Blunting The Point

David French on National Review thinks he knows what’s wrong with college sports:

None of this is surprising. All of it should highlight the need for radical reform. After all, in college sports we see the old collision — between the socialist Utopianism of the central planner and the entrepreneurial will of the individual. It’s long been puzzling to me how many conservatives support the NCAA model of athletic exploitation. Karl Marx once famously proclaimed, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” The NCAA corollary is, if anything, a more corrupt, “From each according to his marketability, to each according to our whim.” “Need” has nothing to do with it.

And his solution?

There’s an easy alternative. Let’s replace the vast NCAA rule book with one line: “NCAA student-athletes must be enrolled at the school and in good academic standing when practicing with an NCAA-sanctioned team or playing in an NCAA-sanctioned event.” That’s it. That’s not a rulebook, it’s a notecard. It’s a slightly longer way of saying, “Treat student-athletes like all other students.” If a school wants to pay players a market rate, let it. If a local car dealer wants to use an athlete for a commercial, that’s fine. If a booster wants to contribute to a player’s salary, let him. Make the NCAA honest. Properly compensate the people who generate the wealth.

And this will place our colleges and universities – our places of higher education, coincidentally upon which the future of the nation rests – in the position of trying to balance the competing needs of education and having a winning team.

And notice how the former goal – education – is a well-defined, if vast, goal, with unlimited positive benefits for both the school, in terms of prestige, and for the nation, for increasing its competitive edge, while the benefits of the goal of having the latter, a winning sports team, are much harder to identify and quantify.

Let’s compare and contrast:

1. Goals
   1. Education: this the main purpose of an educational institution, to instill an education in its students. This should be the organic identity of the school, no matter its specialization.
   2. Sports team: putting a sports team on the field is not a putative purpose of an educational institution,and it has little to nothing to do with higher education. Not that you don’t learn important life lessons playing sports, but these are not the sorts of lessons that require the background of, say, Stanford; they can be learned just as well in the Minor Leagues of baseball.
2. Benefits
   1. The benefits of pursuing education unlimited and multifaceted, from bringing prestige to the instittution, benefiting a nation whose very existence may depend on the educational attainments of its citizens, to the citizens themselves becoming more aware of the complexities of nature and human culture that surrounds them. In short, a good education in a discipline which the student loves is of nearly unlimited benefit for all the actors.
   2. The benefits of a winning sports team? Beyond those that accrue to the actual players, one must appeal to the sense of community they engender. At this juncture, I must admit that I am speculating, because, despite the fact that I attended and graduated from the University of Minnesota/Twin Cities, the various sports teams were non-factors in my cultural life; indeed, most of my time was spent sleeping or studying. So I must merely speculate that a winning sports team improves student spirit; and beyond that, I see little of lasting benefit.
3. Detriments, by which I mean factors that are detrimental to the institution, nation, or students.
   1. There are few detriments in pursuing the goal of providing higher education, but I can think of a couple. First, there is, of course, academic fraud, brought on through the publish-or-perish culture in academics these days. Second, a certain insularity does seem to accrue in the academic world, as the most extreme example might be seen as the antifa movement.
   2. In the attempt to field a winning sports team, there are many detrimental factors. There is,
      of course, the provision of the “student-athletes”, which has led to periodic scandals and uproar. If we follow David’s recommendation, the nature of the scandals may change, but they won’t go away. “Tutoring” scandals wherein teachers are bought off, papers are written by someone other than the student-athlete, and other such incidents will not disappear due to David’s proposal. In general, corruption will continue unabated, and now perhaps unabashed.Second, the entire enterprise of college sports may become unstable as some institutions devote large amounts of resources, perhaps to the detriment of their real purpose, in pursuit of victory, while other institutions do not, resulting in boring contests and even teams dropping out.

      Third, what if your sports team is a losing proposition? Does that mean your community suffers? Is this a wise risk to take in an area that doesn’t contribute to the mission of the institution?
      But less obviously, there’s this entire “community binding” exercise. As frequent readers are aware, I recently commented on tribalism, and certainly a community falls into the same category as tribalism. I do not suggest that they are the same, but I am concerned that they instill certain attitudes that are inimical to the nation as a whole. I will grant that I am fairly blind to this entire part of the human experience. The University of Minnesota keeps sending me these applications to join the alumnae association, and while intellectually I guess I sort of get it, emotionally I find the entire phenomenon perplexing. I didn’t particularly enjoy the educational experience, even if I have derived many benefits from it, so why should I want associate with it afterwards?

No, I think David’s tried to step across a chasm and come up halfway short. I think the problem is that NCAA college sports, as it currently exists, is profoundly foreign to the mission of any educational institution. If David really wants to enable student-athletes to achieve their economic potential, especially at such a young age, then he should advocate educational institutions should simply dump the entire idea of the Big 10, Pac-10, the SEC, the NCAA, the entire schlepping, scandal-prone, distracting mess.

That’s what I advocate. If the NFL and the NBA want a minor league, then have them set it up.

But so far as I can see, college sports teams, as they are currently constituted, do nothing for the educational system as a whole, and that’s because they do not contribute to the main mission and purpose of the institutions.