The head of an institution with a vested interest in maintaining the current college sports business model is unhappy about recent attempts to change it. Who could have predicted such a thing?
In late March a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board ruled that scholarship football players at Northwestern are employees and are therefore eligible to form a union. Northwestern immediately said it would appeal the decision, and at a press conference on Sunday the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, Mark Emmert, described unionization as an almost existential threat.
"To be perfectly frank, the notion of using a union employee model to address the challenges that do exist in intercollegiate athletics is something that strikes most people as a grossly inappropriate solution to the problems," he said. "It would blow up everything about the collegiate model of athletics."
Later he added: "There's some things that need to get fixed. They're working very aggressively to do that. No one up here believes that the way you fix that is by converting student-athletes into unionized employees."
At least he admitted that there are "problems." But the notion that colleges are "working very aggressively" to fix them is debatable. (The Division I board of directors will vote this summer on a plan to give the five largest conferences more autonomy and may adjust rules dealing with scholarship renewal and contact with agents, among other matters.) And his scolding tone was galling. The N.L.R.B. did not "convert" Northwestern players into unionized employees — it recognized that they effectively were employees.
Unionization may not, indeed, be the most elegant response to the exploitation of college athletes. As the general counsel of the American Council on Education, Ada Meloy, wrote in a letter to The Times, "applying the legal label of 'employees' to tens of thousands of student-athletes opens the door to many troubling questions, and few good answers."
There may be unintended consequences; but let's keep in mind that unionization is itself the unintended consequence of colleges requiring "amateurs" to train and compete like professionals, and making money — in some cases, a whole lot of money — off of their labor. That fact, and not unionization, is what deserves to be called "grossly inappropriate."
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