Writing at The Wall Street Journal, former federal prosecutor and longtime television writer/producer Jonathan Shapiro calls Indiana University president Pamela Whitten the school’s “MVP.”
Shapiro is also the author of How to Be Abe Lincoln: Seven Steps to Leading a Legendary Life, which is described as being “written for those who don’t just admire Lincoln but want to emulate his rational, practical approach to law, love, leadership and life.”
As an apparent expert in character, one might wonder which of President Whitten’s accomplishments has Shapiro singing her praises.
Is she the MVP for calling in Indiana state troopers to arrest protesting students on her campus, an action that included snipers on the roof of a campus building?
Is President Whitten the MVP for IU’s attempt to enforce a “no-trespass” order on a group of IU faculty, grad students and alumni, which led to institutional sanctions, sanctions that were later invalidated on First Amendment grounds in a federal court?
Is she the MVP for being subject to an April 2024 faculty no-confidence vote brought over a petition that charged the administration with “encroaching on both academic freedom and shared governance,” including a failure to resist an Indiana state law directly attacking tenure and other faculty protections?
Maybe Shapiro was thinking of the decision to fire the university director of student media and adviser to the Indiana Daily Student newspaper prior to declaring that the print edition could no longer print “news” and instead be limited to “event guides.”
(This restriction was ultimately reversed following widespread objections from students, faculty, alumni and other people who care about free speech.)
I won’t pretend suspense any further, because we all know what is most notable about Indiana University in this moment. Shapiro was praising Pamela Whitten for her stewardship of the Indiana University football team, which recently completed its season as undefeated national champions, a feat all the more amazing given that Indiana University has, historically, been the losingest football team in the history of the Big Ten.
Shapiro praises Whitten for being “quicker than most to adapt to the new world order in college athletics” and being “adept at finding talent,” including hiring coach Curt Cignetti and, after his initial successes, nailing him down with a salary of $11.6 million a year, which required “weathering a storm of criticism.”
The increased attention and revenue realized through this success is, in Shapiro’s mind, an unalloyed good and even necessary compared to the alternatives. As he says, “Nobel Prizes are nice, but the physics department’s fan base will never kick in for a new cyclotron.”
By his biography, Shapiro seems like a person invested in character and justice and protecting the foundational rights of Americans. He was educated at Harvard, Oxford and Berkeley. But in this man’s opinion, what makes a college president an MVP is the success of the football team.
Jonathan Shapiro’s opinion piece is hardly the most important or dispositive evidence that there must be some reckoning when it comes to the major revenue sports and the institutions that host them, but reading it felt like a bit of a tipping point to me, indicating that there is no future where the same person can lead both the entity that is striving for a national championship in football or basketball and an institution of postsecondary education.
It’s all too big. There’s too much money, and the incentives between education and major revenue-generating athletics—always tenuous—are now almost entirely misaligned.
If anyone needs additional evidence, how about Duke University suing a student, Darian Mensah, in attempt to keep him at the school so he could remain their starting quarterback, fulfilling a two-year, reportedly $8 million contract? The parties settled the dispute and Mensah is now heading to Miami, his third school and this year’s runner-up to IU, with two years of eligibility remaining.
Let me pause to say that I 100 percent support student athletes being paid absolutely as much as they are able, and that Mensah and other players who transfer to more promising athletic and financial opportunities are doing nothing wrong. Anyone who laments this state of play should aim all of their ire at the NCAA and its member universities, who had a chance to craft a system that paid students for their labor but refused to do so.
In a way this relatively ungoverned and ungovernable system, which also has former professional basketball players being cleared to return to college, is more clarifying than if the NCAA had allowed athletes to certify and bargain collectively. The attitudes of people like Jonathan Shapiro only reflect reality: The activity that most matters when it comes to many universities is sports.
But that primary importance of sports cannot co-exist with an educational institution under the same leadership. I would like to hear a serious argument rooted in reality that makes this case, because I cannot see it.
The good news is that there are some relatively clear frameworks that can point the way to better futures for both aspects of the contemporary university, athletics and academics.
Clearly football, and men’s and women’s basketball (and potentially other sports that can be run profitably), should be spun off as independent for-profit entities. They will be required to share some portion of gross revenue with the originating institution in exchange for rights to the name and jersey and facilities, but otherwise they will be run separately according to their highest purpose—winning games. These entities will be “owned” through some combination of the institution and a separate body of alumni/boosters/whatever. (There’s lots of ways to structure this as a corporate entity. Perhaps the unique structure of the Green Bay Packers could be used as a model.)
The people running the revenue-generating athletics entity will not report to the university president. They will be accountable to the same structures we find in other professional sports, like team presidents or boards of governors. Players will be eligible to simultaneously attend credit-bearing courses at the affiliated university, but they will not be required to do so while they are rostered as an athlete. Players will receive a guaranteed five-year scholarship credit to return to the institution for the pursuit of a degree following the end of their athletic career.
We may need a salary cap and reductions in roster size—college football teams often have more than double the number of players as NFL teams. The current Division I teams that don’t have the resources necessary to compete as a for-profit entity will drop back into subdivision that remains genuinely amateur, closer to the structure of college sports from several decades ago.
Big-time teams unshackled from the nonprofit entity that hosts them will be allowed to go whole hog on revenue-generating and value-increasing activities.
All I am proposing is that we recognize these sports for what they have become and then allow them to be what they are without trying to maintain a relationship between two entities that have no reason to be conjoined beyond tradition.
Something like what I describe here is inevitable, though in the worst case scenario we simply allow the football team to swallow the educational mission, much like President Whitten has apparently achieved with Indiana University, only on a national scale.
This has the potential to be a win-win for both sports and academics and, at its best, will be a reversal of the era when subsidies from the academic side have been used to support athletics.
All it’s going to take is a critical mass of rich and important people to nudge us that way. For those of us who don’t belong to those groups, our job is to make sure the tribute paid to the remaining academic entity is sufficient to do our work.
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