The college admissions scandal dubbed Operation Varsity Blues has served up a powerful cocktail of outrage and schadenfreude. We’ve witnessed unabashed “Aunt Becky” blithely signing autographs outside Boston’s federal courthouse and learned about CEO dads staging photos of their fake-athlete kids as haplessly as Mr. Felicity Huffman’s car salesman character in Fargoattempted fraud with his pencil.
The details exposing the vanity and amorality of the rich and famous who used the so-called side door to get their kids into elite colleges are so delicious that they can mask a darker truth: When it comes to college sports, these grasping parents, entitled offspring, scheming advisers, and corrupt coaches aren’t the only ones who’ve lost their way.
Girls and boys are being saddled with adult-strength pressure to secure their future by delivering on the field or court, leading to the craziness of recruits committing to college teams even before they’ve had a chance to finish middle school. Meanwhile, youth sports have become beset with runaway professionalization, commercialization, and overuse injuries. And an overall sense of panic has taken hold of many parents who spend years chasing the rabbit of college scholarships for their children and become desperate for a return on their investment of so much time and so many resources.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I love college sports. Although my undistinguished athletic career ended when I left high school, my connection to sports never did. In college, two of my closest friends led Tufts’ Division III football team. I wrote a book about the power of high school basketball to help propel boys out of Boston’s toughest neighborhoods and onto college campuses that offered them the promise of a better future. As a student, a journalist, a mentor, a parent, and a fan, I’ve seen sports at their transcendent best.
So I take no joy in reporting that our college sports system is fundamentally broken.
The American higher education system is the only one on the planet that is also intertwined with a professional-in-all-but-name, multibillion-dollar college sports system that can warp academics and sometimes even swallow it whole. We see this on the Division I level, of course, but the problems go all the way down to Division III. And the damage is increasingly leaching into fields far from campus. Remember, the side door through the athletics department, which rich and famous parents allegedly exploited, was available only because our unhealthy emphasis on sports had already distorted the college admissions process.
It’s time that we all ask ourselves: What are we really doing here?
The outsized influence of sports on campus is not a new problem. Robin Lester, in his book on the history of football at the University of Chicago, describes how the Chicago superintendent of schools accused shameless college coaches at Chicago and Michigan of “practically stealing boys out of high school for athletic purposes” before they could even earn their diplomas. When did he level his accusation? Try 1903. Just two years later, Harvard hired its first paid football coach, at almost twice the average salary of a full professor.
Before we get to the abuses in lower-profile, lower-level college sports, let’s start where the insanity began: big-money football and men’s basketball programs. If you haven’t read the 2011 Atlantic piece “The Shame of College Sports,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights historian Taylor Branch, it’s truly worth your time. Even eight years later, almost all the points in Branch’s indictment of the National Collegiate Athletic Association and its top Division I programs hold up. How pioneering NCAA honcho Walter Byers — he of the toupee and cowboy boots — cagily crafted the term “student-athlete” in the 1950s. How colleges have since used that magical hyphenate as a fig leaf to avoid having to pay athletes in top programs for all the revenue they bring in to university coffers, and to avoid having to pay out workers’ compensation claims when student-athletes get injured “on the job.” And, most of all, how the fiction of amateurism pushed by the NCAA denies many top college athletes a genuine college education and all top college athletes their true economic rights. This fiction reduces them to serfs who are perpetually at risk of punishment for violating the overlord’s regime of arcane, arbitrary rules.
Imagine if Harvard had classified Mark Zuckerberg as a “student-technologist” and demanded ownership of Facebook (total valuation: more than half a trillion dollars) because he created the platform as an undergraduate. Or if UCLA had garnisheed “student-actor” James Franco’s take from starring in Spider-Man 3 (worldwide gross: $890 million) while he was enrolled there.
The only point from Branch’s 2011 argument that doesn’t hold up is his confidence that several lawsuits threatened the NCAA’s Vulcan grip on the college game. During a recent conversation, Branch admits to me that he was overly optimistic. “They’re like the Vatican,” he says. “They’re going to hang onto their lock on the market as long as they can. Reform has got to be imposed on them.”
