Author:
An Observer
[ Edit | View ]
|
Date Posted: 20:33:04 06/10/25 Tue
I just channel surfed by the Big Ten Network. On the news crawler at the bottom of the screen is a succession of press release statements from the 10/11/14/18 members of the Big Ten conference, all to the effect of, "We will not skimp. We will pay out the maximum dollars allowed to our 'student-athletes.' Recruits should know that Indiana/ Nebraska/ Oregon/ Purdue/ Rutgers is in it to win it."
First of all, would you please finally stop the increasingly fraudulent use of the term "student-athlete"? You can resume the next time that a starter asks his or her coach to be excused from practice for a chemistry lab or a make-up exam -- and is then excused.
No coach is going to countenance the normal inconveniences of academia when the student is making more than any of the assistant coaches and, in a few cases, more than the head coach.
Secondly, nobody doubts that the maximum allowable budget will be spent. Indeed, we expect that the budget will be exhausted and then more funds will be transferred, above the table, below the table, in plain white envelopes, in brown paper bags, in Samsonsite brief cases and wired to Swiss bank accounts. The money will keep going up until we find the limits of what boosters want to pay and what players demand to be paid. I ain't betting on a low ceiling.
Lastly, and I've said this a million times here, this is terrible for America. Check back in ten and twenty years to see the state of (1) higher education; (2) secondary education; and (3) middle school education. I predict that all three will be worse, especially (2).
Say what you will about American higher education with all of its faults and warts, with its crazy left wing faculties and its whack-a-doodle athletic boosters, who undoubtedly skew right wing, right now American universities are still the best in the world. That is a tremendous asset for our economy, our culture and our society. American universities help America.
But it doesn't have to be that American universities are ranked #1, any more than it has to be that Princeton or Harvard is ranked #1. From the early nineteenth century through the 1930's, far and away the best universities in the world were German and Oxford/Cambridge. Things changed, including wars and an explosion of scientific research in the US. Thus did American universities begin their ascendancy.
People forget that, for at least half of their existence, Harvard Yale and Princeton were not the leading universities in the world. Stanford just ascended to the top in the last five minutes.
Today, nobody considers the best universities in the world to be German or Oxford/Cambridge.
There's no reason to think that we are entitled to be preeminent forever. In twenty years, NIL deals and the transfer portal will be seen to be one of the worst things that's ever happened to American higher education. It's a shame.
[ Post a Reply to This Message ]
|
Feedback: 