Oh, These “Solutions” Reflect the NCAA’s Values All Right
It’s almost enough to make me think that the Noble Concept of Amateur Student-Athletes is just a massive exploitative scam.
When I say the “NCAA’s” values, this also means the values of the athletic departments themselves, who are sometimes worse than the NCAA’s leadership:
The 18 university presidents and chancellors on the panel stood firm on another measure permitting multi-year rather than year-to-year scholarships, but that also will get further scrutiny. More than 80 schools in Division I objected after the rule change was adopted last October, throwing it back to the board of directors.
The corruption factor of money is so high in college sports they should enjoy the ability to pass the buck(s) to students. Though they probably wouldn’t see it that way.
Is this just another version of the myth of amateurism?
I’m totally on board the notion that the amount of money and attention that is given to college sports compared to, say, academic research says unfortunate things about our society.
But does money corrupt college sports any more than any other activity in our society?
Certainly if, for the sake of argument, we focus on the structure of college sports rather than the place of college sports in our larger culture, the problem is not the supposedly corrupting presence of money, but rather the utterly inequitable distribution of that money.
It’s that universities have a reason to serve their students if they only have tuition and alumni money to pay their bills. A side business in entertainment isn’t good for them.
Universities have many, many sources of income other than alumni and tuition. For example, public universities have state governments. Public and private universities have endowments and various forms of corporate giving.
Some of these sources are obviously more salutary than others. But it’s far from clear to me that dealing with millions of dollars from a side business in entertainment is necessarily worse for the university than millions of dollars from, e.g., agribusiness or the intelligence “community.”
At any rate, this side business in entertainment isn’t going away.
At no point does agribusiness or government agency needs to scum over a student.
No, agribusiness can just scum over a much larger section of the population, without worrying about whether or not any of them are students.
Why is it that I’m not surprised that the NCAA sided with St. Joe and the status quo?
Wow, who could think that a Roman Catholic institution would engage in such a reactionary activity? It is almost as if that activity defined the school’s actual mission.
In many ways, religion does ruin everything.
And if you ever lived in North Carolina, you’d know that basketball IS the religion.
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The NCAA has a monopoly on not quite professional grade sports entertainment provided primarily by students age 18-24 with a very low below market place labor cost structure. It’s a great system except for the folks providing the below market cost labor. Too bad for them. Isn’t this a perfect organizing opportunity?
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