Majoring in sports
October 22, 2020 10:25 AM   Subscribe

A Washington Post op-ed argues that colleges ought to create academic departments for sports. The idea is that athletics would be treated as another liberal art, and that the academic departments would function like music, dance, or drama departments, with a "sports performance" major. Coaches would be professors or instructors, but the departments would also offer traditional academic classes in addition to instruction in athletic activities themselves. Appeals are made to the ancient Greeks.
posted by vogon_poet (38 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
Harvard men’s basketball coach Tommy Amaker, the former Duke great, calls Mike Krzyzewski the finest professor he ever had. “And that’s not a knock against the incredible faculty I had there,” he says.

Okay sure, and if I had lunch with Richard Feynman every day for four years I'd probably be damn good at physics without stepping into a classroom. What does this say about the 90% of kids who do not go to one of the elite programs?

We're not talking about getting into Duke, we're not talking about playing sports at Duke. We're talking about getting recruited at Duke, on their basketball team as a male (I see no mention of women's sports). The odds of that happening are about the same or probably less than winning the lottery. I'm sure the coaching staff at commuter schools that you've never heard, and I went to one, are good. But lets not kid ourselves not only will these students have a Div. III baseball degree on their resume, they'll be burdened with a school no one has heard of.

I have no doubt sports imparts discipline and literal team building but I mean to an extent college is learning how to learn. If we wanted military like discipline why not just send them to the military? That's not at all a knock on the military, I rather like their ethos that they can take anyone and make them a marine or whatever. I don't see Princeton bragging they can take anyone and can make them into a Princeton graduate.

We've already diluted college to it being just High School Plus, lets not keep diluting it. Also the insinuation that liberal arts isn't as valuable as STEM says a lot about where people's minds are in a college education.
posted by geoff. at 10:49 AM on October 22, 2020 [1 favorite]


Fuck this. Divorce the NCAA from colleges completely, and just make it its own farm league. You can go to college, or you can be an apprentice Football player, but you can't do both (at the same time.)
posted by SansPoint at 10:53 AM on October 22, 2020 [44 favorites]


Coaches would be professors or instructors,

Doubt they would accept the cut in pay.
posted by BWA at 11:01 AM on October 22, 2020 [69 favorites]


I don't want to editorialize or argue too much, as I'm ambivalent about the idea overall, but I see the argument being presented here as the following: the claim is that the liberal arts are extremely valuable, the soul of university education, and that athletics is valuable in a very similar way.

I do find it hard to see why, given that a major in dance or vocal performance is legitimate, a major in say gymnastics or jiu-jitsu should not be. This is the most convincing part of the argument to me, more so than the claimed practical benefits.
posted by vogon_poet at 11:08 AM on October 22, 2020 [22 favorites]


Doubt they would accept the cut in pay.
Or the extra work. Or having to teach people who aren't good at what they're learning. (Fun tip for her: many "professors who can't teach" are actually excellent teachers of grad students and upper-level undergrads. They're terrific at teaching students who are exceptionally talented and engaged in their subject. They're not good at teaching big undergrad lectures filled with students who struggle and don't necessarily want to be there. And I'd expect that something similar would be true of most coaches.)
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 11:10 AM on October 22, 2020 [22 favorites]


Fuck this. Divorce the NCAA from colleges completely, and just make it its own farm league.

You could do this, entirely kick paraprofessional sports off of college campuses, and *then* create sports performance departments and majors that would be just as underfunded and under-resourced as your typical music department.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 11:14 AM on October 22, 2020 [13 favorites]


As a professor of music (and music performance), I've long advocated for this idea. It's a sound rationale, and would serve the vast majority of student-athletes much better, not least by better preparing them for any of the many professional options available in the world of sports in the United States, that are not playing for the NFL or similar.

It would also be the quickest, most effective way to check the massive financial abuse in big-time college sports: if all sports teams are units of sports performance programs in academic departments, funding (and funds, and salaries) would be managed by Academic Affairs.

You could do this, entirely kick paraprofessional sports off of college campuses, and *then* create sports performance departments and majors that would be just as underfunded and under-resourced as your typical music department.

This made me laugh and cry at the same time.
posted by LooseFilter at 11:17 AM on October 22, 2020 [28 favorites]


Colleges should offer a major in sports. It could solve some problems.

