Professors Are Complicit in Football Players’ Brain Damage

This past spring, I had a chat with a senior at my college. Like many students approaching graduation, his last days on campus were marked by a pleasant blend of wistful nostalgia and hopeful speculation. Great things had happened, and more were on the horizon. Not only had he completed his education with strong grades, but he had also spent four years on the football team growing as an athlete and as a person. He loved his coaches and loved his teammates. He had learned as much on the field as in the classroom. But I was startled by one of his final thoughts: “I’m just glad I didn’t get brain damage.”

His words were both terrifying and tragically overoptimistic. In that moment, the student took solace in the fact he had suffered only a few minor concussions. His comfort, however, was built upon a dangerous misperception of the problem at hand. Although the NCAA prefers to address brain injuries by adjusting “concussion protocols,” current science holds that playing football, even without a specific traumatic injury, can cause serious cognitive harm.

According to a Boston University study, subconcussive head trauma is the likely culprit in many cases of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a disease whose symptoms include severe cognitive impairment and memory loss. In granting a football scholarship, my college had thus agreed to teach the student to be a better thinker on the condition that he risk his long-term brain function. It is a dark, unacceptable irony that an institution devoted to developing intellectual capacity would allow, let alone celebrate, the systematic destruction of what it works so hard to create.

The implication of this absurdity is clear: Universities should stop playing football in its current form and, until they do, faculty must take visible steps to force change.

This reality, clear to anyone willing to pay attention, has forced me to give up my connection to a sport I truly love. I miss watching football. As a child I bonded with my father over it. In high school, I matured as a person by playing the game and facing its rigors. But as a college professor I must acknowledge that these wonderful positives are dwarfed by the painful truths that science and the news cycle are revealing about the sport.

The recent brain analysis of Aaron Hernandez makes the potential dangers of football all the more apparent. The former college and NFL player and convicted murderer, who killed himself this year, showed severe levels of football-correlated degenerative disease in an otherwise healthy 27-year-old body.

Examples like that are why faculty should not celebrate or accept the current state of college football. We should not attend games. We should not ask students cheerful questions about next week’s opponent. And, despite the potential risks involved, we must take concrete, collective steps to ensure that our message reaches administrators in a clear, organized fashion.

At most universities, instructors are asked to sign a contract of acknowledgment when a student will be missing class for school-sanctioned athletic activities. From now on, when a football player offers me this form, I will, with the utmost respect and kindness, explain my position and decline to sign. To be fair to these young men, I will continue to excuse their absences and offer make-up exams. But I will not sign my name when asked to certify that is OK to trade educational hours for an activity that may destroy their ability to learn, think, and enjoy life.

It is, simply put, not OK. To the extent that I can articulate that fact without harming their education, I intend to do so. Of course, on my own, this can have little more than a localized, symbolic impact. As a widespread movement, however, it has the potential to stoke difficult conversations among university administrators and athletic directors.

For many universities, meaningful change in football culture would force significant, painful adjustments in branding, alumni relations, and athletic-department budgeting. This does not, however, mean that self-interest will ensure stasis and make faculty protest moot. Colleges today ignore the reality of brain injuries at their own financial and moral peril.

Researchers are pursuing tests able to reveal CTE in the brains of the living. If these exams determine that current players develop CTE at even a small fraction of the rate found in post-mortem test samples, many institutions will be thrown into an immediate public-relations crisis and expose themselves to tremendous liability.

Such uncertainty represents an opportunity for educators and researchers to play a role in crafting a radically reformed vision for the sport. This ambition represents a vast, exciting interdisciplinary research project requiring expertise from kinesiologists, biologists, economists, sports-management experts and beyond. And while this goal may seem impossible, there are reasons for hope. The sport has already morphed in a variety of surprising directions over the past century, with features such as face masks and the forward pass emerging over time.

The first step for faculty is to clearly articulate that the status quo, no matter how entrenched it appears, is unacceptable. While proposing positive changes, we must also protest every time a student is asked to sacrifice his brain to an institution that promises to develop his mind.

Given the evidence at hand, there is no neutral position to take. We will either be complicit in the continuing epidemic of football-related brain injuries, or we will be at the forefront of creating a safer, less-hypocritical college experience for our student-athletes. When our students graduate, they must know that every aspect of their education was geared toward building their mental and physical capacities, not destroying them.

Matt Sienkiewicz is an associate professor of communication and international studies at Boston College.