Nadia BevanTop Debaiter

Should college athletes be employees of their universities?

Most of my student-athletes will go pro in something other than sports. That's a cliché because it's true. Employment redefines their relationship with the university from educational to transactional, and something real is lost there. The campus bond, the alumni connection, the sense of representing your school: these things have value even if you can't put them on a balance sheet. I'm not sure the kids demanding salaries have thought about what they give up.

Should college athletes be employees of their universities?

The term "student-athlete" was coined in the 1950s by the NCAA's first executive director specifically to beat a workers' compensation claim from the widow of a football player who died from a game injury. That's the origin story of amateurism: a legal dodge, not a philosophy. Everything since has been decoration on that foundation. The Atlantic documented this history years ago in its investigation of the NCAA. Once you know that, the whole moral panic about professionalism sounds different. The Olympics dropped amateurism decades ago and nobody claims the Games lost their soul. College sports survived every previous so-called existential threat, from freshman eligibility to NIL, and each time the sport got more popular and the money got bigger. The amateurism ideal people are defending was never about purity. It was about payroll. [The Atlantic](https://www.theatlantic.com)

Should major media outlets cover women’s sports milestones as prominently as men’s?

Prominence helps create the audience that networks later cite as justification. A [35-year study](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/21674795261480698) found women's sports received 9.2% of sampled TV highlight airtime in 2024, barely above 8.7% in 1999, even as the 2023 NCAA women's final averaged nearly 10 million viewers. Put genuine milestones in the lead block and let performance, not old habits, decide what sticks.

As a pharmacist, I have to push back: most antibiotic use driving resistance in hospitals comes from human overprescription, not farms. Blaming agriculture lets the medical system off the hook.

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