Side Hustle: College Sports and the Future of Academic Labor

On March 4, 2022, the UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry posted a job advertisement on the university's recruitment platform. The department would be hiring an assistant adjunct professor. It sought someone, the ad said, "committed to the highest standards of scholarship and professional activities, and to the development of a campus climate that supports equality and diversity." Qualified applicants would hold a PhD in chemistry or biochemistry and possess "significant experience" as a college instructor. The application requirements were onerous but familiar to academic job seekers: a cover letter and CV, research and teaching statements, a diversity statement, three to five letters of recommendation. Nothing about the ad was unusual, except for the compensation. The successful applicant would serve on what the ad described as "a without salary basis." The authors of the ad, as if recognizing that the statement could be mistaken for an error, said it again: "Applicants must understand there will be no compensation for this position."1

Academic Twitter/X lit into UCLA. "Is this a joke??" a historian asked.2 "I cannot believe where we are now," an archeologist wrote.3 "Wow, and I thought my pay was low as an assistant adjunct professor," a creative writing instructor tweeted.4 The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed wrote about the unpaid position, then the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. The UCLA chapter of UC-AFT, the union that represents lecturers and librarians on University of California campuses, accused the department of union busting. UC-AFT had won a new five-year contract that fall, and it worried that the administration was attempting to circumvent it. Administrators "may be using these appointments as assistant adjuncts to attempt to avoid their obligations under our union contract," Mia McIver, the UC-AFT president and a UCLA writing instructor, said. "My fear is that UC management's addiction to cheap teaching labor is so strong that our new contract is not going to be honored."5 McIver noted that she and other organizers had discovered hundreds of unpaid teaching positions at UCLA in the wake of the financial crisis. Others observed that Southern Illinois University and Tulane University Law School had also advertised "volunteer" adjunct positions.6 An instructor in Harvard's History and Literature program reported that she had taught a course without pay in 2018 because she cared about the subject and wanted to share her knowledge with students. The course was titled Harvard and Slavery.7

UCLA, at first, attempted to defend the job posting. It dispatched Bill Kisliuk, the university's director of media relations, to explain. It seemed clear from the interviews he gave that the language of "without salary" had not originated at a chemistry department faculty meeting. "Some positions may be without salary when individuals are compensated by other sources and a formal affiliation with UCLA is necessary," Kisliuk told Inside Higher Ed. "These positions are considered when an individual can realize other benefits from the appointment that advance their scholarship, such as the ability to apply for or maintain grants, mentor students and participate in research that can benefit society."8 Some, reading between the lines, wondered whether UCLA intended the position for an internal hire with grant funding or perhaps for a Ukrainian chemist fleeing war. But no, it didn't. The university was offering an alternative compensation package. It would pay the successful applicant not in dollars but in prestige and passion. An assistant adjunct professor of chemistry could perhaps convert an affiliation with the UCLA brand into other sources of income (grants, a private-sector job, a tenure-track position elsewhere), and even if they didn't, they'd be pursing an assumed passion, mentoring students and conducting research that could make a difference, that may "benefit society." But UCLA could see that it was fighting a losing battle. It took down the posting, and Kisliuk issued a "mistakes were made" statement.9 (Kisliuk later moved to the University of California, Davis, where his title was "crisis communications manager.")

That spring, behind closed doors, UCLA was creating a second crisis for Kisliuk to manage. It and crosstown rival USC were negotiating to join the Big Ten Conference and leave their historic home, the Pac-12, to which they'd belonged since the 1920s, when it was the Pacific Coast Conference. The two schools, residing in the West Coast's largest media market, had grown concerned about the Pac-12's struggle to secure a new media-rights deal. TV revenue is the lifeblood of athletic conferences, and the Pac-12 had been lagging behind the two richest conferences, the Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference. In 2021, the Pac-12 had distributed $344 million to its member schools, the Big Ten $680 million.10 The University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma had announced that they would be leaving the Big 12 for the SEC, setting off a realignment scramble, and UCLA and USC, sensing that the "Power Five" conferences could soon become the Power Two, didn't want to be left behind. In late June, the news broke, and UCLA's chancellor, Gene Block, and athletic director, Martin Jarmond, issued a joint statement attributing the decision to "seismic changes in collegiate athletics" and the need to "protect our program from the great uncertainty."11

