the kid sufficient tutoring, the coaching staff offered to pay me, a member of the full-time faculty and his professor, an additional stipend to tutor him. I declined.
I knew that the University of Texas (UT) hired individual academic minders for their football players because a friend of mine had done the job. Austin is bristling with unemployed and underemployed people with graduate degrees and UT paid these minders very well, so it was quite a nice little sideline for starving adjuncts.
I remember sitting in my office in the (soon-to-be condemned and razed) Humanities building when I learned that our relatively tiny athletic department had the budget to pay me to personally shepherd this student to graduation. UT's endowment is bigger than the GDP of some countries and they will not hesitate to charge parents attending their kids' weekend swim meet on their campus over $30 a day to park there, so they've certainly got the funds. And, I'm sure they'd argue, their athletics have generated a solid ROI.
Like your other commenters, I love college football. Here in Texas, it's often the only topic that unifies us. We can leave the question of the ethics of unequal access to academic support for another conversation. As a fellow Recovering Academic, I loved reading this article. I just wanted to add this item to the accounting ledger.
Beth, sorry for the delay. Thanks so much for your insights. Your story about academic minders is incredible. I never saw that at Nebraska when I taught there during graduate school, but that was more than twenty years ago, so I'm sure they have something similar. That example is particularly damning, because it shows how the academic and athletic enterprises are necessarily intertwined -- and how the value of your expertise while mentoring a football player was judged to be much higher than the value of your expertise while teaching other undergraduates. I'm not arguing with people on Facebook about Frost's $15 million dollar buyout, and even though it's true that the contract is handled by donors outside the university, the relationship between the university, athletic program, and state government is best captured by Governor Pete Rickett's declaration of Sept. 1, 2018, as a statewide Scott Frost Day after his hiring. I wonder if there ever has been a statewide day in observance of a professor? I think I know the answer :). But actually :(
The point about sports as a unifier is fair. And I do believe in that on some level as a former college athlete, myself. But even youth sports are not accessible to everyone, and so many of these issues overlap.
I played DI lacrosse at a small Catholic liberal arts school. The claim that we ought to see "the spectacle of college athletics for what it is: a billion-dollar entertainment industry that is often the perfect enemy of intellectual life" has some truth to it -- but I can say from experience that this is hyperbolic. Athletic culture on almost every single college campus has a certain feel to it: many athletes arrogate unto themselves a sort of superiorty that I find laughable. Often -- again, not always -- school takes a back seat to competition. (In this way in particular, we could call college sports the enemy of intellectual life.) Insofar as this is true, I can empathize a bit with the argument to convert all varsity teams to clubs.
It's also true that a lot of schools lose a lot of money on their programs. It is often hard to argue for paying for programs that bring in zero $$$, aside from the tuition the athletes on the team bring to the school.
But this statement -- that college sport is the enemy of intellecutal life -- has a utilitarian ring to it. I'm sure the motivation of many admins in sustaining such programs is the bottom line. For those admins, I think the argument is valid: if that WSJ piece is accurate, and many programs don't actually benefit financially from these teams, then what IS the point of maintaining them? (It would definitely seem, then, to be a bad faith investment in relation to those who support the school externally via donation and to those who support it internally as paying non-athlete students, neither of whom participate directly in the investment.)
But the simple fact that these programs don't boost the bottom line doesn't make them the "perfect enemy of intellectual life." I agree that "grace and restoration are the last things a school can offer when it has squandered millions of dollars that taxpayers, families, and alumni gave in good faith" -- but that does not mean the teams themselves are de facto ordered against the intellectual life (though the culture of many teams does lead to this). I could list the reasons that make sport an inherent good -- but lets consider higher education itself: are the things learned in these places -- i.e., the liberal arts -- ordered to financial ends? Nope ,or at least hopefully not. (This isn't to say fiscal responsibility is not a necessity.) G.H. Hardy argues for a kind of math-for-math's sake in "A Mathematician's Apology": we don't do mathematics primarily for its practical applications: we do it because it is beautiful and delightful. This is true both of higher education itself and the sports that are played at these schools. I played lacrosse and studied the liberal arts for the same reasons: I love them both. If it's true that my alma mater loses money on my program, so be it. I'm okay with being called selfish in this way. But insofar as love is the motivating factor for both sport and higher education, they seem not opposed, but ordered to the same end: human flourishing.
Finally, at the high risk of sounding elitist and arrogant myself: for those who haven't participated in college athletics, you may not understand its worth. Its value is, I think, only understood by having not just experienced it, but LIVED IN IT.
All that being said: YES, yes, me and all my teammates -- and many other athletes -- reseneted the special privileges that the basketball team got and the money that was spent on them. So I guess I'm saying that while sport are not per se ordered against the intellectual life, the culture surrounding them -- the players, the coaches, and the admins -- have rendered it so.
