Sleep Pods, Plush Carpets, and the Dark Heart of the NCAA

It will shock no one to hear that academics have strong (albeit oft meagerly informed) opinions about NCAA athletics. And why shouldn’t we? After all, the stadiums are part of our workplaces, the athletes are students in our classes. Small wonder, then, that when Louisiana State University took to social media recently to boast images of their new $28-million football locker room, replete with space-age “sleep pods,” lush carpeting, and other fundamentals of gridiron preparedness, academics were quick to publicly air their angst.

One LSU Professor, Robert Mann, retweeted the photos of the awe-inspiring locker room with a note remarking, “Meanwhile, across campus, I vacuum my faculty office with a Dust Devil [sic] I bought at Walmart.” The sentiment in this missive was so resonant that it has since been liked by 30,000 — a number almost unimaginable for #AcademicTwitter – but it also received significant pushback from fans, alumni, and even athletes themselves. In a since-deleted tweet, LSU quarterback Joe Burrow responded to Mann: “Why, professor, do you feel entitled to the fruits of our labor?” Mann later clarified that his intention was to draw attention to the dire lack of state funding for educational facilities — a point that was amplified by others circulating side-by-side pictures of LSU’s lavish locker room and reportedly flooded portions of a campus library. But this dust-up is just the most recent iteration of a recurring clash between the academic and athletic wings of higher ed.

In one sense, the grievances of academics on this issue are quite reasonable: Colleges are supposed to be places of higher learning first and foremost. So, if an institution like LSU can afford to blow all this cash to glam up nap time for athletes, surely it can also afford to at least maintain a basic level of cleanliness and non-dilapidation in its non-athletic facilities?

Here’s the problem, though: This isn’t how NCAA Division I sports work. The gladiatorial spectacle of big-time college football has next to nothing to do with the educational mandates of higher education. That is to say, the budgets of athletic departments have nothing to do with those of academic departments. And, more saliently, they shouldn’t.

I share much of the righteous frustration of my colleagues at the lack of investment in higher education. It’s particularly aggravating to see such selectively lavish spending from universities at a time when so many precariously employed academics are struggling to make ends meet, and generations of students are buried by debt. But we need to be mindful about where we direct our outrage lest we end up buttressing the sinister falsehoods (namely, the conflation of student and athlete) that uphold the exploitative NCAA system. Because, regardless of the fact that academic workers and departments, by and large, do not receive the financial resources they deserve, there is something particularly repugnant about professors (especially those privileged enough to have tenure) feeling entitled to a share of the revenue generated on the exploited backs of their own students.

Ironically, the academic side of LSU already relies more on contributions from the athletic department than most institutions in the country. Between 2012 and 2017, $50 million was transferred, despite an initial promise of $36 million. In light of the recent controversy over the new locker rooms, that policy — rightly — will cease. LSU was one of only 10 institutions as of 2016 that provided a greater transfer from athletics to academics than they received in subsidies. Indeed, across the NCAA, less than one dollar of every hundred generated in athletic revenue by public universities goes to academics. That is precisely how it should be.

The root of this problem lies elsewhere, beyond all the smoke and mirrors that enable the NCAA to claim college football as anything other than the lucrative business that it is. The top 25 revenue-generating teams pull in $2.5 billion in revenue between them annually, $1.4 billion of that pure profit. Of course, the NCAA and its apologists like to tell us that member institutions don’t operate like conventional businesses, since they have nonprofit status. That, too, is subterfuge, a shell game to conceal extensive flows of cash into the pockets of coaches, athletic department and university administrators, and team physicians, not to mention the shareholders and legions of executives in the cable television industry.

The revenue-generating behemoth that is the NCAA is built on one thing and one thing only: the grueling and exceptional labor of (disproportionately black and brown) young people. And it is high time faculty recognize that when they make claims to athletic revenue, they are bolstering the fundamental deception at the dark heart of the NCAA system.

The legitimacy of this system is predicated on the fiction that players are students first and foremost, and thus not eligible for a share of the revenue they generate with their labor. This, as we know, is a charade. Even Walter Byers, the NCAA’s first executive director and inventor of the designation “student-athlete,” has admitted as much: “It doesn’t take any great genius to understand that what was real in 1956 can hardly be remembered in the gross commercial climate of intercollegiate athletics today. And I attribute that to the neo-plantation mentality that exists on the campuses of our country and in the conference offices and in the NCAA … the rewards belong to the overseers and the supervisors.”

This billion-dollar industry has managed to create the ideal solution to the interminable problem faced by all capital: Since labor produces the value of the commodities it makes (in this case, the spectacle of college sport), the question of how to produce the maximum amount of profit is really the question of how to compensate labor as little as possible. That college athletes can produce so much value without being categorized as labor is a devious short-circuiting of the system. What professors should be discussing, then, is why and how our students are getting systematically fleeced out of fair compensation for their labor, not why we on the academic side of the university haven’t received a cut of these ill-gotten profits.

Let’s be clear: Our universities require functional libraries, hygienic offices and classrooms, and, most of all, meaningful investment in a regularized, sustainable, and long-term teaching faculty. However, that funding must not be based on revenue derived from the literal sacrifice and gross under-compensation of college football players. It is our job as educators and researchers to make this distinction clearly, publicly, and repeatedly. Otherwise, we are allowing the terms of this consequential debate to be set by the very brutal status quo that we, our student athletes, and all rank-and-file members of our campus communities should be working together to change.

This status quo is neither inevitable nor permanent. Football players do have natural allies on campus, including precarious faculty, service and custodial workers, and graduate students (whose dubious designation as students/workers similarly grants universities license to exploit them). Forging solidarity among these disparate but similarly exploited groups may be the best way to expose and confront the power structures of the political economy of higher education. But that shouldn’t be the end of the list. Tenured faculty have been awarded the privilege to speak without fear of reprisal. It is their responsibility above all to do so on behalf of the athletes who toil on the field and in their classrooms. The message they need to send is clear: College football revenue doesn’t belong in the ivory tower any more than a bedazzled locker room. It belongs in the pockets of the players who give more than we should ever ask to produce it. There is a word for faculty reluctance or refusal to deliver that message: “complicity.”

Nathan Kalman-Lamb is a lecturing fellow at Duke University. He is the author of Game Misconduct: Injury, Fandom, and the Business of Sport (Fernwood, 2018) and co-author of Out of Left Field: Social Inequality and Sports (Fernwood, 2011).