In recent years, the business of college athletics has become a touchstone issue in U.S. public culture. Growing critical attention to the topic can be attributed in part to the work of civil rights historian Taylor Branch, whose 2011 article in The Atlantic, "The Shame of College Sports," argued that the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) oversees the exploitation of college athletes. "Two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence-'amateurism' and the 'student-athlete'-are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes." 1 In addition to Branch's piece, the acclaimed 2013 documentary film Schooled, based largely on his analysis, helped to invigorate a national conversation about the economics of college athletics. 2 Media discussion of the issue has remained rather narrowly focused on questions of dollars and cents-whether college athletes in the so-called revenue-generating sports (men's basketball and football) ought to be paid beyond their current scholarships in light of the vast and increasing amount of revenue their labor generates. Advocates of "pay-for-play" cite figures like the exorbitant salaries that make head coaches the highest-paid public employees in most states and television contracts like ESPN's recent 12-year, $5.64 billion deal to broadcast college football playoff games. 3 Defenders of the NCAA amateur model cite the fact that athletes are already compensated in the form of a "free college education," a commodity that, given rising tuition rates, grows increasingly valuable every year.
Observers from a variety of quarters have remarked in recent years that contemporary civic life lacks the great public minds that helped to shape the public discourse of earlier generations. The most pressing crisis facing intellectual life in the United States in the age of the corporate university, however, is not a lack of great public thinkers but rather a quickly eroding public sphere, of which university teachers and researchers are key members. Examining struggles over and emerging from the conditions of contemporary academic work, this article recasts the public intellectual debate. It argues that the academic labor movement, in responding to the conditions of the corporate university and broader challenges to the public sphere, contains powerful models of public intellectual practice. In particular, the article highlights graduate employee unionism as critical public intellectual work.
Examining three critical periods of transformation in the history of professional football in the United States, this article demonstrates the centrality of the workplace to the development of the National Football League (NFL). The article argues that the NFL originated in the welfare capitalism of the early 1920s; that mass-mediated narratives about corporate management drove pro football's coming-of-age in the 1950s and 1960s; and that fantasy football-the NFL's most distinctive new form of spectatorship in the age of digital capitalism-positioned fans as imaginary managers of human capital. Taken together, these three pivotal moments demonstrate the inextricable links between changes in professional sports and transformations in the organization of work.
Few individuals have so fundamentally changed the business of sports as Marvin J. Miller, who served at the helm of the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) during the pivotal period of the mid-1960s through the early 1980s. With Miller's leadership, the MLBPA transformed from a largely ineffective association into one of the most successful labor unions of the second half of the twentieth century. Miller's tenacity as a negotiator and brilliance as a strategist were chief ingredients in the MLBPA's achievement of free agency for veteran players through a landmark arbitration decision in late 1975. His skillful organizing was instrumental in a series of coordinated job actions, including the long strike in the summer of 1981 through which the players succeeded in defending the system of free agency they had worked so hard to secure. By helping Major League baseball players to build a strong and well-functioning union, Miller brought sweeping change to both the financial operation and broader cultural position of baseball, and US professional sports more broadly.Marvin Miller's critical place in the history of sport deserved the attention of a topnotch biography, and Robert F. Burk was the ideal scholar for the job. His two volumes on the history of labor relations in baseball-Never Just a Game: Players, Owners, and American Baseball to 1920 and Much More than a Game: Players, Owners, and American Baseball since 1921-are definitive works. Burk's biography of Marvin Miller represents another major scholarly contribution, both to the history of sport and the history of the US labor movement. Anyone interested in modern sports unionism will find Burk's study among the most detailed and nuanced treatments of the day-to-day work of organization, negotiation, and confrontation. Furthermore, readers interested in the history of the US labor movement will discover a great deal in Burk's well-researched text.The book consists of 17 short chapters, which are grouped in three parts. The book's first part ("The Making of a Professional Unionist") deals with Miller's upbringing in working-class Brooklyn, his education, and contributions within the US labor movement. Part II ("Baseball Revolutionary") concerns Miller's work as executive director of the MLBPA. Part III ("Defender of the Faith") is a short treatment of Miller's life in retirement, centering in particular on two ways in which Miller remained in the public eye: as an outspoken critic of increased drug testing in baseball, and as a repeatedly denied candidate for the National Baseball Hall of Fame.One of the book's richest contribution is the way it situates Miller's coming-of-age in the context of the American left of the 1930s and 1940s. While aspects of this part of the book may strike some readers as disconnected from the world of baseball, Burk includes a number of wonderful anecdotes that connect the diamond and the picket line. For example, Marvin Miller and his wife Terry served as nominating delegates for Henry Wallace at the Progressive Party'...
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