Thanks for reading, Aaron! I think we agree, overall. You can tell from my essay that I'm deeply conflicted (hence the unreconciled contradiction). Your last sentence captures much of what I wanted to say. The Chariots of Fire reference is meant to show that sports are not inherently antagonistic to academic life; it's a question of priorities. And, as you say, every team has its own culture. I played college baseball in Tennessee and enjoyed basketball and football in high school. The major difference was that my college coach was a local businessman who cared little about academics, except as a way to keep his players eligible. My coaches in high school were also my teachers. Very different cultures on those high school teams.
I have taught many fine student-athletes over the years and largely had a positive experience with football players at Nebraska when they took my writing classes. At the liberal arts college where I taught for sixteen years, sports teams were often the biggest contributors to volunteer projects, and I worked with the football team on trails in a conservation area. When those cultures work in tandem, it can be a beautiful thing.
However, all of this looks differently when academic programs are being cut while athletic programs are protected because they are seen as necessary to the business model. I don't know how many student-athletes would take their tuition money elsewhere if a school offered mainly club sports, but it's a model that would offer more balance. I suppose my polemic is mainly meant to beg the question of whether the current scale of athletic spending -- at institutions large and small -- can be defended.
Sep 6, 2022·edited Sep 9, 2022Liked by Joshua Doležal
I would say that it depends. As a college student who attends one of the lucky few schools that make a profit from sports, I would say yes because the money that is made could be used to support other programs throughout the school. But then that calls attention to some of the other problems associated with college sports, like exploitation and the lack of seriousness that college athletes put to their studies.
But at the same time, football and other college sports are a huge part of college campus culture. Many students here use sports as a way to bond, meet people and develop a shared sense of campus wide community that would be hard to imagine without sports.
I guess my final answer is that it's complicated. Maybe if college sports weren't making my school a profit I would be giving a different answer.
You make an excellent point about bonding. My own experience with this, in fact, is what inspired the essay. As you can see, I'm deeply conflicted. I'll likely turn the game on again this Saturday regardless of how I feel about the scale of spending on athletics because Husker football taps into some of those precious family memories. You are quite right that a sports team brings people from different backgrounds together.
As a former college athlete, I know that the bonds one forms as part of a team are deep and lasting. However, The communities I've found through the arts have been just as powerful in that regard. The word "university" is built on that notion of collective belonging, too. One can feel that one belongs to the academic tradition of a place in much the way that one feels that they are part of Husker Nation.
Do you find it concerning that the scale of spending on college athletics -- at all levels -- continues to rise? If Division III schools are now losing close to $4 million a year compared to $1.6 million in 2005, I wonder how long that trend can continue.
I definitely agree with the ability of the arts to draw people together and form community. But America tends to be a very masculine, aggressive, loud, go go go type of country which influences the things we pour our time and attention to in ways I don't think are recognized enough. Although this attitude can be beneficial we lose out on the benefits of things like the arts which in my opinion has contributed more to human civilization than any sport ever has. I also feel like with the rate that colleges are spending on sports there is sure to be some sort of bust or crash. I think it's interesting that this is happening as college tuition continues to rise and college enrollment continues to decrease. This trend would suggest that American higher education in general is headed towards a dark age.
I have known many people, including myself and my children, who were recruited by college coaches. Most scholarship athletes receive very little money. Some schools only have to guarantee a walk-on team position. A D1 recruiter told me that he has students who accept scholarships as small as 1%, just so they can tell people they went to a big-name university on an athletic scholarship. I always figured those small offers are just a way to fill seats. Tuition and housing fees paid by those athletes are not credited to athletic budgets, but the coaches know it makes them more valuable to their college bosses . I enjoyed participating in college athletics, but it didn't make me a better student.
I don't know why colleges spend so much money to be training grounds for the professional sports leagues and world games. Maybe college governors are a bunch of selfish status-seekers. So why are spectator sports are so popular to the general non-athletic public? I wonder if the reason we fanatically follow a team is because we convinced ourselves that we are a member of the team! The athletes might not know or care about us, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that for an hour or three we can experience an extreme range of emotion we almost never experience in our daily lives. For that brief time we are rambunctiously ALIVE.
P.S. Although spectator sports have been an enjoyable, popular and exciting part of the human condition for thousands of years. I am not sure Cleveland Browns fans get to experience the full range of emotion.
Ha. I have nothing to say about the Cleveland Browns. You could add the Pittsburgh Pirates to that feckless group, I suppose.
These both resonate with the questions I'm wrestling with in the essay: "Tuition and housing fees paid by those athletes are not credited to athletic budgets, but the coaches know it makes them more valuable to their college bosses. I enjoyed participating in college athletics, but it didn't make me a better student." Coaches do a lot of recruiting. But they are paid to do it. Can we say for certain that if faculty were given money from the operating budget and sent on the road to recruit students for their majors that they'd not be able to yield similar results (after a learning curve)? Most academic programs are blamed for their enrollments, but there is virtually no investment in academic recruitment, except for things like engineering and other STEM fields, which makes this a self-fulfilling cycle.