Slapping a thin veneer of legitimacy on top of a commercial enterprise may not solve some problems related to exploitation, but it would distract attention away from them.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:18 AM on October 22, 2020 [2 favorites]


Slapping a thin veneer of legitimacy on top of a commercial enterprise

So should my music department curtail the growth of our music technology/industry programs? Are they entirely illegitimate because the skills training in those concentrations are primarily aimed at commercial, rather than intrinsic/aesthetic, outcomes?
posted by LooseFilter at 11:27 AM on October 22, 2020 [9 favorites]


Also, would NCAA athletes be required to major in this new sport major in order to play? Because there are actually a lot of athletes who want to major in something else and who can handle the work just fine.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 11:29 AM on October 22, 2020 [3 favorites]


The basic idea here is interesting -- integrating all aspects of human endeavors into the education process -- but this article is pretty terrible all around. The author acts as if the problem with college sports is that they don't get enough intellectual respect, not that it's a brutally exploitative commercial system that makes a ton of money for a very few, mostly already rich people, by sacrificing the bodies (and often, futures) of a lot of young kids, who are disproportionately poor and/or minorities. There's a lot of "why are people so mean about sports?!?" whining and very little acknowledgement of how the monetization of college sports has hurt higher education.

For example; "Worse, we’ve told ourselves that athletics actually interferes with education."

The author then talks about all the things that athletics can teach: "Powers of concentration, controlled poise, systems of organization, heightened spatial awareness, multiple brands of analysis, critical thinking, methodology, adaptability. Self-mastery, the ability to direct energy on call." Yeah, OK, but when someone says "athletics interferes with education" they don't mean "playing a sport interferes with education" or "physical activity interferes with education." They mean "devoting massive resources towards sports instead of education and telling student-athletes that their athletic performance is their only priority interferes with education."

Or this: "That’s what we’re doing with college athletics. We’ve taken one of the most critical fields of human learning and dumbed it down with our own prejudices and guilt. We’ve made it a neglected subject and cut ourselves off from a core curriculum."

Yeah, it's the fault of those snooty academics who have mistreated the poor athletes, not the fault of the administrators and advertisers who have poured millions of dollars into college sports.

And for all the talk of this improving education, the author never acknowledges that the money spent on college sports is totally out of proportion with every other educational cost:

"Americans know on a gut level that few subjects are more thrillingly exploratory — or prized — than excellence at play. It’s partly why Clemson pays Dabo Swinney $9 million per year and the price tag for Alabama’s football stadium renovation is over $100 million. The trouble is, we’re half-guilty that it’s all money misspent on an obsession. It’s not."
BULL. SHIT. There's no professor anywhere in the US who gets a $9million salary. How many school libraries regularly get $100million for "renovations" -- ON TOP of their normal budget?

or this: "We’re a little afraid that if college athletics makes too much money for too high a standard of physical excellence, it won’t be pure learning. What a crock."
What the fuck does that even mean?

Or the opening "what if we treated physics students like we treat athletes?" thought experiment:
" they — and their teachers — were constantly made to feel that they were engaged in a semiprofessional exercise that didn’t properly belong in a university setting but was good for revenue."
Is that how those poor, poor, 6-figure salary coaches feel? Or the student-athletes who are lauded and cheered and have their names stitched onto merchandise and given special treatment and interviewed on ESPN? (I'll grant that many student-athletes probably do get treated as dummies by their fellow students and teachers, but nothing in this author's plan seems geared to fix that.)

There's also a lot of question-begging assertions and rhetorical questions:

"Great coaches are incontrovertibly great teachers"
Really?

"Are these things not in fact the root of acumen and professional competence in any field — and do sports not teach them with a special and perhaps even matchless power?"
Uh, I don't know, do they? Why are you asking this question?

"Nick Saban is probably the most potent teacher on Alabama’s campus."
Says who?

"Harvard men’s basketball coach Tommy Amaker, the former Duke great, calls Mike Krzyzewski the finest professor he ever had."
One coach says another coach is the best professor he ever had? Who gives a shit? What does this prove?

And then this:
"By correcting the underlying fallacy that college sports are worthless despite all that money, some plaguing issues would become sharper. Our commitment to nonrevenue sports and women’s sports would be much clearer, and athletic directors would be prohibited from cutting them in a fiscal crunch. The money that schools such as Ohio State have poured into needless administrative bloat and legions of deputy athletic directors would be redirected where it belongs — to educating students."

