NCAA, Exploitation of Labor, Internships and the Big Lie

Since Fagin sent out children to pick pockets, in "Oliver Twist," the notion of exploiting children for the profit of adults has been reviled.  But when a million dollar football coach sends his nineteen year olds out to slam their heads and shoulders into the helmets and knees of their opponents, that is just fine. And when chairman of medicine goes home for a full night's sleep, leaving behind 26 year olds to stay up all night with desperately ill patients, vomiting, bleeding, slipping into shock, well that is valuable medical training.

Young apprentices have been exploited by craftsmen, who taught them their trade, and the young have complained about being used to do the unpleasant grunt work for small rewards, while the accomplished craftsmen replied, "I am teaching you the trade and you are benefiting and learning from this work; it may be exhausting, unpleasant, even dangerous, but, in the end, this is the way you ultimately learn and benefit, just as I did, when I was an apprentice."

In the case of the young doctors, well, at least until the end of the 20th century, they were clearly going to be rich just as soon as they passed through the gauntlet, so nobody had much sympathy for them, until a case of a patient dying was attributed to an overwhelmed, under-supervised intern, and then the press, the courts, legislatures all combined to peel away the entrenched powers that be in the medical profession from their self serving policies which kept interns chained to the wards. The other factor that changed attitudes about tolerating this exploitation was the entry of women into medicine in big numbers: These women had children and refused to stand for the exploitation, and their incomes were just one part of the family income, so they were willing to make trade offs, to accept lower salaries if they could work less. 

In the case of the college athlete, the prospect for immediate, future reward is not the same as it was for the doctor: Only a tiny fraction of college athletes make it as pros. But the fact is, they already are pros, just minor league apprentice pros.  While their coaches make millions, while the vendors line up their trucks selling food and logo jerseys outside the stadium, and while the stadium turnstiles spin, clicking up the tickets sold, and while  the TV crews broadcast their games and the celebrity announcers take to the screens,  the college athletes spend their week in practice to the exclusion of study, traveling off campus to games so other schools may profit.

Not that these 18-22 year olds are complaining. They feel lucky to have these non paying jobs, these "internships" because they have the dream they may make it in the pros some day, or because they simply enjoy the moment. Being a campus hero, playing sports they love does not seem like drudgery to many of these semi pro players.  They are happy to be part of a team, to have the experience of belonging, of struggling together with a group of friends.  Their parents may have pushed them to sign contracts with the colleges, but the players are, generally speaking, proud to be offered these contracts, proud to perform--at least they start out that way.

And they can delude themselves that they might wind up getting their tickets punched with a diploma from Notre Dame or Boston College that will insure them a job selling cars or real estate, or maybe making connections in businesses where being a physical presence is more important than knowing anything in particular.

The inner city kid from Baltimore who winds up playing basketball for North Dakota State, who lives, isolated from other students, with his coworkers, who is injured, loses his "scholarship," i.e. his paycheck, and is sent packing may not be as happy as the kid who was recruited from a big time high school program to play at Duke, who is treated better, even if he is not paid any more than the kid at North Dakota. 

But whatever happens to all those happy Duke basketball players who graduate into the real world and do not wind up playing professional basketball?

Now, as lawsuits make their way through the courts,  college presidents are scurrying around with protestations of how important the educational experience is to their "scholar athletes."  It is a sorry scene, watching these CEO's lying about something when even the dimmest citizen out there knows exactly what college sports are--and that has nothing to do with scholarship or classrooms or laboratories but with fields and wood floored courts or ice hockey rinks. The irony is that institutions with "Veritas" (truth) inscribed in their logos are so loathe to speak the truth when it comes to the "scholar athlete."  From Stanford to the University of Florida, every college president lies through his or her teeth every time he opens his/her  mouth about college athletes. These college presidents are, and this is not an invidious comparison, in much the same position as the bishops who moved pedophile priests from one diocese to another, to keep the game going, to not bring down the whole structure.  Of course, coaches are not sexually abusing their players, but they are using their players for their own rewards and the college presidents are profiting from that and they are lying about the relationships between the players and the colleges. The NCAA has become simply an institution held together by a web of lies. 

The big difference between the Catholic priest scandal and the NCAA is few people thought there was perfidy afoot in the parishes, but everyone knows the NCAA is lying about "student athletes"--the entire country winks at the notion that Joe Namath was at Alabama  to get an education. 

The college presidents lie, because there is so much money to protect. 

The men who run the National Football League do not want to have to pay to train their labor force. Baseball has had to invest large dollars to train their talent, and neither football nor basketball wants to make that investment when there is a group of men who are willing to spend that money for them.  The colleges provide these minor leagues and profit handsomely, exorbitantly, from it. They cannot imagine life without that money. 

But the Europeans can imagine universities without big time sports. So can the Asians. 

As Ross Perot once observed, if we were competing with the Japanese and the Chinese in marching bands, we'd have nothing to worry about. But, the trouble is, our country is not competing in the things these sports programs produce.  We need our universities to train a work force to compete on the world stage, in the global economy, and we are doing that while sustaining an irrelevant side line. Call it diversification.  If General Motors decided to produce feature films, and that made them millions, who would complain?  So the University of Michigan produces doctors and lawyers and computer programs, and it puts on a Broadway season in a stadium which seats 100,000 fans waving blue and maize, spending money, having a good time. 

And Michigan can do all this with unpaid labor.

Who's complaining?