I enjoyed playing college baseball, too, but at some point I decided that missing upper-level classes to drive three hours to play another small Appalachian college was not worth the tradeoff. Missing those away games did not endear me to my coach. But the reverse is also true: faculty don't appreciate always being the last priority. Many student-athletes simply cannot devote themselves equally to both.
I'm not arguing with the power of sports -- I'll keep following my Mets and Huskers largely for personal reasons. When I joined Little League at age 10, the league held a tryout and a draft, and the Little League Mets drafted me. The year was 1986, and the real Mets won the World Series that year. For a lot of people those affiliations have more regional meaning -- being born in Philadelphia, for instance. But at least professional sports doesn't claim to be anything other than what it is. Clearly the charitable work that many professional athletes do is a lower priority than their on-field performance. That mentality is a bad fit for college. Most college athletes have no realistic prospect of going pro, but academic culture filters down, and so the mentality even at smaller schools is influenced by what goes on at the D1 institutions.
funny, I just wrote a post about football too, so ingrained in our national psyche, so much a part of childhood. up here in alaska its very different compared to Philadelphia, where it does feel like a sort of religion, or at least way more important than organized religion.
A fun riff on football culture and on your son's senior season. I resisted playing high school football until my senior year because I imagined that I had a shot at professional baseball and didn't want to get hurt (somehow I thought playing basketball brought lower risk of injury). When the team won the state title my junior year, I realized I was missing out and suited up for my senior year. It was a ton of fun -- much more of a true team sport than baseball or basketball. Ironically, I was not a rabid Husker fan when I attended graduate school there. But it became one of those anchors of identity later in life. I still think football is a fine sport, maybe even with the risks of concussions. I'm just not sure I agree with the financial scale of it in college.
Division III, I think doesn't ever maintain that they have athletics as a source of revenue: that delusion is unique to Division I institutions. At least not as that is commonly understood (media contracts, gate revenues, etc.). But I think you answered part of the question of why in saying that many sports are dominated at the secondary school level by students from wealthier families. No one particularly wants to talk about it but quite a few sports are a way for many Division II and III institutions that are need-blind or need-aware to insure they get enough admits who are full-paying.
It's not all that cynical--at least some of it is also as you say the hold-over of a mens sana, mens corpore philosophy that some alums and current students are attached to--often a sort of back-door critique of the scholarly life, of eggheadism and so on. (And sometimes student-athletes would choose a class over a match, but coaches frequently push them to choose the match or the practice first and foremost.)
Smart commentary, Timothy. I'd argue that even at the Division III level, there is a sense that overall enrollment would tank without athletic recruiting. So even if revenues from media and ticket sales don't exceed program costs, sports are seen as vital to the overall admissions strategy. I don't know if there are case studies that feature institutions who chose to leverage academic programs for the same goal, but I suppose my intent here is to challenge the conventional wisdom (often mistaken for fact) that athletics are indispensable programs that pay for themselves.
I think plainly at the most selective D3 institutions, I doubt that eliminating varsity athletics would cost them applications overall--they're turning down 85-90% of the their applicants, and most admissions directors will tell you that a fairly large proportion of those applicants are academically qualified. What it would cost them is a subset of students that they imagine they want for various reasons, including to keep their gender ratios closer to 50-50 than they might be otherwise. At the more tuition-dependent and less selective D3s, it might be a different story.
The interesting question is what student-athletes see as the value-added of varsity athletics at D3s besides improving their chance of admission. (As opposed to simply having athletic facilities available and having club/intramural teams that have some institutional support for travel, etc.) I don't think there are that many D3 student-athletes who think that their future professional life will derive directly from their involvement with a team, though there are a few (not just playing, but coaching/sports medicine/etc.) I do think at least some varsity sports promise some kind of networking opportunities that are perceived to be different than what is available in academic programs, which explains why in some institutions, particular teams do sometimes align closely with a particular Greek organization if there are such.
Great point about how admission would be unaffected at more selective schools. I suppose club teams might find it harder to assemble leagues. There is something more convenient about belonging to a certain division. I find the club model an interesting thought experiment, but it would require an enormous shift in values. You have hit on another salient point that I missed, which is the burgeoning discipline of Exercise Science (athletic training, pre-health). Teams often offer experiential learning opportunities for those majors. But I suppose the same could be said for a club.
So many good things to unpack here. I'm a former sportswriter, covered three Division I programs. One -- Washington State -- is currently $100 million in athletic debt. I'm not lying about that number. The former A.D. spent like a drunken sailor ($80M football facility when half that would've been fine), put the school in debt and fled to the University of Nebraska (sorry, Josh). Today, they still play the games at WSU, pay the coaches obscene amounts of money, and continue to build up debt, while the university cuts things like theater.
The other schools I covered had similar issues, except Oregon which was saved by a billionaire booster. Otherwise they'd be in the same boat.
I'm a sports geek, love college sports, ran cross country in college, all that. I'm changing my tune on all this with the insane money being tossed around, mostly for facilities and college salaries. It's rather obvious that Alabama will pay all their football players millions, while other schools that can't do it think they have to keep up with the Crimson Tide.
