SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Now is a good time to take a reflective walk with the president of the University of Notre Dame, through the woods behind his office in a golden-domed building, beside two lakes named after saints. A good time, and a serene setting, to ponder a sacred matter of profound moral implications: college athletics.
With the advent of another football season, the accusations of student-athlete exploitation continue to unnerve higher education — the growing demand that student-athletes share in the revenue they generate; the calls for N.C.A.A. reform; the push for unionization; academic fraud, sexual assaults, seamy cover-ups. It’s that 1932 Marx Brothers movie about college football, “Horse Feathers,” only without the laughs.
Nowhere are these questions of morality and justice more pressing than at this academic powerhouse with a football emphasis — or this football powerhouse with an academic emphasis. Notre Dame’s Catholic foundation informs everything here, down to the likeness of Jesus looming over home games, arms raised as if signaling a touchdown, or encouraging the faithful to do the wave.
Its president, the Rev. John I. Jenkins, 61, walking at the moment with head bowed in thought, may not be much of a football man; he is more Aquinas scholar than Rockne acolyte. But he can read the field. He sees the changes coming.
He knows that some detest Notre Dame’s storied football program, down to the constant use of “storied.” He also knows that for all its emphasis on nourishing the soul and improving the mind, Notre Dame is sometimes dismissed as just another exploitative enterprise — an Ohio State in priestly garb — reaping considerable revenue from the toil of football players who see none of the money.
Father Jenkins, a passionate defender of his alma mater, has considered the arguments. He agrees that the N.C.A.A. is struggling to find its role on a changed playing field. And, in what may come as a surprise, he suggests that student-athletes should be able to monetize their fame, with limits.
But he adamantly opposes a model in which college sheds what is left of its amateur ways for a semiprofessional structure — one in which universities pay their athletes. “Our relationship to these young people is to educate them, to help them grow,” he says. “Not to be their agent for financial gain.”
And if that somehow comes to pass, he says, Notre Dame will leave the profitable industrial complex that is elite college football, boosters be damned, and explore the creation of a conference with like-minded universities.
That’s right: Notre Dame would take its 23.9-karat-gold-flecked football helmets and play elsewhere.
“Perhaps institutions will make decisions about where they want to go — a semipro model or a different, more educational model — and I welcome that,” Father Jenkins says. “I wouldn’t consider that a bad outcome, and I think there would be schools that would do that.”
Pundits scoffed when Jack Swarbrick, the university’s athletic director, voiced similar sentiments this year. No way would Notre Dame — practically French for college football — set aside its national ambitions and settle for Saturday matchups against, say, Carnegie Mellon.
Think of it, they reasoned. Television and sports-apparel contracts would dry up, alumni generosity would decline, and the best athletes would go elsewhere. Notre Dame would no longer be ... Notre Dame.
The scholar-president disagrees. Notre Dame will remain Notre Dame no matter what, he says, fully aware that he is on the record.
More at link
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/11/sports...&smtyp=cur
/
"Notre Dame President Stands Firm Amid Shifts in College Football":
![[Image: storm_cloud_over_yucatan_mexico.jpg]](http://wp.loadstorm.com/wp-content/uploads/files/storm_cloud_over_yucatan_mexico.jpg)
