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…
BY STEVEN LUBET Big-time college football is back, with all the tradition and pageantry, but the sport may soon face a well-deserved existential reckoning for two reasons—one physical and the other financial. First, parents may no longer allow their children to participate in youth and high school football, where the numbers have been declining for…
I did not watch the World Cup soccer game between Brazil and Germany, but I have been unable to escape the media coverage of the 7-1 “record-setting” football event, including photos on the front page of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal of Brazilian flag color decorated fans in various expressions of mourning as if someone, yes,…
It seems everywhere we turn these days, we have to listen to someone or read about someone getting screwed. And it’s never a good screw, or if it is a good screw, that means the person still got shafted. Perhaps the only really good screw will be about someone actually having great consensual sex in…
One of the advantages, I suppose, of living now is that we can access “academic” items immediately and participate in a “discourse” about these items, supposedly. I am not saying I want us to go back to the times when monks illuminated manuscripts to let future generations know exactly how they felt about many things…
Over the course of this college football season, there has been much talk about whether college athletes, especially those playing for major universities whose athletic programs generate millions of dollars in revenue, ought to be paid some sort of modest stipend. Writing for Business Insider, Cork Gaines has offered a radically different perspective on this…