If my college offered a cross country club instead of intercollegiate team, I would've joined. We could've coached ourselves or found someone better than the lazy coaches I had. We could find local races, drive ourselves there. I would've been good with all of that. Perhaps the model that needs to be put in place, from major college to small college.
The WSU example is, indeed, painful -- and all too common. The boosters are now playing an outsized role in the NIL conversations. It's just not clear to me what academics has to do with any of it, though all of this presumably falls under the university brand.
Like you, I was a college athlete. I attended an NAIA school in Tennessee that gave out athletic scholarships. Funding for the program was minimal, and we had to raise money by cleaning the NASCAR stands after the Bristol 500. I'm not sure I've ever done anything more disgusting. I enjoyed the sense of belonging, but by my junior year it was clear that missing my upper-level classes in the afternoon to travel to small Appalachian towns for games was not worth the tradeoff. So I actually chose class over the away games, which naturally irked the coach to no end. But he had literally no connection to academic life on campus, and I think that's true for many college coaches. Aside from a handful of exceptions, a college coach's priorities typically work against academic life. I'm not sure there is an easy way to solve it, though the club model is an appealing option.
I remember sitting in the knot-hole section at Memorial Stadium when I was in grade school, and back then I believe those end zone tickets cost about a buck. It was thrilling. And when I was fifteen, I remember sitting with my friend whose dad had 50 Yard Line seats, watch Nebraska beat Army. Wow! That was a big deal in 1960, and years later when I was a senior at Nebraska I managed to score some seats high and away, still in the end zone, and it was still thrilling. And even today, when I happen to catch the Huskers on TV, I can still feel a bit of an adrenaline rush, though admittedly the feeling has lessened in the last years.
But why has any feeling presisted at all? Why do I have a physiological and emotional reaction to a game I never really played by a team I don't even know? Josh, you got me thinking about the complex interplay between sports, Big Time Sports, and the academic institutions that seem to house them. The money involved in Big Time Sports is, as many of the commentors here explain so clearly--insane, both staggering and irrational. We need sport to recruit students but most sports programs loose money.
So why do "we" keep on spending the kind of money that might finance several endowed chairs in the humanities on a scoreboard? I guess there are more or less "rational" reasons in Alabama where football can save a school, but mostly the irrational spending has gone beyond entertainment to something else, but what? A kind of religion (but more important), as some have suggested. Or perhaps it is one of those rituals that brings people together and gives us a sense of place and security as I heard a Greek anthropologist say on NPR today.
I get the way that sport is inflected with money and the conflicted feelings that everyone seems to have about sport and academic institutions or even academics. But it's hard to fight that spine-tingling sensation at the kick-off, the adrenaline rush when you see the football in flight. I even bought a Vikings shirt this year.
I agree, Walter. There's nothing quite like playing a sport, either, and my attraction to fandom draws from that rich well of memory, too. As I say in the piece, it's not sport that's the problem. The adrenaline, the belonging -- all of it was true before the scale of the enterprise grew so large. I have less of a problem with it in professional athletics, since those organizations are not tethered to academic institutions. But even then there are questions of scale that affect communities: how stadiums get paid for, who benefits from tax breaks, etc. Even if players are compensated handsomely, the business of management trading a player away is uncomfortably close to trafficking (I told my daughter that one baseball team "sold" a player to another team, and her jaw dropped, but it still was basically true).
Some defend athletics as civilized substitutes for war, which can also bring its share of adrenaline and belonging (as Cather's Claude Wheeler felt). I suppose that is true. But even then we are participating in something with an evolutionary root in violence and tribalism that I think education is meant to counter. I suppose we live with the contradiction the way we learn to live with our reptilian brains as part of the same organ that composes symphonies?
Unusually balanced discussion of a lightning-rod topic--thank you.
In 2014 I found myself in a unique situation: professor at a university, but also an alum of a different university in a different state where the president terminated a bowl-eligible football team, in December, just as bids were about to go out. (That was a first, the first of many firsts in this saga.) I had it on the authority of a former member of the Board of Trustees of the system that oversaw my alma mater that the termination of football was a first step toward the Board's curtailing of the entire 10,000-student undergraduate presence of my alma mater.
This sounds completely insane until you know that the driving force on the Board of Trustees were boosters of the flagship campus in the system, and they have long wanted the other campuses to shrivel up so that the flagship can get all the students and all the tuition money. It also makes more sense when you know that these boosters were football boosters, and are from the University of Alabama--which has completely redefined at an industrial scale what a "football school" looks like. The Bama boosters on the Board hire and fire presidents at the campuses they oversee, and they finally got one at my alma mater, UAB, who would do their bidding. (There is minimal representation of UAB grads on this board, and zero representation of UAH grads on this board. The board is crimson and white. It's a board overseeing three universities but only really representing one university. Oh, and the board is self-perpetuating, with minimal oversight by anyone, even the governor. Can't make this stuff up.)
