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>> It is my very great pleasure
to introduce one of the most
imminent historians in the
United States.
Well known as both a historian
and as an author, especially for
his landmark trilogy on the
Civil Rights era during the time
of Martin Luther King.
Many of you may already know
that the first book in the
trilogy, Parting the Waters,
1954-1963, won the Pulitzer
Prize among many of the prizes
that his work has received.
He's here, I think, because of
the cover story that he wrote in
2011 that appeared in The
Atlantic magazine entitled "The
Shame of College Sports," which
did touch off a national debate.
He has expanded it into a
digital eBook with a provocative
title: The Cartel.
And it's my very great pleasure
to introduce Taylor Branch who
will speak to us today about the
shame of college sports.
[APPLAUSE]
>> Thank you.
I'm happy to be here.
I was rooting for Wisconsin in
the Final Four for a lot of
reasons.
[LAUGHTER]
Not just because I was
coming here.
I want to say that I am a
tourist in the world of sports.
I did almost play college
football at Georgia Tech.
That was one of the first
thoughtful things I ever did,
not to sign that grant and aid.
I've always loved college sports
but not very often, and I did
this thing for The Atlantic more
or less to avoid taking on
another tone, which is what I
normally do, and I really
stepped into a hornet's nest.
I want to try to cover a lot of
ground in a short amount of
time.
I know we don't have much time
here.
Sports is a big topic.
I basically was assigned, why is
college sports controversial and
why is the United States the
only country in the world that
plays big money sports at
institutions of higher learning?
That is true.
Nowhere else in the world does
this happen.
What got me into it, when I was
at North Carolina, Bill Friday
was the president.
He was chairman of the reform
commission for 20 years, the
co-founder, president of the
University of North Carolina.
Just died a couple of years ago.
He basically wanted to take all
the money out of college sports
and give the university back to
Socrates.
It didn't work.
I went into it not knowing an
awful lot except I had a little
bit--
My overview was, look, the
whole point of sports is that
it's a vacation from thinking.
Sports are to cheer and to boo.
It's an artificial creation away
from real life that delivers
little bits of immortality.
The thrill of victory, the agony
of defeat, so on and so forth,
by artificial rules.
So we don't think about them.
We don't really like them, and
here they are at the university
whose purpose, enshrined for
thousands of years in western
culture, is to think and analyze
and balance things in the
theoretical world against the
empirical world.
And here is sports right next to
us.
We don't think very much about
sports.
We're largely imprisoned in the
mist that allow us to cheer and
boo, to make decisions.
Our attitudes toward most
college athletes are not
attitudes of respect toward
fellow citizens.
They are governed in my
experience, especially the
people who have yelled and
screamed about this issue in the
last couple of years, is that
most people envy, scorn,
worship, don't take seriously
college athletes whether they
are professors in the classroom
or they're fellow students on
campus.
I had the editor of a Big Ten
college newspaper tell me that
they don't write very much about
the athletes outside the sports
performance because most
students don't consider athletes
fellow students.
They'll gawk at them, they'll
line up for their autograph, and
they'll scorn them as jocks, but
they don't think of them as
fellow students.
There is a little, this is the
reason why almost 40 year ago
when I was starting writing
books, I ghost-wrote a book with
Bill Russell of the Boston
Celtics, and I was highly
surprised to show up at his
house and he wanted to talk
about sports as philosophy.
He said all sport is some
mixture of art and war.
An artificial creation bound in
the rules to create an
attractive blend of art and war.
As vicious a sport as boxing,
there's still something
beautiful about Muhammad Ali,
"float like a butterfly, sting
like a bee."
He brought women into
heavyweight boxing briefly.
And as artistic as the little
female gymnasts are, they will
cut your heart out to win.
There's some mix of art and war
in all of these things, and the
blend is hard to understand.
But it plays a vital role
because it is a brief vacation
from mortality.
What I'm trying, functioning,
basically, on how well the
artificial rules work that
create this captivating
artificial world.
That's what the previous
panelists, it seems to me, how
fair are the artificial rules
that create the world that we
love to watch.
Now I want to give you a little
bit of history about US sports.
They grew up in the United
States after the Civil War.
They're basically a century and
a half old.
Most of them came from England.
America adapted British sports.
Rugby, various other sports.
British rounders became
baseball.
We invented basketball in whole
claw, but all roughly in the
same period.
Not coincidentally, this is the
same period when the Olympics
were revived after 2,000 years
of having lapsed.
The British were then colonizing
the world, and they invented the
word amateur to define the
sports that they played as a way
of keeping the sports among the
upper classes.
They had a very amateur, like a
lot of things involved with
college sports, has a
deliciously ambiguous meaning.
It is noble when money, filthy
lucre, is not part of the
equation, but also somebody
who's a ranked amateur is a term
of derision, whose rights are
not to be taken seriously.
Sports grew up and became a
worldwide sensation in England
and it came over to the United
States.
In 1869, the Harvard four-man
rowing crew challenged Oxford to
a race down the Thames River
that attracted 750,000
spectators, including John
Stuart Mill and Charles Dickens,
to watch this race.
Sports were a big deal as the
world became smaller, began to
become smaller, in the world of
empires.
We didn't have an empire.
In fact, we didn't profess to
want one.
We didn't colonize anything
during that late 19th century.
But we specialized in manly
sports.
Football was the quintessential
American creation.
John L Sullivan, the heavyweight
champion in the 1880s, said that
boxing, his sport, was child's
play compared to college
football.