Block and Jarmond acknowledged that joining the Midwest-based Big Ten would mean a burdensome travel schedule for many UCLA athletes. But three letters had, they said, forced their hand: NIL, or name, image, and likeness. The National Collegiate Athletic Association had long preached against the corrupting influence of all forms of compensation for college athletes, including from the sale of one's name and image to external sponsors. But in the summer of 2021, with a California law that would have allowed college athletes to profit from product endorsements about to go into effect, the NCAA changed course. It published a barebones interim NIL guidance that amounted to telling universities to follow their own state's laws. Boosters formed NIL collectives, which served as unofficial recruiting arms of the athletic departments they supported, and coaches began selling recruits on the "exposure" they could offer them. Joining the Big Ten would, Block and Jarmond wrote, "enhance Name, Image, and Likeness opportunities through greater exposure for our student-athletes and offer new partnerships with entities across the country."12 UCLA would not pay athletes or acknowledge their status as workers, but it could offer them the next best thing: a national platform from which they might pursue other forms of income (a corporate sponsor, monetizable social media accounts) and a chance to realize a dream around which they have organized their lives. The UCLA athlete served on a without salary basis.

The unpaid chemistry position was higher education news. The conference realignment was sports news. No one connected one to the other. Even as football stadiums loom over our offices and classrooms, college sports can feel remote from the work of teaching and research and from other campus labor struggles. But college sports have been a laboratory for the management of academic labor since the mid-twentieth century. They have, in the historian Howard Chudacoff's words, served as the "front door of practically every major institution of higher learning in America."13 But sports have also been a back door through which private interests have smuggled in market practices and ideas. The athletic department has modeled for the rest of the higher education industry how passion and the portable value of affiliation can be used to cast academic labor as something other than work. College athletes do not need workers' rights, administrators claim, because they love what they do and because they can realize indirect rewards for their labor (an NIL deal, a professional contract, an education, a future job). They are not professional but must conduct themselves like professionals. They are not preprofessional because few will ever play in a professional league. College athletes are paraprofessional, operating in parallel to and support of a salaried professional class of administrators and coaches, expected to collect compensation for their labor from external sources, to cultivate a side hustle or three.14 Most professors continue to see the athletic department as a strange appendage to the university, but if they look close enough at the college athlete, they might catch glimpses of themselves and perhaps their own future.15

The private sector has long seen colleges and universities as a resource from which it can extract what it needs (job-specific training, research, data) for free or at a steep discount. Pro sports leagues have been doing this forever. But the private sector has been most successful at shifting the priorities of higher education toward market imperatives since the 1970s, when colleges and universities entered what Christopher Newfield calls a "devolutionary cycle." Administrators, facing a flagging economy and the graduation of the baby-boom generation, sought to balance their budgets with private-sector reforms that promised greater efficiency. But outsourcing to private companies committed to maximizing their own returns did the opposite, raising costs and leading to more private-sector reforms. The result has been a "complicated pastiche of mixed modes" that conflate the public good with private interests.16 The athletic department entered the devolutionary cycle before their academic counterparts, at a time that some look back on as a golden age of public investment in higher education.17 It led the way toward privatization and workforce bifurcation and still does. The college athlete of the NIL era exists at the far end of that devolution, where the university shifts from acting as an employer to a platform from which the client, in exchange for a marketable affiliation, may engage in side hustles.

In 2024, the NCAA reached a $2.75 billion settlement with current and former athletes that created the conditions for past and future revenue sharing with athletes. In a press release, the association stressed that the settlement should not be mistaken for a recognition of worker status and that to recognize athletes as workers would "pose a direct threat to both the sustainability of sports programs" and "to the baseline of support provided to all athletes."18 And don't you, the press release seemed to ask of athletes, some of whom were then seeking to unionize, love what you do?