Anyway, I jumped all-in to the fight against the Bama boosters on the Board trying to kill off UAB via killing off the football program. I even got faculty at UAB who were utterly opposed to football to hold their noses and write op-eds against the move, because of the larger existential threat to the undergraduate programs at UAB. And I became one of the larger individual donors to the football program and one of the chief antagonists of the quisling-president of UAB (then and now) who did the bidding of the Bama boosters by killing off football. (The public uproar forced the quisling-president and his Bama-booster handlers to rescind the termination, and since its return in 2017 UAB football has been conference-championship caliber and bowl-eligible every single year. That's a first, too; no team has ever come back from a death sentence, externally or internally imposed, and been bowl-eligible and a two-time bowl winner the first five years after being reborn. Nothing close to that has ever happened in college football.)
So, this was/is a situation where "strange bedfellows" reign. At UAB we had to save football in order to save the university, which is pretty much the opposite of the situation at other universities where athletics bleeds the university dry. Only in a football state like Alabama, I suppose.
John, this sounds like a fascinating article. I hadn't understood the extent to which the flagship campus might cannibalize the branch campuses in this way. Your story of saving football to save academics is really remarkable. Maybe you'd be kind enough to email me some of those op-eds or other materials? Now you have me thinking of a pitch to The Chronicle, too...
Trustees are typically corporate barons of some stripe or another, and the corporate mentality aligns more squarely with commercial athletics, so I'm not surprised by their behavior (though there are some who still adhere to an older view of the scholar-athlete). I know that many coaches are frustrated by our current system, too. I've worked with some coaches as close partners in education, and it's possible that they feel hurt by what I've written here (if they've seen it). But really any coach whose top priority is nurturing young people rather than posting wins and raising money is just as much a victim of this system as a professor is. And your story shows how students are hurt by these large-scale moves with a single sports team.
But if I am right that you are now at Georgia, then it seems that you have traded the frying pan for the fire!
The question for me here at UGA is, will UGA follow the University of Alabama (that is, Tuscaloosa) model of catering to wealthy out-of-state students to the detriment of in-state students? UGA won a national championship by getting Alabama's top assistant (who was a UGA alum). Alabama's out-of-state student recruitment machine is so enormous and targeted at a certain few wealthy neighborhoods in the U.S., the map of their recruitment visits was the cover image for a scathing report by the Joyce Foundation called "Recruiting The Out-of-State University." Alabama's incoming freshman classes have been as little as 33% in-state (in 2017)... which is completely mind-blowing. At that point even Alabamians got somewhat concerned, because the only in-state kids getting into Alabama (who weren't athletes) were from the very wealthiest neighborhoods in Alabama. With pushback, Alabama's most recent freshman classes have been, get this, 37-42% in-state. Whoop-de-doo.
Meanwhile, this fall for the first time in probably forever, UGA's freshman class was less than 80% in-state. I haven't seen a final number, but it was supposed to be between 74%-75%. Last year it was 81%. Is this a one-off because of a national championship, or will UGA serve The Woodlands, TX and Highland Park, TX etc. and become like Alabama? I doubt it, but it's not impossible. All institutions are desperate for money, and milking the out-of-staters via tuition is a common strategy nationwide. Alabama has just done it more brazenly than any other state university.
The op-ed I wrote that laid out the story of the UA System Board of Trustees attempting to gut UAB is here: https://www.al.com/opinion/2015/05/uab_football_first_step_in_hid.html
I wrote a series of op-eds for a now-defunct alt-weekly in Birmingham that chronicled how the Board of Trustees had screwed up and screwed over not just UAB, but also UAH and even the Tuscaloosa campus itself. It's nearly two centuries of piss-poor leadership. The totality of the story, which I don't think anyone has really gotten their head around, is just how long and how badly the incompetence has been going on at the board level. UAB and UAH, which are both bigger research universities than the Tuscaloosa campus (UAB brings in about 6 *times* more research money than the flagship campus), both were created essentially over the dead bodies of bitterly opposed leadership in Tuscaloosa that also eventually swallowed up the UA System leadership, too.
In fact, before UAB had its football team terminated out from under them, an *interim* president at UAH who also just happened to be a former UA president terminated UAH's top sport, ice hockey, out from under the university! Yes, really.
Any more than this I can discuss with you offline. But, as I have told many people and many journalists over the past 8 years, the full and complete story of how University of Alabama and its political machine (literally called "The Machine") runs the state of Alabama all the way to the governor's office and interferes with progress so that Tuscaloosa and UA football can run the state... that full and complete story is a Pulitzer gold mine. Nobody would believe it, so your non-fiction account would probably win a Pulitzer as a novel, but it would still be the most jaw-dropping story of the year.
Quite a story, it sounds like. How deeply do I really want to stick my head into Alabama football and statewide politics??? :) Good food for thought, however.
