These days of war and worries about hostages have made it difficult to consider writing about anything else. Yet life does go on and the best way to manage our many emotions is to balance our lives. In any case, I have already written and spoken about every current angle of the situation that I can address. If you missed my most recent talk on Friday, Nov. 17, you can find it at this link.
As we gathered on that Friday night, a concerned friend pulled me aside to say that he hoped I had some distractions and wasn't watching news of the war nonstop. I did watch quite a bit at the outbreak, mostly Hebrew-language news. But I also have my distractions. One of these is football.
Some of you might have caught wind that I am a baseball fan, dedicated to the Cubs. That began in my twenties. Much earlier in life it was my mother who infected me with the football bug, schlepping me to Miami Dolphins games in elementary school. I'm still a big 'Fins fan and, yes, I'm rooting for the locals here, too. I also like the college games. I even put a few dollars down now and again, though always very, very few dollars.
For most, of course, football is not about very, very few dollars. It is about billions of dollars.
When it comes to the professional leagues, those billions are largely their business, not ours. Not that there are never moral and ethical issues attached to their business. Labor issues - including racial discrimination and pay - have always been a concern for many fans. The use of public funding for stadiums has been a concern for anyone troubled by what it says about our government's priorities. These reflect larger societal concerns but are by no means unique to sports.
What is unique to sports is the corrosive toll it is taking on the culture of higher education, particularly publicly-funded higher education.
And it's about to get worse.
During a friendly post-game analysis with a friend about last weekend's Really Big Game, my friend mentioned to me that the highest paid employee of the state of Michigan is Jim Harbaugh. I was not shocked but I was curious about just how much money we're talking about. Well, it turns out that between salary and incentives, Coach Harbaugh is paid around $12 million per year. By way of comparison, Andy Reid, a three-time Super Bowl winner, also makes $12 million per year as head coach of last year's championship team.
The mission statement of the University of Michigan is not that different than those of other universities. It is "to serve the people of Michigan and the world through preeminence in creating, communicating, preserving and applying knowledge, art, and academic values, and in developing leaders and citizens who will challenge the present and enrich the future." To the extent that intercollegiate athletics are a part of that - and I believe they can be - they serve that mission.
When I was in college ("Hook 'em Horns!") intercollegiate football (and basketball) were no less popular. There were lesser, but still enormous, amounts of money involved. I recall my university arguing that these funds were going back to the athletes; not only those in the lucrative departments, but those in the other ones, too. I took their word for it.
Today, however, it is clearly not the case that the majority of the money is going back to athletes across the board. For one thing, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) itself has reported that there are still enormous gender inequities and imbalances in athletic opportunities.
The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics is a watchdog group comprised of former and current college athletic administrators promoting educational reforms in college sports. It has worked hard to highlight the failings of many big-time athletic programs in areas such as athlete education, health, well-being, and safety.
Those who follow college football know that next year there will be an entirely new playoff structure that will bring with it a gargantuan influx of new money. Over the next ten years combined athletics revenues will grow from today's annual $3.5 billion to more than $8 billion. When that happens, the Knight Foundation projects that it will lead to nearly half of all public institutions in the big athletic conferences "spending more just on their eleven football coaches’ compensation than total spending on all athletes’ tuition, housing, meals, cost of attendance stipends, medical expenses, and insurance coverage at their respective institutions."
The Knight Commission's co-chair, Len Elmore, has pointed out that nine schools have already reached this point and that it "is deeply at odds with the educational mission of taxpayer-supported public universities." The group has made very specific recommendations about how to better - and more ethically - allocate that money without damaging the quality of the programs that are bringing the dollars in the first place. As for how to do that, there are many scenarios on the table, all of them providing increased benefits to the students and educational missions of public (and also private) universities.
The outsized impact of what amounts to publicly housed for-profit sports leagues is about to become much more outsized. When it comes to public universities it's up to all of us to hold them accountable. At the risk of angering some fellow fans, I don't think it's too much to ask that the coaches who want to make $12 million per year might want to consider working for the NFL. ("Please drop those rotten tomatoes!")
Universities are, above all else, values-based institutions. We have already witnessed the damage that comes from abandoning higher values in pursuit of wins. (I am absolutely NOT referring to anything specific here. We have our choice of too many egregious examples.)
Our public universities in particular owe the public consistent adherence to their stated values. When athletic departments degrade their connection to university missions - when they harm the very students and values that they were created to uplift - it damages public trust in one of the most significant institutions ever created by enlightened people. That is something that we humanists cannot simply sit back and tolerate.
That said, I wish every one of us a happy college football playoff season. Let's just remember when we're having all the fun and singing all the fight songs, that there are real students to whom we owe both an education and the appropriate care for their well-being.