***

At the 1956 NCAA convention in Los Angeles, Walter Byers, the association's young executive director, made a declaration that he had made before and that he would make again and again in his almost forty years in the job. College sports was, he told the gathering of athletic administrators, in crisis.

In 1950, Congress had introduced the Unrelated Business Income Tax, a tax on nonprofit organizations that engaged in profit-making ventures unrelated to their core, tax-exempt charitable or educational activities. Members of Congress had been alarmed to learn of a noodle factory that alumni of the New York University Law School had donated to their alma mater. The law school paid no taxes on the noodle factory's profits and claimed that it shouldn't because it used them to fund educational activities. The IRS challenged the law school's claim in court and lost. The Unrelated Business Income Tax didn't bar NYU Law from operating a noodle factory, but it established that it would have to pay taxes on profits from noodle sales. A tax exemption would be anticompetitive; it would put other noodle companies at a prohibitive disadvantage. The Unrelated Business Income Tax posed a threat to the emerging profit models of college football and basketball. Was a Saturday afternoon game an educational activity? Or was it a box of noodles?19

But the greater threat, Byers believed, came from Colorado, where two workers' compensation claims had revealed the legal weaknesses of amateurism. In 1950, a football player at the University of Denver named Ernest Nemeth suffered a back injury during spring practice and filed a workers' compensation claim with the Industrial Commission of Colorado. Nemeth received $50 per month and housing for maintaining campus tennis courts and cleaning a furnace and the sidewalks around his dorm. In 1953, the Colorado Supreme Court, supporting the initial finding of the commission and reversing a lower-court decision, ruled that Nemeth's injury "arose out of and in the course of his employment" and that he was entitled to workers' compensation. One witness observed that "if you work hard [at football] you got a meal ticket." A coach admitted that if you got cut, the meals and campus jobs disappeared.20 (The court also, in a framing that must have alarmed college administrators after the introduction of the Unrelated Business Income Tax, described the university as a "corporation" and higher education as "a business, and a big one.")21 In 1955, Ray Dennison, a football player at Fort Lewis A&M College in Durango died after an on-field collision during a game against Trinidad Junior College. Dennison, an Army veteran, had been twenty-six and married with three children, and his wife filed a death benefits claim with the industrial commission. The commission was still deliberating that winter when Byers and hundreds of athletic administrators huddled in Los Angeles.

The NCAA was no stranger to crisis. The association's self-published 2006 centennial history is one long tale of crisis management: "a point of crisis," "confront the crisis," "hour of crisis," "avert a crisis," "constitutional crisis," "financial crisis," "integrity crisis," "growth crisis."22 A crisis emerges, followed by heroic reform, crisis, reform, crisis, reform. When the late historian John Watterson looked back on a century of college football, he acknowledged that he remained astounded at the game's growth amid almost constant scandal. "Each of its major upheavals [in the 1900s, 1950s, and 1980s] has been a prelude to a growth spurt or came in the midst of a boom on the college gridiron," he wrote.23 But perhaps crisis has not been an obstacle to but a stimulus for the growth of football and other college sports. To declare a crisis is to call for reform, and to call for reform is often a demand for more, not fewer, resources.

The NCAA, in fact, originated out of a declared crisis of on-field deaths and gruesome injuries in football. In 1907, the first president of the association, Palmer Pierce, an Army captain and the former athletic director at West Point, acknowledged that football had degenerated into a "gladiatorial struggle" that encouraged students on the field and in the stands to behave "like savages." He and his fellow founding members, seeking to save the game from a growing campaign to abolish it, adopted amateurism as the association's guiding philosophy. In an address at the association's second annual convention, Pierce spoke of the amateur's "innate love" of sports but defined amateurism as, above all, a form of moral conduct. The association would be a "league of educated gentlemen" dedicated to the continued education of gentlemen. Amateurism, he said, "smiles on the square, manly, skillful contestant" and "frowns on the more skillful professional who, parading under college colors, is receiving pay in some form or other for his athletic prowess."24 Pierce and the NCAA attributed the worst of the violence on the football field to the recruitment of lower-class ringers who lacked the honor of the gentleman amateur. A vice president of the association would later deliver a speech in which he attributed the demise of athletic culture in ancient Greece to the rise of professionalism. The "better class of Greeks" bowed out of competition, he said, leaving sports to "a class of useless professional athletes hippodroming about the country."25 Compensation had led to violence and class trespass. A higher form of compensation, the compensation of moral edification, could, the new association said, repair the damage.

