How is one to address the ethical implosion on campus, from pampered student bullies to timid professors to invertebrate presidents? We forget that the campus is a contradiction in terms. American higher education fears the consequences of its own ideology—from its exploitation of part-time Ph.D. faculty to the scam of hiking the rate of tuition increases above the rate of inflation and pegging it to guaranteed student loans, which it knows its customers cannot pay back.
More to the point, things won’t change until alumni, donors, and the public cease to support financially those campuses that refuse to protect freedoms as enshrined in the Bill of Rights and that empower rather than discipline student lawbreakers.
Instead of athletic teams threatening to strike and not play, the public should preempt them and simply not attend their games or watch them on television.
In justifying the boycott, the public can cite perhaps football and basketball programs’ lack of diversity and proportional ethnic, gender, and racial representation; their propensity statistically to be cited for campus sexual violence at a higher rate than true of the campus in general; and the dire need to address the disparate impact of their recruitment and scholarship policies—as well as their privileged immunity from the rules about class attendance, exams, and grading that apply to the rest of the student body.
If the public tuned out big-time university football and basketball, and donors stopped supporting politically corrupt administrators and curricula, things would gradually improve. Subsidizing opportunistic fascism is a bad idea.