This has bugged me for a long time and it starts in high schools. Athletics are always funded more and at the expense of other programs.
As for the Supreme court ruling allowing college athletes to make money- this is infuriating. Colleges give student athletes free tuition along with other perks. There should be a clause that if they make money from endorsements in college, they at least have to pay back their tuition.
Thank you, Jan, and since you've posted to Inner Life, too, I'll append my reply here :)
I was doing my best not to get into the weeds about NIL, which stems from a sense of justice. Before that ruling, universities were profiting hugely from athletes' performances, and free tuition was nowhere near adequate compensation. The Manziel reference is instructive -- if a single athlete generates hundreds of millions of revenue for a university, that is not a fair system. And all too often this system was exploitative of Black and Brown athletes, who sometimes saw a payday at the professional level and sometimes did not.
So it's complicated. To do away with NIL, you'd have to seriously curtail or tax the television revenue, ticket sales, merchandise, and everything else that goes into the business of college sports. You'd need to cap coaches' salaries and probably do more. There'd be no point in penalizing the athletes while leaving the other tentacles of the octopus free.
A single athlete can make hundreds of millions for a university??? Holy crap. I had no idea. This is a much bigger problem than I realized. Thank you for a bit more of the backstory
Great post, as always, right down to the footnotes. I especially loved your deep dive into the multiple uses of "branding." Still, inspired by your second note, I'm thinking about a bigger problem than academics vs athletics: if state legislatures considered college a public good instead of a private one, we wouldn't have to worry so much about athletics eating from the academic pie. State budgets would support the education of the mind and the body. The public university was a great idea. Time to go find a serotonin boost. 😥 Chocolate? Cats?
Thanks for reading, Tara. You're right that the scarcity in academics stems largely from the lack of state-level support. Whereas athletics is disproportionately buoyed by private donors. (Although there's still some gaslighting about that at some institutions, who dip into the general coffers to cover facilities costs and other shortfalls)
I've been meaning to share the last Chronicle story I wrote earlier this year about academic librarians (and will eventually). Some archives are increasingly turning to private donations for long-term viability. The Cather Archive is a good example of this, and I'm glad that it's thriving because of the generosity both of the Cather family and of private supporters. However, the State of Nebraska ought to have more skin in that game, given Cather's importance as a Nebraskan in national history. If public goods like library archives require private support to stay open, then historical disparities in inherited wealth are going to map onto which resources and which authors get amplified in public institutions. It's unfortunate that some of the gains that we've seen during our professional lifetimes are presently being reversed.
In another lifetime I as a sportswriter covering college athletics and I saw the waste at the beginning of Oregon's facilities arms race. The UO (where my dad was an alum) started the arms race on the west coast and schools like WSU, whom I also covered, have gone into $100 million debt in athletics. Yes, that number is not a typo, $100 million. At the same time, the school shuttered its theater program, eliminated its master's in Counseling degree, among many other slices. WSU has been one school left behind in the college conference changing because they don't bring in enough money.
On the ironic side, Cal and Stanford, have joined the Atlantic Coast Conference. I actually saw a fan write, "They'll do their school work on the plane." Really? Every two weeks athletes will fly 12=hours round trip, missing 3 to 4 days of school, making me wonder if these elite schools aren't that elite after all. I know if I missed that much class at my middling state school alma mater, I would've failed and my professors rightfully would've let the charge in flunking me. I guess Stanford and Cal aren't that tough academically.
But no one sees that this is wrong, and college presidents led the way. When the Pac-12 imploded, the University of Washington president, denied culpability despite that many journalists had notes on her comments. There needs to be a reset but at colleges that will never happen. An inept prez such as G. Gordon Gee or whatever is name is, keeps getting rehired despite missteps at every stop. Why? He likes sports and wears a quirky bow tie, sure to get the well-liquored alums smirking.
It's all out of control and getting worse. The college presidents could end all this, but they choose not to, mostly because they also get a lot of under the table kickbacks.
This is indeed baffling: "Every two weeks athletes will fly 12 hours round trip, missing 3 to 4 days of school, making me wonder if these elite schools aren't that elite after all. I know if I missed that much class at my middling state school alma mater, I would've failed and my professors rightfully would've let the charge in flunking me. I guess Stanford and Cal aren't that tough academically."
Your final point is also telling. I restrained myself in this piece from delving into the short-lived tenure of Admirable Ted Carter at Nebraska. He served as president for only 3 years, overseeing Scott Frost's firing and Matt Rhule's hiring (a $100 million transition, in total), before jumping ship for Ohio State. If executives don't last more than a few years, there's no accountability -- it's just another example of personal branding trumping the institution's best interests.