But the NCAA had neither the mandate nor the resources to enforce the amateur code it advocated. It subscribed to "home rule": it made rules, and colleges and universities decided whether and when they wished to follow them. "To say we were the police is a large exaggeration," Byers wrote of the association in his 1995 memoir Unsportsmanlike Conduct. "Our task more closely resembled that of study hall monitors maintaining some semblance of order within a rambunctious college family."26 Byers took the helm of the NCAA in 1951, at age thirty. In his and most historians' account of his first years, the toothless association's fortunes rose with the sale of media rights for the national men's basketball tournament, which gave the NCAA a sustaining revenue source, and a 1951 gambling scandal that involved the defending national champion University of Kentucky basketball team. Byers gathered members of the association's infractions committee, which he chaired, and hit the team with a one-year ban, the first "death penalty." Kentucky could have fought the penalty but didn't, and the age of home rule came to an end. The NCAA had, in Byer's telling, arrived.

That's at least one version of events. Another is that Kentucky caved and other universities got on board with the NCAA's enforcement regime because they were as worried as Byers about taxation and workers' comp. The Unrelated Business Income Tax and the Dennison case posed threats to more than their athletic departments.

Byers knew that the amateurism of Palmer Pierce would not survive the looming court battles. The NCAA had adopted amateurism to convince colleges and universities not to cut football programs. It introduced the student-athlete to persuade government officials not to recognize college athletes as workers.27 Byers amended the NCAA constitution, replacing athlete with student-athlete and printing new "official interpretations" beneath the association's statement of principles. The NCAA would, for the first time, allow full athletic scholarships, or "grants-in-aid," as it preferred to call them. But, mindful of the Colorado Supreme Court's decision in University of Denver v. Nemeth, it barred institutions from cancelling an athlete's scholarship for poor performance, because of an injury, or for failure to participate. Football or another sport could not appear to be an athlete's meal ticket. A student-athlete competed, the constitution stated, for the "physical, mental, or social benefits he derives therefrom." For the student-athlete, sports are an "avocation" -- a passion, the antithesis of work.28

The Colorado Supreme Court got the message. In 1957, it ruled against Dennison's widow, determining, in a reversal of the state industrial commission's finding and a district court ruling, that the evidence did not establish that Dennison had been "under a contract of hire to play football."29 The court used Byers's new coinage, student-athlete, to describe Dennison, as it had not Nemeth. A coach had arranged a job for Dennison similar to the one that Nemeth had received at the University of Denver. But the Colorado Supreme Court observed that Dennison, unlike Nemeth, had left another job, at a gas station, to take the campus job out of a desire to play football. Dennison had not been enticed, it determined, because, as the recruiting coach said, "Ray wanted to play football." The court found that Dennison had gone out of his way to "take part in football practices and activities, which was his desire, and which he was anxious to do."30 Football was not something he had to do; he wanted to do it. In four short years, the Colorado Supreme Court had gone from defining college athletes as workers entitled to workers' rights to ruling them something else, the opposite even: volunteers doing it not for an education or a check but for the love of the game. Pierce's amateur received an education in gentlemanliness, Byer's student-athlete a chance to pursue a passion as well as income from other sources (a professional contract, a sales job) in the future.31

