Ms. Jackson, a sports historian at Arizona State University, drew from her scholarly research and from her own experience as a Division I track-and field-athlete at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Ms. Jackson, a sports historian at Arizona State University, drew from her scholarly research and from her own experience as a Division I track-and field-athlete at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
She describes a stark divide between two classes of athletes — those who have academic lives outside their sports, and those who must dedicate their time entirely to athletics, robbed of the opportunity to learn alongside other students. “This divide,” she wrote, “correlates with race.”
“Nonrevenue athletes are mostly white, while revenue-sport athletes are disproportionately black,” Ms. Jackson wrote. “This college sports system contributes to the undervaluing of black lives in American society and our institutions. The predominantly white privilege of playing college sports while earning a quality degree comes at the expense of — is literally paid for by — the educationally unequal experiences of mostly black football and basketball players.”
Ms. Jackson spoke with The Chronicle about her motives for writing the piece, how it has been received, and how college leaders and faculty members can make tangible changes. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.`
Q. What went into your decision to publish this piece?
A. These ideas have been simmering in me for over five years now. Historically, athletes have been speaking out about this. We’ve got people like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who’s been doing it for decades. But usually it’s the athletes who are retired and no longer participating in college sports. And I think that’s changed.
What’s new is that we have more current and recent athletes who developed this consciousness, who aren’t afraid to talk about it. Based on my research, as I was growing more confident about my knowledge of this kind of broader historical narrative, I wanted my voice to be complementary to those voices. I want my perspective and experiences to enhance the arguments that they’re making.
Q. Was this issue also something you first noticed as a student-athlete yourself?
A. I would say I, as an athlete, didn’t have any awareness of this whatsoever. I refer to it now as “drinking the amateurism Kool-Aid.” You have to buy into the system if you want to be the best athlete you can be. If you want to be excellent, you have to buy it 100 percent. And a lot of the athletes whose transcripts have gone public, people like Rashad McCants and Julius Peppers — we were at Chapel Hill at the same time — you can actually see the types of courses they were enrolled in. I was getting this world-class educational opportunity.
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Q. What do you think college leaders, other scholars, and faculty members who agree with your perspective can do to bring about change?
A. There are scholars who think that faculty need to be more assertive and force their way into having more-vocal participation in decisions being made around intercollegiate athletics. Ronald Smith, a longtime historian of college sports, makes that argument, and he’s published a few books on it — that it’s not going to be other kind of folks around higher education, it’s the faculty who are the ones who are going to be best fit to reform college sports and bring it back to some place of sanity.
But I think it’s more complicated than that. I think this is an incredibly complex enterprise with various stakeholders. Some schools are segregated, and they’re not going to change that, because white people want it that way. I think it’s very much that thing. In college sports, when you start to pull back the curtain, fans get really upset because they believe so strongly that this is a positive experience, an institution in society.
“I refer to it now as ‘drinking the amateurism Kool-Aid,’” says Victoria Jackson of her days as a college athlete. “You have to buy into the system if you want to be the best athlete you can be.”Victoria Jackson
But I think leaders in higher education need to take advantage of this opportunity to do something. There’s really big questions around the future of football, the sport itself, because we’re learning more and more about how the sport inherently is harmful to the brain. Should the schools be fielding football teams if they’re in the business of supporting and developing brains, not harming them?
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We talk about innovation and disruption in higher ed. This is a great opportunity to do that. Or are we going to see universities continuing to play defense like they have been doing over the last five years, making changes only when it’s absolutely necessary? I want to inspire someone to disrupt the model. The attack has to be on all fronts. Historians hate to talk about American exceptionalism, but we’re the only country in the world where we’ve stuck to the idea of amateur sport, the only place that has commercialized amateur school sport, the only place in the world that has a billion-dollar sports industry within higher education. It’s hard to think about it in that way.
Q. Do you see coaches as playing a role in that disruption?
A. They’re educators. So my argument would be that they should always be operating from a position that places their students’ — not athletes, students’ — interests first. They should have more awareness of the pressures that they’re placing on their athletes to prioritize athletics over academics. They have to take a step back and actually stop themselves from that kind of messaging just because they need to keep their jobs and they’ve got to win to keep their jobs. Because this industry is so competitive. Recruiting is so competitive.
Q: That connects to other issues plaguing college athletics, like the controversy over whether to pay players, and increasing scientific evidence of brain damage from sports like football?
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A. People are like, “Oh, we can’t do that. There’s not enough money, because it has to fund this entire system.” It almost makes me laugh. It’s very ironic that you get [the NCAA] saying, “We can’t pay the players because of Title IX.” That’s just hilarious to historians, because these were the institutions that were fighting to get an exemption from Title IX when the law first passed. They didn’t want to have to provide equal educational opportunity in sports to women. Now they’re saying, “No, we need Title IX, it is the reason we can’t play the college players.”
But you put more and more pressure on revenue-generating sports to make money. I don’t think anybody’s making it consciously, but you see this kind of rationale being made: “We have to compete with the other universities to build state-of-the-art, world-class facilities to get the best recruits so that we can win. We’ve got to do all this stuff. We gotta have the best coach and pay, you know, seven million dollars a year, so that we can win, so that girls can play.”
Q. How has your op-ed been received so far?
A. So Twitter was all over it. The Black Lives Matter folks are like, “This is awesome.” What I was doing was kind of playing off Michelle Alexander’s really important work on the prison-industrial complex, talking about the new Jim Crow and the ways in which black bodies are policed and criminalized and undervalued in American society. So I think in that space this was really well received. But I imagine you know the folks who are fans of college sports who don’t want to pull back the curtain are going to be resistant to what I’m saying.
Q. And among other scholars?
A. One place I have received pushback, which isn’t too surprising, is from the folks who study women’s sports. The narrative within women’s sports is that we need to do more. We’ve got to do more to advocate. There isn’t enough done for women in sports, and so our research and scholarship becomes part of this effort to promote an expansion of opportunity for women and Title IX.
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But if you start looking at the other side of this — if you see the ways in which these are connected — it becomes a lot harder. I mean, yeah, it’s true. Schools should comply with the law. They should provide equal educational opportunity. But things get messier because of the pressures placed on revenue athletes to fund this whole enterprise. So I’ve had people who do work on Title IX and advocate for an expansion of opportunity and for athletes who push back against what I’m doing, saying it’s harmful to that effort.
Q. What’s your response to those critics?
A. It’s an unintended consequence. We should be putting pressure on schools to provide equal educational opportunity on the basis of gender. But the bigger issue here is race, not gender.