I began teaching at an enormous public D1 university in California and finished my last ~15 years at a small Catholic Liberal Arts (CLA) university in Texas. I taught athletes at both, every year. One of the pricey line item costs that most people don't see is the academic support that the universities pour into the student-athletes.
Even at our relatively small CLA university, the student-athletes attended daily classes, for which they earned academic credit, focused on academic coaching. They had specialized study halls and minders who communicated with all of their professors regularly. I remember one particular men's soccer player who was in my senior Capstone course--great kid, all can-do attitude. If he'd been a freshman, the first assignment he submitted would have signaled an immediate move to the developmental writing course; there was no way this kid was going to be able to pass. I reached out to his coaching staff--because that's who you talk to with athletes, rather than academic advisors--to recommend that the student drop the course and get additional help before attempting it again.
After several rounds of trying to get the kid sufficient tutoring, the coaching staff offered to pay me, a member of the full-time faculty and his professor, an additional stipend to tutor him. I declined.
I knew that the University of Texas (UT) hired individual academic minders for their football players because a friend of mine had done the job. Austin is bristling with unemployed and underemployed people with graduate degrees and UT paid these minders very well, so it was quite a nice little sideline for starving adjuncts.
I remember sitting in my office in the (soon-to-be condemned and razed) Humanities building when I learned that our relatively tiny athletic department had the budget to pay me to personally shepherd this student to graduation. UT's endowment is bigger than the GDP of some countries and they will not hesitate to charge parents attending their kids' weekend swim meet on their campus over $30 a day to park there, so they've certainly got the funds. And, I'm sure they'd argue, their athletics have generated a solid ROI.
Like your other commenters, I love college football. Here in Texas, it's often the only topic that unifies us. We can leave the question of the ethics of unequal access to academic support for another conversation. As a fellow Recovering Academic, I loved reading this article. I just wanted to add this item to the accounting ledger.
Beth, sorry for the delay. Thanks so much for your insights. Your story about academic minders is incredible. I never saw that at Nebraska when I taught there during graduate school, but that was more than twenty years ago, so I'm sure they have something similar. That example is particularly damning, because it shows how the academic and athletic enterprises are necessarily intertwined -- and how the value of your expertise while mentoring a football player was judged to be much higher than the value of your expertise while teaching other undergraduates. I'm not arguing with people on Facebook about Frost's $15 million dollar buyout, and even though it's true that the contract is handled by donors outside the university, the relationship between the university, athletic program, and state government is best captured by Governor Pete Rickett's declaration of Sept. 1, 2018, as a statewide Scott Frost Day after his hiring. I wonder if there ever has been a statewide day in observance of a professor? I think I know the answer :). But actually :(
The point about sports as a unifier is fair. And I do believe in that on some level as a former college athlete, myself. But even youth sports are not accessible to everyone, and so many of these issues overlap.
I played DI lacrosse at a small Catholic liberal arts school. The claim that we ought to see "the spectacle of college athletics for what it is: a billion-dollar entertainment industry that is often the perfect enemy of intellectual life" has some truth to it -- but I can say from experience that this is hyperbolic. Athletic culture on almost every single college campus has a certain feel to it: many athletes arrogate unto themselves a sort of superiorty that I find laughable. Often -- again, not always -- school takes a back seat to competition. (In this way in particular, we could call college sports the enemy of intellectual life.) Insofar as this is true, I can empathize a bit with the argument to convert all varsity teams to clubs.
It's also true that a lot of schools lose a lot of money on their programs. It is often hard to argue for paying for programs that bring in zero $$$, aside from the tuition the athletes on the team bring to the school.
But this statement -- that college sport is the enemy of intellecutal life -- has a utilitarian ring to it. I'm sure the motivation of many admins in sustaining such programs is the bottom line. For those admins, I think the argument is valid: if that WSJ piece is accurate, and many programs don't actually benefit financially from these teams, then what IS the point of maintaining them? (It would definitely seem, then, to be a bad faith investment in relation to those who support the school externally via donation and to those who support it internally as paying non-athlete students, neither of whom participate directly in the investment.)
But the simple fact that these programs don't boost the bottom line doesn't make them the "perfect enemy of intellectual life." I agree that "grace and restoration are the last things a school can offer when it has squandered millions of dollars that taxpayers, families, and alumni gave in good faith" -- but that does not mean the teams themselves are de facto ordered against the intellectual life (though the culture of many teams does lead to this). I could list the reasons that make sport an inherent good -- but lets consider higher education itself: are the things learned in these places -- i.e., the liberal arts -- ordered to financial ends? Nope ,or at least hopefully not. (This isn't to say fiscal responsibility is not a necessity.) G.H. Hardy argues for a kind of math-for-math's sake in "A Mathematician's Apology": we don't do mathematics primarily for its practical applications: we do it because it is beautiful and delightful. This is true both of higher education itself and the sports that are played at these schools. I played lacrosse and studied the liberal arts for the same reasons: I love them both. If it's true that my alma mater loses money on my program, so be it. I'm okay with being called selfish in this way. But insofar as love is the motivating factor for both sport and higher education, they seem not opposed, but ordered to the same end: human flourishing.
