Trending
Do big-time college athletics programs have any educationally-redeeming value?
Penn State recently extended the contract of football coach James Franklin and increased the salary of one of the highest paid football coaches in America after what Nittany Lion followers lamented were woeful seasons in 2020 and 2021.
The Franklin situation, however, is not unique.
It is symptomatic of a plague that is actually destroying the values and foundation of higher education in America.
The Chronicle of Higher Education explained how this is taking place in a detailed analysis. The op-ed was written by constitutional law professor Paul Campos of the University of Colorado.
Campos detailed how the salaries of big-time coaches and college presidents were eroding the very essence of higher education in America.
Earlier this fall, Michigan State administrators begged their faculty, staff and graduate students to volunteer to work in the campus's dining halls, because of a severe shortage of regular workers.
A basic principle of economics is that you can retain workers who might otherwise be inclined to seek alternate employment by improving the terms of their compensation.
Michigan State's administration had no difficulty applying that principle to its head football coach, Mel Tucker, who last month received a 10-year, $95 million, fully guaranteed contract extension. Even if MSU should at some point wish to part ways with Tucker because he was no longer winning enough games, it would still owe him the remainder of his contract.
Campos writes: "Coaches and presidents are robbing us blind: Ballooning athletics and administrator salaries are symptoms of the same disease."
The reality, though, is that the highest paid coaches are earning far more than the presidents of the universities, and the truth is that big-time college athletics do not fit within the educational mission statements of any of these universities.
Campos explains that over the years, the salary issues of coaches and administrators have illustrated the distortion of values in an educational system whose focus should be on research and intellectual development but now focuses an inordinate amount of money on entertainment.
The capture of collegiate athletics -- and of American higher education in general -- by the most rapacious forms of contemporary capitalism is reflected by the extent to which making as much money as fast as possible has become the largely unquestioned goal of institutions that were created for quite different purposes.
These institutions nevertheless continue to operate as tax-exempt charitable enterprises, while paying the athletes and contingent faculty members who generate the revenue that funds those enormous salaries little or nothing, is increasingly indefensible.
When I was doing my undergrad work at Penn State in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was confronted with the reality of the distortion of these values while taking an American literature class.
I was shocked to find a group of about 20 football players in the class and could not figure out why they were there.
I still remember one of the athletes, a starting defensive back on the team that was undefeated the previous two seasons, asking the professor this question after he assigned some readings from Walt Whitman.
"What was the name of that dude who wrote them poems?
At the time, we were proud when Coach Joe Paterno talked about his "Grand Experiment" that featured outstanding students like Altoona's Mike Reid, an accomplished musician, and another fabulous defensive player, Denny Onkotz, who was majoring in an esoteric field like nuclear physics. Both were also All-American football players.
Today, as I learned in early 1970, athletes are far from the Reid-Onkotz examples of academic and intellectual prowess.
Some do exist, but they are minuscule when looking at the overall picture. What this example illustrates is the that big-time college football and basketball have eroded the educational process, as Campos illustrates.
And the losers in this process are the millions of students who are forced to assume tens of thousands of dollars of debt in student loans, something that may take them a lifetime to overcome.
Yet, millions of dollars are being paid to people who are not college professors, researchers, librarians, or administrators those whose sole role is to further the academic mission of those universities and colleges.
Conrad is a freelancer journalist who spent the majority of his career in Central Pennsylvania.