In a space where college coaches make upward of $7 million a year and the athletes make a scholarship, the issues of ethics and integrity have traced every recent development in college sports.
Many of those developments have played out in courtrooms; others in Congress. Football players at Northwestern University near Chicago voted on the right to be considered an employee. Ex-players at North Carolina who felt exploited sued the school.
What’s certain is that the integrity of intercollegiate athletics is on trial nearly daily. Name the subject: Conference realignment; escalating coaches’ salaries; pay for play. The major headlines in college sports all revolve around the money. And it’s led many to ask whether college sports are compatible with the goals of higher education.
“The major issue that confronts us all is: We have to agree what business we’re in,” said Peter Roby, athletic director at Northeastern University in Boston. “Is our first priority to generate revenue, is it to win championships or is it to develop young people through athletics and create connections for them on campus?”
The concern among some administrators and critics is that athletics continually trump academics, to the extent that The Drake Group, which advocates for academic integrity in college sports, last year called for the NCAA to be replaced because of this era of “discontent and public distrust.” In a paper that called for an overhaul of the NCAA, The Drake Group wrote: “The NCAA membership has established a plutocracy in which a minority of the wealthiest institutions controls a constant escalation of wasteful spending and extravagance.”
Roby, a former basketball coach and player, is the former director of Northeastern’s Center for Sport in Society and still teaches a course on ethics each year in the center’s master’s program.
His classes often talk about the integrity of a new NCAA governance model that has separated the five power conferences from the rest of Division I under the guise of doing more for the athletes.
“The real motivation is to stay away from lawsuits and to get public opinion back on their side,” Roby said. “But that’s hard to rationalize when the coach is making $7 million. The optics on that look real bad. … I understand the pressures associated with revenue, but are we so hell-bent on revenue that we’re willing to compromise our values and drift away from our mission” to educate?
