Recent scandals here at UNC, Penn State, Syracuse, and more have raised the profile of concerns and criticism about college athletics.  Meanwhile–and in large part on a different track–various high-profile commentators including Taylor Branch and Joe Nocera have been arguing that revenue college athletes (men’s basketball and football) should be considered employees and paid for their athletic service, and even the NCAA has taken a tentative, baby step in that direction, albeit disclaiming the principle. My UNC colleague Richard Southall has recently written two columns that examine the likelihood that legal developments could mean universities will be forced to pay athletes as employees and consider how universities might implement such a change.

It occurs to me that the critiques of the current operation of college athletics are in some ways in conflict with one another. As a professor, I am concerned about pressures for academic double standards; academic misconduct facilitated by athletic-department staff; compromising academic quality in order to pursue athletic championships; privileging athletes over other students in distributing scarce resources like seats in popular classes; demands placed on instructors who have athletes in classes; and distracting university administrators and resources away from the pressing needs of academic missions. In other words: I worry about threats athletics pose to universities.

By contrast, the Branch-Nocera-Southall critiques are concerned about the demands placed on athletes; the difficulty they face balancing the demands of athletics with those of academic life; the physical and employability risks they encounter. In other words: They worry about threats universities pose to athletes.

People I’ve spoken to who more-or-less defend the current system characterize it sort of a grand bargain: universities consent to some degree of compromise of intellectual quality in exchange for positive links with fans and donors who aren’t otherwise connected. Athletes consent to financial exploitation and academic drudgery in exchange for opportunities for big-time exposure, possible high-paying pro careers, and some assurance that boosters will help them out if pro sports doesn’t work out for them. Non-athlete students and faculty consent to privileges offered to athletes in exchange for entertainment and school spirit.

Southall is by any measure a national expert in this area, and I find his critique of the treatment of athletes–and his expectation that revenue athletes will be classified as employees in the not-too-distant future–compelling (though the Euclidean geometry analogy is strained at best).  But unlike Southall, I am very worried about the implications of such a change. Yes, as Southall points out:

if such a quantum shift occurs, western civilization, as we know it, will not crumble; the sun will, most likely, continue to set in the west; and the Law of Gravity will still describe a jump shot’s trajectory.

Now, I can’t confess to having read as widely as Southall has in this area, but I haven’t run across anyone suggesting that these would be the negative results of (further) professionalizing college athletics. But I do think it will exacerbate the already-problematic amount of money involved in athletics and, by extension, the degree of academic compromise demanded by athletics. The athletic tail would be allowed even more to wag the academic dog, and that would be a bad thing.

Southall envisions a regime wherein revenue athletics would be “separate corporate entities,” but associated with the university in some way. They would contract with players, providing salary, contracts, lifetime health insurance, and education as a “benefit.” I’m not sure why education should be understood as a “benefit” instead of, as we now understand it, a sine qua non: The University of North Carolina does not employ as athletes people who are not also students. We also don’t do so for various other kinds of support, e.g., teaching and research assistants.

Meanwhile, “universities would still be free to provide non-entertainment athletic opportunities for students in non-revenue sports.” Would universities be allowed to charge for admission to these sports? How much admission before the sport would cross the line and have to be jettisoned by the university and moved to the separate corporate entity? This strikes me as an impossible wall to maintain. Would spectators be barred from women’s basketball, lacrosse, and track and field because these are to be “non-entertainment”?

Also, note: unlike the current professional leagues, many of the largest employers would be state government agencies, and the collective bargaining regimes for these are very heterogeneous across states, including some important ones (North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina, and increasingly Ohio, Wisconsin, and Indiana) where collective bargaining by public employees is to a large extent illegal under existing or pending law. So I think some of the predictions and approaches are probably harder to implement than Southall expects.

How about a much more modest alternative: universities admit only athletes who meet true minimum academic requirements, and agree to live within reasonable practice and travel schedules that make being an athlete more similar to other things students do outside class (volunteer work, political activity, artistic endeavor, etc.). Universities provide adequate real educational services (not services to paper over deficiencies, but services to actually educate). To the extent that the athletics enterprise as a whole generates income above and beyond expenses, a revenue-sharing agreement allows athletes to collect shares of that surplus. This need not be enforced either legally or through the NCAA, but could quite reasonably be a sort of “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” pledge that universities sign.

These restrictions might ultimately lower the market price of DI coaches, which would be fine, and might also lower the overall quality of play, which would be fine.  I like Southall’s idea of education “credits” that athletes could bank and return to campus to use later, though I think in practice this is already often the case.

One of the critiques that has been raised is that athletes essentially must play in college in order to be noticed by the pros in basketball and football. College athletics, that is, functions as a de facto farm league for the NBA and NFL. By contrast, there are real farm leagues for Major League Baseball and hockey, which may account for the fact that these are less spectacular sports for colleges. Honestly, I don’t see why that’s universities’ problem. NBA and NFL are free to form their own farm leagues, and it’s certainly not in any university’s mission statement that we seek to develop athletic talent for professional teams.

