Justice and College Athletics

A recent column addresses this issue: http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/01/09/greene.pay.college.athletes/index.html?hpt=C2

Cheerleading and Title IX

Interesting news link on Quinnipiac University's attempt to abide by the Title IX legislation by maintaining that Cheerleading is a sport.

Balancing Sports and Academics

Or I could entitle this post "Find the Logical Fallacies". See the Chronicle of Higher Ed for a brief interview with the president of the University of Florida.

Student Sports Fans and Bigotry

"College students who are serious about their identification with their institution’s football and men’s basketball teams are more likely than other students to have homophobic and sexist attitudes." See here for the full article.

Thoughts on why this might be the case and what should be done to deal with these issues?

(Hat tip to Rob Sica for bringing this article to my attention.)

Exploitation in College Sports?

In my introductory ethics course today we had a debate related to whether or not college athletes are being exploited. To frame the issue, consider the following definitions of exploitation:

“[T]o exploit a person involves the harmful, merely instrumental utilization of him or his capacities, for one's own advantage or for the sake of one's own ends.” (Buchanan 1985, 87).

“Common to all exploitation of one person (B) by another (A)…is that A makes a profit or gain by turning some characteristic of B to his own advantage…exploitation … can occur in morally unsavory forms without harming the exploitee's interests and … despite the exploitee's fully voluntary consent to the exploitative behavior…” (Feinberg 1988, 176-79).

“Exploitation [in exchange] demands…that there is no reasonably eligible alternative [for the exploitee] and that the consideration or advantage received is incommensurate with the price paid. One is not exploited if one is offered what one desperately needs at a fair and reasonable price.” (Benn 1988, 138).

“[A] group is exploited if it has some conditionally feasible alternative under which its members would be better off.” (Roemer 1986, 136).

Given these different takes on what exploitation is, can a case be made that college athletes, at least big time college athletes, are being exploited in one or more of the above senses? As one president of Stanford University put it, big time college athletics "reeks of exploitation" because of the revenue generated for the university from the services of the athletes while many of the athletes gain little from their own college experiences.

Kentucky Wildcats, Academics, and Money

Eastern Kentucky University, where I work, is just about 40 minutes from the University of Kentucky, so the firing of UK men's basketball coach Billy Gillispie is big news around here. Interestingly, Gillispie was never officially under contract with the school, but rather both parties were working off of a "Memorandum of Understanding".
I have no idea if this is a common occurrence or not, but here is something that caught my interest:

Athletic Incentives
SEC Regular Season Championship $50,000
SEC Tournament Championship $50,000
NCAA Tournament Appearance $50,000
NCAA Sweet 16 Appearance $75,000
NCAA Final Four Appearance $150,000
National Championship $375,000

Academic Incentives
Academic Progress Rate of 950+ $50,000
Graduation Rate of 75%+ $50,000

Now, I'm not one of those academics who hates sports, thinks they are a waste of time, or even begrudges coaches the money they make (well, that last one isn't always true). But in my mind it says a lot about the priorities of a program when the incentives are divided as they are above. Winning is important, and it is part of a coach's job to help his or her team achieve excellence. However, why not put a little more money into the academic incentives column?