Winning at all costs: US college athletics and the curse of money
College sport is a wildly popular, multibillion-dollar industry, but rampant commercialism has led to numerous ethical, financial, academic and scandals, while spiralling expenses are placing the whole US higher education system under pressure. Jon Marcus reports
A 300-piece marching band leads a parade of fire engines carrying high-spirited cheerleaders past a rapturous sea of more than 80,000 people, almost all of them in red and white. Some of these onlookers wander away from the bedlam to sit in the lap of a nearby statue of Abraham Lincoln, their whispered entreaties to the Civil War president drowned out by the music looping from restaurants and stores.
“On Wisconsin, on Wisconsin, stand up, Badgers, sing,” it blares, over and over. “Forward is our driving spirit, loyal voices ring/On Wisconsin, on Wisconsin, raise her glowing flame/Stand, fellows, let us now salute her name!”
It is football game day in Madison, the home town of the University of Wisconsin, and the pageantry amounts to a uniquely American tradition. The observance of the various rituals is almost religious: the playing of the university fight song, the wearing of its colours, the prayers for victory to Lincoln and the adulation for the Badgers mascot that is omnipresent on the merchandise being snapped up as quickly as sellers can give out the change.
University athletics is deeply woven into US culture and commerce, accounting for emotional loyalties and rivalries and billions of dollars in revenue, divided up among broadcasters, marketers, the universities themselves and highly paid coaches who also stand to earn lucrative endorsement revenue from sponsors.
“Spectators have become addicted to the spectacle, and the universities have swallowed hard and found ways to live with this pact with the devil,” says Jay Smith, a historian at the University of North Carolina who studies university athletics. “And for that reason, the system has become entrenched.”
But US university athletics is also facing yet another round of attacks after a long succession of ethical, financial and academic scandals, an uprising among players who want a share of all that money, and new financial realities that have stretched university budgets and diminished the willingness of non-athlete students to continue to subsidise athletics.
“These threats to the integrity of college sports are an urgent call to reform, if ever there was one,” says Arne Duncan, the former US secretary of education and co-chair of the independent Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a panel mostly made up of university leaders and former college athletes, set up in 1989 in the wake of previous scandals and aimed at promoting academic integrity in college sports.
