Abstract
This paper challenges Professor Myles Brand’s position on the role and value of intercollegiate athletics in U.S. colleges and universities on the ground that it fails to account for considerations of deep fiscal responsibility. It presents both a philosophical and ethical criticism of his position that broadens the discussion beyond athletics to include a particular kind of higher educational institution more generally.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
Faculty research under-productivity might well be determined fairly on the basis of, say, average research productivity over the course of one’s career up to the time of evaluation. So that those, for instance, who publish in excess of the basic standard (say, one article per year in a range of specified kinds of journals) might be able to “bank” their excess publications above and beyond the standard during years when they are less productive such as their final years nearing retirement or during a time of recovery from serious illness or injury.
Of course, I refer here only to full-time tenured and tenure-track teaching faculty in classrooms or laboratories, not to part- or full-time temporary, adjunct or other contingent faculty who work terribly hard without reasonable compensation for their fine efforts.
This evidence is supported by the claim that “The overwhelming majority of those 17,917 teams in all sports and schools end up losing money. In the top football division, which can count of strong ticket sales, 113 of its 118 teams still run a deficit. Of the five that made a profit, only two brought in enough to erase the overall deficit of their schools’ athletics departments.” (Hacker and Dreifus 2010, 158–159; also see 164–167)
One possibility here would be to permanently reduce and cap the salaries of such under-productive personnel, a practice found in some higher educational institutions.
See note 11 for an idea and a reference to a source on what might be done to support intercollegiate athletics should it not be feasible or morally justified to do so with public funds.
Compare Kekes (2006: 132): “American higher education is in a bad state because academic institutions are failing as guardians of the truth.”
Consider also the words of John Kekes: “Teaching imparts knowledge; research deepens and broadens it.” (Kekes 2006: 131)
This point was raised by an anonymous referee for this journal.
While I focus primarily on faculty research under-productivity and the refusal or otherwise failure of many universities to not handle it appropriately, there are various other kinds of academic corruption by faculty, including grade inflation, the marginalization of faculty with moral integrity who threaten to expose faculty corruption (such as faculty under-productivity in research and grade inflation). (Kekes 2006) If for no other reason, the institution of tenure, as imperfect and protective of faculty mediocrity as it often is, nonetheless protects faculty having the moral integrity to speak truth to academic power, including a significantly morally corrupted professoriate!
Should this mean ratios for all courses in all disciplines when, say, the psychologists will have huge numbers of students and philosophers will have comparatively few? Yet one cannot even focus only on philosophy FTEs in general because philosophy service courses have large numbers compared to the more specialized advanced courses. While mean ratios are empirically problematic, a priori “reasonable” ratios will be very hard to justify. This important point was made by an anonymous referee for this journal. While I believe that it is an important consideration and I am grateful to the referee for making the point, it is a challenge faced and to some degree satisfied on a regular basis by higher educational administrators as they make tough decisions about departmental funding. So I defer to administrative experts on this matter to be able to provide reasonable articulations of what constitutes reasonableness along these and related lines.
Subject to the considerations of notes 1–2, above.
I thank an anonymous referee for this journal for making this interesting point.
It would not follow, however, that university athletic departments ought to be eliminated altogether. My point is one about the public funding of athletics that is not self-supportive. But I have argued elsewhere that professional sports franchises ought to be contracted to pay fees to the institutions from which they recruit their professional athletes and from which they effectively exploit public funds to make private profits um J. Angelo Corlett, “Going Pro for the Dough: Economic Exploitation in Intercollegiate Athletics” (2013).
Throughout this discussion, I assume that the enrollment per course remains constant, or that determinations by administrators as to how much of a course load increase or reduction (as the case may be) is appropriate under the circumstances of fluctuant enrollment levels from year to year.
One of the difficulties is that there is a significant degree of corruption among the professoriate. It often takes the form of faculty who refuse or fail to consistently “police” the conduct of their peers regarding productivity. Searle (2006: 120–121) But as Theodore Rozsak writes: “It would be pathetic indeed if those who have given themselves to the life of the mind were to plead that they were powerless to reform their own professional environment, powerless even to save their own souls by the brave attempt to achieve reform.” (Roszak 2006: 88)
Without a doubt, this approach would place a great deal of pressure on graduate students to publish as graduate students. But perhaps this will eventuate in their becoming more mature thinkers in their respective fields, while simultaneously serving as a good reason for currently under-employed and well qualified PhDs to gain a foothold in the academic job market.
References
Brand, M. (2006). The role and value of intercollegiate athletics in universities. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 33, 9–20.
Corlett, J. A. (2005). The good professor. Journal of Academic Ethics, 3, 27–54.
Corlett, J. A. (2013). Economic exploitation in intercollegiate athletics. Sports, Ethics, and Philosophy: Journal of the British Philosophy of Sport Association, (in press).
Hacker, A., & Dreifus, C. (2010). Higher education? New York: Times Books.
Kekes, J. (2006). Academic corruption. In R. Barrow & P. Keeney (Eds.), Academic Ethics (pp. 131–143). Aldershot: Ashgate.
Lehrer, K. (2000). Theory of knowledge. Boulder: Westview Press.
Orszag, J., & Orszag, P. (2009). The empirical effects of collegiate athletics: An update based on 2004–2007 data. Commissioned by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Retrieved from http://fs.ncaa.org/Docs/DI_MC_BOD/DI_BOD/2009/April/04,%20_Empirical_Effects.pdf.
Poff, D. (2003). The duty to protect: privacy and the public university. Journal of Academic Ethics, 1, 3–10.
Roszak, T. (2006). On academic delinquency. In R. Barrow & P. Keeney (Eds.), Academic ethics (pp. 65–104). Aldershot: Ashgate.
Searle, J. (2006). The prospects for the university. In R. Barrow & P. Keeney (Eds.), Academic ethics (pp. 105–130). Aldershot: Ashgate.
Shils, E. (2006). The academic ethics. In R. Barrow & P. Keeney (Eds.), Academic ethics (pp. 35–51). Aldershot: Ashgate.
Taylor, M. C. (2010). Crisis on campus. New York: Knopf.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This paper is dedicated to the excellent person and work of Professor Myles Brand. I would like to thank this journal’s Editor-in-Chief, Deborah Poff for her encouragement and an anonymous referee for valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Corlett, J.A. On the Role and Value of Intercollegiate Athletics in Universities. J Acad Ethics 11, 199–209 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-013-9188-5
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-013-9188-5