As American As It Gets

Courtesy: Washington Post

Student activism: it has been a prominent feature of the campus scene since Civil Rights and Viet Nam War days. Colleges typically point with pride to student organizing, connecting it to higher education’s civic function. Not this time, though: students are organizing against higher education.

Football players seek change. They want a voice in athletic policy that affects them; they want stipends that cover the full cost of college; and they want lifetime medical coverage for athletic-related injuries. “No” says the NCAA. Some reforms may be needed, but the NCAA will decide. Change needs to be constrained, too. A calamity will result otherwise.

Courtesy: alunajoy.com

Ring a bell? It should. It’s anything but new. It happens just about every time powerful people are confronted by activists. Elites respond defensively. They want to maintain control, to keep things pretty much as they are. Otherwise, ruin is right around the corner. It’s the routine that Chicken Little made famous.

Instead, put your trust in us. That’s because …

“We’ve Got This Thing Covered”

We know what’s best for you.

We’ll do what’s right by you.

We’ll stand with you.

Who’s got your back?

Well…. We do, of course!

Not always. While institutions do good things for people, the American experience speaks ruefully to another reality: what institutions sometimes do to people. Banks. Charities. Corporations. Government. The list goes on.

It’s why everyday people—those on the receiving end—become active and organize. They stand up to power. It’s a tussle between Big & Small; and a fight between Might v. Right. It’s about the need to constrain the elites’ ability to call all the shots, all the time, on all the issues.

More than anything else, activism puts a spotlight on democracy’s most fundamental questions—What Fair?  What’s Just? What’s Right?—three ingredients in a casserole called the American value system. That recipe is topped with a pinch of emotion and a dash of conviction.

Voilà!  What emerges is a main course of the American experience: freedom from control and oppression. That’s about as American as it gets.

Wait, though. This analysis suggests that Americans will rally around the athletes (the controlled, oppressed) and support unionization (a fair, just, and right response). But that’s clearly not happening. Americans seem to have vastly different and conflicting ways of thinking about player unionization. And while a dominant public preference hasn’t emerged to date, if one does surface the majority public will likely endorse the NCAA’s anti-union stance.

What?! Why?

Courtesy: urbanpolitico.com

On one level, that outcome makes sense. NCAA v. Players may end up to be Goliath pummeling David. The NCAA and the big universities have the power—money, influence, and connections (to media and alumni). The elites are sticking together, mouthing a party line: how the system will be destroyed (not reformed, but destroyed) if unions come to be. Presidents and chancellors say that—one after the other—aligned without exception. They write Op Ed’s and speak out publicly. Many coaches and ADs are doing the same.

The NCAA plays a support role. It creates talking points with alliterative soundbytes (“Pay for Play”), using language that accentuates a concern for student welfare (not rights, welfare). “Unionization is not in the athletes’ best interests” is the repeated line. Never discussed is why. But clearly understood—though never spoken publicly—is another institutional conclusion: unions are not in our best interests.

It’s classic social marketing, what you’d expect from an association bent on protecting the status quo. The NCAA is banking on the strength of deep ties—member institutions banding together over a shared concern. It’s about money—big money: making it, protecting it, and spending it as the institutions want, using a financial model they prefer. Billions are at stake. That’s high motivation to stick together.

The players, on the other hand, hold the short end of the stick. Yes, they have a national organization, but it’s configured loosely, an example of weak ties (more interpersonal network than hard-wired) with fluid, voluntary membership. And the players don’t control anything: they’re controlled. Taking a union stand is risky: it could cost a player a scholarship or playing time. Taking an anti-union stance, on the other hand, could have a positive effect—aligning a player with coaches and the school’s administration.

It makes sticking together highly improbable: it takes only a few “no-go unionites” to splinter a team and weaken the movement, especially if high-profile players speak out in opposition. We’ve seen that happen already at Northwestern: union organizer Kain Colter’s successor at starting QB says he’ll vote “no” on unionization.

It’s hardly a level playing field.

One power source for players is the legal system. News is promising on that front. The regional director of the National Labor Relations Board rendered his initial ruling in the athletes’ favor. And there’s evidence that independent legal analysis supports the players’ point of view.

Courtesy: docstoc.com

Consider the work done by law professors, Robert and Amy McCormick, of Michigan State University. The McCormick’s published an article in the Washington Law Review entitled, “The Myth of the Student-Athlete: The College Athlete as Employee.” Based on interviews with current and former athletes the professors concluded that players meet the standard of “employee” as defined by the National Labor Relations Act. They write: “These interviews demonstrate that their daily burdens and obligations not only meet the legal standard of employee, but far exceed the burdens and obligations of most university employees.” They continue: “We demonstrate that the relationship between these athletes and their universities is not primarily academic, but is, instead, undeniably commercial.”

The players have another potential source of political capital: “the public” (general and sporting). But things get tricky fast in that regard. There’s a phenomenon called a “wicked social problem.” A social issue becomes wicked when it’s not possible to obtain public consensus about the nature and severity of a situation and/or how it might be addressed—even if it should be addressed. Global climate change is a wicked social problem; and so, too, is the potential unionization of college athletes.

