QUESTIONS ENTIRE COLLEGE SPORTS SCENE

Is’t it time to call a halt to the farce called “college” sports? It is a billion dollar business corrupting our educational system. The myth that a winning football team or basketball team contributes to a college in any way—economically, academically, etc— is obviously just that, a myth.

I spent a lifetime working as a professor at two universities and found nothing good about sports. There is an often-cited feeling that a wining team promotes college spirit, a sense of unity or collegiality, which is true; united behind what. It is lucky if there is one member of the team who is from the state they represent. How many times have you heard someone on TV say I am from here or there and follow it with a “Go and some asinine name like Gofers, Badgers, Ducks, or Blue Devils”.  A university if for teaching yet there is nothing an athletic department teaches. Exercise is good, does that make sense when in a university with 50,000 students only 40 or fifty play sports. The worst travesty is to say that Universities give athletes scholarships to go to college to be educated, something they might not be able to do if there were no athletic program—over 60 colleges each have over 1 billion dollars in endowments and give scholarships is a joke. A college is a full time job and to expect an athlete to spend 60 hours a week on the practice field or court and be educated is ludicrous. The idea they can be athletes and a scholar is a myth. Why would they want to when they desire a career as a professional athlete?  

For the business heads, state legislatures should look at university budgets when it comes to athletics, which is almost impossible to do because of creative bookkeeping. Universities have athletic programs because they make money for everyone but the University. Head coaches are paid over one million dollars and receive many dollars for product endorsements- much more income that anyone else in the university, even the presidents. That says a lot given that, university presidents are now business leaders and not scholars and as such universities “boards of reagents”, which they control, over pay them . . . they lead the income disparity battle when compared to professor salaries.

If universities are to be training grounds for athletes, why not recognize them for what they are, once you do that, it would be obvious the programs would not be akin to scholarship but closer to technical training. Stop the farce of saying professional “college athletics” are students and covering the lie with using fraudulent IQ scores and made up grades. Open up technical training programs to give all kids a chance irrespective of grades and IQ—that would be socially gratifying.

If a university allowed the privately owned and funded technical program to use the university name, mascot, and all the goodies that go with it, then they should pay the university for that privilege. The academic programs could use the money. The main thing is that they would have separate budgets but leave the university alone. Let the greedy among us make their money selling tickets, promoting the teams and selling bowl games halftime ads, which are often out of keeping with the dignity of a university program.

Do you realize how many of our children could be educated on one billion dollars of endowments and millions of dollars of coach’s salaries, player recruitment cost, paying team travel expense, equipment costs, and grounds maintenance that includes huge stadiums? Confining sports to intramural teams would save students, hence, save taxpayers and parents, vast amounts in tuition. Get the greed out of our universities—they are not there to make money; they are there to educate our children.

This professional athletics problem when added to the university industrial complex is making a mockery of higher education. Couple dumping athletic programs with shedding universities of the “willfully” assumed money making responsibility to do patentable research, which also allows industries to corrupt the universities is equally important. Taxpayer’s institutions should not be “cash cows” for business.   

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