They had no helmets.
They had virtually no rules.
You could fight.
Basically it was a scrum to move
the ball down.
Walter Camp invented rules to
put lines on there, to have a
scrimmage line, to have plays.
The forward pass was illegal
well into the 20th century
because it was considered
unmanly, if not immoral, to be
able to throw the ball rather
than to have to go through blood
and guts to advance the ball
down the field.
[LAUGHTER]
That's what happened.
The NCAA could not mandate
helmets until 1939 because they
were considered unmanly.
Princeton became famous for
their chrysanthemum hairdos
where they would grow their hair
out and shape them into
chrysanthemum to soften the
blows rather than having to wear
a helmet.
Sports are a wonderful
artificial world, but the early
American sports, when we were
developing them, were all run by
students.
Universities had absolutely
nothing to do with them.
Walter Camp, the father of
football, said in 1900 that the
whole point of these sports was
that students challenged other
students to games.
They made up the rules, they
enforced the rules.
Yes, they were amateurs because
it was in the Ivy League.
They were all gentlemen, and
like British gentlemen, they
didn't want working class people
and so they called it amateur.
But they all had ringers and so
on and so forth, but they
challenged these games.
Harvard Stadium was built in
1903 without a nickel from
Harvard.
Nothing.
It's the students and the alumni
created it.
But the first half of the 20th
century, the institutions moved
in and controlled it, and it
became the era of the coach.
Knute Rockne became famous.
Control over the players, some
institutional control.
But the NCAA was basically a
small organization that
collected $100 annually from
schools to train referees and
hand out trophies.
All this changed dramatically in
1951 with the advent of
television and the advent of
Walter Byers, who was the first
NCAA director who actually had a
functional office.
They had a few file cabinets.
Until he said television is a
mortal threat to college sports
because if people can stay home
and watch for free, they won't
buy your tickets, and therefore
college broadcasts have to be
regulated like nuclear weapons,
and let the NCAA sign the
contracts and control them.
And he forced all schools to do
that, and they did it in 1951.
And he signed the first
contract, 1951, for $1.6 million
and had a monopoly.
It became the game of the week.
One football game per week.
Now hundreds are broadcast.
But that was the monopoly that
began the money era in college
sports.
It's relatively recent.
Sixty years divided in half.
The first 30 years was a golden
age of a total NCAA monopoly
where they licensed all the
football broadcasts, took a
healthy cut, and they licensed
March Madness and took a healthy
cut.
But the problem is that out of
that history, and I want to tell
you this is a little bit of a
sideline, most of the disputes
about--
I'm going to be talking about
rights and thinking about
players, but most of the
disputes about NCAA internally
are really fights over the money
within the NCAA.
And that's something that you
don't ever hear anything about.
The big football schools grumble
that the NCAA had a monopoly and
was not allowing them to
televise more of their games.
They went all the way to the
Supreme Court in 1984, sued the
NCAA, said it was a cartel that
was restricting their ability to
make money, this is Georgia and
Oklahoma as the lead
universities for the big
football schools, and we don't
want the NCAA, which pretends
that we play the same sport as
Fordham, we don't want Fordham
making rules for how the
University of Texas and
Oklahoma, and we don't want
share money with Fordham.
And the Supreme Court said
absolutely right.
This is a cartel.
You cannot restrict colleges.
It's illegal.
It's against competitive free
enterprise.
They vacated NCAA's contracts
for football.
Ever since then, the NCAA
doesn't get a nickel out of
collegiate football broadcasts.
They all go to the schools.
It created, and that divide has
been covered by the fact that
the value of March Madness has
grown a hundredfold to almost a
billion dollars a year just for
running a one-month tournament
out of which the NCAA gets all
its revenue.
But it has blatant conflict of
interest in enforcing rules
between football, where it gets
nothing, and basketball, where
it gets all of its money.
Don't think this won't be a
factor.
When you read the story, it's
that the five conferences are
negotiated with the NCAA to
raise money for players because
they can afford to pay it but
all the other thousand schools
can't.
What's going on here is that
those same five conferences are
about to have a football
tournament championship that's
going to earn another billion
dollars.
The NCAA won't get a nickel of
it, and if they go to the
networks and say we can run a
basketball tournament too
because it's our schools, the
NCAA won't have any money.
This organization didn't come
down from Olympus.
It's the creature of these same
schools that are creating the
football fight.
Now, that is about really
internal politics.
The issue that I tried to raise
is a little bit different from
that, and it's about the ethics
that you're discussing here.
How did college sports in big
money schools, which are a tiny
minority of the NCAA, 1200
members, about 120 of them play
big time sports, how did they
develop this incredible
$16 billion money machine, and
what do they depend on for
capturing the bulk of that
revenue?
Well, there's a natural
assumption on colleges and
campuses that the universities
are creating value for the
people who are on the campus.
The students are absorbing that
value.
It became ever so easy and
seductive with inertia and
natural assumptions that are
related to medical assumptions
that the doctor is the healer in
charge of the patient that when
waves of money started coming in
the other direction, it was very
easy for universities to say
this is the result of what we're
doing.
We're creating it.
The students who are playing and
creating all of that money are
in the same relationship that
the students in the classroom
are who are hearing our lectures
getting value from us.
When in fact what is happening
is two totally distinct things.
In the classroom, the students
are learning from the
accumulated knowledge and wisdom
of the professors.
