How College Sports Turned into a Corrupt Mega-Business

College sports are a gigantic entertainment business that have nothing to do with the missions of the schools. Frequently, the highest-paid employee of a school is the football or basketball coach, and the athletics budget is hugely subsidized by fees paid by financially strapped students. Players who read and write at a middle-school level (if even that) are recruited to help teams win, but the academic work they do is laughable. Schools rack up big debts trying to win glory on the gridiron or court, even if it means scrimping on faculty salaries and building maintenance.

How did this lamentable state of affairs come about?

To find out, the book to read is Intercollegiate Athletics, Inc. by professor James T. Bennett. He has researched the history of college sports in America, starting with the earliest days (when contests were organized and run by students for their own enjoyment) up to the latest scandals and perversions. He explains how the sports juggernaut gathered force (first football, later basketball) and recounts the various efforts (mostly unsuccessful) to stop or at least slow it. And perhaps most usefully, he points out that the high cost of college sports falls mainly on students through mandatory fees—a tax on education that goes to benefit a pampered few.

If you’re bothered by the fact that, as the author reports on a recent study, Division I schools (the top level in the NCAA’s hierarchy) spend three to six times as much on athletics per athlete as they do on academics per student, then this is a book you’ll want to read.

The first intercollegiate sporting competition was not football, but rowing, when the Harvard and Yale teams met in 1852. Football started to gain popularity in the 1870s when students began organizing games between rival colleges. By the turn of the century, football was big. Winning had become so important that teams routinely brought in “ringers,” which is to say, good players who weren’t students at all. Injuries were common.

The first college presidents to speak out against this spectacle were Charles Eliot of Harvard and Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia. Eliot criticized the “immoderate desire to win” that led to cheating and the militaristic aura surrounding football. At Columbia, Butler decided to abolish football in 1905, calling it an “academic nuisance” that interfered with studying. Butler’s abolition lasted only a decade, however.

From the Northeast, football soon spread to the South and the Midwest, where the problems identified by Eliot and Butler grew apace. One academic leader who tried to tame football’s malign influence was UNC president Frank Porter Graham. In 1935, he drew up a proposal to ban the recruitment of players and any preferential treatment of athletes in the awarding of scholarships, jobs, or loans.

How well was Graham’s proposal received? Bennett quotes him as saying that his critics “opened up with machine guns, and in some cases poison gas.” Attacked by alumni and many of the politicians who voted for UNC appropriations, Graham backed down quietly. Although he served until 1949, he never again attempted to do anything about the growing tumor of college football.

In the Midwest, the University of Chicago was king of the football realm in the 1920s and 1930s. The university’s president, William Rainey Harper, hired the famous coach Amos Alonzo Stagg and gave him carte blanche to win. Stagg did exactly that. His methods were often unscrupulous, but the “Monsters of the Midway” became a powerhouse. But when Robert Maynard Hutchins was named president in1929, he was extremely unhappy with the situation. He thought that sports should be merely an ancillary function of a university. “A college racing stable makes as much sense as college football,” he said.

Under Hutchins, Chicago instituted a rule that football players had to take the same courses as all other students, and that pulled the rug out from under Stagg’s mighty team. By 1939, it was a doormat, losing by such scores as 61-0 to Harvard and 85-0 to Michigan. At the end of that season, Hutchins announced that Chicago would drop intercollegiate football.

In a speech to the students, he explained his reasons: “I hope that it is not necessary for me to tell you that this is an educational institution, that education is primarily concerned with the training of the mind, and that athletics and social life, though they may contribute to it, are not the heart of it and cannot be permitted to interfere with it.”

To the saga of Chicago football, Bennett adds this humorous ending: “The Maroons locker room would be converted to house the Manhattan Project, giving a new meaning to the phrase long bomb.”

We learn that several other universities have also dropped football, including the University of Seattle and the University of Denver. Getting out of that costly extravaganza is feasible, although a university president who proposes it must be ready for fierce opposition.

Consider the tale of Ray Watts, president of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Football is almost a state religion in Alabama, but UAB wasn’t very successful and program costs were heavily subsidized by student fees and the university’s general budget. In 2014, looking at a bleak financial picture, Watts decided that the money football was absorbing would be better spent on academics and announced that the university was dropping the sport.

Getting out of that costly extravaganza is feasible, although a university president who proposes it must be ready for fierce opposition.

Poor President Watts—he hadn’t counted on the ferocious opposition to his pro-academic priorities. He was roasted in the press, excoriated by the alumni, and even the faculty lashed out with a vote of no confidence. To save his hide, Watts reversed field. After a fundraising drive brought in $20 million, he announced that football would be back in 2017. It is back, and so are the high costs.

