A few thoughts on the NLRB decision on Northwestern U athletics

There's nothing surprising about the decision, which decrees that private-university athletes are de facto employees, based on the fact that their scholarships are tied to performance on the field.  After all, the NLRB, in its post-American incarnation, loves to see anybody anywhere unionize.

The college-athletics realm had this coming, even if it's a truly destructive decision.  While it was a stretch to define scholarships as pay, it wasn't all that much of a stretch in this era of scouts having a microscopic knowledge of the talent pool in the nation's high schools, the garish recruiting overtures, the ridiculous amount of power athletic departments have come to have vis-à-vis- the overall university structure.  The pretty illusion that college sports participants are just earnest young folks seeking to hone their physical skills and competitive spirit as a sideline to their main focus of optimizing their understanding of the human condition has been exposed for being just that for a long time.  In that sense, I suppose it's a wake-up call to all of us about just what our priorities are.

And, in this day of junk science and humanities departments turned into sewers of indoctrination, it's not like we're losing anything of great value like we did when higher education could really be taken seriously as a civilizational necessity.

But, as is the case with the Dietary Guidelines Committee I posted about yesterday - or the EPA, or the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, or FHer-care, to name a few of this regime's outlaw functions - this episode points out that when the leviathan state creates its little agencies and boards immersed in concerns found nowhere in the U.S. Constitution, it's never long before mischief is brewing.

UPDATE: John Kass at the Chicago Tribune reminds us that this was all foreseen in the 1930s by University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins.  Hutchins made a decision about how to deal with it that reverberates to this day:

In those days, the U. of C. was a national football powerhouse. The first Heisman Trophy winner was a U. of C. back named John Jacob "Jay" Berwanger, who was awarded the trophy in 1935.

But America's football mania turned Hutchins' stomach. The game didn't bother him as much as the hype, the crooked recruiting, the corruption and the gambling.

So in 1939 he astonished the nation, and angered the sportswriters, by dropping varsity football from the U. of C.

"College football: I do not see the relationship of those highly industrialized affairs on Saturday afternoons to higher learning in America," Hutchins said.

Here's another Hutchins quote:

"Football has done much to disseminate and confirm the popular misconception that a university is either a kindergarten or a country club."

When I was a high school football player, I thought Hutchins was a monster. It was only later that I realized he was a hero.

Of course, football is back at the U. of C., only now, they don't run a big-time program. They're in Division III.

And that's just fine. Division III athletes aren't allowed to practice year-round and run extensive offseason programs.

They play before smaller crowds. They don't get full rides. The coaches don't have shoe contracts. The bookies don't care.

Division III athletes are students. No matter what the sport, they play for the love of the game, not for the love of the money.

Those young people who care more about sports than academics should go pro, where unions are already allowed. Let the pros establish minor leagues, instead of using the colleges for that.

Take the money out of football, and the hustlers, pimps and weasels will go elsewhere.

Which does not in any way preclude keeping a close eye on troublemaking government agencies like the NLRB.