Out on the fields, in big money
sports, the university is
benefiting from value created by
the athletes in huge numbers.
But people don't want to see
that.
They want to see the athletes as
in the same role.
The NCAA invented the word
student athlete to merge the
functions of student and athlete
into a hybrid creature that only
the NCAA understands, that is
creating all of this value and
making the billion dollar sports
industry a part of the
educational process by FIAT
rather than something distinct.
Mark Emmert said, just this
week, you can't chop the college
student in half.
He's got to be a student or an
athlete.
We say he's a student.
He's predominately a student.
That was in answer to the union
ruling at Northwestern that
athletes are predominately
employees.
Another wake up call to get
people finally to think a little
bit about how do you distinguish
between these roles, or should
you.
If the union case at
Northwestern goes forward, it
will be a very bizarre result in
all of labor history that a
talent pool will win collective
bargaining rights when they have
absolutely no individual
bargaining rights.
It's like going all the way from
all homosexual behavior being
criminalized and an unspeakable
taboo to gay marriage without
going through the intervening
decades.
Students today in the NCAA have
almost no individual rights.
The way to look at that is this:
if you are a student who's
playing a sport and you get a
Christmas card from a sports
agent or the representative of a
professional team, the NCAA will
brand you unethical.
They call that unethical.
Self-interest is unethical to
the point that bylaws say that
commercial activity on the part
of college athletes exploits the
athlete.
They are exploited because they
are being denied the benefits of
the amateur system, which,
because of the amount of money
involved in it, amateurism is
somewhat unseemly.
Also because a lot of people are
aware that amateurism vanished
from the Olympics without the
world falling apart.
So they've changed the term in
the last four years.
You don't hear it anymore,
amateurism.
It's now the collegiate model.
It will collapse if students are
exploited by getting money.
Now, this is an Alice in
Wonderland use of language
because in ordinary activity, if
you are denied some fair share
of the value that you create,
you are exploited.
In this world, you are exploited
if you get even a whiff of the
value that you create.
The NCAA, of course the athletes
have no membership in the NCAA.
They have no informed consent.
They have no rights.
They have no vote.
The NCAA does not owe them any
due process consideration.
It went all the way to the
Supreme Court to be exempted
from due process rights.
Athletes have no Fifth Amendment
rights in NCAA investigations.
In this, the NCAA will say we're
beleaguered because we have no
force of law.
We can't subpoena players.
Why can't they subpoena players?
Because you couldn't in a
million years find any state
legislature that would write
laws to do what the colleges do
by collusive agreement to deny
players the right to bargain for
any value a nickel above their
scholarship.
So because there are no criminal
laws, no subpoena, what they do
is they say when we have an
investigation, if you do not
cooperate to our satisfaction,
it shall be deemed unethical
conduct.
So they enforce this by denying
Fifth Amendment rights on top of
due process, on top of no
representation, on top of
everything.
So players are serfs.
Penn State was an example of
that.
Players can have their
scholarships yanked with no
recourse for any reason.
They can be getting a 4.0 in
school, but if they don't play
to the satisfaction of the
coach, if they don't show up at
5:30 in the morning for the
voluntary workouts, they can
have their scholarship yanked.
They have no recourse.
They don't speak out.
Athletes are very tentative
about speaking out on their
campus.
It is the very opposite of what
you hope to incur and to support
in the university, a free
exchange of ideas about this.
College athletes are fearful.
If they knew what was going on
with that coach at Penn State,
they had to think very many
times about exposing it or doing
anything about it because their
scholarship would be yanked and
they'd have no recourse.
The whole NCAA system
concentrates power in the
coaches, in the administrators,
by denying rights to the
athletes.
Many things are challenging it.
My old friend Bill Russell is a
plaintiff in the Ed O'Bannon
case, challenging it because the
NCAA still sells Bill Russell
film from when he played for the
University of San Francisco in
the '50s, and he doesn't get a
nickel.
He just turned 80.
He doesn't get a nickel
from that.
Ed O'Bannon, Oscar Robertson's
a plaintiff.
Lots of people.
I saw Russell last night, and he
was talking about this case.
Jeffrey Kessler just filed suit
last month challenging the basis
of the NCAA's constraints as a
prima facie cartel.
In fact, economics textbook used
the NCAA as an example of what a
cartel is.
Being in economics textbooks.
OPEC is a cartel that sets an
artificially high price on what
you're selling.
The NCAA is a cartel that sets
an artificially low value price
on what you're buying.
Otherwise, every athlete that
gets recruited would be free to
say what are you going to give
me in the way of health
insurance and a whole bunch of
other benefits before you come.
That free market is foreclosed
by NCAA rules that say that that
is not only illegal, that any
athlete that takes part in that
will be banned, their name will
be blackened, and we will call
them unethical.
And we have the nerve to say
that we're doing all of that
because we are so devoted to
them, that we want to preserve
for them the blessings of
amateurism.
This is the part of it that
bothers me the most.
There's a lot of idealism that
is inherent part of the cheering
and the booing.
I love education.
Colleges are mostly about
education.
That's what they should be.
Therefore, I don't want to even
think about athletes having
rights or so on and so forth
They have something priceless.
They can get an education.
It is very unseemly for people
of high education to say I'm
devoted to somebody's interests
and I really want them to get an
education, but I'm going to take
away all of their rights that
they have to defend their own
education and I'm not even going
to discuss the rationale for
which I do that.
That is inertia from a system
where people in college, people
in universities, are so
accustomed to being the
benevolent dispenser of value
that we can't recognize that
this is a different world, that
we have created a world.
