Doing, Undoing, And Redoing Collegiate Athletics: Conceptual Tales Of Marginality And Mattering (original) (raw)
“In the Arena”: Reflections on Critical Public Engagements on College Sport
Journal of higher education athletics & innovation, 2024
In this paper, we reflect on the challenges, opportunities, motives, imperatives, and strategies of engagement associated with public scholarship about college athletics. Public scholarship has become a trendy topic across the academy as universities increasingly push academic workers to boost institutional brands suffering from purposeful chronic defunding through highly visible engagement in the public sphere. We argue that although public scholarship is a vital part of academic work, principal imperatives driving this form of labor should be political/ethical rather than promotional. It is therefore not enough for academic workers to simply generate data for academic audiences, as without public dissemination, the impact is inherently limited and exclusionary. While public engagement is a necessary and important part of our work, it is fraught with the contradictions inherent to the critique of the same institutions that demand that engagement in the first place, as well as the associated collateral intellectual and personal damage that comes from wading into public debate. We provide an autoethnographical account of our personal experiences as scholars intervening in public discourse around the rights of campus athletic workers and our own encounter with ESPN college basketball personality and former college coach Dan Dakich. This account enables us to trace some institutional and personal strategies for educators to create protective measures, build community, and mobilize solidarity against real or perceived harassment. Such tactics aim to help scholars produce public work that genuinely contributes to societal conversations, challenges prevailing misconceptions, and centers the voices of minoritized, abused, and exploited athletes above all.
The Journal of Higher Education, 2016
Using a combined grounded theory and case study methodology, Jayakumar and Comeaux examined the role of organizational culture in shaping the lives of college athletes, particularly related to negotiating dual roles as both student and athlete. Data collection involved 20 interviews with athletes and stakeholders in the affairs of intercollegiate athletics at a Division I public university, as well as field observations and document analysis. The story that emerged from this breadth of data corroborates with and is largely told through the powerful counternarrative of one key informant who is a former Division I college athlete. Findings reveal a cultural-cover up imposed by an idealized image of achieving excellence in academics and athletics,that masks inadequate organizational support toward academic success. While academics are espoused as a priority at the university and within an athletic department that features an academic support system (e.g., tutors, computer center), and although the importance of balancing a dual student/athlete role is constantly reinforced verbally, underlying messages and structures push college athletes toward a greater focus on athletics at the expense of their academic futures. Implications for organizational change are discussed.
Unmasking the Glory and Scandal: The System as an Essential Text for Athletic Administration Courses
2023
Academic book reviews critically evaluate new works, promoting scholarship and enhancing academic publishing quality (Husselbee & Coombs, 2023). The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian offers an insightful analysis of the multi-billion-dollar college football industry. The authors blend praise for athletic accomplishments with critiques of corruption, exploitation, and legal battles, highlighting ethical dilemmas faced by athletes, coaches, and administrators. Drawing on interviews and real-life accounts, they explore the economic forces driving the sport.This review assesses the book's contribution to sports scholarship and its application in Athletic Administration courses. With its journalistic style and real-world examples, the text helps students understand the complexities of intercollegiate sports, serving as a valuable supplement to more idealistic materials. Additionally, the engaging writing style keeps both students and academics invested throughout the semester. Despite some limitations, The System remains an essential resource on the ethics and economics of college football.
Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 2019
Research into racism and college sports largely explores how universities profit off the undercompensated labor of predominately Black men in Division I football and basketball. This research frames college sports as an institution that dehumanizes, marginalizes, and exploits athletes of color (Beamon, 2014; Eitzen, 2016; Hawkins, 2010; Sack & Staurowsky, 1998). Yet to truly understand the bounds of systemic racism in college sports, studies must also interrogate how white people are elevated, centered, and rewarded at the expense of people of color. Drawing upon critical whiteness studies (Cabrera, 2012; DiAngelo, 2011; Leonardo, 2009), I analyzed 47 college athlete narratives and identified 3 interrelated themes—racial segregation, racial innocence, and racial protection—within higher education that protect whiteness. Findings outline how colleges recruit white athletes from predominately white communities who, as a result of their segregated environments, adopted underdeveloped notions of race and racism. Rather than reeducating athletes upon arrival, institutions further racial segregation, innocence, and protection. Ultimately, these processes have allowed white athletes to dodge their role in racism and avoid racial justice responsibilities.
