Tapsearch Com EditorWarped Sports
Ray Tapajna - Here is an article by Tom Palaima about the mixed up priorities related to sports.
Sports are warping our society in many ways. It reaches out as an octopus with its tenacles grabbing the moral fibre of our society.
Besides the story below, we must also come to terms with much more related to human dignity in the workday. Nike uses athletes and the education communities to promote their Nike emblem which appears on uniforms in colleges and in other professionals sports. The Nike logo represents a tragic contradiction in what sports is supposed to do for the participants. It is supposed to maker players better people. However super sports stars make hundreds of millions of dollars endorsing Nike with the Nike workers making only a few dollars a month . Reportedly, they make only enough money to buy one pair of the shoes they produce. Studies tell us that if only a few percentage of the dollars spent on promotions went to better pay for workers, thousands could then enjoy a living wage. How can we expect anything good to flow from this indignity. Sports produce an aura of gods and gladiators not to distant from the days of Rome with wage slaves producing the goods in the sweatshops of the world .
"The Golden Football
The University of Texas' Bad Example."
by Tom Palaima
Published on: Monday, March 22, 2010
The Golden Football photograph by Matt Wright-Steel
In 1928, Harper's New Monthly Magazine published
an article by John R. Tunis critical of college
football. At the time, Tunis was widely regarded
as the best author of sports fiction for 10-to-14
year-olds. While his essay, "The Great God
Football," was nonfiction, it addressed the same
social and moral questions that informed his
novels. Tunis was fed up with excessive
commercialization of college football. He felt it
was corrupting universities across the United
States, including what he called "vast state
educational factor[ies]" like the University of
Texas at Austin.
In 1928, money that could go to academics instead
financed stadiums and paid exorbitant salaries of
athletics staff and intercollegiate bureaucrats.
Players were virtually full-time athletes in "a
regular profession of football," Tunis
complained. "Their degrees are rendered to them
at the proper moment-which is to say when their
football usefulness to the university is at an
end." The few college and university presidents
with some moral backbone claimed that they had
"very limited authority" to exert any control
because of the "well-organized, powerful,
articulate faction" of students, athletic
directors, influential alumni, board members,
committee chairmen, state legislators,
sportswriters and a "football-mad nation." Tunis
vividly called big-time college football a
"first-class octopus strangling the legitimate
pursuits of educational institution[s]."
The problems it causes are still with us, bigger
and more intractable than ever.
Professor Nathan Tublitz studies octopuses. A
biologist at the University of Oregon, he has
been a leader of the reform-minded alliance of
faculty senates known as the Coalition on
Intercollegiate Athletics. Tublitz recently
showed me videos that demonstrate how
intelligent, resourceful, deceptive, shrewd and
cunning the octopus is. Tunis' metaphor was more
apt than he could have imagined.
The first-class octopuses at the 120 schools now
known as the Football Bowl Subdivision have long
resisted the criticisms of education-minded
faculty, students and concerned citizens. They
brush off reports and policy papers drafted by
independent foundations, watchdog groups and
congressional investigators. Attempts at moral
persuasion by secretaries of education and U.S.
presidents fall on deaf ears. They coerce the
National Collegiate Athletics Association to
water down academic standards for athletes. Not
even the recent economic meltdown will bring
big-time college sports schools to true crisis.
But it does exacerbate their negative impact on
higher education.
The NCAA program at the University of Texas at
Austin generated $138 million in revenue last
year, $87 million from football. Yet its profit
margin is less than $2 million. The program's
cumulative debt and debt service are in the
high-risk neighborhood.
Longhorns Inc. has wrapped its tentacles around
the now-hemorrhaging academic budget. The
athletics department gave a $2 million raise to
head football coach Mack Brown as colleges across
the university are laying off staff. In foreign
languages alone, $1.6 million was cut. The head
of the student union recently announced the
closure of the Cactus Café, a historic music
venue, to save just $66,000 over two years.
Worse, the university has ceded trademark and
royalty revenues. Longhorns Inc. keeps 90 percent
of this income, roughly $10.6 million last year.
The yearly debt payment on building bonds for the
nearly $300 million in stadium expansions since
1998 is $15 million. The debt run up by the
athletics department has risen from $64.4 million
in 2004-05 to a staggering $222.5 million in
2008-09.
