Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00 Uh huh
Speaker 1 00:01 <inaudible>
Speaker 2 00:05 is the annex, the sociology podcast. I'm Joseph Cohen.
Speaker 1 00:08 I'm Leslie Hinkson and I gave her a Russel.
Speaker 2 00:11 Our guest today is Fred weary from Princeton university. Fred is the author of credit where it's do rethinking financial citizenship with the Russell Sage foundation today. College sports. Our discussion was recorded on September 17th, 2019
Speaker 1 00:29 <inaudible>
Speaker 3 00:35 an important ruling happened today in California and see AA athletes now they were given the rights to sell their name and likeness to license it and it's giving college athletes a new stream of revenue and a, that's a big win because there's a lot of talk about uh, how NCAA athletes, college athletes are being exploited. They are in effect working for multimillion dollar entertainment enterprises and collecting not much more than tuition waivers. You know, housing allowances and meal plans. And a, a lot of people view this as a violation of labor law or at least a form of injustice against these students. And people are counting this as a win more rights for NCAA players that can now collect money. If, for example, a video game wants to have a college basketball, you know, edition and the latest, uh, hottest, whoever the hottest college starts, you can see how well versed I am in collegiate sports, especially not a very big fan of collegiate sports, but we'll hold off on that for a second. Can make money, can profit off of their big stature in this multimillion dollar industry. What are your feelings about, uh, about the business of college sports and, uh, these pushes to make college athletes proper employees as opposed to student athletes?
Speaker 4 02:03 Well, wait, <inaudible> this is an important distinction, right? Because I don't know what order these segments will air in, but in recording, we just talked about college admissions and we ended with talking about how you have to deny the rules of the game for it to work. But this is qualitatively different than actually then the college paying the athletes, which would effectively deny the amateur, the student athlete, amateur pretense of college. Right. Which you know, for things like football and basketball is somewhat of a ridiculous pretense, but you know it is an important pretense that they've built this stuff on this. You know, why the student would still, you know, it was still maintain what you can send them to. They call them monopsonies to cartel on the part of the colleges of you know, we're just going to give you tuition waiver and you know, a dorm room and that's it.
Speaker 4 02:50 Even though you know we're selling the TV rights for $50 million because this wouldn't change that at all. This simply allows third parties to pay the students know for licensing rights. So you know, if electronic arts, which is, you know, only a few miles down the street from UCLA decides to make a, a college basketball game and some star basketball player at UCLA and licenses their face and their name and their Jersey number two electronic arts, then you know, they would get paid rather than just UCLA getting paid. Right. Cause there'd been previous cases like that where it was ruled as in violation of NCAA rules. But it's actually kind of brilliant because it maintained it, it allows the students to get paid, but by third parties, not by the universities themselves. And it, it maintains that pretense.
Speaker 5 03:37 Okay. So I have a question. Right? So let's say that I am an undergraduate who is also one of those, you know, social media influencers, right? And I get into university X, right? And as part of my, I don't know as part of my shtick as part of what I'm doing as part of me also, you know, recommending brands. I'm also using the backdrop of university X, right? As part of my image. Right? And as part of, Oh, this is how I get more people to follow me. And this is how I get actually like more brands to actually advertise on my Instagram or what have you, and to get more revenue. Uh, how is that different?
Speaker 4 04:27 Uh, well for one, there was no NCAA for influencers.
Speaker 5 04:30 I know, well, not yet. Maybe there shouldn't be
Speaker 4 04:34 that can be limited by the university enforcing its trademark rights where universities will, you know, very often have their attorney file against people who are violating the university's trademark. But let's say that I, uh, became a lifestyle influencer pitching different brands of black polo shirts and a, I dunno, a gap paid me to plug black polo shirts. I could for identification purposes, say, you know, I'm a UCLA professor and I wear black polo shirts almost every day, uh, during the summer. And you know, UCLA wouldn't Sue. But if I like, you know, appeared in front of a big UCLA logo on campus and gave the impression that UCLA was endorsing the gap, then, um, the university would Sue me. But, but that's it. But that didn't have anything to do with the logic of maintaining some kind of idea of amateurism. And it's just a different logic. There's this weird tradition of sports amateurism that the NCAA enforces, uh, that we don't apply to anything else. Right. Like any one of us could get consulting income and our universities won't care as long as they don't see it as those effectively taking up too much time away from our job. And most universities, you're allowed to basically, you know, do side jobs as long as it doesn't add up to more than a few weeks worth of part time work.