The details exposing the vanity and amorality of the rich and famous who used the so-called side door to get their kids into elite colleges are so delicious that they can mask a darker truth: When it comes to college sports, these grasping parents, entitled offspring, scheming advisers, and corrupt coaches aren’t the only ones who’ve lost their way.
Girls and boys are being saddled with adult-strength pressure to secure their future by delivering on the field or court, leading to the craziness of recruits committing to college teams even before they’ve had a chance to finish middle school. Meanwhile, youth sports have become beset with runaway professionalization, commercialization, and overuse injuries. And an overall sense of panic has taken hold of many parents who spend years chasing the rabbit of college scholarships for their children and become desperate for a return on their investment of so much time and so many resources.Please don’t misunderstand me. I love college sports. Although my undistinguished athletic career ended when I left high school, my connection to sports never did. In college, two of my closest friends led Tufts’ Division III football team. I wrote a book about the power of high school basketball to help propel boys out of Boston’s toughest neighborhoods and onto college campuses that offered them the promise of a better future. As a student, a journalist, a mentor, a parent, and a fan, I’ve seen sports at their transcendent best.
So I take no joy in reporting that our college sports system is fundamentally broken.
The American higher education system is the only one on the planet that is also intertwined with a professional-in-all-but-name, multibillion-dollar college sports system that can warp academics and sometimes even swallow it whole. We see this on the Division I level, of course, but the problems go all the way down to Division III. And the damage is increasingly leaching into fields far from campus. Remember, the side door through the athletics department, which rich and famous parents allegedly exploited, was available only because our unhealthy emphasis on sports had already distorted the college admissions process.
It’s time that we all ask ourselves: What are we really doing here?
The outsized influence of sports on campus is not a new problem. Robin Lester, in his book on the history of football at the University of Chicago, describes how the Chicago superintendent of schools accused shameless college coaches at Chicago and Michigan of “practically stealing boys out of high school for athletic purposes” before they could even earn their diplomas. When did he level his accusation? Try 1903. Just two years later, Harvard hired its first paid football coach, at almost twice the average salary of a full professor.
Before we get to the abuses in lower-profile, lower-level college sports, let’s start where the insanity began: big-money football and men’s basketball programs. If you haven’t read the 2011 Atlantic piece “The Shame of College Sports,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights historian Taylor Branch, it’s truly worth your time. Even eight years later, almost all the points in Branch’s indictment of the National Collegiate Athletic Association and its top Division I programs hold up. How pioneering NCAA honcho Walter Byers — he of the toupee and cowboy boots — cagily crafted the term “student-athlete” in the 1950s. How colleges have since used that magical hyphenate as a fig leaf to avoid having to pay athletes in top programs for all the revenue they bring in to university coffers, and to avoid having to pay out workers’ compensation claims when student-athletes get injured “on the job.” And, most of all, how the fiction of amateurism pushed by the NCAA denies many top college athletes a genuine college education and all top college athletes their true economic rights. This fiction reduces them to serfs who are perpetually at risk of punishment for violating the overlord’s regime of arcane, arbitrary rules.
Imagine if Harvard had classified Mark Zuckerberg as a “student-technologist” and demanded ownership of Facebook (total valuation: more than half a trillion dollars) because he created the platform as an undergraduate. Or if UCLA had garnisheed “student-actor” James Franco’s take from starring in Spider-Man 3 (worldwide gross: $890 million) while he was enrolled there.
The only point from Branch’s 2011 argument that doesn’t hold up is his confidence that several lawsuits threatened the NCAA’s Vulcan grip on the college game. During a recent conversation, Branch admits to me that he was overly optimistic. “They’re like the Vatican,” he says. “They’re going to hang onto their lock on the market as long as they can. Reform has got to be imposed on them.”
by Neil Swidey, Boston Review | Read more:
Image: Adobe Stock