UT's actions have a ripple effect across the
country, forcing every other university into an
arms race of sorts, in which schools assume more
and more debt to compete for the best coaches and
players. The core mission of these schools,
education, is held hostage to football program
success. If a university fails to recruit the
highest-quality athletes, meet ever-escalating
coaching salaries, or fails to court wealthy
donors, it risks a losing season. A losing season
means lower revenue and a deficit that has to be
covered from the academic budget, which has
already been slashed to the bone.
If Mack Brown's football team drops out of the
Top Ten, the English department could end up
paying for the football stadium from a budget
already under attack.
Last month, the state of Texas mandated that
UT-Austin cut a further 5 percent ($29 million)
from its operating budget. UT-Austin is looking
at the equivalent of laying off 225 professors.
That would be like shutting down the entire
McCombs School of Business and the College of
Architecture. To save money, only 36 percent of
UT-Austin faculty received raises in the past
year.
Ninety-eight staff members were laid off.
Meanwhile, Longhorns Inc. spent and spent.
Assistant football coaches were paid 9 percent
bonuses plus $3,000 to $5,000 for winning the Big
12 championship, roughly $30,000 total. That's on
top of their average salary of $327,000, four
times the average assistant professor's salary of
$81,800. Their bonuses nearly double what
teaching assistants are paid for a year's work.
Longhorns Inc. sets national trends, so these
actions have national repercussions. Between 1986
and 2007, the average full professor's salary
nationally rose 30 percent in real terms; the
average college president's salary went up 100
percent; and the average head football coach's
salary went up 600 percent.
This is a moral issue. Not long ago, UT-Austin
adopted the motto that "What starts here changes
the world." Its core purpose is "to transform
lives for the benefit of society." Yet recently a
former Rhodes scholar who played baseball for the
Longhorns in the 1990s wrote that "raising the
highest-paid employee's salary by 66 percent in a
time of scarcity might improve next year's
recruiting class for the gratification of fans
and donors, but it does not transform lives for
the benefit of society."
Where is the money coming from? Why is it being
used this way? What are the consequences?
At UT, the sports budget and management are run
separately from the university as an auxiliary
enterprise. Longhorns Inc. CFO Ed Goble has said,
"We eat what we kill." This means that head and
assistant coaches and all manner of directors and
assistant directors eat very well. In contrast, a
battery of regulations prevents the players,
whose hard work generates all these revenues,
from earning what they deserve from their own
athletic prowess. What could be better than to
have 85 workers producing tens of millions of
dollars in revenues while earning a minimum wage?
Plenty. Television networks and fans in stadium
club seats and skyboxes have paid large sums for
the privilege of seeing a good quality product.
So do college students who contribute over $800
million in identifiable student fees and
subsidies that prop up top sports programs
nationally. Who cares whether players can pass
basic calculus, master a foreign language, or
even read a college-level textbook? And the
profits in this scramble for sports entertainment
dollars go to a small set of winners. Only 25 of
119 bowl series programs made money in 2007-08,
averaging about $4 million in profit. The 94
schools that lost money were about $10 million in
the red. The debt of the losers is increasing.
So schools must recruit the best athletes rather
than student athletes. Recently at UT-Austin, the
average SAT score for all male students was 1265,
for male athletes 1029 and for football players
948. For male basketball players SATs were 797, a
staggering 468-point difference.
Institutions that desperately need athletic
talent have lobbied for relaxation of admissions
requirements. And the NCAA has given them a
sliding scale and no specified minimum SAT score.
A school gets a passing score now from the NCAA
if 35 percent of its student athletes graduate
after six years.
What starts with the sports octopus at UT-Austin
is changing the world, even at institutions of
the highest academic rank. The University of
California at Berkeley sports department wants to
return to national prominence, so it ran up a
$31.4 million debt that university leaders repaid
from academic coffers in 2007. Now, after UC
Berkeley has furloughed faculty and staff (but
not football coaches) and proposed a whopping
30-percent tuition increase, its athletics
program reported an additional $12.2 million debt
this year and expects a similar figure next year.
The athletics director announced with a straight
face that these amounts "will be repaid in the
future from external sources of revenue."
Even if such wishful thinking comes true, why
should external revenue sources during a fiscal
crisis be directed at obscenely uncontrolled
expenditures by college athletics programs? In
times like these, it is hard to tell which
creatures are more predaceous, the real sea
invertebrates that Tublitz studies or the
metaphorical college athletics species that John
R. Tunis identified in 1928.
Tom Palaima serves on the University of Texas at
Austin Faculty Advisory Committee on Budgets. He
is UT's representative on the Big 12 steering
committee of the Coalition on Intercollegiate
Athletics.
