College Athletes: Employees? Well, Duh!

Mad Dog begs the reader's forgiveness, but what part of obvious do you not understand?
Is the football player who signs a contract to accept a "scholarship" to a college, which guarantees him room, board, access to the facilities, coaches, travel and all the means to perform for the institution not an employee? 

When he is injured, unable to play, to perform his duties and he is discharged from the team, loses his "scholarship" and "let go" is he not "fired" from his job, without compensation, not to mention workers comp?

It does not take much personal experience at college to see the nature of the employer/employee relationship. There may be some peculiarities to the "student athlete"  relationship, which may more closely resemble that of an apprenticeship, but these kids are working for the college, generating billions in TV, sports paraphernalia income for the college. They have essentially a financial relationship with the institution, and whatever classroom education they get is a perk. But, for the most part, they have no time for "college life." They are at work, going over films with the coaches, lifting weights with their training coaches. Their time belongs to their employers. They are like those Chinese factory workers who live in dorms next door to the factory. They are working nights and weekends and days, too. There are no off seasons. They train year round.

Most college basketball players never graduate because with a 30 game schedule and travel and the lack of academic achievement or ambition of most college basketball players, classroom experience is simply irrelevant to their purpose for being on campus. 

There is the famous story, which dates back to the 1960's about Lenny Moore, a terrific running back for Penn State who was called upon in class by the professor. Moore did not answer; he just stared at the professor. "Uh, Mr. Moore, I asked you a question."
To which Moore responded, "My name is Lenny Moore. I carry the ball. I don't answer no questions."

What Moore was expressing, of course, was his pique with the regulation which in those days required he actually show up physically and attend a certain number of classes, which, in his case, was absurd.   His presence in the classroom was a lie fashioned by bureaucrats. He knew why he was at Penn State and so did everyone else, and going to class had nothing to do with it.

Even the Ivy League is not exempt, although, the Ivies could reasonably argue they could qualify as exceptional,  because they do not offer "scholarships" with cash amounts stated. What they offer is "financial aide" packages for "needy" athletes. But let's examine an anecdote about how this may play out.  

Mad Dog's son was a highly recruited high school wrestler and he was brought to campus by the wrestling coach at Columbia. (Princeton and even the venerable University of Chicago sponsored similar visits to their campuses.)  At Columbia, the coach told the group of hopefuls, "The only places you need to know how to get to are the gym and the library. At the Ivy League, you actually have to pass your classes. But your job is to wrestle and to stay eligible."

In the admission office, Mad Dog talked to an admission officer about another wrestler who had preceded his son. The admissions officer smiled and said, "Well, we were happy we were able to work out the aide package" for this wrestler. And Mad Dog thought, well, that's interesting: This wrestler they were talking about came from Potomac, Maryland, where he lived in a McMansion. His father was an orthopedic surgeon. Both parents drove Mercedes. Somehow, this wrestler, a child of privilege, qualified for "financial aid," which in the Ivy League has to be based on financial need.

Mad Dog's son wound up at Vanderbilt, where he had some football players on his dorm hall. He said he never saw them. They were always at practice, travelling or working out. Vanderbilt's student athletes were, in many cases, actually students, but they had demanding jobs. They were on work study. Of course, their opponents in the rest of the SEC did not have the burden of classwork to distract them, which may explain why Vanderbilt was never very competitive in football.

Duke brags about the high graduation rate of its basketball players, but none of them are engineers, pre medical students or students in any demanding academic area. How could they be, given their work schedule?

It has not always been so. When Mad Dog was recruited to wrestle at Brown University in 1965, he arrived to find that organic chemistry labs were held Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and the wrestling team traveled on Thursday afternoons. So Mad Dog withdrew from the wrestling team. Nobody said a word.

In his dorm, which had a high percentage of athletes, were football players who were engineers, chemistry and physics majors. Several starting football players were pre medical students. One is now chief of Urology at the National Institutes of Health. The starting quarterback is a radiologist.  Brown's football team was competing in those days against Brian Dowling and the professionals at Yale and Harvard and Dartmouth and Brown rarely won a game.  Ultimately, the football coach was eased out and a new regime came in and won more football games, but the physics majors disappeared from the roster.

Those are the worm's eye view stories. From the eagle's eye view, you have only to look at the numbers of players on basketball and football teams who never graduate, whose highest hope is becoming professional athletes, who cannot read, or read much, at the money spent on facilities, travel, coaches' salaries and at the income from football, basketball, and, in the northeast, from hockey to see plainly enough that university sports programs have nothing to do with students, academia or scholarship. As Gordon Gee, the former president of Ohio State remarked, when he was asked whether he would fire the football coach for some transgression, "I'm more worried about him firing me."

The Europeans, the Japanese, of course look at our stadiums our universities in wonder.  What does a stadium at the University of Michigan, with 100,000 fans waving maize and blue banners have to do with a university? To them, it all looks like soccer hooligans. A football team at a university to the rest of the world makes no more sense than an automobile plant turning out Iowa State trucks. In some ways, the truck plant, which would require engineering and business school expertise would make more sense to the core mission of a university than a football team.

But, once again, in America, we have a fantasy--the "student/athlete"--marketed and sold, the Big Lie. And everyone is making so much money (except the workers) for anyone to want to speak the truth--the Emperor has no clothes. He's buck naked. Just don't tell the NCAA. The folks there have big salaries to protect.

Or, as Upton Sinclair observed, years ago: "It is difficult to bring a man to understanding, if his income depends on not understanding."

Here, in America, where the almighty dollar rules, academia has been poisoned. 
Even outside the offices of the football and basketball coaches,  academics have been perverted by the pursuit of money. Professors are bought and sold and their "expertise" and opinions are for sale. Professors get a base salary, but that's not where their real income derives--they are off campus "consulting" most of the time.  "Star" professors get "loans" for summer homes and for mortgages. And what makes them stars? Is it the quality of their scholarship or the effectiveness of their own personal marketing stratagems? 

Even at the university medical schools, the effect of money has contaminated the academic work.  Drug company money supports medical school laboratories and publications carry studies sponsored by pharmaceutical companies. 

And what does academia have to sell?  Unbiased truth, one might say. Harvard's emblem says "Veritas."  But Harvard, all of them, have sold out. "Whose truth?" you ask.

The sponsor's truth.