Just ask around—talk with friends and family—and you’ll get a glimpse into its wickedness. Opinions will vary, as will emotional valence. And it’s not just a straightforward matter of being “for” or “against.” Many people have mixed opinions—say, supportive of issues facing athletes, but unsure (or opposed) to unionization as a solution. Many people end up conflicted.

The “all over the map” public landscape plays into the hands of the institutional and NCAA elites. Why? They don’t have to worry about a groundswell of support for the players, especially support expressed as sympathy. Instead they can manage ad hoc circumstances, as they did last week. Shabazz Napier—star guard for UConn’s national championship basketball team—told the press a few weeks ago that “he sometimes goes to bed hungry at night.” The NCAA countered by proposing a policy change regarding how much food can be consumed by scholarship athletes. The amount, which had been bounded previously, is likely to become an endless plate. See how this chess game is played?

The NCAA also knows that three widely held public attitudes work in favor of its anti-union stance.

The first attitude, which extends deeply into the non-sporting public, is the public’s general attitude toward unions. Public support for unions has dropped like a rock. Historically, the majority of Americans supported unions until about 2009. Support has fallen precipitously since then and has remained low. That means the players’ instrument of choice—a union—won’t get widespread support across America.

Courtesy: getoffmylawnkid.blogspot.com

The second public attitude playing in the NCAA’s favor is the fans uncritical—often mindless—devotion to Alma Mater. It makes the resolution of this matter very different from, say, what happened during the banking debacle—when impersonal financial institutions were perceived to be soulless institutions taking what they could from homeowners, all for self-interested gain. This time we’re talking about a known and personal institution—MY school. “MY school would never do anything BUT the right thing. If MY president, athletic director, and coaches are against unionization, then it must be the right position.” Just try out an alternative interpretation with alums and other affiliates of your school. Most can’t imagine an unconscionable alternative,

The third attitude is a matter of lifestyle. How do you spend your time on football Saturdays and during the college basketball season? If you’re like millions of Americans you organize your life “around the games”—traveling, attending, watching, and discussing—often with family and friends. It’s not a drop in the bucket way of spending your time, either: it’s a defining characteristic of lifestyle. And you LIKE it that way. The alternative—changing the current system—is a risky unknown. And it’s the worst kind of change—irreversible. Why chance it? So what I’m hearing is this: “Tweak the system if needed, but (please, please) keep it generally ‘as is.’ ” Put another way: “Don’t mess around with MY life!”

I could go on, but you get the picture. We have two positions—pro- and anti-union—with contestants unlikely to compromise. One party—the NCAA—is an institutional membership association with significant power and control. The other party—the players—seek justice. In the end the legal system will decide this.

But “this” is about unionization only. The larger picture is rifled with a bunch of “that’s.” That the NCAA and its big-time institutions do one thing really well—generate a lot of revenue—but they can’t seem to do much else, either well or at all. That health issues in college athletics (e.g., head injuries) go generally unaddressed. That so few African Americans—so dominant on the field—haven’t made their way in like numbers to head coaching jobs and in athletic administration. That schools are in an “arms race”—paying head coaches scandalous salaries, building larger and larger stadiums and arenas  … and charging seat license fees and setting ticket prices that are beyond the reach of many working families … as they build more and more suites for high-paying, elite guests. And there’s scandal after scandal at some of America’s top schools, places like Southern Cal, Ohio State, North Carolina, and Penn State.

Perhaps the saddest thing of all is that higher education—presumably an institution above reproach—is at issue here.

In his new book, Players First, Kentucky’s John Calipari probably has it right. No matter how unionization turns out, we’ve probably seen the end of an era—the end of the NCAA as we’ve known it. It can’t seem to keep up with the times. It lags rather than leads.

If we know anything about leadership it’s this: leadership is about moving onward and settling in a new place. It’s about being creative, innovative, and forward—looking, all the things that universities say they’re about. Leadership isn’t about holding on fiercely to a known and experienced model, arguing that the best way is the current way, satisfied to tweak the system here and there.

No nation blossoms that way. No company thrives that way. No person succeeds that way.

Courtesy: rlv.zcache.com

Everybody knows that. But knowing it and practicing it are very different things—the difference between leading and being left behind.

America is great because people across the generations have shown leadership, particularly at times when it’s needed most. They step up. It happens so often, in fact, that leadership under stress has become a national characteristic. It’s really is about as American as it gets.

But not this time….

ENDNOTE: This column is dedicated to my brother-in-law, Pete Corbelli, Sr.  A union guy he worked hard, kept his nose clean, and played by the rules. Good guys always live that way.

Some of the ideas presented in this column were drawn from my editorial opinion that appeared in the Sunday April 13 edition of THE LANSING STATE JOURNAL, “Ask Yourselves: What’s ‘Just’ for College Athletes?”