How would ANY of that happen as a result of this idea? Wouldn't it result in even MORE money being poured into sports?

Finally, I hate this bit because it comes off as so smug:
"Does that sound like a ruinously revolutionary idea, the end of academia? Actually, it’s the conception of a renowned academic named Drew Hyland, a professor of philosophy and classical scholar at Trinity College "

Oh is that what it ACTUALLY is? Sheesh...
posted by Saxon Kane at 11:31 AM on October 22, 2020 [23 favorites]


People are pooh-poohing this but the reality is we have plenty of evidence that there are different types of intelligences and I'll be damned if knowing how to move your body in certain ways in the physical world isn't one of those types of intelligence. My mind usually goes to dance before sports, but it's the same idea. That they are learning how to move their bodies in the physical space in ways I will never be able to learn. I have a lot of influence of thought from the Evergreen State College and how they teach, and they cover how there are multiple types of intelligences and learning.

Forcing athletics to also have rigor to their studies could have great benefits, like degrees focused on the sports they are training to be in, with lots of education about the human body and general health and well-being.

Also, would NCAA athletes be required to major in this new sport major in order to play? Because there are actually a lot of athletes who want to major in something else and who can handle the work just fine.

For sure, I always read this as a way to stop the corruption and explosive amounts of money being spent on exploiting these student athletes, and I would think it would be grossly unfair if they weren't allowed to actually study what they want to study. However, an actual degree in athletics, something they are actually interested in, might be beneficial to those who find themselves struggling because they're not actually interested in other subjects.
posted by deadaluspark at 11:35 AM on October 22, 2020 [5 favorites]


So should my music department curtail the growth of our music technology/industry programs? Are they entirely illegitimate because the skills training in those concentrations are primarily aimed at commercial, rather than intrinsic/aesthetic, outcomes?

I think a more apt analogy would be if your music program was run by Spotify or A&R guys from major labels, where the students were groomed to be pop stars and go on tour, but all the music rights were owned by the department. Oh, and they also smash the students' kneecaps and give them concussions on a regular basis.
posted by Saxon Kane at 11:38 AM on October 22, 2020 [17 favorites]


we have plenty of evidence that there are different types of intelligences and I'll be damned if knowing how to move your body in certain ways in the physical world isn't one of those types of intelligence.

I don't think anyone is pooh-poohing the idea that athletics are and can be a crucial part of education, but rather this author's particular approach, which glosses entirely over the problems caused by the commercialized college sports.
posted by Saxon Kane at 11:41 AM on October 22, 2020 [4 favorites]


Are they entirely illegitimate because the skills training in those concentrations are primarily aimed at commercial, rather than intrinsic/aesthetic, outcomes?

I don't know of any music schools (say, Eastman, Berklee, Julliard) that are operated as direct businesses in the way that sports teams are, first and foremost, which prioritize commercial interests before education. The obscene amount of money paid to coaches, to build stadiums, and the transactional nature of sports in academia exploits students.

I don't see the parallel, unless there is a music school that pays multi-million dollar salaries to conductors, which builds multi-million dollar performance halls, or which uses students to extract free, often injurious life-altering labor on a continuous basis. If I am wrong about that, please let me know.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:48 AM on October 22, 2020 [5 favorites]


One thing to consider is that at Trinity College and other academically-strong Div III schools, they do seem to come sort of close to the mythical ideal of the student-athlete. There is no money involved, and there are reasonable academic standards, but still a huge proportion of students play a varsity sport at a high level. I think sitting on Trinity College campus, the problem probably does look like snooty professors who don't respect the pursuit of athletic excellence.
posted by vogon_poet at 11:48 AM on October 22, 2020 [2 favorites]


Could an American football game possibly pass IRB review?
posted by clew at 11:51 AM on October 22, 2020 [14 favorites]


The obscene amount of money paid to coaches, to build stadiums, and the transactional nature of sports in academia exploits students.