Sports are warping our society in many ways. It reaches out as an octopus with its tenacles grabbing the moral fibre of our society.
Besides the story below, we must also come to terms with much more related to human dignity in the workday. Nike uses athletes and the education communities to promote their Nike emblem which appears on uniforms in colleges and in other professionals sports. The Nike logo represents a tragic contradiction in what sports is supposed to do for the participants. It is supposed to maker players better people. However super sports stars make hundreds of millions of dollars endorsing Nike with the Nike workers making only a few dollars a month . Reportedly, they make only enough money to buy one pair of the shoes they produce. Studies tell us that if only a few percentage of the dollars spent on promotions went to better pay for workers, thousands could then enjoy a living wage. How can we expect anything good to flow from this indignity. Sports produce an aura of gods and gladiators not to distant from the days of Rome with wage slaves producing the goods in the sweatshops of the world .
"The Golden Football
The University of Texas' Bad Example."
by Tom Palaima
Published on: Monday, March 22, 2010
The Golden Football photograph by Matt Wright-Steel
In 1928, Harper's New Monthly Magazine published
an article by John R. Tunis critical of college
football. At the time, Tunis was widely regarded
as the best author of sports fiction for 10-to-14
year-olds. While his essay, "The Great God
Football," was nonfiction, it addressed the same
social and moral questions that informed his
novels. Tunis was fed up with excessive
commercialization of college football. He felt it
was corrupting universities across the United
States, including what he called "vast state
educational factor[ies]" like the University of
Texas at Austin.
In 1928, money that could go to academics instead
financed stadiums and paid exorbitant salaries of
athletics staff and intercollegiate bureaucrats.
Players were virtually full-time athletes in "a
regular profession of football," Tunis
complained. "Their degrees are rendered to them
at the proper moment-which is to say when their
football usefulness to the university is at an
end." The few college and university presidents
with some moral backbone claimed that they had
"very limited authority" to exert any control
because of the "well-organized, powerful,
articulate faction" of students, athletic
directors, influential alumni, board members,
committee chairmen, state legislators,
sportswriters and a "football-mad nation." Tunis
vividly called big-time college football a
"first-class octopus strangling the legitimate
pursuits of educational institution[s]."
The problems it causes are still with us, bigger
and more intractable than ever.
Professor Nathan Tublitz studies octopuses. A
biologist at the University of Oregon, he has
been a leader of the reform-minded alliance of
faculty senates known as the Coalition on
Intercollegiate Athletics. Tublitz recently
showed me videos that demonstrate how
intelligent, resourceful, deceptive, shrewd and
cunning the octopus is. Tunis' metaphor was more
apt than he could have imagined.
The first-class octopuses at the 120 schools now
known as the Football Bowl Subdivision have long
resisted the criticisms of education-minded
faculty, students and concerned citizens. They
brush off reports and policy papers drafted by
independent foundations, watchdog groups and
congressional investigators. Attempts at moral
persuasion by secretaries of education and U.S.
presidents fall on deaf ears. They coerce the
National Collegiate Athletics Association to
water down academic standards for athletes. Not
even the recent economic meltdown will bring
big-time college sports schools to true crisis.
But it does exacerbate their negative impact on
higher education.
The NCAA program at the University of Texas at
Austin generated $138 million in revenue last
year, $87 million from football. Yet its profit
margin is less than $2 million. The program's
cumulative debt and debt service are in the
high-risk neighborhood.
Longhorns Inc. has wrapped its tentacles around
the now-hemorrhaging academic budget. The
athletics department gave a $2 million raise to
head football coach Mack Brown as colleges across
the university are laying off staff. In foreign
languages alone, $1.6 million was cut. The head
of the student union recently announced the
closure of the Cactus Café, a historic music
venue, to save just $66,000 over two years.
Worse, the university has ceded trademark and
royalty revenues. Longhorns Inc. keeps 90 percent
of this income, roughly $10.6 million last year.
The yearly debt payment on building bonds for the
nearly $300 million in stadium expansions since
1998 is $15 million. The debt run up by the
athletics department has risen from $64.4 million
in 2004-05 to a staggering $222.5 million in
2008-09.
UT's actions have a ripple effect across the
country, forcing every other university into an
arms race of sorts, in which schools assume more
and more debt to compete for the best coaches and
players. The core mission of these schools,
education, is held hostage to football program
success. If a university fails to recruit the
highest-quality athletes, meet ever-escalating
coaching salaries, or fails to court wealthy
donors, it risks a losing season. A losing season
means lower revenue and a deficit that has to be
covered from the academic budget, which has
already been slashed to the bone.
