Why not pay college actors like college athletes?

When Connecticut’s U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy talks about college sports, he uses the word “business.” That’s the problem.

Once upon a time, college sports existed on campus as extracurricular activity subordinate to all things academic, but on many campuses that has not been true for decades.

Nowadays, education has completely fallen away from the discussion of big-time college sports. Money is everything, except in such platitudes as “Athletes learn life lessons.” Does this inanity mean that important lessons can’t be learned in classes such as U.S. history? While sports enjoys a period of enormous growth in higher education, flush with funds given by the university, history departments shrink because of limited resources and irrational attacks.

Many studies have demonstrated that college athletics do not raise funds for a college, but rather that academics subsidize sports. The amount that a Division I institution spends per athlete far surpasses what it pays per nonathlete. No one seems to believe these facts no matter how often stated, no matter how many administrators and trustees receive the reports. The University of Hartford, perhaps, is the exception.

After receiving a report geared to its particular situation, the University of Hartford made the wise decision to move its sports programs from Division I to Division III. It’s a matter not only of survival, but of ethics, of the right thing to do. It is a fact: UConn athletics operates at a deficit. The athletic department there drains resources from many academic departments, from nursing to English, from chemistry to social work.

What is a university? Does it exist to provide professional opportunity for young athletes? Sounds like that might be Sen. Murphy’s university of the near future. He has introduced legislation in Congress to allow college athletes to make money off their names, images and likenesses. The Connecticut General Assembly passed a bill this year allowing this.

Where does this end? Should theater departments pay undergraduate performers a salary? Did Yale University pay a salary to Jodie Foster when she studied in New Haven?

Let’s take the business out of college sports and put sports back into (and under) the educational mission.

As the editors of the 2017 Brookings Institution report “Unwinding Madness: What Went Wrong with College Sports and How to Fix It” wrote:

“Change can move college sports further toward commercialization and professionalism, or it can endeavor to reinforce the historical vision of college sports as an amateur activity subordinated to and in harmony with the educational mission of U.S. colleges.” Let’s stick with the educational mission. Over a hundred years ago — when college sports had started their proliferation — the eminent writer W.E.B. Du Bois said that “the true college will ever have one goal, not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.” Let’s sit down at that table. Amen.