|
I can't believe it's taken this long for something like this to happen, and hopefully college sports finally get off the public payroll at major state universities (at the very least). It absolutely boils my blood that huge sums are devoted to renovating sports facilities and providing amenities (inaccessible to the majority of the student body) for a tiny sliver of incredibly talented athletes, based on huge donations from alumni who give money specifically for sports. The inanity of admitting these students to universities in the first place, when many (though not all) are demonstrably unqualified for higher education is equally ridiculous. Universities should be centers of education and research, not development leagues for the national professional sports associations. Having actual development leagues for college-age players would be a start (not being familiar with football or basketball, do these exist already?). Even spin-off athletics programs associated with the university (but independent from it) like other people in the thread have mentioned would be great.
|
#
¿
Jan 29, 2014 02:14
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 07:28 |
|
|
bawfuls posted:This LA Times article compares college atheletes to graduate student teachers, who successfully unionized about a decade ago. Not to get too off-course, but the California TA union is something of a mixed blessing. It means that TAs have regulated work hours, guaranteed pay, maximum student loads, and good health insurance (with vision, dental, and even child care!). On the opposite end, it has meant that TAs are no longer academic apprentices in some disciplines, which has totally changed the landscape of graduate study. When the UAW 2865 formed in the late '90s, it meant that in some cases departments started treating grad students as fungible teaching commodities rather than future researchers. Fifteen years on, that means less security in your academic track (if you get set back and don't have enough advocates on the student review board, you often get cut because of finances in my department), more focus on "hiring" TAs to teach classes, admitting too many students than can be funded long-term (to continually cycle incoming new employees and avoid financial commitments to senior grad students), and slow replacement of adjunct faculty with TAs and tenure-track faculty with adjuncts. Obviously there are a lot of other factors playing into the transformation of universities into businesses, and I can only speak for a single department in the UC system, but unionizing was maybe not the best choice for academic apprentices. If you make researchers employees, what ends up mattering is that they teach and hit the artificial progress deadlines (MA completion, quals, dissertation defense, etc. at certain times) and not the quality of their research. And this also means that, on opposite end, there are plenty of 10-year+ grad students in my department who do no research and haven't published, but are kept because they continue to teach for less than it would cost the department to hire actual faculty. Grad school itself has become a career for some people. But to bring this back to the actual topic of the thread, athletes and grad students differ in a very fundamental way: graduate students are at the university to become future researchers, which is the goal of research schools, or to teach students, which is the goal of all schools. Student-athletes are students who have chosen to participate in voluntary athletics programs, nothing more. As I've said before in this thread, many of them do not belong at the university, cannot complete basic college requirements, and have no interest in anything other than playing their sport. Athletes who are good enough for college, or want a college degree, should apply like everyone else to get their degree, and the rest should do what they really want to do. Like MourningView said, fraud is pretty common and coaches funnel their students to easy classes because they know the kids can't pass college courses. Threatening letters (or even in-person meetings!) from the athletics department are not unheard of if you give a prize student-athlete a D they earned by never attending class and failing just about every assignment (and the passing grades are often probably plagiarized, written by a tutor, or bought papers anyway). There is no excuse for having college athletics in their current form, and the sooner some kind of independent development leagues are created the better. Keep the university branding if you care. But comparing student-athletes to student instructors is just lazy. The purpose of the university is to teach, not to be a sports league. Student instructors are explicitly fulfilling the mission of the university, and student-athletes are basically a distraction and a money sink.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 29, 2014 17:33
|
|
|
Frackie Robinson posted:Yeah, but if we had a system where schools actually fostered an environment where these guys could actually attend classes and leave with a useful degree, it would be a good system. You'd have immensely increased the future potential of a lot of guys who'd never have had the means to attend college were it not for athletics. That's pretty decent compensation. That's root idea behind this whole system, and it's not a bad one. In a lot of cases the only reason they got in is because of the athletics, they certainly couldn't get in (regardless of background) on the merits of their applications simply as students! E: VVVVV Getting forced through a degree program to fulfill the requirement to be a student isn't really bettering your life in some cases. The number of unemployed college graduates should be ample evidence that a degree isn't a magic bullet to improve people, but I think I get the point you're making. The non-major sports will suffer too, but I think there's an argument to be made that those don't belong at the university any more than football/basketball do. What's the argument for college athletics in the first place? The gentleman-scholar ideal from three centuries ago? Why should being good at sports give you any sort of leg up at all? Idiot Wind fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Jan 29, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Jan 29, 2014 17:40