The student-athlete overshadowed but did not replace the amateur. Amateurs, traveling a separate track than their student-athlete peers, thrived in this new era. I was one of them. I competed in track and field for the University of Washington in the mid- to late 2000s. I wasn't a star, even by the standards of a nonrevenue sport, but I enjoyed many of the same perks as the football and basketball players, whose faces appeared on billboards and whose jerseys could be purchased at the campus bookstore. I got to choose my classes first, ahead of nonathlete seniors, and I had access to free one-on-one tutoring in all subjects. The athletic department flew my teammates all over the country for meets and sent us to weeklong training camps on the Puget Sound. We received enough Nike gear to outfit a small village. Every spring, we hosted an invitational and dual meets in Husky Stadium, where we sprinted, ran, jumped, vaulted, and threw in front of 500 people and 69,500 empty seats. Opponents of compensation for college athletes often observe that most athletic departments lose money, but they overlook how revenue from football and basketball media rights gets redistributed to athletes like me. The student-athlete subsidizes the amateur.32

The student-athlete of 1956 was a white man -- Ernest Nemeth, Ray Dennison. But as the athletic departments of the Big Ten and Southeastern Conferences integrated, the term transformed into a signifier of Blackness. The historian Michael Oriard observes that the reforms of the late 1960s and early 1970s — in which the NCAA empowered coaches to cancel athletes' scholarships for failure to participate or because of "serious misconduct" (read protest) and limited all scholarships to one-year renewable grants — amounted to an attempt to curb the growing prominence and power of Black athletes in the most high-profile sports.33 Professional/amateur marked a class divide; student-athlete/amateur took a more racial (but still classed) form. Black athletes who enrolled at predominantly white colleges and universities met what the historian Frank Andre Guridy describes as a "realignment, rather than a demolition, of social hierarchies."34 Black women athletes found that, as Amira Rose Davis writes, Title IX most benefited white women and girls — even as universities enlisted Black women's "symbolic labor" to burnish their images as conduits to an integrated, multiracial future.35 The middle- and upper-class white athletes on the lacrosse field and the tennis court remained amateurs, but Black athletes, who once might have competed for Florida A&M or Tennessee State, were integrated and separated as student-athletes. Administrators and officials also discovered that the academic success of some amateurs could be used as a cudgel against student-athletes who failed classes or didn't graduate. The rower earned As; why couldn't you? The academic struggles of some student-athletes, they found, could be used to suggest that all student-athletes got what they deserved from the university, which was nothing.36

From the introduction of the student-athlete concept to the screw-tightening reforms of the post-integration era, the NCAA and member institutions built a framework for managing revenue-producing athletic labor as a paraprofessional workforce. The rewards of college sports were intangible: pleasure, passion, the development of leadership and interpersonal skills, future earnings in professional sports or from improved job outcomes resulting from a subsidized degree. College athletes needed to act like professionals, administrators and coaches told them, not because they were professionals but because sports were side hustles that facilitated further, perhaps remunerative side hustles. The college athlete had no main gig.

***

Professors taught in the shadow of their universities' football stadiums, but most didn't think that the alumni's bread and circuses had much to do with them. In 1991, Murray Sperber published a book about the business of college sports called College Sports Inc. He subtitled it The Athletic Department vs. the University, insisting that the athletic department "has almost no connection to the educational departments and functions of the school."37 Sperber, who taught at Indiana University, may have wished to distance himself from Bobby Knight, the Hoosiers' hotheaded Hall of Fame basketball coach, but the athletic department was not the university's antagonist. It had won the university long ago.

Take the University of Kentucky, for example. In 2009, the university announced that it had landed "its latest prize recruit" after an "intense six-month courtship that included a weeklong stay at Gainesway Farm [the thoroughbred horse breeding compound] and the promise to invest more than $80 million dollars."38 The recruit was not an athlete or a coach but the cancer researcher Mark Evers, who would direct the university's Markey Cancer Center. The university had wooed Evers from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston with a $650,000 base salary and by pledging to spend between $35 and $40 million dollars to develop a 30,000 square-foot state-of-the-art research facility. It also agreed to hire seven full-time researchers and a team of technicians from Evers's lab in Texas. University officials compared Evers to a "five-tool player in baseball," and the executive vice president for health affairs, reflecting on the recruiting process, said that they had executed a "full-court press."39 The financial crisis had hit Kentucky hard, and some wondered how the state university could afford to spend more than $30 million dollars on a basketball coach — it had signed John Calipari to the richest contract in the sport that spring — and $80 million dollars on a cancer center. (Calipari's deal included two cars and membership to the country club of his choice.)

