American Higher Education: Sports, Commercialism, and Crisis

Introduction: Higher Education in Crisis

Is there anything to celebrate about higher education in the twenty-first century? What are the most troubling issues facing America's campuses, particularly those that have emerged over the past twenty years? These questions demand thoughtful, scholarly answers. On the one hand, there are crises related to university finances: student financial programs are bogged down by endless congressional haggling, federal financial backing for important research and development has withered significantly, and scholarships and grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have not been able to meet the demand of qualified scholars (Thelin, 2013). On the other hand, according to the Knight Foundation Commission, many university presidents — if not most — are admitting that they no longer have control of their NCAA-governed athletics programs. Moreover, deans in medical schools are being urged to begin training medical students in cooperation and patient empathy, a long-valued concept that has apparently — and sadly — been lost in recent years as American medical doctors have become more concerned with the bottom line (Thelin, 2013).

In addition to the troubles impacting colleges and universities today, there is also an enormous burden facing the students who attend the estimated 4,600 institutions of higher learning in the United States. The future for many of today's college students — and for graduates who financed their educations with high-interest loans — is awash in red ink. The total student loan debt in the United States has now reached $1.2 trillion (Talev, et al., 2014). Between 2004 and 2012, student loan debt almost tripled, rising from $364 billion to $966 billion (Talev, 2014). President Barack Obama and U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced legislation to ease that burden by, among other things, reducing the interest rate on loan repayments. But deep ideological divisions within the U.S. Congress have made it nearly impossible for any positive action to be taken on behalf of students.

This paper examines and critiques several issues — beyond those mentioned above — that have plagued higher education through the first fourteen years of the new millennium. Relevant background is provided on how universities and colleges arrived at their current difficulties. Specifically, this paper addresses: (a) the problems associated with the commercialization and corporatization of American institutions of higher learning, including the drift from strictly academic purposes toward a kind of crass consumerism; and (b) how the enormous financial rewards generated by big-time college athletics have degraded and embarrassed colleges and universities, created fraudulent coursework, and allowed some students to graduate based not on what they have learned but on how well they performed on the football field or basketball court.

Thesis: Colleges and universities are entering a critical phase in their evolution — from providing a broad, well-rounded education to operating as commercially and corporately oriented institutions. Either the tide will turn back toward educational fundamentals for a significant number of institutions, or the trend toward producing commercially trained consumers rather than educated citizens will ultimately corrupt universities to the point where they are unrecognizable as places of higher learning.

Big-Time Sports in the College and University Milieu

Among the many programs offered by today's institutions of higher learning — including research-oriented curricula, socially valuable initiatives, and career preparation — big, flashy, profitable, and sometimes corrupt sports programs (notably football and basketball) stand out conspicuously. College and university sports had become a $16 billion-a-year industry by 2014 (Barrett, 2014), and along with those billions come a mixed bag of glory and pride on one hand, and shame and sanctions on the other. Scandals caused by violations of NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) rules are commonplace, leading essayist William C. Dowling to assert that the commercialization of student athletes is a destructive force in American higher education (Dowling, 2001).

Dowling, an English professor at Rutgers University, bases his critique of big-time college sports on several key arguments, but his most prominent claim is that higher education has prostituted itself to commercialized sports (Dowling, 2001). He uses the word corruption frequently and supports his positions with specific incidents involving Division 1A programs — particularly football and basketball, the two biggest revenue generators.

He describes a scandal at the University of Minnesota in which a tutor for athletes had plagiarized more than 400 pieces of work for approximately twenty basketball players over a five-year period. These basketball players were apparently more focused on qualifying for March Madness — the NCAA's annual high-profile tournament — than on learning or preparing for careers (Dowling, 2001).

Dowling also notes that academic dishonesty is not the only problem that arises when universities recruit talented athletes with weak academic preparation and questionable ethical standards. At Virginia Tech in 1997, nineteen players were simultaneously under criminal indictment for offenses including rape, assault, and burglary (Dowling, 2001). While Dowling presents valid arguments to support his view that corruption has become pervasive in big-time college sports, he tends to reiterate the same themes and catalogue rule-breaking universities without offering workable alternatives to the corruption he condemns.