|
|
|
bawfuls posted:Whether these people are fulfilling an "essential function of the university" or not is irrelevant. What do most grad students do that "brings revenue" as teachers? They're being paid to provide the basic service that a university is involved in providing. That is explicitly the goal of having TAs teach. How is voluntary participation in extracurricular activity at all the same? If the goal of student-athletes is to make money, why the hell are they in college at all (except because, at the moment, that's the stepping stone to pro sports)? Obviously conditions should be improved, but they just shouldn't be where they are right now. Whether they're asking for pay or not, they're asking to be treated as employees, when they just aren't employees at all.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 29, 2014 20:19
|
|
|
SporkOfTruth posted:This also applies to the topic at hand because college football is essentially an apprenticeship as well, in the vocation of professional athletics. No reason for them to not unionize. Maybe this is where the disconnect I'm having on the topic is, because the rhetoric on one hand is amateur student-athlete engaged in an extracurricular activity, and on the other it's being treated as employees and apprentices. The fundamental question I still can't get past is why the university (except for historical reasons) should have athletic apprentices in the first place. In the short term, I think you're probably right and that this is a good step, but I dislike the comparison still and think that athletics should be removed from the universities. SporkOfTruth posted:All of these complaints would be resolved in UAW 2865's case if the UC would let all graduate student employees unionize, like they do at 23 other public universities in California. Y'know, at the CSU's. Yes, all grad student employees are unionized there. I'm sure our glorious new President will facilitate the expansion of the union, but in the short term the effect of unionizing in my department has been to create push back against research. Which doesn't mean that the union isn't a good thing (I'm also a member), but it wasn't a quick fix for grad student employees. I have doubts that unionizing is really the correct long-term answer to the problem for athletes, since it's going to take a long time for anything good to come of this (look how long it took grad students!), and in the end in comes down to protecting and monetizing the top percent of student-athletes and not to the educational mission of the university. It's not the small sports threatening this, as others have mentioned, and for good reason. Edit: bawfuls posted:Grad student TA's are helping to teach classes. Classes are one of the services a University provides in exchange for tuition fees. TA's are contributing to the production of that service, thus they are contributing to the collection of that revenue stream. Are sporting events part of the service a university should supply? Obviously they are one at the moment, but should they be? Idiot Wind fucked around with this message at 20:55 on Jan 29, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Jan 29, 2014 20:50
|
|
|
bawfuls posted:It doesn't matter if they should be or not for the purposes of this discussion. As long as the university is an entity that makes money off of sports like football, then the players who's labor is creating that value deserve to be compensated for doing so. I think you're right on that count and that I wasn't acknowledging that fact, that the teaching duties of grad students are contributing to the overall revenue in the sense that they allow schools to offer more classes and enroll more tuition-paying students. My hangup seems to be similar to King Hong Kong's, in that I can clearly see the link between the goal of a university (teaching students and conducting research) and graduate student instructors/researchers, but that the link between the goal of the university and its athletic programs seems more tenuous. The university is definitely exploiting the athletes in the current situation, but taking the athletes out of the university and putting them in semi-pro leagues of their own seems like a better solution than trying to turn them into university employees. Idiot Wind fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Jan 29, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Jan 29, 2014 21:47
|
|
|
bawfuls posted:Well, too late. It already is, and College Football is a massive and quite profitable industry. We can either accept this reality and allow for unionization to bring some balance and justice to the situation, or we can abolish athletic scholarships and profit-seeking in NCAA football completely. Or maybe the NFL and NBA could, I don't know, have their own minor league systems that don't interfere with the operation of educational institutions?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 29, 2014 23:15
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 07:28 |
|
|
bawfuls posted:I would argue that allowing these players to unionize could in fact hasten the arrival of such a framework. Yeah, I think as long as this moves in that direction unionizing will have been a good thing both for the universities and for the athletes involved. Of course, there's the incentive you mentioned in your last post, the massive existing cash cow of college sports, that will exert a powerful influence on keeping the money where it is. Simply defining student-athletes as employees is not the same thing as creating a new framework to address the issues caused by a modern sports industry interwoven with the educational system, though it may be a start. E: Sorry, quoted before your edit. I think we're on the same page though, as far as the power structure of the leagues is concerned 
|
|
#
¿
Jan 29, 2014 23:30
|
|