Last week, the Indiana University Hoosiers football team won the national college football championship. It provided a heck of a story, as a football program that had
historically been not very good rose to become an undefeated champion in just a
couple of years. Some folks even invested in some considerable hyperbole, such
as suggesting that the Indiana football team had “saved” college football.
Years ago, I quit following college football, as I documented on this blog. In recent years, I had allowed myself to gravitate
back into following it again somewhat. I’ve enjoyed sports, including college
football, since I was a kid, and I wanted to feel that entertainment again.
Yet, even as I followed this year, I repeatedly returned to the concerns that
led me to give college football up years ago. For example, when I read about the Texas Tech donor whose money essentially made the university into a football contender
and who now has considerable influence at that university (and, to boot, was
even characterized in the article to which I have linked as possibly “fixing”
college football), I felt rather disgusted. It seems like no one should have
that degree of power, and if they do, that they would invest their resources so
heavily in football seems inappropriate. My reaction is compounded when I
consider that specific example alongside the Texas Tech system this fall prohibiting faculty from being able to teach theidea that there are more than two genders. The entire situation seems
emblematic of misplaced priorities in U.S. society, aligning with my thoughts
when I gave up college football years ago. In a market-driven economy that uses
the logic of that economy to justify expenditures on college football, I
feel compelled to spend my time and money elsewhere and to encourage others to
do the same. Especially at a time when education, the arts and humanities,
scientific research, and so many other things that are vital to universities
are under attack and losing funding, I can’t justify contributing to the
inequitable financial resources thrown at college football.
To add to this, in the week before that college football
national championship game, I read a nationally syndicated column arguing for universities to lose their nonprofitstatus and the tax advantages that go with that. The argument was
predicated on the amount of money flowing into college football. The columnist
admitted that, despite his concerns, he would be watching the national
championship game. This seemed not only like a case of being unwilling to
address one’s own complicity in a problem one has identified, but also a case
of mistaking college football financial success with supposed financial success
of universities themselves. As I see the significant budgetary drains that
occur within the educational, research, and creative parts of universities, the
argument in the column becomes particularly obnoxious. On the one hand, if we
want to have a philosophical debate about whether universities should be
considered nonprofit organizations and receive tax breaks because of it, I’m
willing to engage in that discussion. On the other hand, on a pragmatic level,
if we did remove those tax breaks and universities now had to account for that
in their budgets, do you think for one moment in the current situation that
it’s the college football teams that are going to bear the brunt of that? Over
the last couple of decades, we have seen expenditures on bigtime university
athletics soar at the same time as other aspects of those very same
universities, most notably the educational services that are the core of the
universities, face even greater budgetary constraints. I see no reason to
expect that further economic constraints on the university will go any other
way, unless those constraints directly impact the bigtime athletic programs,
whether through required reductions in funding to those programs; mandated additional flow of
financial resources from those programs to other areas of the universities; or,
as in the market-driven response I have advanced, less people consuming the
sports. (Of course, maybe other educational services bearing the brunt of the
budget cuts is exactly what folks such as that columnist ultimately want and
just aren’t explicitly saying.)
In the end, I’m back to where I was in 2012 when I gave up college football. I’d really like to follow it, getting back into my pattern of putting it on television and radio on Saturdays and on weekday evenings in the fall. I can’t in good conscience do so, though. As much as I have let myself drift back into college football, I have to force myself back out. It’s not about saving college football; it’s about saving all the other, frankly more important, things that go on at higher education institutions.