The University of Kentucky was making cuts elsewhere while raising tuition, but it must, the president and provost determined, continue investing in what had become the crown jewels of the twenty-first-century public university: athletics and medicine. In the afterword to the 2019 third edition of his A History of American Higher Education, John Thelin observes that the public university had "drifted into a new 'A&M'" — not agriculture and mining or agriculture and mechanics but athletics and medicine.40 Facing declining investment from federal and state governments and public misgivings about the culture of higher education, presidents sought to create new revenue streams (media-rights sales, National Institutes of Health grants) and to rebrand the land-grant mission on which many of them were founded. They would no longer be tradition bound but market facing, innovation driven. Walk across most public research university campuses, and you will see evidence of the new A&M in the infrastructure: a gleaming new medical center on one side of campus, a quad surrounded by crumbling old buildings devoted to the arts and sciences at the center, and a gleaming new athletic compound on the other side. (Thelin remarks that the arts and sciences have endured but might be best denoted now by a lowercase a&s.)41

In using the language of sports recruitment to announce the hiring of Evers, the University of Kentucky administrators may have been seeking to assuage critics of Calipari's exorbitant contract. (We're pursuing NCAA championships but also a cure for cancer!) But the comparison said more than they may have known. The Markey Cancer Center was following the athletics model of higher education, which is a star-based, administrative model. College athletes are short-term stars; they come and go every one to four years. But the coaches, if they build a successful program, can stick around for decades, serving as the faces of their institutions and amassing staffs that, in football, can number more than a hundred. At large state universities, the going rate for some assistant football coaches now exceeds a million dollars a year. At Michigan State University, where I teach, the forty-five-year-old assistant Joe Rossi coordinated one of the worst defenses in the Big Ten in 2024. The team finished 5-7, and Rossi made $1.5 million, more than the president of the university (but still almost $6 million less than his boss, the head coach). The university rewarded him with an extension. MSU can afford to do this (if it can afford to do this) because it gets the athletic labor Rossi manages for well below market rate. A defensive back on Rossi's roster is not a worker but, as the NCAA has long held, a consumer of his own labor. Management is work; athletics and health care are passions and platforms through which to pursue external forms of compensation.42

In 2013, the anthropologist David Graeber published an essay in the radical magazine Strike! Titled "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs." It went viral and led to the 2018 book Bullshit Jobs. Graeber argued that as much as half of all labor in the Global North was bullshit: work for the sake of work that even the people doing it would acknowledge made no contribution and didn't need to occur. He theorized that bullshit jobs, which would seem to contravene market imperatives, existed because they served the interests of finance capital by encouraging resentment toward middle- and working-class people who held jobs that did make a contribution and that may offer workers some satisfaction and even pleasure. Graeber arrived as his theory by observing his own industry, higher education, where the growth of administrative staffs seemed to correlate with increasing resentment toward professors.43 Graeber had moved to London by the time he wrote his essay, but had he looked across the Atlantic to the American university, he would have found a longer-standing, more extreme version of administrative bullshit and resentment in the athletic department, where administrative costs had shot through the roof as generations of unpaid athletes in football and basketball, most of them Black, had been declared a "problem" and even a "disgrace." 44

