COMMENTARY: A Need to Reorder College Priorities
By Joseph J. Honick
A recent story in the Seattle Times sports section almost jumped off
the page when I read it: seems the popular basketball coach for the
University of Washington Huskies has agreed to a 10-year contract
extension that will pay him somewhere around $1.6 million per year,
not counting "bonuses."
Admittedly, I did not know that public servants coaching sports receive "bonuses." But it was the rest of the article that really jostled my mental processes about educational priorities. According to the writer, this guy is not at the very top of the heap. Coaches at Arizona, California and UCLA are making and will continue to earn much more than the UW roundball boss.
I should say here that I am a sports fan, mostly for football at all levels, but there does come a time when some maturity can and should provide a refocusing of how things must work.
For example, what never, or at least hardly ever gets discussed is that big-time college sports teams are little more than farm clubs for professional clubs. In some cases the collegians even have agents.
More than that, far too few hang in long enough to earn degrees from the very schools that afforded them full scholarships, housing and other benefits, with many opting to sign professional contracts with teams that have recruited them away from school and with no concern for the academic side of anything.
This last dose of reality might be just fine in the free market of college athletics that taxpayers kick in for, even when private universities are involved because of tax benefits for such institutions.
From my perspective as a concerned citizen and someone who has had it up to my eyeballs from those screaming about the costs of medical care for the poor, I think there is or should be an early demand for a reordering of priorities and responsibilities.
Some of these coaches are being paid more than their own college presidents and certainly more than most college presidents to produce teams that go to playoffs, create stars and, at least theoretically, make the schools more attractive to even non-athletes who might like the glamour of going to a place where teams grab headlines.
In a piece in these pages a few years ago, I mentioned my participation in a program with the oxymoronic title that went something like this: "Ethics and the Professional Athlete."
Even then, I urged consideration for greater responsibility on the parts of both professional teams that scavenged for new talent and the scholarshipped athletes themselves. I proposed then and still believe today that professional teams scooping up athletes before graduation should compensate the universities for the costs of having trained the players the pro’s took.
Likewise, I proposed that the athletes themselves sign a commitment at the outset of their collegiate, taxpayer-paid careers to repay the schools for the time, space and other expenses while they were there unless they remained through graduation.
Suffice to say those ideas made me a bit of a laughingstock (Is this guy for real?) and somewhat of a pariah for the rest of that program.
So, back to the news stories about the multi-million dollar coaching contracts at the college level. We still have not discussed the costs of the assistant coaches and other expenses attendant to such programs.
If in fact the coaches really do bring in terrific profits to their schools to advance truly academic efforts, an argument might be made for this pattern of pay not accorded to most professors who also attract millions in research grants and other offerings.
One would hope, however, that the beneficiaries of all this athletic investment, the players, coaches, professional teams, promoters and all the rest might soon see the logic and responsibility to help colleges which annually, if not daily, have to scrounge for budgets, teaching talent and all the rest.
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Joseph J. Honick is an international consultant to business and government and writes for many publications, including huntingtonnews.net. Honick can be reached at joehonick@gmail.com.