For a decade, I’ve been a member of a faculty committee that works closely with the athletics department at Northwestern University. A fellow professor once complained to me about the special admissions considerations that athletes receive, arguing that we could admit more oboists if athletes didn’t get so many spots. At the time, the university was being sued as part of athletics-department scandals involving sexual harassment and hazing. One case was dropped, and others were settled without the university admitting wrongdoing. During the same period, the university announced the construction of a brand-new football stadium that would be the most expensive ever built for a college team. It was a lot to digest all at once. In answer to my colleague, I nodded in agreement, thinking, Yeah, more oboists.
But as I considered the mission of our university—helping students decide what they want to do after college, cultivating the knowledge and skills they need to achieve their goals, supporting faculty research, and raising capital to ensure that we can continue to do that work—I became less certain that oboists are more desirable, and more qualified for admission, than athletes. Why do we think that, over the course of their life, oboists will make a greater contribution to society than linebackers? (I mean you no offense, kind oboists! The duck is my favorite character in Peter and the Wolf.)
On campus, many people remain doubtful that Northwestern’s athletics and academic missions are aligned, especially as football becomes more and more of a business sheltered by a university. Critics are right to lament the increased professionalization of college sports, but they also believe that most student athletes care more about their sport than their classes. Many academics see sports as frivolous and corrupting, as a distraction from the higher purpose of moral and intellectual formation—and as the most visible sign of the commercialization and corporatization of the modern university. We worry that out-of-control spending on sports could lead us to abandon our commitment to academic achievement.
[Sally Jenkins: The knives are out for Bill Belichick]
Many, maybe even most, of these negative views of athletics held by my colleague and others are based on misconceptions. Take the complaint that student athletes are paid. Other students have the opportunity to get paid for work they do for the university and on their own behalf. We have a start-up incubator that has raised more than $1.6 billion in capital. Why shouldn’t athletes profit from the work they do too?
Our college athletes are hardly dumb jocks. As part of my work on the Committee on Athletics and Recreation (now called the Intercollegiate Athletics Committee), I’ve reviewed athletes’ selection of majors, academic performance, and travel schedules. I served on committees that hired our two most recent athletics directors. In my interactions with the athletics department and with student athletes in particular, I’ve been impressed, above all, by the emphasis they place on academic success, and how much effort they put into being students. I wish more of them wanted to major in my discipline, history, but that’s a different story.
Despite the seemingly constant negative attention paid to youth sports, I’m not convinced that parents of athletes put any more pressure on their kids than the parents of kids involved in other pursuits do. Northwestern’s Division I athletes worked as hard to get here as the oboists—or dancers, debaters, and comedians—did. Their accomplishments are every bit as impressive, and their chosen path every bit as legitimate.
Yet student athletes have told me that they sometimes feel like they don’t deserve to be here; that nonathletes don’t want to do group projects with them, either because they think that their practice and travel schedules will make them unreliable partners or that they are intellectual lightweights.
In fact, athletes do as well as nonathletes in their classes, and they typically get better grades during their active season of play compared with the offseason. As the director of our American Studies program, I met frequently with majors, one of whom was a runner on our varsity cross-country team. In addition to talking about her thesis or the classes she needed to graduate, we talked about the discipline necessary for her to maintain her 3.9 GPA. Her answers combined behaviors she learned from sports and from academics: physical activity, nutrition, sleep, good study habits. I learned a lot from her about a life well lived.
Student athletes do get support from tutors and advisers whom they’re required to meet with regularly. But nonathletes also have access to advisers, tutors, and other academic-support services. They aren’t required to use them, although it would benefit them if they did.
Athletes do miss a lot of classes, which grates on professors. On average, they miss maybe five days of class per quarter. In a nine- or 10-week quarter, that could amount to 15 or 25 percent of all class meetings. When athletes arrive on campus, their advisers tell them they can major in anything they want. That’s not entirely true, because some majors have requirements, such as lab time in the natural sciences, that conflict with practice or competition schedules. I wish they really could major in anything, but all students and not just athletes decide which classes to take and which subjects to major in based on their other curricular and extracurricular commitments, including work and family obligations. They’re also the only students who have to announce at the beginning of each quarter how many classes they’ll skip.
