Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
So the Dartmouth College basketball team has voted to unionize by joining the Service Employees International Union, setting off a loud explosion in the cartel called the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The team’s theory is that playing on such teams helps promote the college’s PR, and thus finances, and so they should be paid as employees, even though Dartmouth, in Hanover, N.H., provides among the most generous financial aid of any such institution in America, and academics, not athletics, is primary at such “elite” colleges unlike, it seems, at many schools.
I wonder if forcing even fairly small private colleges, such as Dartmouth, to treat athletes as employees will lead some institutions to stop competing in some inter-collegiate sports, including basketball. That sport has never been very big at Dartmouth, by the way. So maybe the college will consign it to merely intramural competition. A reasonable decision.