Another anecdote that I left on the editing room floor: this fall, for the first time, UNL implemented "Volleyball Day" -- a day when all classes were canceled so that everyone could pack Memorial Stadium to cheer on the women's team. It set a world record for attendance at a women's sporting event -- 92,003 fans. And I'm sure it was seen as a marketing coup, like the Colorado storyline this year. But like Stanford and Cal joining the ACC, the message sent is that academics come second (or third or ___). I mean, canceling classes campus-wide for a sporting event is something new under the sun, yes?
The Stanford and Cal situation is awful, but I can see Volleyball Day teaching the equivalent of one day or more of gender studies, so that could be a fair trade, not in favor of athletics, but in favor of *seeing* women. That's worth a day of class, yes. :-)
Interesting idea. I wonder how many women feel seen on a day that magnifies athletes (who are all now influencers, too)? But perhaps the story is more empowering than not?
If our campus cancelled class for a women's sporting event, I might just go! I wouldn't know if those particular athletes were influencers, so maybe my conclusions would be a little rose-colored. 🙄
Great piece. Most folks love sports, either playing or watching. That can’t be said for chemistry or composition. Universities should be promoting the latter, but they just can’t help themselves, now that they have turned into corporations.
I've been thinking about the corporate part of it, Liz, and Alyssa's comparison to cable television is the only one that has made any sense to me. Because typically a corporate product (like Wheaties) is very clearly defined and has its own integrity. Athletic sponsors might help promote it, but the product itself remains intact and unchanged. That analogy to higher ed simply doesn't hold. The brand messaging from a university reveals the confusion about what the product actually is. If Alyssa is right, and the real product (chemistry, composition, information literacy) is simply losing its appeal, and administrators are trying athletic promotion as a last resort, then the boom in sports revenue is just a harbinger of collapse. The institutions themselves might not collapse, but the meaning of what a university is certainly will.
On this one @A Jay Adler beat me to it: No one writes better on the changes in academia than this eloquent, studied author. I'll add only that the loss of the humanities in our universities defines the loss of the human in the soul of the nation. Will also restack you, Joshua.
This has bugged me for a long time and it starts in high schools. Athletics are always funded more and at the expense of other programs.
As for the Supreme court ruling allowing college athletes to make money- this is infuriating. Colleges give student athletes free tuition along with other perks. There should be a clause that if they make money from endorsements in college, they at least have to pay back their tuition.
Thank you, Jan, and since you've posted to Inner Life, too, I'll append my reply here :)
I was doing my best not to get into the weeds about NIL, which stems from a sense of justice. Before that ruling, universities were profiting hugely from athletes' performances, and free tuition was nowhere near adequate compensation. The Manziel reference is instructive -- if a single athlete generates hundreds of millions of revenue for a university, that is not a fair system. And all too often this system was exploitative of Black and Brown athletes, who sometimes saw a payday at the professional level and sometimes did not.
So it's complicated. To do away with NIL, you'd have to seriously curtail or tax the television revenue, ticket sales, merchandise, and everything else that goes into the business of college sports. You'd need to cap coaches' salaries and probably do more. There'd be no point in penalizing the athletes while leaving the other tentacles of the octopus free.
A single athlete can make hundreds of millions for a university??? Holy crap. I had no idea. This is a much bigger problem than I realized. Thank you for a bit more of the backstory
Great post, as always, right down to the footnotes. I especially loved your deep dive into the multiple uses of "branding." Still, inspired by your second note, I'm thinking about a bigger problem than academics vs athletics: if state legislatures considered college a public good instead of a private one, we wouldn't have to worry so much about athletics eating from the academic pie. State budgets would support the education of the mind and the body. The public university was a great idea. Time to go find a serotonin boost. 😥 Chocolate? Cats?
Thanks for reading, Tara. You're right that the scarcity in academics stems largely from the lack of state-level support. Whereas athletics is disproportionately buoyed by private donors. (Although there's still some gaslighting about that at some institutions, who dip into the general coffers to cover facilities costs and other shortfalls)
I've been meaning to share the last Chronicle story I wrote earlier this year about academic librarians (and will eventually). Some archives are increasingly turning to private donations for long-term viability. The Cather Archive is a good example of this, and I'm glad that it's thriving because of the generosity both of the Cather family and of private supporters. However, the State of Nebraska ought to have more skin in that game, given Cather's importance as a Nebraskan in national history. If public goods like library archives require private support to stay open, then historical disparities in inherited wealth are going to map onto which resources and which authors get amplified in public institutions. It's unfortunate that some of the gains that we've seen during our professional lifetimes are presently being reversed.
