Not just because of the disgusting scandal that is Penn State, but because athletics have nothing to do with education and typically detracts from it. Just personally, I’ve seen the corruption of an athletic program when, as a graduate instructor, I was pressured into passing the jocks in my classes who never showed up, handed in plagiarized papers, and otherwise failed to do a passable imitiation of a college student. But the Penn State illustrates the problem on a larger scale: people associated with college athletics get away with murder (well, rape) because people are afraid of their power. Even a supposedly moral giant like Joe Paterno, revered throughout the land, respected for his character, turns out to be a self-serving piece of crap, so what can you expect from the thugs and careerists running the other 99.99% of lesser athletics programs? Just pull the plug on all of them now, and get back to the education business.
ummm… personal observations and anecdotes carry little weight when discussing a large population, unless you got to observe each and everyone.
Has there ever been a society anywhere that literally believed athletics had nothing to do with education? Do you literally believe it, and would you apply that all the way down to kindergarten?
It’s one thing to say that something’s wrong when some sociopath gets away with serial rape for god knows how long, and that the entire program that enabled and accommodated him should be burned to the ground, but isn’t figuring out how and why to move our bodies around a pretty important aspect of learning to cope with the fact of our presence in the world?
Here’s a pre-Paterno article from the October issue of the Atlanticwhich argues essentially the same thing; albeit focussing on the exploitation of the players angle.
As a non-American I find the whole ‘college sports’ thing quite strange. From an outsider it looks like you have a multi-billion dollar system of ‘shamateur’ sports somehow entwined with your institutions of higher education.
You’re conflating athletics with physical education. Not the same thing at all.
As much as the OP doesn’t present a compelling case, and I don’t see how outlawing athletics is feasible… Yes, we overvalue athletics as it pertains to our educational institutions, particularly at the college level.
I am given to understand that collegiate sports are a great way to encourage alumni donations and that part of that money is allotted for scholastic ends. I dunno, I don’t really care about sports on the professional, collegiate or high school level. I understand and appreciate the appeal of sports scholarships as a way to educate people who would have otherwise skipped higher learning but I have no interest in paying for yet another new stadium or sports arena. If the chem labs are still using outdated fume hoods, then the sports complex can hang on to their ratty abductors and adductors for a while.
This opinion courtesy of someone who did not attend a single football game at his college and had no desire to. Homecoming was nothing but a hindrance because it fucked up the bus schedule and I dislike changes in my routine.
^
your point regarding collegiate sports is actually a small part of the financial cycle which is fueled by school pride. there are other ways to get alumni donations besides inter-school athletic competitions.
I don’t know. Why don’t you tell us what the results of your statistical analysis is.
The problem, though, is that the Athletic Department encourages donations…to the Athletic Department. Definitely, I think it probably keeps the alumni in touch with their Alma Mater which makes donations to academic funds much more likely. And the merchandise licensing probably helps the university at large. But I’m pretty sure the $5 “Facility Fee” I (and every other fan who buys a ticket) has been paying for 4 years now is going straight into the stadium fund. I doubt the Zoology department will be seeing much of the $15,000 Luxury Box revenue either.
This opinion courtesy of someone who could probably count on one hand the number of home football games he’s missed in the last 25 years. 
Dude’s right, if they never made me run an 8 minute mile I never could’ve learned sohcahtoa.
College athletics is not the problem. Let’s see.
Do the top division 1 athletes in gymnastics, tennis, track and field, cross country, swimming, skiing, field hockey, fencing, volleyball, water polo, or rugby cause any problems whatsoever? Of course not. Are all non-scholarship, club-level, and intramural sports programs healthy? You bet.
Now, do the division 1 athletes in football and basketball cause problems? Yes they do.
Why the difference?
- endowments, revenue, gifts drawn by big-name sports
- demographic differences between the typical participant in each group of sports
- scholarships to clearly unqualified “student athletes” who would never otherwise be in [a division 1] college and who have no chance of matriculating fairly with any degree other than “physical education” if they don’t leave early to enter a draft
This.
How on earth do college sports get elevated to the point where you get basically fake students?
I presume by “athletics” the OP means organized sports. A lot of countries have physical education in K-12 but no organized sports. No official school teams. No tournaments between schools. And they do pretty well - beating United States in education quality in a lot of cases.
From an insider’s perspective I would say that your observation was astute.
Yes, I think they should be banned; they are a giant racket, and they also fuel a culture of drinking and gambling on college campuses that is, in my opinion, extremely detrimental. But I think the whole college system needs to be reformed in general. Of course, it’ll never happen.
That’s exactly right! College students would not drink or gamble if not for collegiate athletics. Ever.
Can anyone explain WHY sports do relate in a meaningful way to higher education? I’m another confused non-American 
Why is it better to have people around who are not very intelligent, but are good at throwing a ball, when the aim if the game is actually to 1) educate people to be brilliant physicists & 2) make brilliant discoveries in the field of physics. Or other academic fields.
Sports to me is just a different thing. Kinda like… eating out, or sex, or sunbathing. Practiced by students, sure. But it doesn’t seem to relate to university education.
It certainly didn’t start out the way that it is now – and, if big-time collegiate athletics didn’t already exist today, it’d be hard to imagine that they’d be allowed to be created, out of whole cloth, in anything approaching how they look now.
Once upon a time (and we’re probably talking about the late 19th / early 20th century), college football and basketball, even at big schools, probably were a lot more like the other sorts of intercollegiate sports which Buchanan mentions. Intercollegiate athletics (in which teams from different schools play against each other) undoubtedly evolved out of intramural sports (in which teams of students from the same school play each other) and “club” teams (not officially sponsored by the college). The athletes who played those sports were almost undoubtedly students first, athletes second.
As football and basketball became popular in American sporting culture, it was the college game which was the highest / most organized level of the sport, and became the focus of interest among sports fans (pro football and pro basketball both lagged behind the college games in popularity until at least the 1950s). That focus undoubtedly led to the slow changes in the importance of those sports at those schools, until you finally did get to the point where you had “student-athletes” who never would have otherwise qualified to attend those schools on their academic credentials, and the teams themselves becoming of outsized importance.
It should also be noted that, even in football and basketball, things are not nearly as out of whack when you look at smaller schools.
What an excellent summary of the previous post! Rarely have I ever seen such a fantastic grasp of another’s thoughts, without once going off into hyperbole, and exaggerating the original claim beyond comprehension!
Please explain to me how the educational pursuit of “figuring out how and why to move our bodies around” is accomplished by sitting in a stadium seat watching a group of large men push and throw a ball back and forth on an artificial turf field while another group of large men try to stop them.
I’m quite confident that I received an adequate post-secondary education, even though I lacked the above experience.