It’s time to recognize the reality of college sports

College athletes are often regarded as among the most elite members on any American campus. But their short-term status frequently belies what they really are – indentured servants of a collegiate-entertainment industrial complex.

Their relatively privileged place in U.S. universities was exemplified again in recent days by news from whistleblower Mary Willingham on ESPN. Willingham revealed that an athlete at the university of North Carolina-Chapel Hill was awarded an A- for a partially plagiarized 146-page “essay” about Civil Right icon Rosa Parks.

It is old news that some colleges in essence have one set of academic standards for real students and a far more lax set for students who are recruited because of prowess on the football field or basketball court. In fairness, many students on athletic scholarships are smart, work hard and go onto success in adult careers. But the cliché of the pampered college jock has sufficient basis in reality to justify real concerns.

Different standards are unfair – perhaps most of all to the athletes who are being allowed to skate through courses that are designed to provide job and life skills.

This is, of course, only an interesting sideshow to the larger controversy roiling college athletics this spring – the potential unionization of the football team at Northwestern University.

The decision by the National Labor Relations Board that Northwestern players are employees who should be allowed to negotiate for pay and other benefits is a whiff of reality in a system that has long been dogged by flagrant hypocrisy. To claim that players are merely students who are being aided with tuition is a ridiculous sham. As the UNC grading scandal illuminates, these are players first and foremost, while for many of them education is an unkept promise.

It would be far more honest to admit that Division 1 athletics and the wealth they represent is a subsidiary of the professional sports industry. And pro sports are a subsidiary of the entertainment sector that provides programming for network and cable television.

Historian Taylor Branch has done a wonderful job of piercing the thin veil that defines college jocks as “student-athletes” who are exempted from things like workers compensation or much ability to sue for the injuries they sustain while generating revenue for universities.

“Two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence – ‘amateurism’ and the ‘student-athlete’ – are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes,” Branch writes. “The tragedy at the heart of college sports is not that some college athletes are getting paid, but that more of them are not.”

There will be much scrambling by the NCAA, universities and powerful alumni groups to preserve the status quo of college athletics. There is too much money riding on the outcome for these entities and individuals to give up on such a lucrative system. Nor is the National Labor Relations Board a perfect example of disinterested wisdom. Its positions swing wildly from one presidential administration to the next. But it’s right this time.

It is time to recognize the reality of major college sports.