Administrative bloat raises costs, some of which get covered by tuition hikes, some by cuts to the units that the administrators oversee. Another method for cutting costs has been, as the UCLA job posting demonstrates, an increasing reliance on volunteer labor that institutions frame as educational or as a chance to gain skills and add lines to a résumé. Scholars have noticed, naming the university's wageless workers "the voluntariat" and "decommodified labor."45 Annie McClanahan suggests that we may be witnessing not the triumph of neoliberalism but the arrival of economic pressures long familiar to the working poor, immigrants, and workers of color in the lives of people once shielded from them. Neoliberalism wasn't new to the late twentieth century but, she argues, new to people like her and me, humanities professors.46 The life raft for some has been a move into administration, which had to be the real work of the university because, well, who would ever do it for free? The new A&M that they manage lends itself to wageless labor by combining one form of work raced Black (revenue sports) and another gendered female (care work). It is a platform for side hustles, whether NIL deals or "soft money" cobbled together from grants. Calipari and Evers will still get paid, but others may, the university assumes, come along for little or nothing.47

Among national universities and liberal arts colleges, higher education has itself taken the form of a sport. In 1983, U.S. News and World Report published the magazine's first college rankings with vertical tables that would have been familiar to any regular reader of the sports page. The Associated Press Poll, launched in 1936, and the Coaches' Poll, added in 1950, had long ranked the best college football and basketball teams based on the results of ballots distributed to media members and coaches, and U.S. News borrowed their method. The magazine's original rankings were based on a survey distributed to every president of a four-year college in the United States, about half of whom responded. The survey asked the presidents to select the ten schools in their own institution's academic category — national university, national liberal arts college, regional liberal arts college, comprehensive university, or smaller comprehensive university — that "did the best job of providing an undergraduate education."48 Stanford ranked first among national universities, followed by Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. But public institutions fared well, with the University of California, Berkeley, in fifth, the University of Michigan in seventh, and the University of Illinois tied with Cornell for eighth. (Publics would tumble in subsequent rankings as U.S. News added factors like selectivity, financial resources, and alumni giving. But the rankings would reward state universities with large athletic departments by allowing them to count the cost of intercollegiate sports toward "per-student expenses.")49 The presidents whom the magazine interviewed stressed that the highest-ranked colleges were not "necessarily the best schools for everyone," but rankings, as a genre, are not about relative merits or fit.50 They are about better and worse, rising and falling, winning and losing. The competitive model that the U.S. News rankings codified encouraged alumni, students, and even faculty to see themselves as consumers of academic prestige, rooting for their college to climb a spot or two — to beat Stanford, defeat Michigan.

A drop in a university's ranking can, like a losing season for a power conference football program, prompt declarations of crisis. Is the president up to the job? Has the university put too much money here? Too little money there? Is it headed in the wrong direction? Rankings accelerate the administrative carousel and encourage institutions to direct resources upward, to the people whose job it is to manage crises and communicate a university's vision.

Crises may be bad for individual administrators, but they are good for administrators as a class, and sports are crisis-producing machines. In the mid- to late 1980s, college sports generated one scandal after another. The University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias died of a cocaine overdose in his dorm hours after being selected second overall in the NBA draft. An investigation revealed that the Southern Methodist University football program had operated a $400,000 slush fund with which it paid athletes and that the sitting governor of Texas, who chaired the university's board of governors, knew about and condoned. In response to Bias's death and the SMU scandal, The Knight Foundation decided to assemble a commission to propose reforms to college sports. Most of the members of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics were either current or former university presidents, and their final report, published in 1991 to glowing reviews, recommended what they called the "one-plus-three" model. They called for greater presidential control (the "one") to ensure the three objectives of academic integrity, financial integrity, and accountability through certification.51 Presidents, the presidents said, ought to be in charge of the NCAA and of conferences. No one, neither the Knight Commission nor the national press, acknowledged the bald self-interest of a bunch of presidents advocating for more presidential control. College sports were in crisis, and their best hope was, the Knight Commission determined, more administration.