Finally, at the high risk of sounding elitist and arrogant myself: for those who haven't participated in college athletics, you may not understand its worth. Its value is, I think, only understood by having not just experienced it, but LIVED IN IT.
All that being said: YES, yes, me and all my teammates -- and many other athletes -- reseneted the special privileges that the basketball team got and the money that was spent on them. So I guess I'm saying that while sport are not per se ordered against the intellectual life, the culture surrounding them -- the players, the coaches, and the admins -- have rendered it so.
Thanks for reading, Aaron! I think we agree, overall. You can tell from my essay that I'm deeply conflicted (hence the unreconciled contradiction). Your last sentence captures much of what I wanted to say. The Chariots of Fire reference is meant to show that sports are not inherently antagonistic to academic life; it's a question of priorities. And, as you say, every team has its own culture. I played college baseball in Tennessee and enjoyed basketball and football in high school. The major difference was that my college coach was a local businessman who cared little about academics, except as a way to keep his players eligible. My coaches in high school were also my teachers. Very different cultures on those high school teams.
I have taught many fine student-athletes over the years and largely had a positive experience with football players at Nebraska when they took my writing classes. At the liberal arts college where I taught for sixteen years, sports teams were often the biggest contributors to volunteer projects, and I worked with the football team on trails in a conservation area. When those cultures work in tandem, it can be a beautiful thing.
However, all of this looks differently when academic programs are being cut while athletic programs are protected because they are seen as necessary to the business model. I don't know how many student-athletes would take their tuition money elsewhere if a school offered mainly club sports, but it's a model that would offer more balance. I suppose my polemic is mainly meant to beg the question of whether the current scale of athletic spending -- at institutions large and small -- can be defended.
I would say that it depends. As a college student who attends one of the lucky few schools that make a profit from sports, I would say yes because the money that is made could be used to support other programs throughout the school. But then that calls attention to some of the other problems associated with college sports, like exploitation and the lack of seriousness that college athletes put to their studies.
But at the same time, football and other college sports are a huge part of college campus culture. Many students here use sports as a way to bond, meet people and develop a shared sense of campus wide community that would be hard to imagine without sports.
I guess my final answer is that it's complicated. Maybe if college sports weren't making my school a profit I would be giving a different answer.
You make an excellent point about bonding. My own experience with this, in fact, is what inspired the essay. As you can see, I'm deeply conflicted. I'll likely turn the game on again this Saturday regardless of how I feel about the scale of spending on athletics because Husker football taps into some of those precious family memories. You are quite right that a sports team brings people from different backgrounds together.
As a former college athlete, I know that the bonds one forms as part of a team are deep and lasting. However, The communities I've found through the arts have been just as powerful in that regard. The word "university" is built on that notion of collective belonging, too. One can feel that one belongs to the academic tradition of a place in much the way that one feels that they are part of Husker Nation.
Do you find it concerning that the scale of spending on college athletics -- at all levels -- continues to rise? If Division III schools are now losing close to $4 million a year compared to $1.6 million in 2005, I wonder how long that trend can continue.
I definitely agree with the ability of the arts to draw people together and form community. But America tends to be a very masculine, aggressive, loud, go go go type of country which influences the things we pour our time and attention to in ways I don't think are recognized enough. Although this attitude can be beneficial we lose out on the benefits of things like the arts which in my opinion has contributed more to human civilization than any sport ever has. I also feel like with the rate that colleges are spending on sports there is sure to be some sort of bust or crash. I think it's interesting that this is happening as college tuition continues to rise and college enrollment continues to decrease. This trend would suggest that American higher education in general is headed towards a dark age.
I have known many people, including myself and my children, who were recruited by college coaches. Most scholarship athletes receive very little money. Some schools only have to guarantee a walk-on team position. A D1 recruiter told me that he has students who accept scholarships as small as 1%, just so they can tell people they went to a big-name university on an athletic scholarship. I always figured those small offers are just a way to fill seats. Tuition and housing fees paid by those athletes are not credited to athletic budgets, but the coaches know it makes them more valuable to their college bosses . I enjoyed participating in college athletics, but it didn't make me a better student.
I don't know why colleges spend so much money to be training grounds for the professional sports leagues and world games. Maybe college governors are a bunch of selfish status-seekers. So why are spectator sports are so popular to the general non-athletic public? I wonder if the reason we fanatically follow a team is because we convinced ourselves that we are a member of the team! The athletes might not know or care about us, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that for an hour or three we can experience an extreme range of emotion we almost never experience in our daily lives. For that brief time we are rambunctiously ALIVE.
P.S. Although spectator sports have been an enjoyable, popular and exciting part of the human condition for thousands of years. I am not sure Cleveland Browns fans get to experience the full range of emotion.
Ha. I have nothing to say about the Cleveland Browns. You could add the Pittsburgh Pirates to that feckless group, I suppose.