Excellent point.
In another lifetime I as a sportswriter covering college athletics and I saw the waste at the beginning of Oregon's facilities arms race. The UO (where my dad was an alum) started the arms race on the west coast and schools like WSU, whom I also covered, have gone into $100 million debt in athletics. Yes, that number is not a typo, $100 million. At the same time, the school shuttered its theater program, eliminated its master's in Counseling degree, among many other slices. WSU has been one school left behind in the college conference changing because they don't bring in enough money.
On the ironic side, Cal and Stanford, have joined the Atlantic Coast Conference. I actually saw a fan write, "They'll do their school work on the plane." Really? Every two weeks athletes will fly 12=hours round trip, missing 3 to 4 days of school, making me wonder if these elite schools aren't that elite after all. I know if I missed that much class at my middling state school alma mater, I would've failed and my professors rightfully would've let the charge in flunking me. I guess Stanford and Cal aren't that tough academically.
But no one sees that this is wrong, and college presidents led the way. When the Pac-12 imploded, the University of Washington president, denied culpability despite that many journalists had notes on her comments. There needs to be a reset but at colleges that will never happen. An inept prez such as G. Gordon Gee or whatever is name is, keeps getting rehired despite missteps at every stop. Why? He likes sports and wears a quirky bow tie, sure to get the well-liquored alums smirking.
It's all out of control and getting worse. The college presidents could end all this, but they choose not to, mostly because they also get a lot of under the table kickbacks.
This is indeed baffling: "Every two weeks athletes will fly 12 hours round trip, missing 3 to 4 days of school, making me wonder if these elite schools aren't that elite after all. I know if I missed that much class at my middling state school alma mater, I would've failed and my professors rightfully would've let the charge in flunking me. I guess Stanford and Cal aren't that tough academically."
Your final point is also telling. I restrained myself in this piece from delving into the short-lived tenure of Admirable Ted Carter at Nebraska. He served as president for only 3 years, overseeing Scott Frost's firing and Matt Rhule's hiring (a $100 million transition, in total), before jumping ship for Ohio State. If executives don't last more than a few years, there's no accountability -- it's just another example of personal branding trumping the institution's best interests.
Another anecdote that I left on the editing room floor: this fall, for the first time, UNL implemented "Volleyball Day" -- a day when all classes were canceled so that everyone could pack Memorial Stadium to cheer on the women's team. It set a world record for attendance at a women's sporting event -- 92,003 fans. And I'm sure it was seen as a marketing coup, like the Colorado storyline this year. But like Stanford and Cal joining the ACC, the message sent is that academics come second (or third or ___). I mean, canceling classes campus-wide for a sporting event is something new under the sun, yes?
The Stanford and Cal situation is awful, but I can see Volleyball Day teaching the equivalent of one day or more of gender studies, so that could be a fair trade, not in favor of athletics, but in favor of *seeing* women. That's worth a day of class, yes. :-)
Interesting idea. I wonder how many women feel seen on a day that magnifies athletes (who are all now influencers, too)? But perhaps the story is more empowering than not?
If our campus cancelled class for a women's sporting event, I might just go! I wouldn't know if those particular athletes were influencers, so maybe my conclusions would be a little rose-colored. 🙄
Great piece. Most folks love sports, either playing or watching. That can’t be said for chemistry or composition. Universities should be promoting the latter, but they just can’t help themselves, now that they have turned into corporations.
I've been thinking about the corporate part of it, Liz, and Alyssa's comparison to cable television is the only one that has made any sense to me. Because typically a corporate product (like Wheaties) is very clearly defined and has its own integrity. Athletic sponsors might help promote it, but the product itself remains intact and unchanged. That analogy to higher ed simply doesn't hold. The brand messaging from a university reveals the confusion about what the product actually is. If Alyssa is right, and the real product (chemistry, composition, information literacy) is simply losing its appeal, and administrators are trying athletic promotion as a last resort, then the boom in sports revenue is just a harbinger of collapse. The institutions themselves might not collapse, but the meaning of what a university is certainly will.
I think you are right. Ugh.
On this one @A Jay Adler beat me to it: No one writes better on the changes in academia than this eloquent, studied author. I'll add only that the loss of the humanities in our universities defines the loss of the human in the soul of the nation. Will also restack you, Joshua.