A new plan to pay college athletes

A new means of paying college football players has been proposed. To shirt legal and NCAA rules, some have suggested that players could be paid through monies raised through crowd sourcing of fans. The fact that this would be the wrong to be righted says something disturbing about American values.

Colleges and universities squirm under the shady ethics that money brings. School presidents routinely pay themselves fractions of what they pay the football coach. Presidents jump when bigwigs want a coach fired.

Sports facilities are built when other priorities are clear because that’s where the money is. One more time values skewed by money. Many serious, hardworking student scholars never get the perks and the life preservers thrown that football players do. And these scholars came to college to actually get a degree.

Obviously, I am against this latest and any plan to pay college athletes. I’ll share a story that I rarely tell. As a student at Tulane University, I majored in mathematics, minored in chemistry, studied three languages as well as art history. I was Phi Beta Kappa, won Woodrow Wilson and National Science Foundation Fellowships, got a scholarship to Harvard for summer study, was the top student in mathematics and won the Dean’s Medal for highest GPA in the College of Arts and Sciences. I went on to get graduate degrees and had a career of teaching of 45 years. In college I put in at least as many hours on my work as any athlete did on studies, practice and play.

There’s a small, engraved piece of metal on a small plaque with my name on it in some obscure office on the Tulane campus. That’s all okay with me. But it’s still hard to believe in the integrity of education when I pass the athletic trophy case.

We can find the football player on the way to the NFL, but we can’t find the scholar on the way to the Nobel Prize.