Aug. 23--Labor is not what it used to be, or even where it used to be, and to find it among the Northwestern football team is like finding a crowbar in with the cuff links.
Northwestern is one of the places, after all, that uses the snob school chant when losing, "That's all right, that's OK, you will work for us one day."
So, striking a blow for the working stiffs can seem a bit like a stunt. But let us not doubt the sincerity of the attempt, rather applaud the effort.
It can't hurt and it might help, despite the National Labor Relations Board patting the guys on the helmet and saying, "Nice try, fellas."
The Northwestern union suit did alert us to what we already know. To paraphrase an old Oklahoma chancellor, the goal is to have a university its football team can be proud of. Bear Bryant once wondered if 60,000 people ever rallied around a math class. Alas, no, and more's the pity.
We will not adjust our preoccupation with polls and bowls and all the rest of the college folderol that has nearly nothing to do with why colleges exist in the first place.
There may be no more distorted designation in sports than "student-athlete." In truth, some are one, some are the other, some are both and a few are neither.
But the very fact colleges feel compelled to identify their assorted warriors as students assumes there is some doubt. Not that they are athletes, but that they are students. The term calls attention to the two pillars of college sports, hood and wink. Pay no attention to that rich alumnus behind the curtain.
There should be no reason to identify a college student as anything other than a student, not a student-actor, or a student-journalist or a student-engineer.
I was once a student teacher, which meant that I was in training to be a teacher. A student-athlete is not learning to be an athlete, otherwise he or she would not have been recruited and promised an education, along with all the other things that go with the scholarship, like spending too much time being an athlete to be a student.
Still, I suppose, there is a degree of decency in the term, better than being a student-employee, which is what the Northwestern suit was all about.
And, by the way, I was once a student employee, which meant I worked for the university while I was a student, stocking books in the Ohio State college book store, passing them out to scholarship athletes at the beginning of each term and collecting them when they were returned. More often than not, a new book would be given back without one page being turned or one item underlined or one note written in the margin, which is the usual way student-students treat text books.
I knew then that athletes, certainly the very best ones, are not in college to be students. The sham does not mean colleges should exploit their athletes, as they do to make a whole lot of money, without giving some of it back. But it is a street with two-way traffic.
Of course college athletes use their games to make money, if not immediately then as soon as they can. The least profitable thing you can be in college basketball is a senior. One and done. That is the state motto of Kentucky.
In any other area of a college, say, in Coach Bryant's math class, if a whiz in arithmetic can sell his skill to anyone who will buy it, he still will be able to study mathematics. If a student writer publishes a novel in his freshman year, he does not have to wait until after he graduates to collect the royalties.
A college athlete can not benefit from being an athlete, but the school can benefit from him being one. A school can sell an individual's likeness, but the individual cannot sell his own. This is the land behind the looking glass and down the rabbit hole.
Nice try, fellas.
Lincicome is a special contributor to the Chicago Tribune.
