College Sports: Exploitation, Compensation or Education?

Trying to find some fiscal sanity and a sense of proportion to collegiate athletics in New Mexico, or anywhere else in America, is like trying to teach a pig to fly. It just isn’t going to happen any time soon. But the situation has gotten so preposterous, so expensive and so ethically compromised that it endangers the mission of the university — a mission that plays an indispensable role in working to keep New Mexico’s economy healthy, its cultural life vibrant and its science and technology at the cutting edge. It’s time to start getting serious about refocusing the role of college sports.

That’s what UNM Regent Rob Schwartz tried to do last September. He made a strong, and courageous, effort in an op-ed piece in the Albuquerque Journal headlined “NM needs doctors, teachers, counselors — not athletics.” The headline was somewhat misleading, of course. But the gist of Regent Schwartz’s argument was sound. Big-time athletics at UNM has become an unconscionable drain on the institution itself, and on its primary purpose — to educate New Mexicans, not to entertain them.

And it’s not enough to be “adequate” as an institution of higher learning, either. The goal must still be to serve students in the pursuit of the highest degrees of knowledge and competence possible, in the service of learning as the principal motive and function of mentally healthy and adaptive human beings.

Despite the drain of big-time sports, UNM is a fine university, given its resources and location. But its grasp on reality when it comes to sports seems tenuous. UNM holds its own in the pursuit of knowledge with other, richer institutions with gaudy reputations. I’m a UNM alumnus, and proud of it to my core. I was a back bench track jock at UNM in the ‘50s the ‘60s, and proud of that too, though the finish line was usually still mine to cross when others already had. And I’m an avid Lobo fan.

But it seems to me now that for UNM to try to compete in football, particularly with billionaire schools, is simply absurd given the fiscal, cultural and public health realities of the day.

Regent Schwartz puts it this way: “This year the university will have to absorb substantial budget cuts, as it has every year over the past decade. Even with the best (athletic) director and staff we could possibly hire, the athletics program has not come close to meeting its budget in years, and it will have massive losses this year. It isn’t the program’s fault, but there is just no way to staunch the bleeding. Students don’t want to contribute any more to intercollegiate athletics through their fees; donors won’t contribute any more, either; fans won’t pay any more. But the program will continue to cost us each year, bleeding taxpayer and tuition revenue away from the very reason the university exists.”

Regent Schwartz wants us to refocus athletic programs “to build the best intramural program in the country” in lieu of intercollegiate sports. That’s a fine idea, and we should do that. But who’s going to pay for that? And what chances are there for generating community revenue?

But his idea of building a “competitive club sports program … that will be composed of people who come to UNM primarily to study … and then compete against students who have done the same at other universities,” should be explored.

I’ll make a modest proposal of my own. UNM should join the ranks of colleges and universities — like Boston University, University of California Santa Barbara, DePaul University, University of Denver, Loyola University Chicago, Manhattan College, University of Texas at Arlington and dozens more — that have chosen to declare their seriousness about their academic mission by cutting out the most expensive, and dangerous, sport program — football.

UNM should then take a hybrid approach with the remaining sports — some becoming intramural, some becoming “club sports” and some retaining their intercollegiate status. Arguably, UNM can still be nationally competitive in both men’s and women’s basketball, soccer, track and field, baseball, tennis, golf and perhaps volleyball. We are, after all, two-time national women’s cross country champions, 2015 and 2017, and we took second place in 2018. We have traditionally had competitive, entertaining and income-generating basketball and baseball traditions.

Intercollegiate sports at UNM could increase revenue and interest by requiring that at least half of each of those teams be composed of in-state athletes and spend the funds to vigorously market UNM’s teams as truly New Mexican, local teams made up largely of local athletes. A move like that could infuse all such intercollegiate sports with new local enthusiasm, engaging the passions and commitments of New Mexicans who attend and support high school sports programs.

The idea would then be to spend the money saved on focusing the university’s intellectual talents on refining and re-emphasizing undergraduate education.

Such a plan could actually intensify UNM’s presence in the state’s myriad sports-loving towns and cities and help to better fulfill one aspect of the school’s communitarian mandate. It would start to address the intolerable situation of the gross disproportion between academic funding and sports funding, seen most graphically in the difference in salaries between, let’s say, assistant coaches in the big-money sports and part-time teaching faculty in the university’s pioneering and premier Honors College. It’s still the case that non-tenured Ph.D.s who are master teachers lead undergraduate honors seminars for a mere $3200 a semester, if not less. Imagine trying to hire a coach for an equivalent amount. Something is terribly wrong here, especially in a culture like ours that pays according to what it values.

Correcting such a disproportion might also provide a new context in which UNM could begin to come to grips with a national dilemma that’s about to change the nature of college sports forever — the question of compensation or exploitation. The U.S. Supreme Court last week heard a case brought against NCAA restrictions against compensating athletes with educational perks beyond scholarships. The court seemed to favor compensation over so-called “amateurism.” It seems sure that the case is a prelude to a growing movement to pay college athletes salaries, especially in dangerous contact sports, such as football. The issue is a complicated one, with many layers, including a precedent for compensation pointed out by the Institute of Sports Law and Ethics at Santa Clara University involving universities paying students for licensing technologies that they have invented while in school.

With the potential financial implications of paying athletes, most colleges and universities will be forced to completely rethink their commitment to intercollegiate sports in the near future. We may see football, and even basketball and baseball, consigned to semi-professional status, belonging to leagues populated with teams from super rich universities with name-only associations to the schools. The cherished concept of “student athletes” may be reserved for low cost but potentially higher revenue “lesser sports” with 50% local players.

Who knows how it will turn out in the end? Maybe pigs will fly, but everything is about to change in the world of intercollegiate athletics, and an equitable outcome is of greater importance than one might think at first. The issue of compensation or exploitation, and a university’s duty to protect its students from harm — including sports with uncommonly dangerous M.O.s — speaks to the integrity of the institution and its core values. Are universities exploitative hypocrites that talk a good game but take advantage of their students? Or do they take their time-honored role of in loco parentis (acting in place of a parent) seriously enough to protect students from long-term physical injury and ethically tawdry if subtle financial abuse?

This is a very serious matter, indeed.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it