The two suggestions he does offer are unlikely to be adopted anytime soon by the University of Texas — which generated $104.5 million from Division 1A sports in 2012, the highest of any school — or Michigan ($85 million) or Alabama ($81.9 million) (Gaines, 2013). His first proposal is that universities actually pay college athletes competitive wages, thereby removing the fiction that they are students attending college to learn. That proposal is ambitious, but his second is perhaps even more difficult to implement: he suggests that some portion of the revenue from multi-million-dollar television deals could be used to send in-state students to out-of-state universities (Dowling, 2001). He does not elaborate on how this would work or why it would be preferable to other uses of those funds.

The UNC Fake-Classes Scandal

Thirteen years after Dowling's essay, revelations about blatant corruption within the once-respected sports programs at the University of North Carolina (UNC) were brought to light by whistleblower Mary Willingham, a university staff member whose job was to tutor students and student athletes. What Willingham reported to the media made some of Dowling's earlier examples of wrongdoing seem mild by comparison.

The UNC Department of African, African-American, and Diaspora Studies reportedly offered more than 200 lecture courses that were entirely fictitious. No student athlete who enrolled in any of those 200 courses ever attended a single lecture — because the classes did not actually meet. They were fraudulent, phantom courses designed to keep talented athletes academically eligible. Those athletes were overwhelmingly African-American, and their focus was basketball or football, not academics (Barrett, 2014).

Some football players during the years Willingham worked at UNC lacked basic literacy skills, with comprehension levels she estimated at roughly the fourth grade. Yet those athletes had access to a hard drive containing a large database of term papers. Many reportedly made minor adjustments to existing papers, printed them out, and submitted them for credit. Willingham stated that it would be highly implausible for professors — in courses requiring at least one twenty-page paper — not to have noticed that identical papers were being submitted repeatedly (Barrett, 2014).

Once the university realized that Willingham was sharing information about UNC's corrupt practices with a local newspaper reporter, she was demoted and eventually fired. On July 1, 2014, she filed a lawsuit against UNC, claiming her termination was retaliation for making the scandal public (Barrett, 2014).

Commercialization and Consumerism in Higher Education

Over the past ten to twenty years, higher education has become commercialized to a degree that raises serious concerns. Among the most troubling developments documented in the literature is the displacement of learning by profit motives and corporate intrusions into academia. Elvira Nica explains that while higher education should function as a place of learning and a training ground for high-tech society, a significant portion of the student population is viewed by corporate America as market-based human capital to be leveraged for profit (Nica, 2014).

Nica argues that higher education should be generating excitement about learning and building skills vital to the emerging global economy, but instead, in many instances, students are treated as debt laborers servicing corporate investments (Nica, 2014). For-profit universities in particular are failing to graduate well-rounded students and failing to hire faculty motivated by knowledge rather than financial gain. Scientists whose research does not lead directly to marketable technologies are being sidelined, and humanities education at public universities could effectively become extinct, Nica warns — because those interested in philosophy, languages, literature, religion, history, law, and the visual and performing arts are not the recipients of corporate grants for science and technology (Nica, 2014).

Because many universities offer curricula based on market metrics and technical competence rather than on producing well-educated graduates, the student is in many instances reduced to a kind of consumer commodity (Nica, 2014). Students are being funneled through courses oriented strictly toward future earnings, rather than toward knowledge that places the present moment in meaningful historical context. Because many private universities are operated as business firms, they are vulnerable to becoming instruments of the stock market, creating a dynamic in which students see themselves as customers (Nica, 2014). Furthermore, as universities become more corporatized, power shifts from professors and faculty to university management professionals who are increasingly beholden to corporate interests — resulting in higher tuitions and lower standards with respect to broadly based, thoughtfully designed education.