If we don't want to use our
players, if we don't want to pay
them and give them their rights,
then don't use them in big
business.
But we want to have it both
ways.
I think that it is more
unethical than the medical model
of the doctor having control
over the patient because that is
normal.
But the patient at least has
rights, has recourse.
Doctors liability insurance
premiums, if nothing else, will
tell you that the patients have
recourse that college athletes
don't.
The easy answer to all of this
is that at big time schools and
universities, students are
students in the classroom and
they're athletes on the field.
They are two separate functions.
You cannot begin to address the
contradictions and manage them
until you recognize that they're
different.
That in one case the university
is dispensing value and the
other it is receiving value.
One is a commercial sport
entertainment model; the other
is a university model that
requires clear thinking.
The first evidence of clear
thinking is to be able to
distinguish those things.
It doesn't happen on most
university campuses because
people are afraid that the whole
system will come crashing down.
It may be that a university like
Wisconsin, if the revenue
athletes had rights, the
university would not want to
play those sports.
That's fine, but at least you'd
be addressing a conflict between
two inherently different
functions.
It's not so hard.
Most of us play many different
roles.
We're doctors.
We're board members.
We're parents.
We play all of these roles, and
we're able to distinguish them
and the standards that they
have.
But for college athletes alone,
we say their role is essentially
defined by what they're doing in
school.
Right now I think most
universities offload their
academic responsibility for
college athletes to the NCAA.
The NCAA is not an academic
organization.
It maximizes money.
They're not pretending to say,
oh, well, we'll create more time
for studying.
That's your job at the
university.
If you admit a student who can't
do work, if you allow students
to take too easy courses, if you
go easy on them so that they can
play on the field and represent
your school, that's your fault.
The faculties should have the
integrity to address the
academic performance of the
students in the classroom and
then, as members of the
university governing body
dealing with the athletic
department, deal with whether or
not those conflicts are
surmountable and that you want
to have basically those two
enterprises on your same campus.
If you do that, then you'll have
an honest system.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
>> All right.
Our next speaker is Professor
Walter Dickey, who has been a
member of the University of
Wisconsin Law School faculty
since 1976 where he was awarded
the George Young Chair.
He's had a distinguished career
in the criminal justice system.
He has also chaired the
University of Wisconsin
Athletic Board.
He has served as a
representative, a University of
Wisconsin-Madison faculty
representative to the Big Ten
and to the NCAA.
And he is currently, if I'm
correct, chief of staff for
UW Athletics.
And he's going to speak to us
today about do athletics belong
at a university of the
first rank.
[APPLAUSE]
>> Thank you.
And thanks for the opportunity
to be here.
I chose that title, Do Athletics
Belong at a University of the
First Rank, for a couple of
reasons.
One, because I want to answer
the question in part yes, and
use the opportunity to say why,
to sketch what I would say is an
athletic model, one that we've
got here at Wisconsin and that
many other schools have got.
But also to add the qualifier,
if it's done in the right way
because I think the qualifier
allows us to explore the need
for reform and perhaps shed a
little bit of light on what the
pathways to reform might be.
Why would athletics belong at a
university of the first rank?
I think primarily because of the
primacy of education.
If universities are not about
education, they may be about
other things, research and
service, but they certainly have
to be about education.
And if athletics does not have a
key role to play in the
education of both the students
athletes as well as other
students, I'm not sure we should
have it here or at any other
university like ours.
In law school, I used to talk to
my students about what I was
trying to teach them.
And what I would say was that I
wanted them to leave my class in
a condition I called poised
to learn.
And by that I meant I wanted
them to be positioned to learn
for the rest of their lives,
that that's really the value I
could help create for them.
Although, obviously, an awful
lot of the responsibility lay
with them.
And I talked to them and thought
about, well, what is that
condition?
What's poised to learn?
What qualities does it have?
And I obviously asked myself,
what can I do in my teaching
endeavors, not just in the
classroom but also in clinical
settings, to put students into
that condition?
Well, what is the condition?
How are you going to learn for
the rest of your life?
One way I've sometimes thought
about it is how are you going to
make decisions when there's
nobody around to tell you what
to do.
That's really what is part of
the condition we want our
student athletes and our
students to be in.
What are the qualities they
would have?
Well, one is obviously the
ability to know stuff.
Knowing stuff is a good starting
point.
Although, the world is going to
change, and I don't think
knowing the current world is
certainly ever going to be
enough.
Certainly not in law; I doubt in
medicine or in many other
fields.
Secondly, they have to have the
ability to communicate.
They have to be able to convey
their ideas as well as listen.
They need analytical ability.
They need a sense of confidence
because with confidence they're
willing to undertake endeavors
that they might not otherwise
undertake.
They've got to have some
imagination.
They've got to have some
empathy.
If they're going to have
judgment, it seems to me they're
going to have this host of
qualities that are going to
allow them to solve problems in
the future in their lives
whether they're in professional
or personal.
And I guess the question is, do
athletics afford students the
opportunities to be poised to
learn?
Do they help develop those
qualities?
And I would tell you
emphatically, done the right
way, I think they do.
So our student athletes not only
have an opportunity to start to
develop these qualities in the
classrooms where they are but
also on the athletic fields
where they obviously spend a
fair amount of their time.
I think there's some other
reasons why we should have
athletics at universities of the
first rank done the right way.
One is one that we're really, I
think, sort of reluctant to talk
about.
