1st Edition

Intercollegiate Athletics, Inc. How Big-Time College Sports Cheat Students, Taxpayers, and Academics

By James Bennett Copyright 2020
    230 Pages
    by Routledge

    230 Pages
    by Routledge

    Intercollegiate Athletics, Inc. examines the corrupting influence and damaging financial effects of big-time intercollegiate athletics, especially football and to a lesser extent basketball, on American higher education.

    Including historical and contemporary perspectives, the book traces the growth of intercollegiate sports from largely student-run activities supervised by faculty to the gargantuan, taxpayer-supported spectacles that now dominate many public universities. It investigates the regressive student fees that have helped subsidize big-time sports at public universities and prop up chronically unprofitable athletic departments, as well as the corrosive effects of athletics on the university’s academic enterprise. A review of the alleged salutary effects of massive sports programs, such as spurring alumni donations and student applications, reveals that such benefits are largely illusory, more myth than real. The book also pays special attention to the often prescient, if largely unsuccessful, opponents of these developments, and considers the alternatives to big-time athletics, from abolition to professionalization to club sports.

    Students, scholars, sports fans, and those interested in learning how big-time football and basketball have cast such an enormous—and often baleful—shadow upon American colleges and universities will profit from this provocative and engagingly written book.

    1. Introduction  2. From Brutal Gentlemen Amateurs To "Student-Athletes" On the Payroll: The Development Of Intercollegiate Sports  3. Stopping Football in Its Tracks—Or Getting Run Over  4. Athletic Fees Rout Hapless Students: The College Sports Scandal That Never Makes the Headlines  5. Money Changes Everything  6. Athletics: The Best Boost Academics Ever Had?  7. "A Game for Every Girl And A Girl For Every Game?": A Brief Look At How Women's Sports Lost Their Virtue And Became Carbon Copies Of The Male Game  8. Reform—Or Renewal?

    Biography

    James T. Bennett is Professor of Political Economy and Public Policy at George Mason University, USA, and a prolific author. His research interests focus on public policy, political economy, and labor economics.