Speaker 5 05:51 So do you think the NCAA is actually going to kick California schools out of the NCAA because of this bill passing?
Speaker 4 06:01 I don't know enough about sports too.
Speaker 3 06:04 Come on. It's <inaudible>. It's like 40 million consumers. No chance, no way. Two of the nation's biggest markets or in that state, probably like five of the top 50 markets are in that state. No chance.
Speaker 4 06:18 No, but, but you can turn around the other way, right? Where, let's say that you're the university of Alabama and you, and you want to make sure that when electronic arts comes, and you kind of implicitly know that electronic arts, if they expect to make a, you know, $500 million off of a NCAA football 2019 that, you know, they, they've allocated $50 million of that to licensing, you know, money, they kind of have like a $50 million pot. You want to make sure that your share of that, you know, licensing money goes to the school and not to the students. Right. I mean, that's what I'm saying, the very cynical level, the NCAA is just a monopsony is to cartel and cartels have to punish defectors. And so if, if you know, uh, so Leslie, actually you're the one who read the article. Does this apply to all schools that are in California or only public schools? So it doesn't apply to USC?
Speaker 5 07:09 I'm quite certain it's every school in California.
Speaker 4 07:12 Okay. So if USC, you know, which has, you know, even I in my ignorance of sports, know that it has, you know, one of the best college football programs in the country. Uh, if USC, you know, in effect gets less licensing money because half the licensing money is going not to the university itself, but it's going to the student athletes whose likenesses appear in the game that's gonna scare the university of Alabama because they're afraid that the same thing could happen there. And so they're going to effectively ask the NCAA to punish schools in California in order to kind of maintain the cartel. That's enlightened though. I mean, who knows.
Speaker 5 07:49 Yeah. So I have another question. Having to do this. So let's say, you know, whatever this goes off without a hitch in California and CWA says whatever, whatever, how might this affect university revenues? Right? I mean, so, you know, big college sports, div one sports do actually generate a lot of revenues and you know, a lot of that money goes to coaches, right? A lot of that money goes to just sponsoring that sports program in particular. But I'm assuming some of that money, does any of that money go towards anything else? And if so, what does that like, what does that say about, you know, about funding for colleges and universities when now you know you have these young athletes who now can say, I can take a little bit of command right over some of this revenue stream for myself. Is that one of the reasons why people are so against this?
Speaker 3 08:47 So I feel like the two are unrelated. I realize that, well, okay, let's, let's say it like this. I hate to be this person, but in Canada when I went to school there were no athletic scholarships. Collegiate sports were not a big thing and the university stayed focused on being a research and teaching institution. And as a foreigner here, I find that American universities act like conglomerates and they have entertainment services in their portfolio. They have merchandising operations and all of that. And if I look and I feel like those, those trends have only intensified in the 20 or so years that I've been here. And what's happened in that period. Tuitions have gone up and for some reason like universities are phasing out professors. So I feel like a lot of this causes a form of mission drift where you have these students that to my mind, and this is not CUNY because CUNY acts like a Canadian university where it just provides sort of basic services and research in some buildings downtown. But a lot of these American universities, I questioned whether all of these non-core or what I perceived to be non core activities, benefit core activities at all. Like I, I just, it's hard for me to imagine that Rutgers football is somehow contributing to like either cheap education in the state of New Jersey or a more research because you know, the percentage of adjuncts is going up there and tuition's going up. So like what the, what are these side enterprises, what's their purpose?
Speaker 5 10:27 Have you never read the adolescent society by James Coleman? Right, right. Okay. You're the only educational, you know, so one of Coleman's like I would say primary questions after doing this research and looking at all of these different high schools. Right. Is he says, you know what, I figured out, I figured out that like no one likes this smart kid, right? Because kids who do well in school just because they're smart, that's just for their own glory, right? Everyone loves the star athlete, right? Because the star athlete, number one brings the school glory and also provide this sort of, this opportunity for everyone within the school to come together and have this shared sense of victory, right? And so there is this idea that, you know what if, and that's in high school, so you're bringing that, you're bringing that same kind of idea with you along the college.
