WILL INTERCOLLEGIATE SPORTS RUN AFOUL OF THE FACULTY LOUNGE?

We've long understood that intercollegiate athletics drain resources from higher education, and at best might attract students who don't, shall we say, raise the academic profile?

It's not a surprise that the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, might get involved, but with a market test? "Should Institutions Support Sports Programs That Don’t Make Money?"  No, and follow the money going down the tubes.

Most athletic programs are not profitable. Each year the National Collegiate Athletic Association issues an annual report on the finances of intercollegiate athletics. The 2020 report found only 25 Division I programs had revenues exceeding expenses. No Division II or III program had revenues exceeding expenses. There are 1,102 Division I, II and III schools.

Athletic programs may not necessarily benefit student athletes. Recent court cases have focused on how the profitability of sports programs may violate student athletes’ rights. In June 2021, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in NCAA v. Alston et al. that the NCAA could not bar student athletes from being paid. In O’Bannon v. NCAA, the court ruled in favor of O’Bannon regarding using a student athlete’s likeness for commercial purposes. Also, instances exist where student athletes did not receive the education promised. A 2017 report about the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill detailed a decades-long practice of providing fake classes for student athletes.

"Eligibility studies" has become a thing more generally, but yes, it probably began with the so-called revenue sports. Whether professors will take enough interest in their curriculum more generally to go after special education in the service of retention more generally is best deferred to another day.

Inside Higher Ed contributor K. J. Bowles properly calls "nonsense" on the usual defenses of intercollegiate sports.

In these instances, and in others, student athletes are viewed as moneymaking tools and exist to serve the institution. Monetizing students’ skills and talents is problematic for many reasons, both legal and ethical. Profitability may not be the best way for an institution to determine whether a sports program exists. Perhaps there are other ways to look at the reader’s question.

If most programs are not profitable, and profitability may come at the expense of student athletes and nonathletes alike, how do institutions weigh the cost of sports programs against their value? Many institutions point to benefits such as access to education for students, student development, co-curricular support, a marketing tool for enrollment and an engagement tool for alumni and friends. But do these benefits apply to all sports programs at all institutions writ large? No, because institutions vary in size, scope, focus and capacity.

I could be a Difficult Person and ask whether or not hailing the achievement of graduates more generally isn't "monetizing students' skills and talents," albeit that being done in the service of selling space to prospective students rather than betting opportunities to existing sports fans.  On the other hand, that essay notes how universities have been using the corona shutdowns as an opportunity to get out from under some of the financial pressures, and hiving off the sort of upscale sports that the nomenklatura might have been using as vehicles to get their spawn admitted where they otherwise couldn't cut it.

But as recently as 2016, when Northern Illinois administrators were looking for ways to save money, their criteria included protecting the women's sports, the better to comply with Title Nine of the Civil Rights Act.  But that provision is being stressed these days.

As the long history of sex testing in elite sport reflects, sex segregation has been the design from the beginning. The point has always been to exclude male-bodied athletes from women's events so that females could be featured despite their relative physical disadvantages. Title IX represents a modern version of this original design, requiring schools receiving federal funds to establish separate women's teams and to set aside more or less equal funding, facilities, coaches, and competitive opportunities for their female student-athletes.

The goals of elite sport today remain consistent: to ensure the same number of spots in finals and on podiums for females as for males, both as an end unto itself and as an expressive vehicle to empower girls and women in society more generally. An identity-based eligibility standard for women's sport would do different work for those whose gender identity doesn't match their biology, but it would be category defeating.

That post dates to 2019; it recently reappeared, as the Ivy League is all of a sudden relevant in women's swimming, not in a good way.

A group of parents has sent a letter to the NCAA and the University of Pennsylvania detailing their concerns about having a biologically male swimmer tower so far above the females against whom he is competing.

“At stake here is the integrity of women’s sports,” the group of 10 parents wrote. “The precedent being set — one in which women do not have a protected and equitable space to compete — is a direct threat to female athletes in every sport. What are the boundaries? How is this in line with the NCAA’s commitment to providing a fair environment for student-athletes?”

Here's the dilemma for the faculty lounge set: do you accept Professor Bowles's assessment of the non-revenue sports as a money suck, or do you have to burnish your intersectional credentials by welcoming the crossers to swimming or distance running, or, horrible dictu, wrestling?  Radio talker Clay Travis hopes to discomfit the faculty lounge denizens, and their willing accomplices elsewhere.  "Tag all the left wing sports media members and ask them why they are pretending this UPenn transgender story doesn’t exist. And why they aren’t sharing any opinion on it at all."

The official response from Penn?  "No, there's nothing nuts about a crosser on our swim team.  You are nuts for bringing it up."  No, really.  "The university sent a short reply to the parents, telling them that Penn Athletics 'is committed to being a welcoming and inclusive environment for all our student-athletes, coaches and staff' and said it encouraged student-athletes to utilize the 'robust resources' available to them at Penn, including Counseling and Psychological Services and the LGBT Center."  That locker room is not really welcome and inclusive to the born-female swimmers, is it?  "Sorry you believe women's sports are for women; maybe try being less crazy?"

If the case for shutting down Collegiate Sports, Inc. for losing money isn't a winning argument, perhaps shutting down Collegiate Sports, Inc. for losing its collective mind might be.