And that is I view athletics as
a sort of fundamental expression
of the human spirit.
I think athletics have got a lot
in common with ballet, with
dance, with theater, with drama,
with art because in them we, the
participants, strive to have an
experience, we might call it
transcendent, that is something
we all strive for throughout
life.
We look for it in lots of
different places, in prayer and
poetry and art, but we also
experience it on the playing
fields.
And to have people to have the
opportunity to have that
experience, if you've ever had
it, is a very special thing and
something that we should want
young people to have.
As I said, that's not something
we really like to talk about.
I sometimes think that the
popularity of athletics really
obscures its possibilities.
There's a certain elitism to the
anti-athletic sort of tenor of
things.
And I don't think that we would
say the same things about ballet
and theater that we tend to say
about athletics.
Although, I would venture to say
they have a lot more in common
than we're necessarily willing
to acknowledge.
I think there are some other
reasons to have athletics on a
campus such as ours.
Though, I would also say the
same things about athletics and
its regulation as I used to say
about the criminal justice
system.
If you're going to draw up a
criminal justice system today,
you wouldn't draw up the one
that we've got, but it is the
one we've got, and if we're
going to make it a better one,
then we've got to deal with what
we've got with its
possibilities, its
limitations, etc.
I would say the same thing
about athletics.
I don't think if we're going to
draw up the athletic world we
would necessarily draw it up the
way it is.
But for all kinds of reasons,
forces that nobody really
controls, it has developed in
the way that it has, and our
responsibility is to make the
most of that, or if we can't
have sufficient value in it,
then frankly we shouldn't have
it on a campus such as ours.
But among the other things that
I think athletics does is
provide people with opportunity
to attend to school and to
participate in athletics and
enjoy the experiences that I
just very briefly described.
Just to take Wisconsin as an
example, you're all probably
fairly aware of the fact that
football and basketball and to a
certain extent men's ice hockey
support the entire athletic
program at the University of
Wisconsin.
Actually, though, seven out of
eight student athletes are not
football players or men's
basketball players.
Most of them are actually
participating in other sports,
so-called non-revenue sports.
A lot of those kids are getting
scholarships.
A lot of them are getting the
opportunity, as I said, to
participate in athletics.
They're getting a chance to go
to school and to come out of
school if not debt free,
certainly closer to it than many
other students are, and there's
an enormous benefit both to the
experience and to the fact that
they're positioned to go on in
life in ways that they otherwise
might not be.
I happen to believe we've got a
moral obligation to provide
opportunities to women who, if
we were simply doing this on a
business basis, would not be
afforded the opportunities
they're being afforded on this
campus.
We spent about $20 million a
year on women's sports here.
The revenue generated by those
sports is relatively small.
And I personally would say that
affording students those
opportunities, whatever their
gender, whatever their race, is
a major plus.
Something that universities
should be about because
education is at least in part
about opportunity.
And if we can create opportunity
for our young people that they
otherwise might not have, I
personally think universities
should be in that endeavor.
I want to say a word or two more
about this financial model
because I'm not sure it's very
well understood.
And I want to say a word or two
also about the legal landscape
in which athletics exist.
Wisconsin is, in many ways,
unique in that our athletic
program is self-supporting here.
The annual budget is
$100 million a year.
We generate about $20 million a
year in donations.
That is, not revenue from
television, not revenue from the
conference, not revenue from
ticket sales and the like.
And we require, obviously, that
$20 million in donations in
order to sustain the program and
keep it at least in the black if
barely so.
I say that because it puts in
perspective what I essentially
would call a revenue transfer.
We're obviously transferring
revenue in the athletics program
from sports that generate money,
whether its from television or
other things, and we're
obviously devoting it to sports
that don't make money in order
to create opportunities for
participation.
In that respect, we have very
much in common with the rest of
the university.
There are revenue transfers
going on all over the campus.
I think anybody who's been here
for any period of time realizes
that the sciences, to a great
extent, are providing support
for the other side of campus who
do not generate the revenue that
would make them, in the words of
the athletic world,
self-supporting.
There's nothing particularly
unique to athletics about that
revenue transfer.
We seem to think with respect to
the university as a whole, a
great university requires
history departments and English
departments and Portuguese
departments, departments that
may not be self-sufficient in
the way that we've been
discussing.
But if we're going to be a great
university, we should have those
departments, and those
departments that do generate
revenue ought to be supporting
them.
We feel the same way in
athletics.
We are engaging in the same
kinds of revenue transfers
because we think opportunities
ought to be afforded to women
golfers, women volleyball
players, male wrestlers, and
many of the other sports that do
not generate sufficient revenue.
With respect to the legal model,
it's a really complicated world.
The legal model, I think, as the
previous speaker mentioned, is a
very fluid one.
There are lawsuits going on all
the time, but I think it's
important to realize that the
regulatory environment is really
a very complex one.
First of all, realize that the
regulatory environment beings on
the campus.
We have institutional rules, and
those institutional rules apply
to athletics.
They also apply to academics.
I say that and I emphasize that
because I want to make a point
about criticism of conferences
and of the NCAA and their
application or lack of
application of academic
standards.
The fact is the academic
standards that we have here at
Wisconsin are for us to make.
They're for us to regulate.
They're for us to change if we
wish to change them.
And so when we hear criticism,
for example, about majors
shopping or pushing kids into
majors that they otherwise would
not be in, I think we need to
realize that if that's going on,
that's us that's doing that.