The Knight Commission has continued to release reports since — one in 2001, another in 2010, a whole series since 2020. It remains devoted to guarding against "pay for play," even as NIL and revenue sharing has transformed college sports.52 The 2024 settlement between the NCAA and past and current athletes allowed universities to pay athletes for the use of their NIL, which means that universities now sell their athletes' labor (through tickets and media-rights deals) and purchase their endorsement (of the program for which they play and the university they attend) but do not pay them to play, do not, god forbid, exchange wages for work. For the college athlete, the university is not an employer but a platform, a market actor engaging other market actors, including, perhaps, an adjunct professor of chemistry.

In his history of the unending attempts to reform college sports, Ronald Smith observes that almost every group on campus or affiliated with higher education has been brought in, consulted, asked for recommendations — every group except college athletes themselves and the people who teach their classes.53

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In the 2010s, college athletes raised fists, knelt during the national anthem, and fought for the right to unionize. At the University of Missouri, thirty members of the football team threatened to sit out an upcoming game in protest of anti-Black discrimination on campus unless the president, Tim Wolfe, resigned. Wolfe held out for one day before he, with the university facing a million-dollar fine for forfeiting the game, gave them what they wanted. The Missouri athletes had discovered what the sociologist Harry Edwards and the San Jose State football team had in 1967, when they staged their own strike: If sports were big business and the front door of the university, then athletes had a "power lever."54 The protests of Edwards's time were met with what Roderick Ferguson describes as a "ferocious offensive" to constrain them and a new generation of students — students of color, women, immigrants, working-class students — making demands on the university.55 But they were also confronted with a more subtle counteroffensive. Protest could be cast as an expression of passion, and passion, the student-athlete knew, would be compensation enough. Some iconic forms of campus protest even came to seem like part of the curriculum, as if a four-year education wasn't complete without at least one sit-in.

The first Trump administration gave college students reason to protest. The second has given them, their professors, and other campus workers reason to fear that higher education as they'd known it would not survive. As I revised this article for publication, the president, less than a week after launching a war against Iran, held a roundtable at the White House titled "Saving College Sports," to which he invited fifty lawmakers, conference commissioners, and university presidents and athletic directors. It included no current or even recent college athletes. Trump, sitting at the head of a long conference table, voiced his support for the proposed SCORE Act, which would grant the NCAA an antitrust exemption and bar college athletes from being classified as workers. "This is a very important meeting," he told the gathering, "because this is really the future of, I think, beyond college sports, this is the future of colleges."56 As college sports go, so goes the university. About this, at least, Trump might be right, and we, all of us — including professors whose total interaction with their university's athletic department is enduring stadium traffic — should be concerned about the future his administration charts for college sports because it may be ours. The anti-trans campaign in sports has, for example, served as a model for the government's subsequent assault on gender studies research and teaching. And the plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which ended race-based affirmative action, wielded Harvard's admission of "ALDC students" — recruited athletes, legacies, dean's interest list [often donors' children], and the children of faculty and staff — against the college. The "A" received the most attention in oral argument.57

The confusion over NIL and revenue sharing has distracted from a college athlete unionization movement that now faces additional obstacles in the second Trump era. In spring 2024, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce held hearings in response to the National Labor Relations Board's recognition of the Dartmouth men's basketball team's right to unionize. A Republican congressman from Virginia struggled to understand why the team would wish to join the Service Employees International Union. Most college athletes are "willing participants," he said. "They are the envy of the rest of campus and their high school teammates who didn't have the ability to continue to college." Multiple congresspeople noted that some athletes were now striking "six- and seven-figure deals" with external sponsors. Others said that unionization posed an "existential threat" to college sports.58 Didn't college athletes want to play sports? Didn't they know how lucky they were? Couldn't they make money from other sources? Wouldn't a chemist want to teach at one of the best public universities in the country? Wouldn't they know how lucky they were? Couldn't they apply for grants, for other jobs? Didn't they want the CV line? We are all student-athletes now.

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Joseph Darda is a professor of English at Michigan State University and the author of four books on American culture, sports, and racial formation. He is currently completing a history of the radical sports movement of the early 1970s.

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Banner Image of a 1954 Teamsters Local 107 meeting at Franklin Field on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. Photograph by George D. McDowell. Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries.

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