Football and, to a lesser degree, men’s basketball are fundamentally different from our 19 other varsity teams. These two sports spend and earn the majority of athletics-department revenue, are responsible for the most controversial changes to how college sports work, and receive almost all of the negative press. They make the system run and are inextricable from it. They, too, can add academic value.
To be transparent, I’m a fan. I’ve traveled to football bowl games in Nashville and Las Vegas, and March Madness basketball games in Sacramento, where I met recent and older alumni. To demonstrate how big-time college sports can help an entire university to prosper, a trustee pointed me to the example of Vanderbilt University, whose chancellor, Daniel Diermeier—previously on the faculty at Northwestern and the University of Chicago—has invested heavily in sports (especially football and basketball), written about the benefits to the university, and seen applications skyrocket and admissions rates dip. (There are also counterexamples; Northeastern University dropped its football program in 2009 and has still shot up the rankings.)
Over the past decade or so, applications from high-school students in the Northeast to schools in the Southeastern Conference—the Big Ten’s primary rival in athletics, in terms of prestige and television dollars—have increased by more than 90 percent. Perhaps it’s a coincidence, but most SEC schools have climbed in the academic rankings over the same period. Maybe they’ve ridden the wave of social-media posts of outdoor parties in February, or Bama Rush. But maybe a good football team, along with fancy dorms and good food, is considered by many incoming students to be an essential part of university life. Meal plans and residence halls aren’t core to our academic mission, either.
This fall, we’re debuting our new $875 million stadium. Our roster of college-football players will earn $21 million to $25 million to play this year, and our quarterback will make $1 million to $2 million. We’ve lured Chip Kelly to Evanston; as the former head coach of the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles, he will be as much of a campus celebrity as an offensive coordinator can be. We’ve also landed a $35 million gift from the Uihlein family specifically for football. Mac Uihlein was a captain of the team last year. That donation has upset some of my peers not only because of the family’s politics—they’ve donated to pro–Donald Trump super PACs and national efforts to limit abortion rights—but also because it’s further evidence of our investment in sports at a moment of austerity for much of the university. It’s a big bet that spending so much on football will lead the team to victory and that competitive success will boost the whole university.
The dramatic transformation of college sports makes it harder for me to justify my fandom—to myself and others. Conference expansion has shattered pretenses to regional coherence. Athletes now sometimes attend three, four, or five schools during their college career. Federal courts have held that student athletes can be paid directly by universities and simultaneously earn additional income from sponsorships and advertisers. Amateurism as the model on which college sports are based has always been a half truth, but today it’s basically dead. These facts are enough to make one wonder what the college half of college sports even means.
[Ian Bogost: College is coming apart]
As a faculty member, I’m fine with most of this, but with many reservations. When I taught a large lecture course on the history of college sports, I learned about a tackle named James Hogan, who played for Yale University from 1901 to 1904. He was in his mid-to-late 20s and didn’t pay tuition, and the university paid for his spring breaks in Havana. His story is a reminder that money has infected college sports for a long time.
Even so, I’m concerned that the money our athletes receive will affect my interactions with them as students in my classes. Instead of learning history, will they be focused on how to invest or spend the dollars the athletics department is paying them? Their labor for the university is more valuable than mine, so will they wonder why they should have to listen to me at all?
Yet I continue to believe that a university’s athletic and academic successes are complementary, if not connected. I still disagree with my colleague’s claim that sports drag down the more elevated intellectual and creative purpose of our institution. Football games and other sports connect generations of students, faculty, and alumni. Investments in athletics can boost a university’s academic reputation, along with our roster of poet laureates, Nobel Prize winners, and Marshall Scholars, and can also be a source of financial stability or even prosperity.
Even now, I think college sports, on balance, do more good than harm. It has been a rough period at Northwestern and other institutions of higher learning. I see sports as part of what holds us together as a community at the same time that they’re one more source of tension for others, such as my oboist-loving colleague. Yes, there’s too much money in the system, and that money can invite corruption that goes against our values. But there’s also too little attention paid to what college athletes gain from a university education, and what the rest of the university gains from having first-rate athletes here, in the classroom as well as on the field. The value of big-time college sports is real—for players, for fans, for professors—although you do have to work harder than ever to see it.
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