College Sports Are Great

For a decade, I’ve been a member of a faculty committee that works closely with the athletics department at Northwestern University.

A fellow professor once complained to me about the special admissions considerations that athletes receive, arguing that we could admit more oboists if athletes didn’t get so many spots.

At the time, the university was being sued as part of athletics-department scandals involving sexual harassment and hazing.

One case was dropped, and others were settled without the university admitting wrongdoing.

During the same period, the university announced the construction of a brand-new football stadium that would be the most expensive ever built for a college team.

It was a lot to digest all at once.

In answer to my colleague, I nodded in agreement, thinking, Yeah, more oboists .

But as I considered the mission of our university—helping students decide what they want to do after college, cultivating the knowledge and skills they need to achieve their goals, supporting faculty research, and raising capital to ensure that we can continue to do that work—I became less certain that oboists are more desirable, and more qualified for admission, than athletes.

Why do we think that, over the course of their life, oboists will make a greater contribution to society than linebackers? (I mean you no offense, kind oboists! The duck is my favorite character in Peter and the Wolf .) On campus, many people remain doubtful that Northwestern’s athletics and academic missions are aligned, especially as football becomes more and more of a business sheltered by a university.

Critics are right to lament the increased professionalization of college sports, but they also believe that most student athletes care more about their sport than their classes.

Many academics see sports as frivolous and corrupting, as a distraction from the higher purpose of moral and intellectual formation—and as the most visible sign of the commercialization and corporatization of the modern university.

We worry that out-of-control spending on sports could lead us to abandon our commitment to academic achievement. [ Sally Jenkins: The knives are out for Bill Belichick ] Many, maybe even most, of these negative views of athletics held by my colleague and others are based on misconceptions.

Take the complaint that student athletes are paid.

Other students have the opportunity to get paid for work they do for the university and on their own behalf.