BY DANIEL A. SEGAL

At this dire moment of relentless attacks on academic freedom, educational excellence, and rights of campus speech and assembly, we still have big-time college athletics—gridiron football, in particular.

This is especially visible at Indiana University.

Even more than at most colleges and universities, the administration of IU’s President Pamela Whitten has targeted faculty, cancelled academic events, and improvised outlandish restrictions on time, place, and manner of speech in a sustained effort to shield from accountability the Israeli genocide in Gaza, disempower the faculty, and chill honest teaching about race, gender, and sexuality. In these far-right pursuits, the administration has been aided and abetted by Indiana’s state government, which has adopted legislation chilling faculty speech and gutting tenure. The overall result is that what previously had been a truly great public university is now vastly diminished.

And yet, Indiana’s football team won the College Football National Championship this year, after having been among the weakest D1 football programs for many decades prior to the 2024 season. This remarkable turnaround required considerable financial resources. IU spent more than $20 million to bring new athletes to their 2025 team, with quarterback Fernando Mendoza receiving some $2.6 million of that; in addition, Coach Curt Cignetti was paid over $10 million for the year. Meanwhile, the university’s graduate students continue to receive less than a living wage for carrying out teaching duties that are crucial to the university’s educational mission (as also was true under the previous IU administration).

To start, the very existence of a thoroughly commercialized football team bearing the university’s name reflects the extent to which shared governance has long been defined by compartmentalization. The academic freedom that IU faculty possessed in the pre-Whitten era existed along with—and indeed, was predicated upon—the faculty having little to no role in decision-making about the athletic program, just as the faculty has long had little to no role in decision-making about IU’s investments. Put simply, hyper-commercial athletic programs are one more piece of evidence that the faculty’s role in shared governance was always circumscribed and conditional—always on loan to the faculty, never established on solid ground.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, compartmentalization of a different sort defined mass media coverage of IU football’s success. Of the copious sports journalism about IU football this past season, almost none of it mentioned, much less examined, the Whitten administration’s dismal record on academic freedom, rights of campus speech and assembly, and support for educational excellence. Instead, IU football has been covered as if all else at the university is copacetic—as if, for instance, there had not been a series of overwhelming faculty votes of no confidence in President Whitten’s administration. This mass media silence and inattention is indicative of how fully football success is a distraction from seeing universities as educational institutions. This gives the lie, in turn, to the tired platitude that the football team (at least when it is a winning team) “connects” alums and the broader public to the university. A distraction is not a connection.

Mainstream mass media has, in addition, provided prominent venues for opinion pieces asserting, as a single if loose bundle, that the football team’s triumph is, at once, of great benefit to the university, a result of President Whitten’s leadership, and nothing less than a model for how universities should be run. One such puff piece appeared in The Wall Street Journal, a second in the in-state financial publication, The Indianapolis Business Journal. And most prominently of all, The Washington Post provided Whitten herself the space to advocate for running universities as a whole on the model of IU’s football program under her presidency: “This Playbook Got Indiana to a Rose Bowl: It Can Improve College Education,” Whitten opined.

But just what are the elements of the “playbook” Whitten offered for higher education? Simply this: “prepare rigorously, execute decisively and measure […] by results.” These are, of course, tired cliches of managerial-speak, hardly revelations or insights.

Similarly baleful is Whitten’s assertion that the ultimate goal of implementing her “playbook” in higher education is for universities to become “truly nimble research and workforce partners to industry.” Here we learn everything about education—critical thinking; the fostering of democratic citizenship, and more—that Whitten is eager to de-fund and excise.

None of my comments to this point are specific to football, but football’s distinctive gendering, as a hyper-masculine sport, is also worth considering here. At the college level, in fact, football remains the only sport that is exclusively male, with no analog for women athletes. The celebration of football success is thus, perforce, a valorization of both manliness and biological sex as a supposedly bedrock fact: indeed, it is difficult to imagine how a celebration of football could free itself of such gender claims. The celebration of IU football was thus in synch with the ongoing MAGA attack on “gender ideology” in higher education.  A women’s basketball championship by contrast—and because women play the game at such a high level today, even a men’s—would not similarly have been at such odds with the historical shifts in the construction of gender that the right loves to hate.

Let us acknowledge, finally, that a key element of football’s hyper-masculinity is stoic acceptance of bodily pain and the severe health risks of playing football, notably chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). How can it possibly be compatible with the mission of an educational institution to sponsor an activity that is so definitively linked with cognitive dysfunction and degenerative brain injury?

Big-time college football, with its gender and medical troubles, preceded our dire moment in higher education of course. We should nonetheless take note of how richly a national college football championship articulates with and boosts projects of the ascendent right of our moment, both on our campuses and beyond.

Daniel A. Segal is Jean M. Pitzer professor emeritus of anthropology and professor emeritus of history at Pitzer College of the Claremont Colleges. His scholarship ranges from Jane Austen (with Richard Handler) to racial discourses in the Americas to theorizing states and non-states in world history (with Ken Pomeranz). He is a past president of the AAUP chapter of the Claremont Colleges and a member of Jewish Voice for Peace’s Academic Council.