Agreed, my sense is that making sports performance an academic degree would end the abuses you describe. I think we're having two separate conversations, one about the idea and one about the specific version of the idea described in the op-ed. The idea itself is interesting and has potential; what is described in the op-ed much less so--I suppose my only point here, then, is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
posted by LooseFilter at 11:51 AM on October 22, 2020


Agreed, my sense is that making sports performance an academic degree would end the abuses you describe.
This seems hopelessly naive to me. It might be true at some schools, but not at your average Division I football or basketball powerhouse.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 11:57 AM on October 22, 2020 [1 favorite]


Do Americans realize how odd college sports looks like from the outside? I can't think of anywhere else in the world where universities routinely have stadiums worth more than their laboratories. It looks very strange, and this here, trying to squash together athletics and academics in a way that makes sense... are you ok?
posted by adept256 at 12:09 PM on October 22, 2020 [2 favorites]


The performing arts are generally treated as fine arts, not liberal arts, yesno?

I also went to a small college where physical sport was required to balance mental activity. It probably did improve our liberal educations - that is, help us learn to be free equal citizens.But that’s because we didn’t value winning above everything. This will not fly at 'Bama.
posted by clew at 12:24 PM on October 22, 2020 [3 favorites]


I think there are a lot of ways that an academically focused "Sports Department" could work.

The state college near me has an (apparently well-regarded) sports marketing program. They have sports focused physical therapy programs.
The community college has an active physical education program that works alongside the traditional education program. They also help people become certified coaches.

For that matter, historians interested in sports and athletics would probably benefit from being in a department where sports is taken seriously and not considered something for children.

All of those could be rolled into a comprehensive department that turns out people educated on the latest research as it pertains to bodies and training.
Then they could go on to a variety of careers.

But if we're just talking about some backhanded way to legitimize public institutions being feeder leagues for billion dollar corporate sports, similar to the "Athletic Department" most big schools already have, then no, it is an awful idea.
posted by madajb at 12:42 PM on October 22, 2020 [4 favorites]


The state college near me has an (apparently well-regarded) sports marketing program. They have sports focused physical therapy programs.
Physical therapy is an academically-rigorous graduate program that requires major-level biology, chemistry, and physics as prerequisite classes. It's also extremely difficult to get into. It has basically nothing in common with a sports program taught by coaches. And it's not going to be re-homed in a sports department, because it's important to physical therapists that they be recognized as highly-trained medical practitioners, and not as glorified personal trainers.

My institution has a sport studies program. Sport studies uses insights from history, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, and other social science and humanities disciplines to examine the social and cultural meanings of sports. Nobody considers it "something for children." The scholars in the sport studies program typically have dual appointments in sport studies and a more-traditional discipline like history or anthro, and they are treated with the same respect as any other scholar. We also have an exercise science major, which is housed in the physiology department. That major already exists at a lot of institutions, and the faculty have PhDs in related disciplines.

I don't think the author has much of a clue about how universities actually work, but there's no shortage of scholarly attention being paid to sport and physical activity. It's just that scholarship is produced by scholars, and most coaches aren't scholars.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 1:35 PM on October 22, 2020 [16 favorites]


I would like to see a reasonable cap on the ratio of highest and lowest paid employees (or contractors) at universities, say 8 to 1. Hell, making it 10 to 1 or even 20 to 1 would be a huge step in the right direction. Right now at my university, it's closer to 200 to 1, and the football coach makes three times what it costs to fund my entire department. It's obscene. At least for public universities, we should enshrine into law that the highest paid people cannot make so ridiculously much more than the lowest.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 1:41 PM on October 22, 2020 [4 favorites]


I don't think the author has much of a clue about how universities actually work

True Dat!

some backhanded way to legitimize public institutions being feeder leagues for billion dollar corporate sports

That pretty much hits the nail on the head, as far as this article goes.

I've skimmed (but not closely read) the article by Drew Hyland mentioned in the OP, and while it appears to be a more thoughtful discussion of the educational value of athletics, I'm also not finding any discussion of the financial behemoth that is College Sports and why that is problematic. His understanding of sports in college education seems to based on 1) when he played basketball for Princeton about 60 years ago, and 2) a grad professor making fun of him because he did a Heideggerian analysis of playing basketball. He also makes the odd assertion that because European universities don't focus on producing professional athletes and that throughout Europe there are many local sports clubs that anyone can join and play in, that means they don't think sports have any educational value. What the fuck? For a philosopher, dude makes some big leaps of logic.
posted by Saxon Kane at 2:32 PM on October 22, 2020 [2 favorites]


As far as I understand it, developing the skill of playing a sport would not be considered a legitimate scholarly activity for a scholar of sports studies. Maybe it could be some kind of an advantage for a sports studies scholar to have been an athlete (probably not), but primarily the job is to research and write.