Speaker 5 11:29 Who cares about the kid who builds the robot, right? That wins whatever prides, right? Who cares about the kid who decides to drop out and start this weird social media thing that none of us even know what social media is? No one cares about them, but everyone cares about the starting quarterback. Everyone about, you know, like pick a position of any sport because we can all come together and cheer that person on and actually feel that victory and feel as though we were part of that victory. And I think that that is part of the American college and university model, right, is building the sense of community.
Speaker 3 12:14 Yeah. That's for sure. That'll agree with. Yeah. But like what's the core mission? Like what I like, to my mind, to my naive person who's trapped in 1990s Canada, like universities have two central jobs, right? Developing knowledge through research or whatever artistic output where the humanities are concerned and training, like pass it, creating that knowledge, creating those products and passing along, you know, how to knowledge and things that are not part of that are non-core about taking over the world. Joe taking over the world. Right. And so, you know, if you bring enough people right from, you know, who you believe we're going to be the leaders of tomorrow and then you also provide this experience for them whereby they actually formed the sense of identification with the institution. Right. You are on your way to taking over the world, or at least part of it, but there's like para military groups who also want to take over the world. Like what, what's the core mission like? I don't know.
Speaker 6 13:24 Yeah, so the, the only thing I worry about is that um, we used to do this with the firm, so we used to say affirm had a core mission that had a sort of a bottom line of profitability and everything else was flaw. And then sociologists went into these various organizations and they said actually people are doing lots of other things in addition to making money. And that all that sort of helps them make the money or at least that's what they think it does. And most people don't test whether it helps or not. So I don't want to get to get into the mode of there are things that are core that universities do and anything that's not, that has to be sort of chopped off. The other thing that I think is useful to work through is the extent to which our sense of the way someone needs to be trained is actually going to help them in their careers.
Speaker 6 14:10 So unless you are in a research career or you're doing something highly technical, a lot of people get jobs that they learn as they go. And aside from a few sort of core skills that they can pick up and they should have picked up in high school, it's not clear that a lot of people are picking up a set of other skills that we're teaching them, that's allowing them to then sort of ascend and be the head manager or a supervisor or the new CEO. A lot of these people are sort of generalists than they and they do fine. And that's why I think we're kind of, sometimes we get into the mode of thinking about training someone who's gonna sort of be able to do the kind of jobs that we do. And that's not most of the world. So I'm a little worried about sort of worrying about the function of the university as a, as it relates, especially as we're thinking about these student athletes and because in part I think what's happening is that the student athletes were already sort of a threat to the academic community because they weren't real versus in a lot of places, they all look at student athletes and they'll say they are not really students.
Speaker 6 15:14 If it weren't for the money they're making and the sports, they would not be here. And so, and because of some of these students are coming from disadvantaged backgrounds, they show up doubly disadvantaged. On the one hand, they come from a disadvantaged background and they show up in a place that says it's set for what your body will allow you to do on the field. You don't belong. And so I don't want us to get into that, into that rut of sort of ratifying the sense of those who don't belong, both who are only there because their bodies permit them to be. And also thinking about sort of the people who don't belong as being somehow greedy or brutish. And therefore they were reaching out to grab money because they just try to get where they can and they're, they're not really attached to the core mission of the university.
Speaker 6 16:01 And so, so, so I think that some of the objections that are coming from a lot of different places, and for some people it's about sort of who belongs at the university and what are the types of people who will break the sense of student to student equality. Because we kind of think about university campuses as being highly sort of democratizing institutions. And so everyone's the same and you're just working your, you know, you're doing the best you can and your grades, but you know, you're, you're engaged, LD, public base, et cetera. And everyone's kind of the same. And this, what's happening with the student athletes, it's because of their prominence and because of their importance for a person's sense of attachment to the school, whether or not someone even wants to donate to the school often as tied to their wonderful memories of going to the ball games together. Right. And so, so here are people who are sort of breaking this fiction of equality and I, so I think that's, and so the ones who break the picture, we call it, they're people who often come from a very unequal and a debilitating background. So, so I just wanted to just put that out there.