College Rivals: Athletics, Academics, and the Life of the Mind
Journal for the Liberal Arts and Sciences , 2020
In this essay for the Journal for the Liberal Arts and Sciences (Oakland City University), I demonstrate how the culture of American higher education has failed to take advantage of how athletics can be a model for a robust liberal arts education. I argue that the current state of college athletics, transmogrified by consumerism, directly contradict the purpose of "higher" education.
In January 2012, during his "State of the Association" address, National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) President Mark Emmert urged members to fix the "collegiate model." Imbedded in the speech's framework, this relatively new term in the NCAA national office's lexicon has received spontaneous consent from the association, member universities, and other college-sport constituents including administrators, coaches, athletes, reporters and journalists, and college-sport fans. This anchor-"The Collegiate Model of Athletics"-has been adopted without disclosure regarding its genesis, dissemination, and insertion into college-sport's institutional consciousness. This process of achieving spontaneous consent among constituents provides a case study illustrating the NCAA's position as a hegemon, the institutional logics that sustain such hegemony, and the effective use of propaganda to quell critical examination of and dissent to the created collegiate model of athletics. Such examination reveals this process has not only been detrimental to higher education and the general public, but particularly harmful to college athletes.
2019
The purpose of this qualitative, interpretivist phenomenological study was to understand and provide a transferable, informed, and learned perspective of the daily experience of working in the liminal space between two powerful, ostensibly cooperative but often competing interests: major university undergraduate academics and big-time Division I athletics. Nine learning specialists from Division I Power Five institutions participated in phenomenological interviews. Findings indicated that the phenomenon constituted a liminal space between the opposing forces of academics and athletics, with student-athletes, faculty, colleagues, and coaches having influence on the liminality. Unit directors diminished the sense of liminality while faculty contributed very little to it. Advisors and coaches contributed most significantly to the negative liminal experience of the phenomenon, characterized by senses of dissolution, dislocation, reversal and uncertainty consistent and deleterious liminal effect. Participants indicated that the most powerful motivating force in the job was love for the students. Implications of this study for the profession include an understanding of forces affecting learning specialists and student-athletes and recognition of one reason for the high turnover rate among learning specialists. This study will assist in recognizing and understanding liminality, and may afford learning specialists the means to reduce its effects. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………...……… Background of Academics in Collegiate Athletics……………….… Statement of the Problem ……………………………….…………..
Journal of Intercollegiate Sport, 2021
When discussing the Black male student-athlete, dominant perspectives argue that they are being educated while another perspective argues that this population is being exploited. This article moves beyond the question of whether Black male student-athletes are being educated or exploited as we argue that both can happen. Utilizing Critical Race Theory, we highlight dominant perspectives about Black male student-athletes as well as offer an analysis of their experiences. The article provides the presentation of a fictive counterstory that portrays the notion that this population can experience education and exploitation. We conclude by offering a discussion about approaches that institutions and athletic departments can take to better serve Black male student-athletes, including adopting the Excellence Beyond Athletics approach (Cooper, 2016).
Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 2019
Research into racism and college sports largely explores how universities profit off the undercompensated labor of predominately Black men in Division I football and basketball. This research frames college sports as an institution that dehumanizes, marginalizes, and exploits athletes of color ). Yet to truly understand the bounds of systemic racism in college sports, studies must also interrogate how white people are elevated, centered, and rewarded at the expense of people of color. Drawing upon critical whiteness studies , I analyzed 47 college athlete narratives and identified 3 interrelated themes-racial segregation, racial innocence, and racial protection-within higher education that protect whiteness. Findings outline how colleges recruit white athletes from predominately white communities who, as a result of their segregated environments, adopted underdeveloped notions of race and racism. Rather than reeducating athletes upon arrival, institutions further racial segregation, innocence, and protection. Ultimately, these processes have allowed white athletes to dodge their role in racism and avoid racial justice responsibilities.