That's being done at the
institutional level.
Nobody's making us do that.
We may think we need to do it to
remain competitive in this
environment, but I think we
sometimes fail to realize that
responsibility for the
regulation of athletics at this
institution is primarily at this
institution.
And if we will live up to our
obligations, we can regulate it
in ways that I think would make
us proud, and, quite frankly, I
think we do.
I said, though, that it's a
complicated legal environment,
and obviously the NCAA and the
conference play vital roles in
that regulatory environment.
I think it's also important to
realize, though, that there's
federal legislation, Title IX
for example, that is part of the
environment that dictate, as I
said, what I consider to be a
moral obligation but create a
legal obligation to provide
opportunity for women that's on
par with the opportunities that
we afford to men.
We obviously have got lawsuits
galore.
You've got the unionization
movement.
We're obviously in a time of
great fluidity with respect to
the regulatory environment.
I can't stress, though, how
important I think that amidst
all this fluidity, amidst all
this complexity, that we find
some pathways to reform.
And let me say a couple things
about the direction that I think
that reform should take.
This now is the 'done the right
way' part of the talk.
First of all, I think it's
unconscionable to accept
academically inferior
performances from our student
athletes.
I just think it's inexcusable.
There's no reason why a faculty
such as ours would or should do
so.
I think it certainly happens at
lots of campuses.
It's undoubtedly happened on
occasion here.
But that is, again, something
that's within our control, if we
simply have the will and courage
to deal with it.
Secondly, the recruiting system
is badly flawed, as is the
enforcement system.
I could really talk for hours
about the need to reform the
enforcement system.
We heard some comments from
Professor Branch about the Fifth
Amendment and about the subpoena
power and the like.
The fact of the matter is,
though, at its core, the
enforcement system is too slow,
too unfair, too tied up with
relatively trivial matters and
not concerned about major and
significant problems, too slow,
and frankly does too much
reputational damage to those who
do not deserve it and not enough
reputational damage to those who
do deserve it, the people who
actually commit the infractions.
I think there are other things
that really are obviously in
need of reform.
I think anybody who watches the
current scene has to say to
themselves, how can we
compensate coaches at the level
that we compensate them at and
not provide at the very least
the full cost of attendance for
our student athletes?
That's a fair question.
I don't even think it's one
that's deserving of any time
here.
I think it's so obvious that if
we are going to be providing
young people with full
scholarships, they essentially
ought to be leaving this place
debt free, if not better off
than that.
If we're really serious about
education, I think we've got to
make regulatory changes in
practice schedules and the like.
For example, there need to be
dead periods during which
practice not only cannot be
required, it is not allowed.
And one of the reasons we need
those dead periods is we need to
give these young people a break
from the rigors of their
athletic endeavors but also
because we need to create
opportunities for them to have
internships, to study abroad, to
do the many things that other
students have the opportunity to
do that they, quite frankly, are
not always necessarily allowed
to do because of their
commitment to their sports.
Now, there are other things that
I would say by way of this.
Health and safety is another one
that I think really doesn't
require very much in the way of
comment.
I just don't think it's
debatable that there needs to be
a far better job done on the
health and safety issue with
respect to student athletes, and
we've got to be concerned about
their health after they leave
here and try to make provision
so that that health is insured
or cared for because the idea
that they would suffer some
injury, whether it's a use
injury or some other kind of
injury, while they're playing
sports here and not have the
cost of continued treatment for
that after they leave here just
seems to me to be sort of
unthinkable.
One way of putting it then is
that we do need to spend money
in different ways in athletics.
I would say that we need to
direct the spending of that
money towards the kids.
We need to make the kids first.
And I'm not sure that we're
necessarily doing that anywhere
close to the degree that we
should.
I guess I'd conclude here, since
I think my time is probably sort
of running out, with a couple of
observations.
When I was introduced, you
weren't told that I actually ran
the prison system here for some
time.
I took a leave of absence from
the university to do so.
And I did it at a time, just to
give you sort of some
perspective, when the prison
population in this state was
5,000.
We had 5,000 inmates.
Now we have 22,000.
And I think the fact that we've
gone from 5,000 to 22,000 is
about as disappointing a
development in my professional
life or in my world as I can
imagine.
I naively believed at the time
that that trend was starting
that good sense, that clarity,
that providing information about
the consequences of the
direction of policy with respect
to the mentally ill, with
respect to young people, with
respect to people who come from
disadvantaged backgrounds would
actually lead Wisconsin and
other states to make better
sense of its corrections policy.
It obviously did not turn out
that way.
And one of the things that I
learned from that was that the
deeper currents in our society
that were pushing us in the
direction we went with respect
to corrections policy were far
more powerful than good sense
information, at least as it was
presented in those days.
And I think it's fair to say
that we've got deep currents in
our society that are certainly
pushing us towards greater
competitiveness, globalization.
I don't want to sort of be a
sour old puss and say me first,
but you can't help but notice
the popularity of selfies and
the like and how important the
individual is.
Maybe that's a good thing.
The question that it leaves me
with is, whatever happened to
the good old common good?
Maybe I was brought up in a time
when the common good was the
naive belief of people like me,
but it seems to me our
commitment to that is really
sort of eroded.
And I worry, quite honestly,
that what we're going to see
with respect to athletics is
sort of further erosion of what
I would think of as the common
good because I think the
creation of opportunity, I think
the provision of education
really has got payoffs far
beyond the immediate ones or the
immediate benefits that people
realize for them, not only for
those individuals but also for
all of us.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
>> So, do we have some
questions?
