In the American educational system, the tail wags the dog rather than the reverse. At both the high school and college level, it is more important for many institutions to have winning teams in the major sports, particularly football and basketball, than academic achievement. This is certainly true at colleges, but is also valid at many high schools. To assess the importance of sports versus academics in most schools, one only has to look at the pay of coaches versus teachers. Professors at the University of Texas generally earned between $150,000 and $250,000 last year. Mack Brown, the head football coach at the university, earned well over $5 million. A similar disparity can be seen in the salaries of football and basketball coaches at major athletic universities versus the pay that professors receive in the academic disciplines.
In addition to the way athletic coaches and professors are remunerated, there is also the money that goes into building and maintaining athletic facilities compared to the money given to academic departments for their facilities, laboratories and so forth. Two years ago at the University of Florida at Gainsville, the sports budget increased at the same time that the computer science department funding was cut by 30 percent.
Over and over again there have been scandals at different universities where athletes have been given grades without going to classes, were given the answers to questions on tests, had other people take the tests for them, and so forth. This type of behavior is tolerated because the schools want the best athletes to represent them notwithstanding their academic abilities. In basketball, many of the outstanding players do “one and done.” They go to school for one year and then go on to play professional basketball. It is pure hypocrisy for these athletes to pretend to be interested in academics when they will drop out of school and pursue an NBA career as soon as the NBA rules allow them. Football players have to generally stay for three years before they can jump to the NFL. But why should any of these athletes be considered students when they do not value academics? (The recent suit by Northwestern football players asking to be considered employees seems to make a lot of sense in terms of the work they perform for the university.)
The reason of course is money. The universities want the best athletes regardless of academic prowess because they will earn money for the universities. Sports fans will buy tickets to see the games the teams play and generate income, and alumni will donate more money to the university if they produce winning teams. The recent re-alignment of the conferences has solidified the earnings power of the universities engaged in big time sports, as TV will pay them money year in and year out to broadcast their games. But all of this has nothing to do with the supposed objectives of the universities- to impart knowledge to their students. Having a winning or losing team representing them should make no difference academically.
Though many of the sports programs at the major universities did not generate income in the past, this will change now with the television money that the conferences will distribute to the universities. But it’s time to change the structure of big times college sports. Football and basketball teams should be set up to represent the schools but without full time students. The athletes should be employees of the universities who sponsor the teams. They should be like minor league football and basketball teams. The alternative is to set up sports the way the Ivy League now does it, where legitimate students play for their teams. Perhaps the caliber of play is not comparable to Alabama or Notre Dame, but there’s no hypocrisy in having these individuals representing the schools. Those who back big-time sports, however, would not like it. Academics should come first in our universities and high schools.
Resurrecting Democracy
www.robertlevinebooks.com
Political junkie, Vietnam vet, neurologist- three books on aging and dementia. Book on health care reform in 2009- Shock Therapy for the American Health Care System. Book on the need for a centrist third party- Resurrecting Democracy- A Citizen’s Call for a Centrist Third Party published in 2011. Aging Wisely, published in August 2014 by Rowman and Littlefield. Latest book- The Uninformed Voter published May 2020