On the other hand, if a college president wants to add big-time sports or move up to a “higher” conference, he’ll find plenty of support. He can hire consulting firms to produce “research” that will demonstrate how a sports move will have great long-term benefits. In such studies, the costs are always downplayed while the supposed benefits (such as increased school loyalty) are hyped.

This has “worked” at a number of schools, including UNC-Charlotte. In 2007, chancellor Philip Dubois decided that his school’s reputation would soar if it started playing top-level football. He got his way. Millions were spent to build the necessary stadium and hire the coaches. Student fees went from an already lofty $1,160 per student to $1,648. Since starting play in the Sunbelt Conference in 2008, UNCC teams haven’t won many games, but even if they had, is there any reason to believe that the institution would be the least bit better? Bennett doesn’t think so.

But sometimes common sense prevails and the idea of boosting school prestige through sports is shot down. One such case was at another UNC institution, Winston-Salem State. The administration foolishly committed to moving up to NCAA Division I in 2007. But three years into its transition, a new chancellor concluded that the cost, which included $10 million in facility upgrades, was not justified and the school went back to competing in Division II. No sense in throwing good money after bad.

Bennett’s penultimate chapter explores the way women’s sports have followed the ruinous path of men’s athletics, beginning in the 1970s. That topic merits a separate article.

And that brings us to the ultimate chapter: “Reform—or Renewal?”

Bennett is not optimistic that college sports will change for the better. Few college presidents have the backbone for a fight with the entrenched athletics establishment, the faculty is generally not interested in battling it, and hardly any students care much about the cost that athletics adds to their bills. How about federal intervention? Bennett mentions some legislative ideas that have been floating around Congress but isn’t enthusiastic about any.

How about paying college athletes? Bennett gives that idea the back of his hand. He writes, “If college football and basketball players do join the ranks of the officially salaried, we will have the strange spectacle of ordinary students paying increased fees in order to subsidize not just the education but the livelihoods, the salaries, of their far more feted and celebrated sports-playing fellow ‘students.’ And if you pay those who play revenue sports, the big-time sports factories may need to shutter non-revenue sports, which would run afoul of Title IX.”

If you read Intercollegiate Athletics, Inc. you’ll be convinced that we have a serious problem, but also that it’s a problem with no evident solution.

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Want to save public schools? Embrace school choice

Debate over school choice has got ugly. A public school district administrator in Kentucky recently suggested he’d delay students’ graduations if the state legislature passes school choice legislation that would give tax credits to private donors who support voucher programs for kids to attend schools of their choice. The proposed program is similar to one in Florida, and the federal government has reportedly pledged up to $70 million in support to the Bluegrass State if it passes the bill.

At the heart of the outraged responses to such programs is the assumption that supporting public school students who want to attend private schools will undermine public education and hurt the kids left behind by transferring funds into private hands. However, research consistently shows that these claims are misguided. In fact, if you really want to improve the state of America’s public schools and the welfare of students, then school choice offers a way to do exactly that.

School choice is the surprisingly radical idea that families shouldn’t be denied the opportunity to choose the educational path that’s right for their children — including and especially low-income families. Yet, across the United States, students are not only deprived of the chance to attend private schools that might provide better opportunities due to financial circumstance, they also can’t even attend a better-regarded public school a few miles down the road, because they’re arbitrarily locked into a single public school by their zip code.

With a captive audience, as it were, this means that poorly-performing schools face no consequences and lack the incentive to improve the quality of their services. In fact, even in states like Arkansas that have allowed kids to transfer into public schools across district boundaries, not all government funding allocated for their education follows them to their new school. This means that schools that lose students to choice actually receive more funding per-pupil than before.

But extra funding seems to have little to do with improving failing schools. The United States spends a whopping $15,424 for every public school student it educates (a nearly threefold increase in real terms since 1960) despite student performance remaining flat over that period. This figure is also significantly higher than the average for countries in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a 36-member forum of the world’s democratic, developed nations. In fact, it’s even above what the average OECD nation spends per-student on college education. Yet, with all that funding, the average American student still fails to outperform their OECD peers.

Clearly, public education in the United States doesn’t have a lack of funding. It has a problem with how the money is being spent. Indeed, administrative costs account for a substantial chunk of the spending increase at US schools in the last century — funding that doesn’t directly go into classrooms or into improving student outcomes, yet grew at thrice the pace of student growth between 1992 and 2009. Providing incentives to spend money more effectively, efficiently and in the best interests of families and kids, rather than on a bloated bureaucracy, is a must for improving outcomes.

That’s where school choice comes in.

When California adopted public school choice, for example, some schools lost students, while others gained them, as families ‘voted with their feet.’ In the end, however, both kinds of schools benefited and improved their outcomes, as those that lost students consulted with parents and focused on areas to work on in order to retain kids.

