Signs of a system run amok
Published April 9, 2014
Editorial by Burlington Times-News, April 8, 2014.
A lot that is wrong with big-time collegiate athletics was on display Monday night when the national men’s basketball championship was contested in a gargantuan complex built for football in Arlington, Texas.
On the one hand was the University of Kentucky, a school steeped in the blue-blood tradition of high-level college basketball dating to the early 1960s and now the most prominent purveyor of the so-called “one-and-done” system in which teenagers are essentially rented for a year before being jettisoned into the world of professional basketball. On the other hand was the University of Connecticut, a school with a more recent tradition of basketball success marred by banishment last year from the tournament for myriad academic and other problems under former coach Jim Calhoun.
In many ways, that these two teams wound up at the end of a wildly unfolding 68-team bracket seems fitting in a modern culture now at odds with the more traditional mindset of an older generation — the latter believing that it is the mission of colleges and universities to educate students, not promote athletics in a delirious chase for TV revenues. The newest conventional wisdom calls for athletes at major universities to be paid from that rich pool of dollars as they pretend to be students, often facing far less strenuous — or in some cases no — academic standards. Few if any schools on the large athletics stage are immune from this malady. It’s hit home in this state over the past few years at the University of North Carolina.
That administrators in institutions of higher education have occasionally winked while such abuses continue is one of the shames of modern-day academia.
So in some ways it could be argued that this meeting of Kentucky and UConn — won by UConn and followed by the now predictable student vandalism that accompanies (gasp) good news — is the justified result of a system run amok.
By irony or coincidence, it also coincides with the ruling last month by a regional National Labor Relations Board in Illinois stating that for all practical purposes football players are school employees — not students. For the moment, the ruling could only impact Northwestern University and its football team. But the immediate path includes all private universities and their football players. Ultimately, it could impact public schools like the University of North Carolina and N.C. State.
The Supreme Court eventually will wind up with this case in a fight for the future of college athletics. If the labor board’s ruling stands, then college football players will likely be joined on the list of university employees by their counterparts in basketball, baseball, track, volleyball and wrestling. Colleges can’t turn football players into paid employees without turning all athletes into paid employees. The cost will be too high to sustain. Only a handful of athletic programs actually make money, and even those programs are divided into revenue-generating sports and non-revenue sports. Football is the cash cow. At best, basketball holds its own. The rest milk football for what it’s worth.
There’s obviously a lot broken in the system when the mission of athletics casts a shadow on a student’s classroom achievement or when a university scholarship worth thousands of dollars isn’t seen as compensation enough for student-athletes.
It is well past time for higher education to seriously evaluate athletic programs, academics, student life and finances.
