Abstract
I argue for two main points concerning French’s critical examination of the ethics of college sports. The first is that French’s analysis of Actually Existing Elite College Sports is a fair, comprehensive, and entirely persuasive critical takedown of how these sports are presently conducted and justified. The second is that his proposed remedy for what ails college sports today, which advocates paying student athletes what they are rightly owed for the significant revenue they bring in, misses the mark in one important respect. For it leaves unchallenged the damage done to universities and the games themselves by their present unprecedented commercialization. Any meaningful reform of contemporary colleges sports, I argue, must directly address and redress the ill effects of the intrusion of the market into their internal athletic affairs.
There is plenty of reason for pessimism, but it would be better to do what one can to get people to follow an improbable scenario, than to simply throw up one’s hands.
Richard Rorty (2006)
Everything I know about morality and the obligations of men, I owe it to football [soccer].
(Albert Camus 1960)
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Notes
- 1.
The university of Michigan is a good example. As its former president, James Duderstadt, reported after its football team won the national championship in 1997, the athletic department ran a deficit of close to $ 3 million dollars that had to be covered by money taken from the general university fund (French, 82). This was, Duderstadt hastened to add, the rule rather than the exception throughout his reign as president.
- 2.
I think I can safely say this with regard to elite intercollegiate football and men’s basketball, since I am not aware of any example of outlier examples in professional sports like Chicago Cubs fans, who evidently, and I might add inexplicably, savor losing as much as winning if past history is any indication, in the ranks of these premier college sports.
- 3.
In fact, he might have cited the oft-cited Morrill Act to bolster his case in this regard, which was passed by Congress in 1862 and provided grants of federal lands to states for the purpose of establishing new colleges that would extend their mission to include the teaching of agriculture and the “mechanic arts” (engineering). The addition of these new branches of learning was in response to a crying public need for experts in modern industry and agriculture (Delbanco 2012, 77).
- 4.
For an excellent account that argues the moral principles fundamental to sport are expressions or reflections of the same moral principles found outside of sport, see Russell (2007).
- 5.
That sports are one of the few endeavors in which young people can achieve a level of athletic perfection beyond the reach of their older peers also accounts for why this particular positive value of sport cannot be achieved outside of elite, top-level sport. In this one particular respect then, I dispute French’s claim that all of the positive values of sport can be achieved just as easily in pickup games or intramural sports as they can in elite athletic settings (3).
- 6.
I suspect French would retort that the task of such reform is too Herculean to stand a realistic chance of succeeding. This is, no doubt, a further reason why he opts instead for paying athletes their just desserts rather than taking on the powerful commercial forces that presently govern intercollegiate sports. A full response to this objection would require a paper in its own right. But I can make two brief replies that aim to show that driving the commercial forces out of college sports is not quite the quixotic venture it might at first appear to be. First, French’s own suggested remedy of paying college athletes could similarly be dismissed as a utopian pipe dream. For the consensus among sports economists is that there is not enough money to go around to pay players, not, that is, without radically cutting back on the profligate ways athletic departments spend money especially on high profile football and basketball coaches. French himself, as already noted, observed that most big time athletic departments lose a lot of money. My second reply builds off the first. If it is true that most of the top intercollegiate programs are losing money in ever larger chunks, it is apparent that they cannot sustain their present spending levels without crashing and burning. That would mean my own proposal to attack the intrusion of the market into college sports is very much a distinct and realistic possibility, and an especially timely one.
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Morgan, W.J. (2017). The Ethical Morass of College Sports. In: Goldberg, Z. (eds) Reflections on Ethics and Responsibility. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50359-2_8
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