All right, yes.
>> I wonder if both of you could
comment on something that
neither one of you addressed.
There are a number of people in
the past, including
Rick Telander, who wrote a
book in 1989 called
The Hundred Yard Lie, and he
suggested that athletes be paid,
and there were numerous reasons
he gave in the book.
One of them is that we serve as
a farm club for the NBA and the
NFL.
Major League Baseball pays for
their own farm club.
Why aren't they paying us for
some of the athletes that we are
grooming for professional
sports?
But could you comment on paying
the athletes?
>> Sure.
I'd just go first by saying
this, first of all, I don't
think paying the athletes is
what we should do.
As I said, I think we need to be
spending money in different
ways, but that would not be the
way that I would do it.
And the reason I think that is
I think it detracts from
education.
I think if you have a
professional model, education is
going to become more secondary
than it is at so many schools
and that we have really got to
focus more on education, not
less on education.
Now, secondly, I think that if
young people want to turn
professional, they ought to have
every opportunity to turn
professional as soon as they
want to and can.
The 'one and done' rule is not
an NCAA rule; that's
an NBA rule.
Maurice Clarett, the Ohio State
tailback who sued because he
wanted to be able to play
professionally but the NFL had a
rule that forbade him from doing
so until he completed so many
years after his high school
class.
That's an NFL rule.
That's obviously not a
university rule.
My personal attitude is if
people want to be professional,
then they ought to have
professional opportunities.
I don't know why universities
have the obligation for creating
professional teams or
professional student athletes.
That's not our job.
>> I would simply say that
universities have created
professional sports already.
All you have to do is look at
the contracts and the TV
ratings.
The question is, what is the
distribution of that revenue?
And I'm not saying that athletes
should be paid, but I am saying
that they should have a right to
ask for payment and we should
have the obligation not simply
to assume that we're dispensing
something benevolently to them
but to look them in the eye and
say you don't deserve a say in
that decision and if you ask for
it, we're going to blacken you.
And that's what I'm saying is
hard.
It's hard to justify.
Every time it's been challenged
when adults are involved, the
Supreme Court and the football
schools, NCAA tried to restrict
the pay of assistant coaches a
few years ago.
That went all the way to the
Supreme Court.
Assistant coaches said that's
un-American and they won and
they collected a $54 million
judgment.
So when adults are involved,
it's already a professional
system.
The question is how it's run and
what rights, if any, the
essential talent have.
Right now they have no place at
the table.
I think that it's hard to
explain to them why they don't
have a place at the table.
People say the world would fall
apart, but that's what they said
about the Olympics which were
actually even less professional
than college sports are now.
The old AAU Olympics said that
college sports were already
whores because they're paying
them with scholarships.
But when athletes were given a
seat at the table on the Olympic
committees by law, amateurism
vanished in the Olympics
by 1986.
So these things, it's just a
question of whether you address
the rights.
I'm not saying that if there
were a functioning market for
revenue athletes that it
wouldn't have profound effects.
I think it would drain money
from coaches.
I think it would drain money out
of some of the non-revenue
sports.
It would force the universities
to have painful decisions, one
of which may be not to have them
like most of the other great
universities in the world don't
have these sports.
But at least those would be
honest decisions.
The volleyball team and the swim
team and the field hockey team
existed at Wisconsin, I bet,
before the age of television.
People figured out how to pay
for them then.
They as a community decided how
to do it.
What has happened is that we've
gotten seduced into
expropriating all this money
from the revenue athletes that
we then dispense as we want to
do and say we need this
distribution model because
otherwise it would be
disruptive.
That's not a good enough answer.
>> A question for Walter.
You said that the university has
to be or should be responsible
for taking academics seriously,
and six years on the athletic
board I've been tremendously
impressed how seriously the
school and the department do
take it, but it's obviously a
farce at many other places.
And so universities just don't,
many don't, and there's no
consequence.
So if you think that that's
really one of the essential
components of having an elite
program, how do we get from here
to there without having the NCAA
or somebody else enforcing it,
which they claim they don't have
enough funds to do?
>> I think the NCAA and the
conference, perhaps more the
conference depending on which
conference we're talking about,
can play a profound role in both
raising academic standards,
insuring that there's academic
integrity, and doing other
things to enhance the
educational experience of
students at a sort of larger
regulatory level.
I think NCAA action is
absolutely essential.
For example, one of the things
that's been discussed is the
whole idea of an academic red
shirt.
That would be you could have
scholarship but you couldn't
play the sport because the
thought was there was need for
attention to your academics
during your first year at the
institution.
That obviously has got financial
implications.
We would support that model, but
I think the idea that any
institution could unilaterally
put it into place strikes me
as a bit unrealistic.
So there is no doubt that both
conference and NCAA regulation
would be necessary if you're
going to have greater integrity
in academics and in academic
expectations.
Some are rule changes of the
kind that I just described.
Some of it, though, really is,
in my view, a need for
institutional control models
that give the conference and the
NCAA true regulatory authority
over institutional control.
The Big Ten has made, I think,
some very substantial steps to
try to bring greater integrity
into both compliance academics,
and actually medicine is the
third category that has been
subject to special scrutiny.
So I think it's going to be that
sort of an interplay norm
between institutional
responsibility but also,
obviously, conference and NCAA
responsibility.