These both resonate with the questions I'm wrestling with in the essay: "Tuition and housing fees paid by those athletes are not credited to athletic budgets, but the coaches know it makes them more valuable to their college bosses. I enjoyed participating in college athletics, but it didn't make me a better student." Coaches do a lot of recruiting. But they are paid to do it. Can we say for certain that if faculty were given money from the operating budget and sent on the road to recruit students for their majors that they'd not be able to yield similar results (after a learning curve)? Most academic programs are blamed for their enrollments, but there is virtually no investment in academic recruitment, except for things like engineering and other STEM fields, which makes this a self-fulfilling cycle.
I enjoyed playing college baseball, too, but at some point I decided that missing upper-level classes to drive three hours to play another small Appalachian college was not worth the tradeoff. Missing those away games did not endear me to my coach. But the reverse is also true: faculty don't appreciate always being the last priority. Many student-athletes simply cannot devote themselves equally to both.
I'm not arguing with the power of sports -- I'll keep following my Mets and Huskers largely for personal reasons. When I joined Little League at age 10, the league held a tryout and a draft, and the Little League Mets drafted me. The year was 1986, and the real Mets won the World Series that year. For a lot of people those affiliations have more regional meaning -- being born in Philadelphia, for instance. But at least professional sports doesn't claim to be anything other than what it is. Clearly the charitable work that many professional athletes do is a lower priority than their on-field performance. That mentality is a bad fit for college. Most college athletes have no realistic prospect of going pro, but academic culture filters down, and so the mentality even at smaller schools is influenced by what goes on at the D1 institutions.
funny, I just wrote a post about football too, so ingrained in our national psyche, so much a part of childhood. up here in alaska its very different compared to Philadelphia, where it does feel like a sort of religion, or at least way more important than organized religion.
https://fatherofzoomers.substack.com/p/homer-vs-kenai?r=jejuu&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
A fun riff on football culture and on your son's senior season. I resisted playing high school football until my senior year because I imagined that I had a shot at professional baseball and didn't want to get hurt (somehow I thought playing basketball brought lower risk of injury). When the team won the state title my junior year, I realized I was missing out and suited up for my senior year. It was a ton of fun -- much more of a true team sport than baseball or basketball. Ironically, I was not a rabid Husker fan when I attended graduate school there. But it became one of those anchors of identity later in life. I still think football is a fine sport, maybe even with the risks of concussions. I'm just not sure I agree with the financial scale of it in college.
Division III, I think doesn't ever maintain that they have athletics as a source of revenue: that delusion is unique to Division I institutions. At least not as that is commonly understood (media contracts, gate revenues, etc.). But I think you answered part of the question of why in saying that many sports are dominated at the secondary school level by students from wealthier families. No one particularly wants to talk about it but quite a few sports are a way for many Division II and III institutions that are need-blind or need-aware to insure they get enough admits who are full-paying.
It's not all that cynical--at least some of it is also as you say the hold-over of a mens sana, mens corpore philosophy that some alums and current students are attached to--often a sort of back-door critique of the scholarly life, of eggheadism and so on. (And sometimes student-athletes would choose a class over a match, but coaches frequently push them to choose the match or the practice first and foremost.)
Smart commentary, Timothy. I'd argue that even at the Division III level, there is a sense that overall enrollment would tank without athletic recruiting. So even if revenues from media and ticket sales don't exceed program costs, sports are seen as vital to the overall admissions strategy. I don't know if there are case studies that feature institutions who chose to leverage academic programs for the same goal, but I suppose my intent here is to challenge the conventional wisdom (often mistaken for fact) that athletics are indispensable programs that pay for themselves.
I think plainly at the most selective D3 institutions, I doubt that eliminating varsity athletics would cost them applications overall--they're turning down 85-90% of the their applicants, and most admissions directors will tell you that a fairly large proportion of those applicants are academically qualified. What it would cost them is a subset of students that they imagine they want for various reasons, including to keep their gender ratios closer to 50-50 than they might be otherwise. At the more tuition-dependent and less selective D3s, it might be a different story.
The interesting question is what student-athletes see as the value-added of varsity athletics at D3s besides improving their chance of admission. (As opposed to simply having athletic facilities available and having club/intramural teams that have some institutional support for travel, etc.) I don't think there are that many D3 student-athletes who think that their future professional life will derive directly from their involvement with a team, though there are a few (not just playing, but coaching/sports medicine/etc.) I do think at least some varsity sports promise some kind of networking opportunities that are perceived to be different than what is available in academic programs, which explains why in some institutions, particular teams do sometimes align closely with a particular Greek organization if there are such.
Great point about how admission would be unaffected at more selective schools. I suppose club teams might find it harder to assemble leagues. There is something more convenient about belonging to a certain division. I find the club model an interesting thought experiment, but it would require an enormous shift in values. You have hit on another salient point that I missed, which is the burgeoning discipline of Exercise Science (athletic training, pre-health). Teams often offer experiential learning opportunities for those majors. But I suppose the same could be said for a club.