Speaker 4 17:03 So I want to, I want to go back to Joe's point a asking like, you know, what, what is the effect on the bottom line? My understanding of certain strictly financial terms, a, you know, successful sports program like, you know, in one of the big sports, so basically men's basketball or men's football, if you have a, you know, uh, well-regarded program makes a profit in of itself, but that it almost all schools, the athletics program as a whole loses money. So, you know, the, so the men's football team might make money, but basically all of that money gets spent on the women's soccer team and the men's rowing team. The highlights. Yeah, the highlight team and basically a bunch of other sports that exist, but there's no audience for. And so there's no TV rights and so they don't make any money. And basically you're the coach and you're paying for the field and you know, all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 3 17:52 Do they lose money or they do they end up being net costs on the bottom line.
Speaker 4 17:55 Yeah. So even at a big sports school, like say USC, the football program makes a profit, but the athletics program as a whole loses money because you know, all those other programs are almost as expensive as football, but they have basically zero revenues right now that is making a big assumption, which is that you're assuming that other revenue sources aren't driven by, um, athletics. So, you know, if it's the case that let's say, uh, let's say for the sake of argument, I don't know if there's data on this, but let's say for the sake of argument that when USC has a good football season, alumni donations go way up. Hmm. That could end up making so much money that it could mean the sports would be profitable for school like USC overall. But you know, we do have to take seriously, uh, Leslie point that, you know, these things have, uh, an almost Durkheimian function.
Speaker 4 18:42 Although I'd add that, you know, all four of us went to grad school at Princeton and Fred's back there. Now I, and you know, Princeton is not a big sports school and hasn't been a big sports school since like the 1920s when Hobey Baker was, you know, playing football there. But nonetheless, it's not like kids at Princeton are like, ah, you know, I got here just cause I didn't go and you know, I could, I could just as well be at Harvard. It would make a difference. Like they have intense identification with the school. And so, you know, and you know, Joe, maybe you can tell us what it's like in Canada, but you know, there, there are plenty of schools where people are like, well, you know, this where I go, it's closest to my house. It's pretty good. You know,
Speaker 3 19:19 that's, the Canadian system operates like the CUNY system. Okay. So I don't think that the identification with schools is as strong in Canada as it is in the United States. Like universities are less of a total institution. I find Americans really identify a build their identity, you know, with reference to the schools that they go to. And, and Canadian schools are more about, you know, learning and research and they are not these comprehensive lifestyle, total experience institutions. You know, where you're supposed to just, uh, where would the cater to all facets of your development between the ages of 18 and 21
Speaker 4 20:01 as so often? I wish I knew all the words, so Canada, so I could sing it, right?
Speaker 5 20:05 Yeah. Mean I think the last thing that I would say is if, I don't think it actually matters whether or not your team is a winning team or whether or not you're the best in the division, what matters is that you create this opportunity for collective whatever. I collected identity creation and you know, I mean, I went to a div three place, right? And you know, and football games, basketball games, lacrosse games, right? Those, I mean people came out in droves. Right. And you know, and there was a really strong sense of identification among students with the institution. Think in part because of like the huge, the huge focus at the institution and then the undergraduates themselves then placed on the importance of, you know, of athletics and bring us all together on a Saturday evening or a Saturday afternoon.
Speaker 1 21:06 Yeah.
Speaker 2 21:10 You've been listening to the annex, a sociology podcast special thank you to Fred wiry of Princeton university. His book is credit where its due rethinking financial citizenship, coauthored with Kristin seatbelt and Anthony Alvarez with Russell Sage or on the web, the annex podcast.com on Twitter at social Chantix and on Facebook, the annex sociology podcast. Our producer is Seth Marino. The socio cast team includes Jaylene cologne and and Mohammed theme music by lane up ORSA. On behalf of Leslie Hinkson and Gabriel Rossman, I'm Joe Cohen. Thanks for listening.
