Richard J. Severson

As we await U.S. District Judge Wilkens’s decision regarding the House v. NCAA settlement, I cannot help but feel that the dreadfully long and winding (litigious) NCAA road that has gotten us here is a dead-ender.  Sure, recent lawsuits have delivered on the issue of whether student-athletes should be paid or not.  Big deal.  There are far more important issues at stake than how to divvy up the riches of the college sport industry. 

Hypocrisy grows in bloated athletic departments like fat on a pig.  Plain and simple.  Perhaps the most egregious example: the outlandish salaries of holier-than-thou football coaches who lecture everybody ad nauseum about the virtues of amateurism and the incalculable value of an education paid for by an athletic scholarship that includes room and board in an exclusive compound separated from the rest of the student body.     

You want the truth?  Neither students nor coaches should be making millions of dollars when the salary of a full professor is $120,000 per year on average.  Common sense alone (not to mention common decency) would suggest that a salary that dwarfs the college president’s pay grade by a factor of at least 25 is absurd.  All this unbounded wherewithal piles up in athletic departments as the debt load for average, everyday students and their bamboozled families skyrockets to two trillion dollars.  How can a young couple afford to buy a house and start a family if the biggest chunk of their projected lifelong earnings is earmarked for student loans?  The goal of every college—including the athletic department—should be to ensure that every student graduates with little to no debt. 

What troubles me most is that student-athletes have become pawns in a Big Money scheme that makes getting an education practically irrelevant.  The irony of this situation is palpable.  Being an athlete is not separate from what it means to be a student.  On the contrary, participating in sports is the epitome of American philosopher John Dewey’s influential “learn by doing” theory of education.  Being part of an organized team gets to the heart of what is essential to an education.  In what other “classroom” can you learn how to pull your weight in a shared endeavor that requires discipline, good character, sacrifice for the greater good, social/emotional intelligence, friendship, camaraderie, ambition, leadership, and so many other qualities that are required for a civil society to flourish?  No wonder so many college athletes have gone on to become such successful Americans, including a president (Gerald Ford, who played football for the University of Michigan), and, my favorite example as a lifelong Minnesota Vikings fan: Alan Page of Purple People Eaters fame, who went on to become a Minnesota Supreme Court judge.  The list of exemplary former student-athletes is practically endless.  Why?  Because education is a participatory sport in its essentials.  It is unforgivable that the NCAA has overlooked that fact for the entirety of its existence.  Student-athletes are exemplary students, nothing more—nor less.  Colleges and universities have much to learn from them about building meaningful curricula that engage the heart and soul of their student bodies.