If Mack Brown's football team drops out of the
Top Ten, the English department could end up
paying for the football stadium from a budget
already under attack.
Last month, the state of Texas mandated that
UT-Austin cut a further 5 percent ($29 million)
from its operating budget. UT-Austin is looking
at the equivalent of laying off 225 professors.
That would be like shutting down the entire
McCombs School of Business and the College of
Architecture. To save money, only 36 percent of
UT-Austin faculty received raises in the past
year.
Ninety-eight staff members were laid off.
Meanwhile, Longhorns Inc. spent and spent.
Assistant football coaches were paid 9 percent
bonuses plus $3,000 to $5,000 for winning the Big
12 championship, roughly $30,000 total. That's on
top of their average salary of $327,000, four
times the average assistant professor's salary of
$81,800. Their bonuses nearly double what
teaching assistants are paid for a year's work.
Longhorns Inc. sets national trends, so these
actions have national repercussions. Between 1986
and 2007, the average full professor's salary
nationally rose 30 percent in real terms; the
average college president's salary went up 100
percent; and the average head football coach's
salary went up 600 percent.
This is a moral issue. Not long ago, UT-Austin
adopted the motto that "What starts here changes
the world." Its core purpose is "to transform
lives for the benefit of society." Yet recently a
former Rhodes scholar who played baseball for the
Longhorns in the 1990s wrote that "raising the
highest-paid employee's salary by 66 percent in a
time of scarcity might improve next year's
recruiting class for the gratification of fans
and donors, but it does not transform lives for
the benefit of society."
Where is the money coming from? Why is it being
used this way? What are the consequences?
At UT, the sports budget and management are run
separately from the university as an auxiliary
enterprise. Longhorns Inc. CFO Ed Goble has said,
"We eat what we kill." This means that head and
assistant coaches and all manner of directors and
assistant directors eat very well. In contrast, a
battery of regulations prevents the players,
whose hard work generates all these revenues,
from earning what they deserve from their own
athletic prowess. What could be better than to
have 85 workers producing tens of millions of
dollars in revenues while earning a minimum wage?
Plenty. Television networks and fans in stadium
club seats and skyboxes have paid large sums for
the privilege of seeing a good quality product.
So do college students who contribute over $800
million in identifiable student fees and
subsidies that prop up top sports programs
nationally. Who cares whether players can pass
basic calculus, master a foreign language, or
even read a college-level textbook? And the
profits in this scramble for sports entertainment
dollars go to a small set of winners. Only 25 of
119 bowl series programs made money in 2007-08,
averaging about $4 million in profit. The 94
schools that lost money were about $10 million in
the red. The debt of the losers is increasing.
So schools must recruit the best athletes rather
than student athletes. Recently at UT-Austin, the
average SAT score for all male students was 1265,
for male athletes 1029 and for football players
948. For male basketball players SATs were 797, a
staggering 468-point difference.
Institutions that desperately need athletic
talent have lobbied for relaxation of admissions
requirements. And the NCAA has given them a
sliding scale and no specified minimum SAT score.
A school gets a passing score now from the NCAA
if 35 percent of its student athletes graduate
after six years.
What starts with the sports octopus at UT-Austin
is changing the world, even at institutions of
the highest academic rank. The University of
California at Berkeley sports department wants to
return to national prominence, so it ran up a
$31.4 million debt that university leaders repaid
from academic coffers in 2007. Now, after UC
Berkeley has furloughed faculty and staff (but
not football coaches) and proposed a whopping
30-percent tuition increase, its athletics
program reported an additional $12.2 million debt
this year and expects a similar figure next year.
The athletics director announced with a straight
face that these amounts "will be repaid in the
future from external sources of revenue."
Even if such wishful thinking comes true, why
should external revenue sources during a fiscal
crisis be directed at obscenely uncontrolled
expenditures by college athletics programs? In
times like these, it is hard to tell which
creatures are more predaceous, the real sea
invertebrates that Tublitz studies or the
metaphorical college athletics species that John
R. Tunis identified in 1928.
Tom Palaima serves on the University of Texas at
Austin Faculty Advisory Committee on Budgets. He
is UT's representative on the Big 12 steering
committee of the Coalition on Intercollegiate
Athletics.
