In college sports, the almighty dollar triumphs over education and tradition

In 1958, Clark Kerr, president of the University of California, said "the three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni and parking for the faculty."

I am more than satisfied with my parking spot at the university where I work. Long married, I absolve my alma mater of responsibility for my sex life. What I want to talk about is college athletics. They're sure as heck not just for alumni anymore.

The traditional major college athletic conferences have broken into pieces and reassembled into Franken-leagues over the past few years. Consequently, traditional rivalries alumni cherish have disintegrated.

I grew up in Palo Alto, California. Stanford Stadium is across the street from my high school, and I went to just about every Stanford home football game between sixth and 12th grade. Stanford, a 25-mile drive from the Pacific coast, has committed to joining the Atlantic Coast Conference. Stanford's traditional rivalries with USC and UCLA will vanish after over a century.

My friends and neighbors who are Stanford alums won't drive across the country to tailgate in Piscataway, New Jersey, for a football game with Rutgers like they would've headed to LA for a USC game. The reconfiguration of the leagues was not done for the benefit of alumni.

So, maybe it was done for the students? In addition to football, Stanford student-athletes who play basketball, soccer, baseball, softball, women's lacrosse, wrestling, women's gymnastics, cross country, golf, tennis, track, swimming and women's rowing will be flying across the country for games, matches, regattas and meets. It's hard to see how long plane rides and missed classes benefit students or their education.

Of course, Stanford is not the only school affected by rejiggering conference memberships. The University of Colorado hired the talented "Neon" Deion Sanders as head football coach last December and then jumped conferences from the Pac-12 to the Big 12. Sanders said he would try to push out current scholarship students to make way for new transfer students. He was successful. Out of a roster limit of 85, only 10 scholarship players from last year remain this year. Losing a scholarship or transferring schools due to new management doesn't serve the interests of affected students either.

So, if college athletics isn't run for the benefit of alumni or students, what the heck is going on? As in the Watergate scandal, it's best to "follow the money." Thanks to bloated football broadcasting rights, the Big Ten could offer USC and UCLA annual payments of approaching $80 million, more than twice what they could have expected from the Pac-12. After a century, they jumped ship to the so-called Big Ten, which will swell to 18 teams next fall.

College athletics have become big business. Division I athletics generated $15.8 billion in revenues in 2019, according to the National Collegiate Athletic Association. In 2021, the NCAA earned around a billion dollars for March Madness. With new TV contracts for football and basketball, the number should soar in coming years. None of the funds will be paid to students.

The highest-paid state employee in 40 of the 50 states is a college football or basketball coach. Highest-paid of all is Nick Saban, head football coach of the University of Alabama, who receives approximately $11.7 million from the state. (Alabama K-12 schools rank in the 40s in math and reading scores, student-to-teacher ratio, percentage of licensed or certified public K-12 teachers and median ACT scores.) Forty-eight of 50 employees on the list are men. The only women are Nos. 49 and 50 - vice chancellor of the University of Maine and New Hampshire's chief medical examiner. The latter makes $261,538 per year, about 2% as much as Saban.

In 2021, the University of West Virginia finished a $55 million upgrade to its football locker room, training facilities, player lounges and more. This year, the university recommended eliminating 32 majors and cutting $7 million in staffing, including 38 faculty members.

In his seminal "General Education in a Free Society," published in 1945, another university president, Harvard's James B. Conant, wrote that the first priority for college education is preparing students for "life as a responsible human being and citizen." A second priority is a "student's competence in some occupation." Conant believed participation in sports can further these goals by helping students acquire "initiative and resourcefulness." He says nothing about athletics as a dollar generator. And then again, neither did Clark Kerr.

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