I mentioned the institutional
control point because that's a
way of, in a sense, making the
individual institutions comply
by auditing in the -- sort of a
way to see to it that they're
actually living up to the claims
that they're making about their
academic situations.
>> Hi.
I'm Zach Bohannon, MBA student a
former member of the men's
basketball team.
I have a quick question--
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
I just had a quick question just
to hear both of your sides on
the whole students being signed
over through the national letter
of intent, their name, image,
and likeness for the whole
university to have and the NCAA
to have for the rest of their
careers until their eligibility
is completed.
I just want to hear what your
guys' take on that issue is.
>> I hesitate to say that
because I'm scheduled to be a
witness in the trial on that
because it is a--
You can't play if
you don't do it.
It has no basis in law.
It's something that the NCAA
enforces.
They make money off of it.
It's being challenged.
And I think it's going to be
pretty hard to justify.
Already one of the defendants
has settled for $40 million to
stop selling these videos
because there's a lot of money
involved and the athletes have
none by virtue of this signature
that has to be signed every
year.
Scholarships have to be renewed
every year.
They don't have to be, but they
can be.
If you don't sign it, you don't
play.
So the whole question before the
courts is, is that a foreclosed
market?
Is that fair or is it not?
Again, when similar things have
been challenged where the rights
of adults, non-players, are
concerned, the courts have ruled
that they're unfair.
I don't see how they'll be any
different here.
And my guess is that
Mr. O'Bannon has a pretty strong
case.
>> I became aware of that rule
when I attended my first Big Ten
meeting, and my initial reaction
to it was: that's not right.
That's not fair.
And I continue to feel that way.
Now, having said that, I think
one of the things that is worth
exploring a little bit, take the
jersey with the name on it, one
of the questions that's worth
exploring is this question of
how do you value University of
Wisconsin and then the name of
the individual player.
Because obviously the fact that
it's the University of
Wisconsin, the brand, not a word
that I like, matters a lot and
adds a lot of value to whatever
the sale price of that is.
But that's more a question of
detail.
Just to sort of alert you to the
question of deciding how much
it's actually worth is not
necessarily such an easy thing
to do.
But my own personal opinion is
that limiting student athletes
on this count is wrong.
And I might maybe use the
opportunity to say that had I
had more time in my
presentation, one of the reforms
I would have said we need is
student athletes with a voice at
the table.
Again, I don't think unions are
necessarily in their interest.
Though, I could be wrong about
that because that's a much more
complex world than I think
people may realize.
But, quite frankly, given, and I
hesitate to comment on history
in the presence of
Taylor Branch, but it looks to
me like the direction of history
here is clearly towards greater
participation by stakeholders or
however you want to characterize
them, and student athletes
certainly deserve a voice at the
table as the issues that we've
been talking about here today
are worked through.
>> Jim Clearly, and I feel like
one of those commercials during
the basketball.
I played Australian rules
football.
Former member of the -- Blacks
in 1982.
But anyway, Taylor, could you
comment on what we can learn
from other global campuses,
institutions?
You've said we're the only
country that focuses on sports
at higher education
institutions.
What can we learn from other
countries?
You mentioned that boat race
with 750,000 people.
They do have big sporting events
in United Kingdom, Australia
between universities.
What can we learn from other
countries?
>> I'm not an expert on other
countries, but the club model is
very strong around the world.
University students, while
they're in university and after
university, they join club teams
that play.
Some amateur.
Amateur, by the way, amateur
means that you do it yourself.
It's a self-avocation that you
choose to do it.
It's something that is hard to
reconcile with something that is
imposed on you with something
else.
The very meaning of the word.
So they have clubs that are
amateurs where they get together
and they play.
They also have professional
clubs.
Sometimes they're near
universities; sometimes they're
not.
They're affiliated with towns.
They're more like Little League
or that sort of thing in the
rest of the world.
And what that does, Oxford, they
get prestige out of the fact
that one of its students is also
a star member on a club team,
but it's not the Oxford club
team.
And that generally is true
around the world.
And of course there are more and
more universities being created
around the world.
We're unique where the brand is
the university and the control
is in the university.
And, of course, that's a little
bit hard in all of the
regulatory things between the
NCAA and the schools.
Look in the newspaper story and
study it carefully.
Almost every time one of these
disciplines is announced, the
university says that we're doing
this because we've talked to the
NCAA.
The NCAA says the university is
imposing these penalties on
itself.
And the reason is because both
institutions have some sort of
justification, difficulty,
explain the rationale for things
that cause injury to the
players.
They're where the penalties
fall, and there is no legal
justification for it.
In some senses, both sides are
somewhat reluctant to take
responsibility so the university
says we're doing it because we
don't want an even more severe
thing done by the NCAA, and the
NCAA says thank goodness the
school's doing it.
You'll notice that in the Penn
State case, for example, the
report came out, the Louis Freeh
report came out in the Penn
State case, pinpointed
dereliction of duty in the
president's office, the athletic
director's office, the coach's
office.
A logical penalty may have been
to say those offices will have
fewer assistants.
But instead the penalties all
fell on the players, denying
scholarships to players who
weren't even there yet.
That's what happens when you
have a system that doesn't have
the players at the table.
That would never have occurred
had the players been part of
making the rules or making the
enforcements.
That's what I call informed
consent.
Students have more rights in the
classroom than athletes have in
athletic disputes over NCAA
rules having to do with what was
formally called amateurism and
is now called the collegiate
model.
I think that phrase will be
phased out too.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]