From Rachel Toor
Inside Higher Ed covers athletics only occasionally, and I pay little attention to sports (except during March). But during one week in 2017, I saw news stories of football players kneeling in protest at a game and read the report on Aaron Hernandez’s autopsy, which revealed severe brain damage from repeated head trauma.
For someone who doesn’t get football, all I could think about was how players are treated like commodities to be bought and sold, with their physical dimensions listed like chattel. I began to ponder connections between this system of exploitation and— Well, never mind.
I wrote an essay. But before I submitted it to my old friend and future work wife, Doug Lederman, I sent it as a courtesy to the then-president of my university. I had initially written it as a letter to her—a former college athlete and my sometime running companion—asking her to get rid of football on moral grounds.
She called me late at night and begged me to keep her name out of it. She asked that I craft my message to “members of the campus community.” I didn’t do that, but having a sense of who had the real power in this conversation, and not wanting to do her harm, I rewrote it and addressed it to the “dear trustees.”
I got some thumbs up from readers of IHE, but when the piece was republished as an op-ed in my local paper, I got delightful hate mail, including one message that started out, “Look here, missy!” I heard how furious the intended readership of that piece—the trustees—were at me.
I’ve long said my best students are often athletes, farm kids, and military vets. And as someone who has competed in something like 70 to 80 marathon-length and longer races, I value all the things we learn from taxing our bodies and minds. I’m all for both-and rather than either-or.
When I first started working on The Sandbox, I had to get Doug to explain to me what was happening with conference realignment. When he told me that Duke would be playing Stanford, that UNC would be going up against Berkeley, I thought, Why aren’t students protesting that? Cross-country travel for all teams? Isn’t this the generation that is worried about climate destruction?
Earlier this year, I attended a basketball game with a university president who explained the House settlement to me. She was struggling with the decision about opting in to the wackadoodle new system of direct athlete payments.
All I could say was, “Are you freaking kidding me?”
So I was delighted to get the piece below from another current president.
