For decades, a small but passionate group of academics has offered a potential balm for the fraught relationship between athletics and education at major universities: allow students to major in sports.
One such is David Hollander, a clinical professor at New York University’s School of Professional Studies, US. He has spent years espousing the intellectual value of basketball — positionless play can teach entrepreneurial thinking, and fast breaks can teach interpersonal communication. Hollander lobbied for the Catholic Church to name a patron saint of basketball (it did) and helped persuade the United Nations to declare December 21 World Basketball Day.
Within the next year — in what he sees as a small step toward athletics being taken seriously in the academy — Hollander is planning to teach a course for varsity, Olympic and professional athletes in which their experiences playing and practising their sport will be part of the curriculum.
“You can get a degree right now in higher education, in dance and art and music, drama,” Hollander said. “And I think those are totally valid degrees. They’re portals into the human condition.” He added: “I don’t see how athletics is any different. How that ancient cultural form, like those ancient cultural forms that I’ve mentioned, are not intrinsically academically meritorious.”
Recently, the ideas of educators like Hollander found a notably influential audience: sports apparel company Nike, which pumps hundreds of millions of dollars into college sports through its sponsorship agreements.
Nike wants to lobby universities to offer minors or majors in athletics. Students would earn credits for time spent on their sport (practising and playing) and also for taking classes that help them understand the social, cultural, anthropological and physiological elements of athletics.
Some models suggest the major could include sport-specific strategy courses, along with courses in nutrition, performance psychology and physiology. It is an idea that has gained momentum in an era when athletes are now able to be compensated for their name, image and likeness, or NIL, which allows some of the most popular student athletes to be paid as much as some professionals.
“We think that there’s enough interest from the colleges that Nike works with to be able to make this happen,” said John Jowers, Nike’s vice-president for communications.
Jowers said he believed that while NIL was disrupting the financial models of college athletics, the focus on money took college sports “further and further away from the kind of core principles around education and college athletics in general”.
Giving athletes the opportunity to major in sports “closes that gap by offering something really, really radical, really new and really beneficial to colleges and universities”, he said.
Jowers said the notion of offering a major in sports interested Nike because it would allow it to create cultural impact in a way that benefits athletes and be at the forefront of important conversations.
Nike has a new CEO, Elliott Hill, who has been tasked with reviving its business. During an earnings call in December, Hill said he wanted to see Nike return to its roots by focusing on sports rather than lifestyle apparel, and centring on its athletes. It’s an ambition that dovetails nicely with its push for a sports major.
Sceptics, however, postulate that for Nike to help bring about this change would be a marketing coup, and a way for it to further ingratiate itself with young athletes.
“I think the sports major is basically being proposed to rationalise and justify the time on the field,” said Nathan Tublitz, an emeritus professor of biology at the University of Oregon, US. “And it certainly wouldn’t be as intellectually rigorous.”
For some sceptics, that’s part of the concern. Tublitz, who was the president of the university senate at Oregon, said most of the athletes who took his courses were excellent students, but he did not think sports satisfied universities’ goals of “critical thinking skills and improving oral and written expression”.
He added: “One argument for this type of major is that sports, and competitive sports specifically, contribute to the formation of a holistic, integrated person. Makes persons more mature. And that’s true. But so does travelling. So does gardening.”
Tublitz said the amount of money involved in college sports makes it difficult to compare to subjects like dance or theatre. If a dancer misses a performance because they become ineligible because of poor grades, that doesn’t affect a university’s bottom line in the way it could if a star football player misses games.
John Davidson, a professor of Germanic language and film studies at Ohio State University, US, and its faculty athletics representative, said he worried about conflicts of interest if coaches were allowed to weigh in on their players’ grades. Those coaches would have an incentive to have the athletes pass courses so that they maintained eligibility, whether their work deserved it or not.
NYTNS
