Shame

Some billionaire alum donated $165 million to the athletic program at Oklahoma State. That's terrific.

I'm sure there aren't departments and units on campus reeling from rounds of budget cuts, struggling to attract and retain faculty and students, units for which a much smaller chunk of change would probably make a world of difference.

That's not important. But football and ego are.

"What I keep coming back to is we're in the Big 12 and it's a tough conference. I want us to be competitive," [Boone] Pickens said. "How it impacts me? My name's on the stadium. I don't know what else they could do. I guess they could put it on each one of the seats."

OK, so there's a significant Freudian quotient of vanity at play on the part of the donor. But that doesn't excuse the OSU president from acting like this is just as good as if that much money had gone, oh, I don't know, into some of the academic programs instead.

"It'll impact the whole university," Oklahoma State president David Schmidly said. "It'll make it easier for us to recruit students, it'll help us recruit faculty. Every aspect of the university is going to benefit from this."

Sure, this will probably help recruit prospective student-athletes. And faculty (especially if "faculty" is understood as anyone who answers to "Coach" instead of "Doctor" or "Professor").

After all, there's nothing like privileging the small minority of athletes among the student body and giving them all sorts of perks and breaks that wouldn't be tendered to any normal, non-athlete.

I have to say, this is really doing a lot to make me more convinced that athletic programs (at least above the recreational, intramural level) are just a bad idea in general at the university level. I know that it's fun to root for the alma mater, even if they haven't won a bowl game since the Truman Administration. And it can be exciting to be on campus when the basketball team has a realistic shot at winning a national title. And athletic programs do generate a lot of revenue.

But I have to question how much of that revenue is actually get distributed throughout the university (say, to academics), and how much just gets pumped right back into the athletic department's coffers. My guess is that the athletic program isn't subsidizing academics as much as it's the other way around. Especially if you consider non-monetary forms of support provided to student-athletes (like writing make-up exams and assignments, for example).

Yes, I'm speaking out of a little bitterness here. I have at least one student in my section who's a student-athlete and will have missed at least the first two sections, and probably more this quarter. In this case there isn't a lot of extra work required on my behalf, since I'm just making the student produce a lengthier version of the weekly assignment.

But still, I feel like there are fundamental questions of fairness. Is a student entitled to makeup work if s/he misses class due to athletic commitments? Functionally, I can't see what difference there is between someone who misses class for a game or meet, and someone who misses for a job interview, work on a school project or paper, a long weekend or the opportunity to sleep in. There's some relativization there, I'm sure, but the main difference is that faculty are in effect expected to provide opportunities to make up work missed by the student-athlete, whereas the non-student athlete is at the mercy of the individual faculty member. I never agreed to such a condition when I accepted my appointment, but it's basically presented as a fait accompli. It's easy to see how student-athletes appear to constitute a privileged caste on campus. And a particularly privileged one when you consider that tuition, room and board, etc. are often provided free to scholarship athletes.

Now, I might feel differently if universities were doling out at least as many scholarships for meritorious students. Particularly when tuition at many a private institution can run close to $30,000 a year these days, not that it's really "cheap" anywhere.

Perhaps the greatest shame in all this, though, is that it doesn't really do justice to the athletes themselves. Unless I missed some part of the university charter, the mission of the university is fundamentally to provide an education and to promote learning and personal development (or some similar combination of buzzwords). The emphasis, of course, is on education.

That's not the case, though, with student athletes. No one taking classes during their athletic season is able to give anywhere near the appropriate amount of time and effort to their coursework. I have no doubt that student-athletes need tutoring and other academic aids because independent learning can be pretty difficult, especially if you haven't already developed strong skills in the discipline. But student-athletes are subjected to such conditions so they can help the athletic department rake in millions of dollars. If that's not exploitation, I don't know what is.

Unfortunately, I don't have any concrete answers for how to resolve this situation. One might be to release student-athletes from coursework during their season, so they don't have to try to balance sports with schoolwork. Of course, that doesn't work so well for sports with a long season that can span multiple terms, and especially since most sports hold practices and workouts year round. Maybe the answer is to allow students to defer their academics altogether until they've exhausted their academic eligibility, though taking four or more years off between school is not much more conducive to learning. Or maybe we should simply make athletics less important. Keep them if you must, but make it something on the level of club sports, where there aren't scholarships involved, or the same monetary and time commitments.

But throwing more money -- $165 million -- at college athletics isn't going to improve matters.