An Additional, Deeper Irony in the Penny Press!

Perhaps the greatest irony in the week's Penny Press also cropped up in The Atlantic, where historian Taylor Branch responds to some of the many reader opinions generated by his recent article about college athletics. In that article, Branch outlines the enormous amounts of money colleges make off their 'amateur' players, who are technically student-athletes and who don't get paid. Certainly there are iniquities in that system, but Branch chose to underscore them in an untenable way: by reviving the old college-athletes-as-slaves argument and hammering on it.

Such a gambit raised a few hackles, most certainly including my own, and in this latest issue, Branch responds:

Let me respond to Steve Donoghue on the slavery analogy. He is one of many readers who find it extreme and inaccurate, but I stand by the comparison because I think it illuminates patterns of thought. My analogy was qualified, of course. College athletes are not literally slaves. However, they have in common the fact that immense wealth has been create from their skilled, diligent labor, in such a way that denies them the full rights of American citizenship.

... Anyone who wonders how slavery survived so long would do well to ponder the NCAA. It rests on fiat an inertia. People shy away from considering its basic justification, because there is none. Similarly, people once despised the abolitionists, not in defense of slavery in principle, but precisely because they were upset that the abolitionists were right.

 

My grandmother would have said "Stop digging before you bury yourself." First, you can't stand by a comparison that's flawed not at its fringes but at its heart, any more than you can qualify an analogy by vitiating its central tenet. College athletes aren't denied any "rights" as American citizens that all other college students aren't also denied; the "rights" to which Branch is alluding have been specifically abrogated by the athletes themselves, when they entered their colleges and Big Ten universities with their eyes wide open. Those athletes don't get nothing in exchange for their physical skills - and they get a whole hell of a lot more than the slaves in Branch's analogy did: not just food and shelter, but a free ride at their school (often to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars that non-ball-bouncing students actually have to pay) - a degree from Yale or Brown or Stanford. Yes, the schools exploit the popularity of college athletics to generate money off the 'diligent' work of these athletes, but the 'pattern of thought' illustrated is greed, not ownership. And there's plenty of greed to go around; as I pointed out in that earlier post, the entire superstructure about which Branch achieves such moral indignation is built on the greed of its student athletes and their parents. And their greed would be utterly unrecognizable to the slaves in Branch's analogy - they're hungry not to be free but to be multi-millionaires in four years or less. They know that they're not allowed to demand a multi-million salary while they're students - they voluntarily become students anyway, to play the long odds for those multi-millions the instant they graduate. There is no part of that reality which compares in any way with slavery, a system whose inhabitants entered into it involuntarily, with no hope of freedom, much less mind-staggering wealth. What Branch should have written this time around was "Look, the more I researched the iniquities and inequalities of college sports, the more hot under the collar I got, and in rage I wrote those slavery-comparison bits, but I see now I went too far."

And even such a backtrack wouldn't explain that second quoted paragraph! People despised abolitionists because they hated the fact that abolitionists were right? As with the slavery analogy, so too here: it's almost possible to forget that the writer of this nonsense is in fact one of the greatest historians America has ever produced, author of the incredible America in the King Years trilogy that should be required reading at every college and university in the country (this is, of course, the deeper irony). I know he must know this, but after reading that second quoted paragraph, I feel compelled to point it out anyway: Racists hated abolitionists because they thought those abolitionists were "nigger-lovers" - most certainly NOT because they secretly knew slavery was wrong. Slavery in America flourished because bigots actively used the Bible and majority tyranny to enforce it - not because of some self-loathing Freudian contortion.

I've almost never read such a statement from a working professional, and I can't account for it. We're all entitled to our occasional howlers, but yeesh - to put it mildly, William Lloyd Garrison would have been amazed to learn that the mobs screaming for his blood were actually agreeing with him ...

 

 

Shame and Acclaim in the Penny Press!

Naturally, I was as outraged as anybody else by the long litany of greed and corruption detailed in Taylor Branch's Atlantic cover story "The Shame of College Sports," but I was equally irritated by the never-pretty sight of a heavyweight professional historian getting carried away with himself in the bright spotlight of one of the nation's greatest magazines.

The problem isn't Branch's writing, which is top-notch as always, nor his research, which is depressingly thorough and damning. The problem is the central conceit he appears gravitationally drawn to:

Slavery analogies should be used carefully. College athletes are not slaves. Yet to survey the scene - corporations and universities enriching themselves on the backs of uncompensated young men, whose status as "student-athletes" deprives them of the right to due process guaranteed by the Constitution - is to catch an unmistakable whiff of the plantation.

Yes indeed, slavery analogies should be used carefully - and Branch doesn't do that. The first step to 'carefully' would be 'sparingly,' but the whole college-athlete-as-slave motif shows up six times in this article. And even the repetition would be excusable if the idea itself were warranted, but it's not. What it is, of course, is a gross historical insult.

Coaches may be oblivious or worse (and I know from worse; I had an up-close ring-side seat for the height of Hayden Fry's reign over the University of Iowa); recruiters may be unscrupulous; school administrators may be complicit and greedy ... but college athletes are still there voluntarily, and the last time I checked, the most central defining aspect of slavery is that it's involuntary. And the slaves who are there involuntarily dream of their freedom - not of eventually owning the plantation: Branch's simplistic moral geometry omits one of the central forces driving the whole shoddy, money-grubbing apparatus that is college sports today - the players themselves.

Those players - the stars among them most of all - aren't bought in Ghana and shipped to East Lansing. Their parents and coaches and recruiters might dream of endorsements and trophies and money, but the players themselves have dreams too - of endorsements and trophies and just mountains and mountains of money. Branch comes to what he styles as an inevitable moral conclusion - that these college players should be paid something for playing, especially considering how much the colleges are gaining from having them around. But colleges make money from all their students, and the bespectacled kid in the computer science lab who's going to leave college and make $4 billion doesn't expect to be paid while he's on campus. Star college players in football and basketball and baseball can expect to make millions from professional franchises when they graduate - franchises that would never have had a chance to see what they could do post-high school if not for all those expensive new college sports arenas. Calling those athletes slaves when so many of them will go on to lives of ridiculous wealth (or even when so many of them have the chance for such ridiculous wealth) is the kind of grotesque blunder only an impassioned historian could commit.

Fortunately, as always with The Atlantic there are compensations. There's the mighty Ben Schwarz, for instance, this time writing a perfectly-constructed brief appreciation of the problematically unfriendly American writer Ambrose Bierce, or the always-great B. R. Myers, this time writing about, of all things, Australian crime-fiction and getting in several shots at the often distressingly minimal writing of the modern murder-thriller:

"I'll bet you don't skip dialogue," Elmore Leonard says. I'll bet you don't buy books for it, either. If the novel is to survive in this distracted digital age, it must do more, not less, of what only the novel can do.

That (plus his priceless quip that crime fiction is "largely a matter of people answering doorbells") can restore so much of what the put-upon reader needs - especially after that cover, showing an athletic black arm branded by the NCAAP. I realize cover-designers are trying to get people talking, but still ...