The same principle applies to private school choice. The competitive pressure placed on Florida’s public schools by its school voucher tax credit program resulted in higher reading and math scores, as well as lower suspension and absence rates. And a meta-analysis of various school choice voucher programs found that these programs have had, at best, significant positive effects, and at worst, negligible effects on education outcomes for public school kids. But a majority of the studies report had positive feedback.

Even if we ignore the benefits of competition that these programs produce for public schools, we shouldn’t forget that the point of education programs isn’t to empower schools — it’s to empower students. Families and kids choose schools for a variety of reasons, including for a safer environment, better academic, artistic or athletic programs, and even for proximity to family and friends. That right ought to be expanded, not restricted.

The wealthy already choose schools for their kids based on these criteria. Those opposing school choice programs, then, are only hurting low-income families who rely on and benefit from them the most. School choice isn’t just good for educational outcomes or pushing public schools to do better. It’s the right thing to do.

Satya Marar is a policy analyst with the Reason Foundation specializing in school finance.

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Australia: University O-Week censors excel themselves

“Free speech crisis? What crisis?” Uttered in freaky unison, this frequen­t denial from university vice-chancellors has allowed them to resume normal programming.

That consists of VCs putting their heads in the sand rather than confronting those trying to nobble intellectual diversity on campus. It includes VCs sending long emails about how proud they are of their diversity programs, with no sense of the irony that diversity of opinion is not part of that program. And it means VCs devoting more energy to attracting foreign stud­ents than defending freedom of expression.

How much longer can univer­sity leaders ignore the accelerating rhythm to raids on free speech at Australian universities? Today, the most brazen opponents of free speech within universities are those who control student unions. Funded by other students’ money, the leaders of student unions use their union muscle to control what other students hear, read and learn. Not content with running social events, defending students’ rights or holding university management to account, a small group of students have assumed a new role as campus censor. And they imagine that if they provide a band and a BBQ, they can flex their polit­ical arm without reproach.

On Tuesday afternoon, the student association at Melbourne’s Monash University, which runs Orientation Week stalls, BBQs and other events aimed at offering students “a diverse introduction to Monash”, rejected an application from Generation Liberty to be part of the program’s activities.

Generation Liberty is a program run by the Institute of Public Affairs for young Australians, includi­ng university students, introduc­ing them to ideas, arguments, and perspectives that they may have missed at school or university. The program is a big hit; its growth, especially over the past 12 months, points to a real hunger for knowledge not addressed by schools and universities.

In an email, events officer Michel­e Fredregill from the Monash­ Student Association told fellow Monash student Luca Rossi, a Generation Liberty co-ordina­tor at the university: “We have carefully reviewed your booking request and discussed it internally. Regretfully we must decline your booking application on the basis of our terms and conditions. Generation Liberty’s positions on issues such as climate change do not align with MSA’s.”

This is what happens when zealotry is threatened by facts. There is nothing in the terms and conditions to justify denying Genera­tion Liberty’s application to be part of O-Week, which kicks off on Monday.

In any case, a student union, or any other body, cannot use “Ts & Cs” to contract out of obligations under Victoria’s Equal Opportunity Act 2010 not to discriminate against a person on the basis of their political beliefs or activities.

More sinister is MSA’s reference to not aligning with “Generation Liberty’s positions on issues such as climate change”. Neither Generation Liberty nor the IPA has a “position” on climate change. The 77-year-old research organisation and its younger offshoot, known as Gen Lib, produce research­ based on facts: the rest is left up to who is reading, listening or watching IPA papers, podcasts or YouTube videos.

Rossi, 19, has hit back at this MSA censorship. “As a student at Monash, it is insulting for your ­student association, who supposedly represents you, to basically say you can’t be trusted with your own thoughts, we have to think for you.”

The Monash law/arts student features in a series of Gen Lib YouTube videos launched late last year called What I Wasn’t Told.

At last count, What I Wasn’t Told … About Climate Change had attracted just shy of 200,000 views. The video includes links for the curious to read the research that justifies every statement.

Rossi says had Gen Lib been given the chance to join O-Week, “we would have set up a stall, handed out some stickers and badges, and if some students want to have a chat with us, then we give them the idea of freedom. And that’s it.”

What exactly are the officeholders of the student union at Monash afraid of? That some ­inquisitive students might grab a vegan burger from the MSA BBQ, then wander over to the Gen Lib stall and pick up a free sticker ­carrying the Jordan Peterson quote “In order to be able to think, you have to risk being offensive”?

Or maybe they fear the badge carrying these words from Ricky Gervais: “Just because you’re offended doesn’t mean you’re right.”

Another badge says: “Make ­Orwell Fiction Again.”

