This article makes it sound like college sports as we know it ride on this union decision.
The decision revolves around the definition of employee. Are revenue producing athletes "employees"? If they win this argument and are allowed to unionize, they then start negotiating pay, many other teams will try and unionize and I agree this changes everything in college sports.
Thoughts?
Northwestern athletes' union push will change college sports
http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20140204/OPINION/140209970?r=6112G2540690E4Z#The attempt by Northwestern University's football players to form a union is a tribute to the way Northwestern treats and educates it athletes.
In contrast to, say, Clemson or Auburn or Florida State universities, Northwestern provides teams for its students; it does not recruit dubious students for its teams.
Driven by the billions of dollars generated by college football and men's basketball, most big-time sports programs bend and stretch the rules and their academic standards as they gather players for football teams that can qualify for bowl games and basketball teams that can qualify for the NCAA Final Four tournament. Coaches guide athletes into easy majors and courses that ensure that the players will be awarded grades that will keep them eligible to play.
I'm an adjunct instructor at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, teaching a seminar on sports journalism. The university's president, Morton Schapiro, mentioned in my seminar that he personally checks the school's 6,000 course offerings, searching for clusters of athletes. If he discovers that more than 20 percent of the students in a course are athletes, he investigates and makes any necessary changes.
A more typical picture of college athletes and their course selections came at the University of North Carolina, where a course in the Afro-American Studies Department entitled “Blacks in North Carolina” included 18 Tar Heel football players in its roster of 19 students. The course never met. None of the students completed the required term papers. And all the athletes passed and remained eligible. We know of the UNC situation only because of a newspaper investigation and the indictment of the course professor on a charge of defrauding the university.
SIGNIFICANT CHANGE
The athletes at Northwestern stay eligible by taking real courses, going to class, earning their grades and graduating. The school's graduation rate for athletes is the highest of all schools participating in big-time sports. Its rate of graduation for African-American athletes (83 percent) is higher than the average undergraduate graduation rate for all students in all schools (73 percent), according to a study by the University of Pennsylvania.
Kain Colter, a star quarterback and the leader of the football players' effort to form a union, is a pre-med student majoring in psychology. His idea to form the union in an effort to improve the working conditions of his fellow players came as he listened to a professor describe how the steelworkers union improved the workplace for its members.
Northwestern will fight Mr. Colter and the players before the National Labor Relations Board, asserting that the players are students and not employees, but the players' effort is an obvious product of their Northwestern educations and a demonstration of their capacity for critical thinking and their ability to ask the right questions.
Whatever happens at the NLRB and in the courts, the Northwestern athletes' action is a major step in a process that will result in significant changes in college sports. Athletes in other schools, coaches, athletic directors, university presidents and governing board members are talking about the Northwestern football players and what they have done.
Thanks to these players and the educations they received as athletes at Northwestern, a time may soon arrive when the exploitation of college athletes will end and they will be treated with respect and enjoy the educations that they deserve. It's nice to win on the field, but these athletes are doing something more important.
Lester Munson, senior writer and legal analyst at ESPN, has worked in sports journalism for 24 years.
