A reader writes:
With all due respect, claiming that Penn State should mark the end of college sports is borderline comical. Katha Pollitt and George Will completely miss the boat on what college athletics means to the 98.5% who don't make it to the pros, from D-1 down to D-3. The work on my jump shot got me into a better college than I could have without it. Athletics, particularly in poorer communities, gives students an incentive to maintain and work in the classroom to maintain their eligibility. Yes, there will always be outliers, but athletics gives people in the worst communities an out.
A student-athlete writes:
Collegiate athletics is as much a part of American heritage as any institution or religion. In essence, Pollit is arguing for the sterilization of American culture. Something tells me Burke would not approve, even in the face of a horrific scandal.
Another reader:
If a high-school teacher is found to have been involved in child molestation and it turns out the principal may have had some knowledge of it and did nothing, should we disband secondary education in America?
Pollitt's attack on college sports as a monolithic venture, with little distinction made between football and smaller, non-revenue sports such as tennis, field hockey or wrestling, raises serious questions about the article's seriousness and objectivity. The corruption that she complains about may well infect football, basketball and perhaps baseball and hockey, but to tar these other athletes and coaches, who labor intensely for little recognition (or in the case of the coaches, pay) is insulting.
Pollitt notes that in no other country do people connect sports and education as we do. This is true (I teach at a university in Belfast, Northern Ireland), but with very few exceptions they also feel nothing like the sort of affection for their various alma maters that Americans do, an affection that in many cases leads toward significant financial donations – not just to athletic departments, but to the university in general, allowing a financial stability that is making the American university system far more secure than many European universities during the current crisis. There is little doubt that, like it or not, the obsession with college sports plays some role in this.
Another also looks abroad:
Pollitt says "sports is sports and education is education," and claims that "[i]f there was no scholarship incentive for those skills, the kids might not blow off their classes in favor of endless hours in the gym." Frankly, that's spoken like someone who has never loved playing a sport and aspired to greatness at it, and like someone who didn't do all that much research into the international examples she cites.
Pollitt points out that no other country has such a robust university-based sports system. She's right. What she ignores is that other sports-crazy nations have robust junior leagues for star athletes that enable them to blow off university altogether. As you're surely aware, the professional structure of English football goes WAY beyond the Premier League; the next seven tiers of the football pyramid (going down to the regional divisions) have a whopping 338 teams combined – dozens more professional or semi-pro minor league teams than baseball in the US (even counting all the independent semipro leagues), in a country one sixth the size of the US. (I know, I know, football dominates the sporting scene in England while baseball competes with several other major sports, but the point holds.)
The absence of athletic scholarships did not lead to more studious young athletes; it led to those athletes blowing off classes for endless hours in the gym actually playing professional sports, bypassing college altogether. If Pollitt is serious about eliminating college sports altogether, that's fine – but she's loony if she thinks that, magically, kids will choose books over balls.
So let's assume that's not actually what she meant, and she really means "let's eliminate scholarships for athletics." But that justification is weak both in theory and practice. In the American ideal, universities are about more than just what happens in the classroom; they are about a campus culture that provides a full day of educational and life experiences for students. On that score, an athlete is no less deserving of a scholarship than someone who brings academic honors to the institution, or a dancer or actor who contributes to its art scene, or any of the other myriad skills for which institutions may choose to award scholarships.
There is a different way, though. For decades, the Patriot League – a Division I league that includes the Naval Academy and West Point in all sports but football, and includes other notable institutions such as Lehigh, Lafayette, Holy Cross, and (in football) Georgetown – prohibited schools from offering athletic-only scholarships in its bylaws. Schools could still offer grants-in-aid packages that would cover the student/family portion of the financial aid package, but would still leave the student responsible for things like completing work-study programs. That policy has since been lifted, but that model would present a more graduated approach to mollifying Pollitt's concerns.
The Dish 