Unionized College Athletics: Another Liberal Boondoggle
By Dr. Carole Hornsby Haynes | April 16, 2014
College sports have long been an important part of college life. Now thanks to the liberal agenda of social justice, that now seems to be going by the wayside like so many other things American.
Unions, desperate for new members – i.e. more money to control the political arena -- have targeted college athletics as new territory. Not lost on them has been the highly lucrative business of college sports for many universities.
With Obama’s cronies inside the National Labor Relations Board, the ruling that Northwestern University football players are employees and entitled to form a labor union came as no surprise.
College athletes also filed a federal lawsuit against the NCAA charging that the conferences are making billions off college football and basketball players.
In a nutshell: greed takes front center stage. The players want a piece of the gate.
Many football players earn scholarships that will, in exchange for their training and playing, provide them with a free education in preparation for profitable careers later. Some will move on to the big leagues and make millions of dollars as professionals.
If student players think they should be paid big bucks to play, perhaps they should skip college and go straight to the pros after high school graduation. However, the pros don’t recruit new players from high school, only from colleges. So high graduates will have to wait until age 21 and gain experience and visibility playing for other teams, while hoping to be recruited by the pros. But that is iffy.
Student players are forgetting about the many benefits they receive through the college -- invaluable training in world class facilities, top notch coaches, and a pathway to the pros, education for a profitable career later in life.
It seems they’re forgetting who’s bringing them to the dance.
As for the students who are suing to have the NCAA rules changed, no one held the gun to their heads to force them to sign an agreement with the college. Yet now they are suing for what they consider their rightful fair share of the billions of dollars the NCAA earns while paying princely sums to coaches and paupers pittances to them in the form of scholarships.
Forcing colleges to unionize athletics is the proverbial camel’s nose in the tent of college athletics as momentum to change NCAA rules gathers steam.
As always with unions, the issue is not as simple as it appears on the surface. Domination will occur in college sports along with collective bargaining, strikes and sit-downs. It will undoubtedly reach out to other extra-curricular activities, perhaps to band members or cheerleaders or the swim team.
With unionization, some schools could be eliminated.
According to Henry Bienen, Northwestern’s president emeritus, giving athletes the right to unionize might chase schools from top-level intercollegiate sports.
The time has come to have a discussion about what we expect from our colleges. Is it unionized athletics or attaining a better education? Sports are a very important part of college life, but certainly they are not a profession.
The U.S. economy is in the tank, foreign policy is scorned on the world stage, ObamaCare is sinking faster than the Titanic, and Common Core is proving itself to be just “common” instead of world class.
That’s not enough transformational change, so now they are destroying another piece of Americana – our treasured collegiate sports programs. For that is surely what is going to happen with this latest liberal cockeyed notion of unionizing college athletics.