written in wall street journalFormer federal prosecutor and longtime television writer/producer Jonathan Shapiro calls Indiana University President Pamela Whitten the school’s “MVP.”
Shapiro is also the author of How to Be Abe Lincoln: Seven Steps to Living a Legendary Lifea book described as “written for those who not only admire Lincoln but want to emulate his rational, pragmatic approach to law, love, leadership, and life.”
As an obvious character expert, one might wonder what accomplishments of President Wheaton led Shapiro to lavish praise on her.
Did she get an MVP for calling on Indiana State Police to arrest students protesting on campus, which included deploying snipers on campus building rooftops?
Was President Whitten the MVP of Indiana University’s attempt to enforce a “no trespass” order against a group of IU faculty, graduate students, and alumni, which resulted in institutional sanctions that were later invalidated in federal court on First Amendment grounds?
Was she the MVP after receiving a vote of no confidence from faculty in April 2024 in response to a petition charging the administration with “violations of academic freedom and shared governance,” including failing to resist an Indiana law that directly attacks tenure and other faculty protections?
Perhaps Shapiro is considering the decision to fire the university’s student media director and adviser. indiana daily student newspaper The newspaper then announced that its print edition could no longer print “news” but was limited to “event guides.”
(This restriction was eventually lifted due to widespread opposition from students, faculty, alumni, and others concerned about free speech.)
I’m not going to fake the suspense anymore because we all know what’s most compelling about IU at this moment. Shapiro praised Pamela Wheaton’s stewardship of the IU football team, which recently completed the season as an undefeated national champion, a feat even more impressive considering IU is historically the losingest football team in Big Ten history.
Shapiro praised Whitten for “adapting to the new world order of college sports faster than most” and for being “good at spotting talent,” including hiring coach Curt Cignetti and locking him in with an $11.6 million annual salary after his initial success, which required “weathering the storm of criticism.”
In Shapiro’s view, the increased attention and revenue generated by this success is a pure benefit, even a necessity compared to the alternatives. As he put it, “The Nobel Prize is nice, but fans of the physics department will never support a new cyclotron.”
Judging from his biography, Shapiro appears to be a man committed to character and justice and to protecting the basic rights of Americans. He was educated at Harvard University, Oxford University and Berkeley. But in this man’s opinion, the key to a college president becoming an MVP is the success of the football team.
Jonathan Shapiro’s opinion piece isn’t the most important or conclusive evidence that some reckoning has to happen when it comes to major revenue sports programs and their host institutions, but reading it felt like a bit of a turning point to me in suggesting that it’s unlikely that the same person will lead an entity and an institution of higher education competing for a national championship in football or basketball in the future.
Everything is too big. There is too much money, and the incentives between education and major revenue-generating sports, always tenuous, are now almost completely misaligned.
If anyone needs more evidence, how about Duke suing a student, Darian Mensah, in an attempt to keep him at the school so he could remain the starting quarterback on a two-year contract reportedly worth $8 million? The two sides settled the dispute, and Mensah now heads to Miami, his third school and this year’s runner-up to Indiana University, with two years of eligibility remaining.
Let me pause for a moment, I am 100% in favor of student-athletes being paid as much as possible, and Mensah and other players moving on to more promising athletic and financial opportunities have done nothing wrong. Anyone who deplores this state of affairs should focus all their anger on the NCAA and its member universities, which had the opportunity to institute a system of paying students for their labor but refused to do so.
In some ways, this relatively unregulated and unmanageable system, which also allows former professional basketball players to return to college, is clearer than the NCAA allowing collective certification and collective bargaining for athletes. The attitudes of people like Jonathan Shapiro only reflect reality: For many colleges, the most important activity is athletics.
But the primary importance of sports cannot coexist with educational institutions under the same leadership. I’d like to hear a serious argument rooted in reality that proves this, because I can’t see it.
The good news is that there are some relatively clear frameworks that point the way to a better future for contemporary universities, both athletics and academics.
Clearly, football, men’s and women’s basketball (and possibly other profitable sports) should be spun off as separate for-profit entities. They will be required to share a portion of their gross revenue with the sponsoring bodies in exchange for rights to names, jerseys and facilities, but otherwise they will operate individually in line with their overriding purpose – winning matches. These entities will be “owned” by some combination of the institution and a separate alumni/booster/other institution. (There are many ways to structure this as a corporate entity. Perhaps the Green Bay Packers’ unique structure could serve as a model.)
Personnel operating revenue-generating athletic entities do not report to the university president. They will be accountable to the same structures we see in other professional sports, such as team presidents or boards of governors. Players will be eligible to concurrently take credit courses at affiliated colleges but will not be required to do so while on the roster as an athlete. Players will receive guaranteed five-year scholarship credit to return to the institution to pursue a degree after their athletic careers are completed.
We may need salary caps and reduced rosters — college football teams typically have more than twice as many players as NFL teams. Current Division I teams do not have the necessary resources to compete as for-profit entities, and they will regress to a truly amateur subdivision, closer to the structure of college sports decades ago.
Large teams, freed from the constraints of the non-profit entities that host them, will be allowed to fully devote themselves to revenue-generating and value-added activities.
My suggestion is that we acknowledge these movements for what they are and then allow them to be what they are, rather than trying to maintain a relationship between two entities that have no reason to transcend tradition.
Things like what I’ve described here are inevitable, although at worst we simply allow the football team to swallow the educational mission, much like President Wheaton apparently accomplished at Indiana University, only on a national scale.
This has the potential to be a win-win for sport and academia, and in the best case scenario, it would reverse the era of subsidies in academia being used to support sport.
All it takes is enough wealthy and important people to push us to do so. For those of us who do not belong to these groups, our job is to ensure that tributes to the remaining academic entities are sufficient to do our job.
