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Q&A with Dan Nathan: Sports as a reflection of society
What's the matter
with a society that offers a football
coach $1 million?
Dan Nathan
In the weeks ahead, America will be busy both celebrating the holiday season with family—and watching college football bowl games. Wherever Ohio State, Alabama, Iowa, and others end up, you can bet their fans will be there—wearing school colors and eyeing every play. They probably won't be thinking about the fact that head coaches at top schools are making almost a million dollars a year on average. But Dan Nathan, associate professor and chair of the Department of American Studies, has given some thought to it. He shares his perspective below.
I know you teach American Studies. What courses do you teach?
My interests are eclectic, so I teach a wide range of subjects. I teach a section of the American Studies gateway course and our methods class. I also teach a course on how Hollywood filmmakers have represented the American past, and another on global perspectives of the United States. I have also taught courses that have a literary bent, such as American autobiography and one about E.L. Doctorow's America. But the one I find the most challenging is my course on American sport, which tries to put sports in their historical and cultural contexts and uses them to talk about issues like commercialization, identity, race, ethnicity, gender, and globalization. (For more on Professor Nathan's background and teaching and research interests, click here.)
Last April, you made a presentation at Penn State University titled "What the hell's the matter with a society that offers a football coach a million dollars?" How did you decide to pursue this question?
I was invited to give a talk at a colloquium and wanted to spend some time thinking about an issue that has fascinated me for many years, namely, the ways in which rooting for local athletes and the home team often symbolizes a community's preferred understanding of itself. So the talk was really about American sports fandom, civic identity, and the politics of belonging, which was its subtitle.
Many years ago I read that Joe Paterno, the legendary Penn State football coach, had once asked (rhetorically, I assume), "What the hell's the matter with a society that offers a football coach a million dollars?" He said this in 1973, when a million-dollar salary for a coach seemed ludicrous to most people. Of course, to some it still does. In fact, just recently USA Today reported, "The million-dollar coach, once a rarity, is now the norm. Head coaches at the NCAA's top-level schools are making an average of $950,000 this year, not counting benefits, incentives, subsidized housing or any of the perks they routinely receive."
It was my intention to use this quote and the anecdote in which it was embedded to begin a conversation about why people in some communities care so passionately about "their" teams, so much so that they would gladly pay a college football coach a small fortune. Like many things in life, the decision to do so is complicated.
How so?
The answers to this question—and there are many good ones—are not just rooted in business, what the market will bear and the fact that many college football teams generate revenue, even though most are in the red. Obviously intercollegiate sports at Division I schools like Penn State and UCLA and the University of Alabama are big businesses, part of a multi-billion dollar a year industry. But the decision to offer a football coach a salary, benefits, and perks that are worth several times more than what the president of the same university earns is rooted in the value that people ascribe to winning, status, identity, and in some places tradition. These decisions are rooted in culture.
You pose the question, "Is it morally wrong?" Where do you come down on this?
It obviously depends on one's sense of morality, that is, what one thinks is right and wrong; the code by which one lives or thinks one should live. Yet even a moral relativist, or someone who is uncomfortable projecting or imposing her conceptions of equity and justice on others, can recognize that there is something, say, unsightly if not repulsive about football coaches and athletes (and actors and musicians) being paid 50 or 100 times more than public school teachers, fire fighters, and police officers.
But morally wrong? Not to me—and I'm very critical of big-time college athletics—as it doesn't violate my core principles. If the people who run institutions of higher education, most of which have tax-exempt status because our government believes that they contribute to the common good, think they need to pay football coaches many times more than the highest paid faculty members, that's their business. I'm just glad I don't work at such a place.
That said, a thoughtful colleague of mine believes that we can reasonably describe a system and a society in which fundamental needs go unmet while a football coach is paid eight figures as immoral. He's got a good point.
But speaking of morality, a strong sense of rectitude is one of the qualities that Paterno embodies for many people and this is, I suspect, one of the reasons he is and has long-been a cultural icon and for some, a folk hero. Yes, all the winning helps: Americans love a winner. But Paterno does more than just coach the Penn State football team. He represents his university. And I'm sure it's challenging to be a living symbol.
Where does Skidmore College fit into this conversation? Or does it?
Skidmore and other small colleges do fit into this conversation. Obviously Skidmore and its competitors do not play big-time sports and have not sold their institutional integrity and soul to television networks like CBS and ESPN. We play small-time sports. Proudly. Still, our commitment to athletics is substantial. The college devotes significant resources to this activity: time, energy, space, and money. Why? Because we think it serves a useful function, that it's a salutary activity, that it's good for the school and for our students. But the key here and at many other liberal arts colleges, unlike places where football coaches make millions of dollars, is that our commitment to athletics does not undercut or make a mockery of our stated mission, which is education and scholarship, not hosting televised athletic spectacles. Skidmore's teams and athletes, it seems to me, operate within an institutional framework that is consistent with who we are and want to be. ~ Interview by Peter MacDonald, Office of Communications
Posted On: 12/11/2009
Tags: penn state university, big-time college sports, dan nathan
