What Are College Sports For?

culture  ·  

Originally posted on my tumblr.

They’re not for child rape, I think we can all agree. But the scandal1 of Jerry Sandusky is the latest in a series of events calling into question the outsized influence of sports programs (football and basketball, mainly) in American universities. Too many schools today are basically sports franchises with a side business in education – and the players don’t even get paid! For all but a handful of universities, sports are money-losing propositions at a time when tuition keeps spiraling upward. Indeed, I can think of no other country that organizes its education system the way we do, where something ancillary to academic education has become not only one of the major draws, but can even distort a university’s own sense of purpose.

But what are college sports for – or any school sports program, for that matter? It has something to do with teaching virtue, doesn’t it? Or that’s what we tell ourselves, in any case.2 When you play a sport, a team sport in particular, you (supposedly) learn about working together, following the rules, confidence, fairness, losing well, winning well, &c. Obviously, these aren’t qualities that couldn’t be learned elsewhere, but sports are a convenient vehicle for introducing them by taking advantage of young people’s natural competitive instincts. That would militate in favor of intramural leagues, maybe even intercollegiate matches between cross-town rivals; but would it entail the massive, profit-driven system that is the National Collegiate Athletic Association today? I doubt it.

Another thing that college sports could be for comes from the Roman concept of mens sana in corpore sano, or a healthy mind in a healthy body. Stereotypes about jocks and nerds notwithstanding, doing some kind of vigorous physical activity is good for the brain. That activity, however, could be anything: It could be football or basketball, but it could also be ballroom dancing or parkour; I myself took aikido classes in college, attracted as I was to the whole “achieve world peace through kicking ass” message. But again, nothing about that principle entails anything like the NCAA or big-time college sports as we know it.

Part of the problem may be the mixed legacy of the university system itself. In the Anglo-American world, at least, colleges used to function mainly as finishing schools for the aristocracy, where excelling at one’s studies was not required, and was even frowned upon. The birth of the modern research university and the rise of the meritocracy has largely swept that tradition away, but it remains the case that higher education is pulled in two contrary directions: In one, it is a bastion of privilege; and in the other, it is a servant to the community and the public at large. Although the headline college sports are incredibly popular, they strike me as being in the former camp, existing mainly for the benefit of university administrators, sports program directors, and alumni boosters, but not necessarily the students or the broader community. It’s a situation that is proving to be untenable, as the events of the last year (e.g., Penn State, U. Miami, the Taylor Branch article, the creation of the National College Players Association) have shown.

  1. Is scandal too weak a word for the allegations being lodged against Sandusky and those at Penn State who are accused of enabling him? Perhaps; but then I am always reminded that “scandal” comes into the English language from the Greek word skandalon, which is frequently used in the New Testament to refer to traps, snares, stumbling blocks, and occasions for sin. “Woe unto the world because of scandals!” Jesus says. Given the behavior of Joe Paterno and others who witnessed or were informed of what was allegedly going on, “scandal” seems appropriate. ↩

  2. Prior to Sandusky’s indictment, Joe Paterno was widely viewed as not only a great football coach, but a moral leader as well. But it’s telling that praise for Penn State football under Paterno often also mentioned how rare it was for a big-time sports program to not be racked by scandal, albeit of the comparatively petty, money-under-the-table kind. ↩