Greene's article is thought provoking if not provocative. He questions the possibility of professionalizing, and indeed privatizing, one of the leading (labor) industries of America. The implication here is for the better of the student athletes who, despite popular lore, are not the "kings" of campus many suppose; nor are all higher eduction college athletics the "fund- siphoning" hogs they're often made out to be in the press and hasty academic censure. However, Greene's mentioning of the harsh reality that many athletes can lose their scholarship for any reason holds water for many of us former D1 athletes who know all too well the ways in which our scholarships--often, the only means for many of us from working class, racially and ethnic minoritized, and first generation higher education backgrounds to attend an accredited 4 year research institution--can be treated like a carrot held out in front of our noses. Frequent body composition tests, daily monitoring and restricting of dietary habits and an uncomfortably latent presence of sports medicine bodily intervention and regulation, grueling training hours and schedules, the imposition of "dry season" regulations and game day curfews--all of these explicit and subtle "rules" the average college athlete is expected to follow to comply with both NCAA and team ideology function as an effective technology of power to regulate and control the student-athlete's daily physical activity and interactions, movements, and even beliefs on a campus. We are, in short, being made into, somewhat paradoxically, Foucault's "docile bodies": bodies fashioned by compulsive body work to maintain the peak physique and performance necessary to secure our scholarships and thus attain a college education.
In truth, Greene's argument is too simple. Too implied. I assume he refers here to the "money making" sports when he speaks of professionalization--precisely why this is such an ethical and controversial issue. While we might argue that the NCAA exploits the potential privatizing and profitable potentials of athletes, the truth is that less than 1% of student-athletes will go pro; those that do are often rewarded handsomely and enter a whole new institution of power thereafter. But college athletics was never intended to be an arena of professionalization. It was mean to be an extended space of higher education and leisure. And the disbanding of the AIAW and the passage of Title IX created further difficulties in how NCAA would regulate how organized sport would function in the higher education apparatus to service the leisure and talent of men and women. In general, the agreement is that student-athletes should be students first, athletes second; athletics should be a means to attaining a higher education. Whence the lack of athletic funding for Division III and Ivy League institutions.
If college athletics were to professionalize, the exigency for an athlete to attend college for an education would be fraught with complications. What would the motivation for academic excellence be when they would become an "employee" of the institution whose paycheck is removed from the web of relations that comprise the general student's college experience and educational expectations? What responsibility/ies would college athletes hold to the higher ed institution, its mission statement, educational principles? And when that athlete's career ends, what of their potentials for careers in non-athletic related sectors of corporate America? This is, of course, not even to mention the great divide between revenue generating and non-revenue generating sports. And one last question I want to ask is, for whom does this prospect of privatization ultimately benefit? The (student-)athlete, or the institution? Obviously, the questions are complex, and there are, alas, no hard and fast solutions.
While I sympathize with Greene's intentions here, I also question what I perceive as a narrowness and simplicity of perspective. There are a lot of implicit assumptions buried in Greene's argument that continue to suggest that to speak of "college athletics" in the popular press is to invoke the lore and status of traditionally revenue-generating male sports. Greene's pontifications surrounding the lore of college athletics don't necessarily jive with most college athletes' experiences. And just because one can shoot hoops well doesn't mean they don't struggle with other aspects of systematic and structural isolation and marginalization on college campuses; this not even speaking of of the struggles women college athletes continue to face as they struggle for institutional legitimacy and support at the higher education level, let alone the professional level.
Like Greene, I too don't wonder if professionalization would be a boon or bane for college athletics. But I suspect, as perhaps the cynic in me as former student-athlete-turned-academic-scholar does, it would the latter.