Yet universities do employ people whose primary contribution is to be very good at dancing, painting, or singing. I can't see a good reason why there should be a distinction between sports and these other activities -- it does seem like something is missing there, even as the proposal in the article doesn't really seem workable.

I also think people may be underestimating the degree to which the bad dynamics of college sports are replicated in academic departments at the graduate level. (hugely overpaid star faculty, exploited students doing most the work to produce most of the value, university skimming money off of revenue from grants, huge donations and fancy buildings for some programs and pathetic underfunding for others...) A department of athletics would only be somewhat worse.
posted by vogon_poet at 2:34 PM on October 22, 2020 [3 favorites]


A department of athletics would only be somewhat worse.

Given present pay rates, it would be an order of magnitude worse. (Literally. The top coaches here at Illinois make 3 and 4 million dollars a year. The top academic professors -- including those in upper admin positions -- make 300 to 600 thousand a year. The bottom of the pay scale is basically the same in both cases.)
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 2:45 PM on October 22, 2020 [6 favorites]


If PE was a legitimate college level subject, I think I would've paid more attention to it during K-12. K-12 PE was just kids being competitive for the sake of being competitive, and I understood none of that and hated the experience. If it was shown to be the cerebral and intellectual subject it can be, lots of nerds and geeks would've been more interested in it. Unfortunately it forces values around sports to change as well, and there's a lot of social inertia around that.

I was actually trying to teach myself swimming again, pre-COVID, and found newer books like "Swimming Science" or something. One of the authors made the point that sports research is paradoxically underfunded, so you actually get lots of coaches employing pseudoscience and dogma in their training. There's also a well-known strength training coach, Mark Rippetoe, who often reminds people how much strength training papers today are poorly premised/designed with misleading conclusions, and have to be read skeptically with big grains of salt.
posted by polymodus at 4:16 PM on October 22, 2020 [2 favorites]


K-12 PE was just kids being competitive for the sake of being competitive, and I understood none of that and hated the experience.

Often egged on by sadistic instructors. Plus the often uncomfortable experience of being nude with/in front of a bunch of other kids (usually of the same gender) in the locker room, with all the vulnerability, sexual confusion, and bodily shame that inspires.

Kids need to be physical and learn to operate their own bodies. That can and should be a fun experience. As with everything else, kids develop differently, and have different capabilities and proclivities, and not everyone is suited to the major team sports that were the sole content of my phys ed classes. But the stereotypical phys ed teacher didn't give a shit about helping all the kids to develop physical coordination and health. They wanted to coach the most athletic kids, maybe in the hopes of discovering some future hall of famer or living out their own pro-sports fantasies. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but it means the kids who aren't as comfortable or confident in their bodies experience constant humiliation. I didn't discover until I went to college that I actually enjoy and am even pretty good at several athletic/physical activities. Still, it's been incredibly difficult for me to sustain any sort of long-term exercise habit, because I felt so inadequate for 18 years, and no adult (parents included) ever taught me how to get beyond that.

I know a few people who teach kinesiology, physical education, etc. at the university level, and besides all the science/medical stuff, there also seems to be a much broader focus on all sorts of physical activities beyond just team sports, so hopefully that means that phys ed classes are/will be a lot more fun and diverse than they were when I was growing up.

developing the skill of playing a sport would not be considered a legitimate scholarly activity for a scholar of sports studies

I don't think it'd be a necessary activity, but I don't see why it couldn't be considered part of their scholarship, or at least their professional development. Hyland talks about writing a phenomenological analysis of the last 4 minutes of a basketball game in which he played.

Yet universities do employ people whose primary contribution is to be very good at dancing, painting, or singing. I can't see a good reason why there should be a distinction between sports and these other activities

The majority of artists (visual, literature, music, dance, drama, etc.) who teach at universities do so (at least in part) because of the paycheck and bennies. They may be fairly successful in the terms of their art, but that often doesn't pay enough, or reliably enough, for them to do that and nothing else. This is why free jazz legend Anthony Braxton was getting tenure at Wesleyan, while the guys in Iron Maiden were out getting BJs. Also, and especially in the case of performative arts, they don't have the desire or temperament to pursue that sort of success in their field -- many amazing acting teachers have no desire to ever step in front of camera or are happy doing regional theater in their off-time.

