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…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH On February 24, the following item was posted to the blog of the Ohio Conference of AAUP: OSU Athletics No Longer the Exception to the Rule In October of last year, we published a blog post about how much Ohio universities were subsidizing their athletic programs during the 2017-18 academic year. We indicated…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for Vox, Sean Illing interviews Joshua Hunt, a reporter for the New York Times and author of University of Nike. These are the opening paragraphs to the article, which provide the background to the book and the interview: In 2014, the New York Times sent an investigative reporter to the…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH At a very high percentage of both public and private universities academic budgets are under strain because of all sorts of expenditures on non-academic programs, initiatives, and enterprises. One of the largest of these expenditures is typically on intercollegiate athletics, and the athletics budgets almost never include spending on stadiums, arenas,…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH 1. The Board of Trustees appointed a Special, Independent Working Group (“Working Group”) to oversee an independent investigation of allegations that Coach Urban Meyer failed to act appropriately regarding alleged abuse by Zach Smith of his former wife and related allegations that he misrepresented his knowledge of the alleged events at the…
POSTED BY KELLY HAND In a new op-ed* in the Wall Street Journal, Jay Smith, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, comments on reforms to college basketball recently proposed by Condoleeza Rice and her NCAA-appointed Commission on College Basketball. He is skeptical about the commission’s recommendations to address corruption because they…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The statistics on salaries are from ESPN (cited at the end of the post). In a piece for Business Insider, Matthew Michaels has added the governor’s salaries and median household incomes for each state as comparative measures. The listing is from the lowest “highest salary” to the highest. See the…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In an article for Business Insider, Alan Dawson has provided a ranking of the 30 stadiums with the largest crowd capacity. If there were any doubt that major college football is primarily a big business and is skewed to the biggest programs in the five largest conferences, this list should put it…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH We often hear concerns expressed about Division I athletes who help to generate significant sports-related revenue for their universities but who do not complete degrees and who do not have extended professional careers or do not even get professional contracts. But when one considers that Division II players typically do not…