My bottom line is this: I care far more about protecting the core academic missions of universities–major social institutions whose health and integrity I consider very important–than I do about protecting relatively few athletes who are themselves highly specialized, skilled individuals whose short- and long-term careers are not part of the university’s central mission. I think college athletics–revenue and not–can be a great benefit to universities, athletes, and non-athlete students alike, but I think the primary consideration has to be focusing on the core academic mission of the university.

Of course many universities do lots of things that are not in the core academic mission. They put on plays; they display art; they publish books; they maintain gardens and natural lands; they maintain radio stations; and more. The principles I’ve suggested here, I think, apply to all these other pursuits: they should be subsumed under the core academic mission and should not be allowed to drive or undermine that mission.

Go Heels! Beat State!

Another thing I use mail merge for is generating individualized reports to students about their grades. It can read a grade spreadsheet and turn that into one page per student with all the grade records.

For Chinese people, and many other Asian groups, the New Year is the most important family/cultural holiday. People go to great trouble and expense to spend the holiday with family, and there are many meaningful cultural and spiritual practices associated with it, even for nominally atheist people. But our religious accommodation policy does not cover this holiday unless people are willing to say that their religion is being Chinese, or that their religion is Daoism or “Chinese traditional” religion. If they are willing to ask for religious accommodation for the holiday, they can have it, but mostly they don’t ask.

I have long been fascinated by this artificial legalistic boundary between “religion” (which must be accommodated) and “culture” (which is ignored as a basis of accommodation) when, in reality, the two are always wholly intertwined.

An older post in which I reflected on related issues on my own blog

1.) I gather that one of the things that precipitated the crisis was Greece’s disclosure last year that its sovereign debt was about double what had previously been reported, is that correct? How did that happen?

2.) Krugman and others have pointed out that one of the differences between Greek/Italian/Spanish debt and US debt is that the Euro is not under the control of the Greek/Italian/Spanish governments. As such, they cannot really grow their way out of the crisis because their economies do not contribute all that much to the value of their currency, in stark contrast to the US.  In this sense, they participate like a “United States of Europe” in that each state can choose to issue bonds, but these bonds will be valued in a currency the value of which is not mostly in the state’s power. So does it follow that if North Carolina were suddenly to restate its balance sheet and disclose a lot more debt than previously thought, the dollar would be in crisis? If not, why not?

3.) Similarly: there are various places that use other countries’ currencies for various reasons. I believe Panama and some other countries maintain a one-to-one exchange rate with the USD; Equador, El Salvador, and East Timor apparently use it as official currency. For several years after independence Namibia used the South African Rand as official currency, and after that maintained a one-to-one exchange rate between the Rand and its Namibian Dollar; other countries in that region (Lesotho and Swaziland) use the Rand still. Why are these examples less of a problem than countries in the so-called “Euro Zone”? Since the Euro is a convertible currency, why couldn’t any country just decide, unilaterally, that its official currency would be the Euro? Why, in other words, does the ECB have sway over individual Euro-Zone countries?

This set off a kerfuffle, with many accusing the Conservative government of attempting to undermine same-sex marriage rights. The government moved quickly to reconfirm its commitment to same-sex marriage rights, and made a statement that it intended to change those aspects of the law that did not recognize same-sex and/or foreign marriages.

This decision, which reverses policies set in place in 2004, was only revealed when a lesbian couple petitioned for divorce. They were told that no divorce was possible because their marriage wasn’t legally recognized by Canada, the same place that issued the marriage license in the first place.

The question of whether this also means that the government will stop issuing licenses to non-residents, how it will affect immigration policy, same-sex marriage rights of Canadians, and so on.

Cacaphony

The syllabus is here in case you’re interested.

Enjoy the semester -

I am a bad person to ask this question because, truth be told: I have never in my life paid any attention to this rule. I didn’t even know it existed until I was well into assistant professorhood, and only awhile after that did I come to appreciate the other people took it seriously. Seems crazy to me to go to any amount of extra work for the benefit of one person who probably won’t read the whole thing anyway. But I’ve known people who have spent days of their life making careful abridgments to reach exactly 20 pages. So, I have a view for myself, which is basically “Eh, I’m not doing that and it’s perfectly okay if somebody doesn’t accept my paper as a result; it’s not like whether or not I get to present at ASA will make any tangible difference whatsoever in my life at this point.” Yet, I recognize, this being the right answer for myself does not mean that it is the right answer to give to students or other folks who ask what they should do. So I’m never sure what to say. Any thoughts?

(Incidental additional wrinkle: one student I know is using a restricted medical dataset that involves a detailed chain of review and approval in order to be able to submit a paper using the data for publication. The student is expressly prohibited from submitting any paper anywhere that diverges from the paper that was approved. In other words, the student either needs to break the rules of the data agreement–and that’s not going to happen–or would need to engage the approval process again solely for the ASA-submission version of the paper.)

Sociology doesn’t have this rule, right? Should it?