BY ANNIE ADAMS

The COVID-19 pandemic belies the assertion that the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is devoted to students.

While instructors of practice-based courses in science and engineering and performance-oriented classes in the arts are scrambling to reach students remotely and offer them some semblance of a classroom experience, the NCAA has largely shuttered operations. Following the Southeastern Conference’s recent memorandum on virtual meetings, which heavily circumscribes virtual training, the NCAA will no doubt offer general guidelines outlining a standard approach: one focused on liability and recruitment, not learning and reflection.

If the NCAA offered students an essential service—or, perhaps more correctly, if its leaders believed it offered students an essential service—it would be working to meet the needs of the students already in its divisions, students whose collegiate experiences have been upended by this pandemic, to provide essential support now while still facilitating those students’ progression and graduation rates. To date, the organization has only touted a “grassroots” social media movement, “United As One,” wherein the branded message (the “O” is the NCAA logo) is “personalized with the school’s logo on the other side” and revised its financial distribution model to account for lost revenue from the cancellation of the March Madness basketball tournament.

In the press release regarding the revised distribution model, the NCAA’s chair of its board of governors noted that the association was able to address the economic impact of the coronavirus crisis quickly because its “forward-focused planning” included preparing “for a financial catastrophic event like the one we face now.” And there is every reason to believe that this planning did take place. Senator Chris Murphy’s well-researched series of reports on the NCAA, “Madness, Inc,” and California’s recent move to allow student-athletes to profit from endorsements represent substantive legislative challenges to the NCAA’s business model. Already preparing for the permanent prospect of having to minimally “pay” its revenue-generating talent, the NCAA no doubt factored in contingencies of relatively finite duration, contingencies that could conceivably include a pandemic.

Colleges and universities should take note and begin their own “forward-focused planning,” planning that will allow them to protect their academic core in the midst of a pandemic while they reevaluate the unsustainable cost of NCAA athletics.

Such planning starts not with a sober look at budget numbers, which are well known and widely circulated—the deficits schools run supporting the NCAA are so thoroughly documented that even the NCAA acknowledges their inordinate cost on its website—but with a reconsideration of the stories that we tell ourselves about what colleges and universities do. While the ubiquity of this athletic association has made it difficult to discuss collegiate-level athletics outside of the NCAA’s parameters, these discussions are both possible and necessary, not in the least because the benefits of sports participation should never have served as a de facto justification of a specific athletic organization in the first place.

First, higher education institutions in America have to admit that they lost the ability (or credibility) to make an academic justification for student participation in sports or exercise regimes when they almost uniformly shed collegiate-level physical education requirements in the 1980s. Continuing to offer pale echoes of arguments from Plato’s Republic in order to excuse the exorbitant expense of an inherently parasitic association is not just incongruous; it is manifestly irresponsible. All students deserve improved health outcomes and lessons in the importance of teamwork. Such unalloyed good should not be reserved for only a small subset of students who come to campus already displaying certain forms of physical prowess. Public institutions in particular, which receive state funds to educate the polity, should revisit their civic mandate in light of this public health crisis.

Next, we need to uniformly acknowledge that the NCAA is a billion-dollar enterprise with record-breaking profits that are largely guaranteed by the non-profit status secured by its self-serving filiation with higher education. What so many who favor NCAA participation euphemistically refer to as a college’s or university’s front porch is far from some kind of inviting addition, individually molded to enhance the value of a stable structure. It is a generic casino floor stretching across multiple campuses, where the majority of schools gamble millions of dollars annually, in the hopes of an elusive Flutie effect that might lead to surges in applications for admission, while calling it an investment in foundations that are cracking under increased financial pressure.

Last, but not least, colleges and universities need to recognize that the economic imposition of an association that takes far more than it gives back is an ill of our own making, solidified through the determinations of our own business officers. The National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) sets accounting standards for higher education and defines our budgetary categories. They are the ones who grant institutions the ability to categorize athletic programs as either a “student service” (an expense for an activity primarily designed to aid students’ development and well-being outside of instruction) or an “auxiliary enterprise” (any revenue-generating good or service offered to faculty, staff, or students that is expected to be financially self-supporting). It is NACUBO’s unwarranted and unnecessary budgetary flexibility that allows programs within even the most elite division of the NCAA, Division I, to be either liberally supported by an institution’s education and general funds (as an unprofitable “student service”) or lavishly isolated as a quasi-private auxiliary, free to rake in revenue as a not-for-profit entity that is largely tax-exempt.

As far as the budgets of most colleges and universities are concerned, the game of the NCAA has long been over. It is time for the American higher educational system to stop the clock to focus on the academic core that actually serves our students.

Guest blogger Annie Adams is a professor of English at Morehead State University. She serves as a faculty regent on the MSU Board of Regents.