Just like most universities can't afford to put Lady Gaga on their payroll, they couldn't afford to hire LeBron James either. They could hire 2nd or 3rd tier players, minor leaguers and the like, people not good enough to get into the professional leagues. But the only real source for that would be... college sports. Or they could focus on the less popular sports: the world's greatest fencer probably demands a much lower salary than the Superbowl MVP. Or they could get retired players looking for work in their later years. But then, you may be dealing with people suffering from extreme physical and/or cognitive decline due to their careers: how lucid could a 60 yr old football professor who's suffered dozens of concussions be?

I think one issue is the slippage between "sports" and "athletics" -- or in different terms, "for-profit entertainment" and "physical education." Hyland wants to talk about, thinks he's talking about, athletics/physical education -- the disciplining and coordination of mind and body through physical activity. But he ignores the $500bn elephants in the room that are the college and professional sports industries -- probably because his own professional and personal life is so distant from it -- and their immense, detrimental effects on universities, students, and education. So his whole proposal seems a little detached from reality, existing only in some imaginary gymnasium in a Neo-Athenian fantasy land.

Jenkins, on the other hand, is concerned with sports and entertainment (or as the WWE calls professional wrestling, "sports entertainment"). I think she misunderstands or misrepresents Hyland's article so she can say, "See, not only are sports educational, they are even MORE educational than all that other education! So spending tons of money on sports is great, and we should probably make it even MORE important in colleges!"
posted by Saxon Kane at 5:17 PM on October 22, 2020


polymodus: The Art of Swimming: The Shaw Method
posted by Saxon Kane at 5:19 PM on October 22, 2020


I also think she's misguided in thinking that having a "sports performance" major (akin to dance performance) would lead to MORE attention being paid to non-revenue sports and women's sports. At very large state universities, mostly the flagships, maaaaaaaaybe. But at smaller colleges (let's say basically every private college in Division I, which is like 1/3 of them), they already don't have dance performance majors -- you really need to be at a fine or performing arts college/conservatory for that, because at a college of 10,000, it's hard to get to a critical mass of dance performance majors unless that is your whole thing.

But as the NCAA loves to say in its commercials, "there are a bazillionty-seven NCAA athletes, and the vast majority of us are going pro in something other than sports." And I actually went to college with a few women who did go pro in their sports (Ruth Riley WNBA, Shannon Boxx USWNT, etc.). But neither of them majored in athletic-related fields, and of their teammates (when ND was consistently among the top 4 in the country for women's basketball and soccer), almost none of them would have been INTERESTED in doing so. They were studying pre-med or philosophy or engineering or marketing or accounting, to prepare for the careers or further education they wanted. And if the college had said, "You need to major -- or at least double-major -- in sports performance to play varsity, because this is an academic endeavor," the vast majority of them would have said, "Uh, fuck that" and stopped playing, because hardly anybody is going pro in women's basketball or soccer and if you do, you're not making much money. Even the superstars who DID go pro have "fallback" careers planned.

Football and men's basketball have a high enough potential economic payoff (and cultural cachet) to make it worth the gamble for some students. But other college sports just don't. The track & field program at Oregon draws most of the potential superstars, and other NCAA teams often have a lot of kids who JUST LIKE TO RUN while they study chemistry with an eye on med school. And I think for all these non-revenue sports and women's sports, saying "you have to produce papers on the economics of your sport and provide reflections every semester connecting sports to your field of study" would lead to a LOOOOOOOOOOT of athletes saying, "ha ha, fuck that, I can run/swim by myself; I can play in the college rec league/on the club team; I'm not voluntarily adding a bunch of pointless labor so 'sports performance' can be considered academic when I have no intention of going pro, I'm carrying 15 credits and a work-study job, and I'm prepping for the LSAT." I think it would tend to harm -- dramatically harm! -- virtually all sports but football and men's basketball, and dramatically reduce the number of colleges hosting non-revenue sports and women's sports.