The only steadfast position taken by Gen Lib is a belief in open inquiry and students thinking for themselves. Clearly this belief in intellectual diversity does not align with the MSA.

Rossi, one of 16 Gen Lib campus co-ordinators at 15 Australian universities, is frustrated by the lack of transparency, too. “It’s shady,” he says, alluding to the decision by MSA president James McDonald to fob it off as an “operations issue” in answer to Rossi’s request for more details as to why the student union rejected Gen Lib’s application.

“It’s basically as little transpar­ency as possible: ‘You’re not allowed­ to be here because we don’t agree with your views. Now please go away’,” says Rossi.

Alas, passing the buck about incursio­ns into intellectual diversity happens at the highest levels about an issue that should be embedded in the DNA of every serious ­university.

When the student guild at the Queensland University of Technology refused Gen Lib’s applic­ation to be part of Market Week last month, vice-chancellor Margaret Sheil learned about it from the media and responded by ­saying QUT was committed to “a variety of contesting viewpoints”.

But when this asserted belief in contesting viewpoints has not filtere­d down to the student guild, it is clear that intellectual diversity is not embedded in QUT’s culture.

The dirty little secret is that stud­ent unions are baying campus censors, too. And it takes only a handful of students who control events such as Market Week at QUT and O-Week at Monash to undermine intellectual diversity for the rest of the student popul­ation. IPA research compiled last year revealed that 59 per cent of students believe they are sometimes prevented from voicing their opinions on controversial issues by other students.

For student unions, freedom of speech is a controversial issue.

It is a stark failure of logic and leadership when VCs try to dodge responsibility by saying stud­ent unions are “independent” from university administration. Student unions hold functions on campus, they are meant to represent other university students, and student unions are partly funded by ­compulsory student services and amenities fees paid by every stud­ent, except international ones.

Who then, if not university ­administrators, will hold these student censors to account?

It is not unreasonable for VCs, acting on behalf of all students, to require students within student unions or guilds to commit, in practice, to freedom of expression, open debate and intellectual diversity. That starts with O-Week ­activities.

Instead, there is a failure of accounta­bility right up and down the line. Just over a week ago, new Tasmanian Liberal senator Claire Chandler questioned professor Nick Saunders, chief commissioner of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, the body charged with holding universities to their part of the funding deal — universities receiv­e federal funding from taxpayers in return for delivering intellec­tual inquiry on campus. Saunders said the regulatory body has no authority to rein in censorship by student unions.

Chandler tells Inquirer: “One of the real policy questions that has to be answered here is: does a university’s obligation to promote free speech on campus extend to student unions … given that these unions are getting funding from universities, through services and amenities fees that are compulsory?”

Of course it should. More than that, it is time to restart the battle over compulsory fees that prop up these student censors. Whereas the Coalition government abolished­ compulsory student unionism in 2005, the Gillard governmen­t reintroduced them in 2010 in the form of the services and amenities fee. Ten years later, stud­ent unions are using these compulsory fees to fund their censorship­ of ideas and people on campus.

Chandler, who is passionate about universities fostering ­genuine intellectual freedom to sharpen young students’ minds, says that if the model code recommended by former High Court chief justice Robert French in his review of free speech at Australian universities doesn’t capture oblig­ations of student unions to free speech, then this “gap” needs to be addressed.

Fill the gap, by all means, but a code will not necessarily change a culture.

I saw a similar problem up close as a member of the ABC board for five years. There was, and remains, a deeply embedded culture among journalists, producers and higher levels of the tax-funded media behemo­th opposed to the intellectual diversity that is explicitly requir­ed under its charter.

Internal codes which purported to commit the ABC to their legislative charter made no difference up against that culture. Instead­, even egregious cases of bias by journalists were routinely met with management claims that editorial policies are too vague, dodging any finding of a breach of the policy. Management would suggest the ABC board redraft the policies, a useless “make work” exercise­, to remove areas of grey.

When another glaringly obvious episode arose of bias, often from the same journalist — recidiv­ists were not hard to find — the board would receive the same response. It’s all rather grey so we can’t do anything. In other words: go away, our ABC culture trumps a code and even a legislative charter mandating intellectual diversity.

The same scenario will unfold across Australian universities. Even the most beautifully crafted free-speech code will count for nothing until there is meaningful cultural change.

And that will not happen until the Morrison government moves to reduce funding to universities that do not implement cultural change.

Over to Education Minister Dan Tehan to walk the talk, remembering too that academic freedom was thrown under the bus when James Cook University decided­ to sack professor Peter Ridd on a bogus code of conduct claim. JCU has committed to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend that action in courts, rather than defend intellectual ­diversity.

In the meantime, we are left to ponder the state of a higher educatio­n where codes, laws, regul­ators and the media are needed to remind VCs and student union­s about the core business of a ­university.

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