And I mean, honestly, my university did have a "study of music" department, and music performance majors. But there were like 10 music performance majors, and it takes like 100 musicians to make a symphony. I played in the symphony because I like playing and I'm pretty good at my instrument (bass), and rehearsing for a couple hours a couple of times a week was a nice break from my other academic work. If I'd had to produce a bunch of academic work to be allowed to play in the symphony, I would have quit the symphony, as would probably 80% of the other performers, who were not connected to the music department at all.

And if the schtick is "we have to educate the whole person, including their body," well, lots of colleges that pride themselves on their traditional liberal artiness just, you know, DO that, and have students take some phys ed credits and talk about the well-rounded person body/mind/spirit stuff. They just, like, DO that, without trying to turn football performance into an academic discipline in the name of students being well-rounded.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:56 PM on October 22, 2020 [4 favorites]


Honest question: how is this sports performance studies different from a major in kinesthesiology?
posted by Big Al 8000 at 7:05 PM on October 22, 2020 [1 favorite]


Honest question: how is this sports performance studies different from a major in kinesthesiology?
posted by Big Al 8000 at 7:05 PM on October 22
[+] [!]


Whatever it would be, it s probably not as intense, in order to accommodate student athletes sleeping through class. At big state u, these kids get worked
posted by eustatic at 12:45 AM on October 23, 2020


Do Americans realize how odd college sports looks like from the outside?

Usually not. Or do, but don't care. Or are proud of it.
posted by doctornemo at 9:33 AM on October 23, 2020


I don't think the author has much of a clue about how universities actually work

Agreed. The piece describes a sliver of US higher ed, depending on the paragraph.
For example, community colleges are effectively invisible - which is typical of most discussions of American academia, both within and beyond campuses.

ArbitraryAndCapricious does a good job of pointing out the programs which currently exist in higher ed, that do something like what the author calls for: physical therapy, sport studies, exercise science. Big Al 8000 adds kinesthesiology.
One of my dissertation committee profs, a comp lit person and Fred Jameson student, recently published this book about basketball. And yes,
I don't think the author has much of a clue about how universities actually work, but there's no shortage of scholarly attention being paid to sport and physical activity. It's just that scholarship is produced by scholars, and most coaches aren't scholars.

What feels strange to me about the article is that it seems to be arguing that academia doesn't take sports seriously enough, or offer the field enough respect.
posted by doctornemo at 9:43 AM on October 23, 2020 [2 favorites]


I have a bachelor of arts in music and a master of science in sports management. Having studied both, I think having a liberal arts major in athletics/sports is a great idea.

I got my bachelor's degree from a state college that was not well-known for its music program. One of the degree requirements for the program was being in band -sorry, Wind Ensemble- for 6 semesters. Band met from 12 - 1:30 MWF, was a one credit course, and required practice outside of the 4.5 hours of seat time for the class. We also had to pass 6 levels of lessons on our individual instruments, have extra group lessons that were non-credit bearing, and attend outside musical performances. Being a music major took up a lot more time than being other liberal arts majors, at a crappy state school, with no hope of actually getting a job in the music field. There is no reason why people who like sports couldn't get the same education from studying sports more rigorously. What's the difference between being a musician preparing for a concert and an athlete preparing for a game or meet? Good musicians get into good music schools; good athletes get into good athletic programs. You also don't have to be a music major to be in band, but you're still expected to practice and be prepared to play in rehearsals and concerts. You just major in something different. It could totally be the same for sports.

One thing I found when I was studying sports management was I was much more likely to finish the readings and participate in class because I really enjoyed what I was learning about. I was a better student because I enjoyed the subject matter. Just imagine if student-athletes could major in their sport. We would give these students a leg up in learning how to learn. There could be so many electives related to sports, like sports management, athletic training, phys ed, coaching, that these students would have many opportunities to build career paths outside of being a professional athlete. I believe people are better served being set up for success than set up for failure.
posted by DEiBnL13 at 1:50 PM on October 23, 2020


There’s at least one sport science university already.
posted by clew at 12:00 AM on October 25, 2020


Wait is this whole thing just a call to create a "Sports Science" program? Because that's already available at many German universities (bachelors or masters!). I absolutely don't see a problem offering this as a degree option, like physical therapy or kinesiology with a specific focus on sports.
posted by LizBoBiz at 1:40 AM on October 26, 2020 [1 favorite]


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