We need to be honest about just how screwed up this country is and how its institutions are in maddening crises.

We need to talk about things like higher education, college football, and the madness that is about to unfold with in-person instruction during a pandemic.

1/

Before we dive into it, we have to state a few things.

- College football is the driving force behind in-person classes.

- College football has become one of the main drivers of higher education.

- There is NO REASON AT ALL why higher education depends on college football.

2/

If aliens were to land on Earth and ask for an introduction to how things work, they would look at something like higher education and college football and the dependency and be absolutely stunned.

We're been socialized into it, but the entire situation is maddening.

3/

We should start with a recent conference call with the SEC, the most powerful football conference.

Players had honest, mature questions and got nothing even approaching decent, actual answers.

Why?

Because this situation isn't logical at all.

4/

The NCAA, the "governing" body has already said there had to be in-person classes in order for there to be football.

It was responsible and honest, but for college DEPENDING on football, it meant there HAD to be in-person classes.

There was no going back at that point.

5/

Here's the problem: higher education has become a giant business instead of a public service.

It has been commodified and sports like college football have become huge draws, both in terms of tickets but also advertising.

None of this, btw, involves learning or preparation.

6/

Before I go further: a confession.

I love college sports. Always have. I am a huge fan and it's something I have to wrestle with, my part in this whole thing.

I also love the school pride, how it unites people. But what it has become is simply insidious.

7/

What was revealed on that SEC call is something all us professors have known and understood.

The universities HAVE to reopen for in-person classes because every one of these schools is operating with razor-thin budgets.

Why? Because they're businesses.

8/

If football doesn't happen, if in-person classes don't happen, many universities will fall into an economic crisis.

Many will fold. Others will face even worsening austerity.

It's the financial situation that has been created that has made this a "necessary" risk.

9/

What we don't want to talk about is how terribly mismanaged and commodified higher education has become.

Administrators treating it like a business, not to mention legislatures using austerity and "economic goals" has made this an incredibly fragile house of cards.

10/

Faced with a school potentially losing tens of millions of dollars, with potentially closing, with worsening austerity, schools HAVE to have in-person classes, both for tuition and for football.

Think about that. Look at it. Chew on it.

None of this makes any sense.

11/

High education needs bailed out on a massive scale.

Unbelievable amounts of money.

But it also needs reworked, because this current system was unstable, exploitative, and completely flawed.

This crisis has been building FOR YEARS. The pandemic only hastened it.

12/

Now, schools are having to force athletics even while it's unsafe and to do that they're forcing students into unsafe situations, and relying on unenforceable rules, haphazard plans, and are just waiting for major, tragic outbreaks.

13/

But this discussion needs to touch on the athletic system, which is just...barbaric.

We're asking unpaid athletes with possible future careers to take risks we don't even understand yet.

All in order to try and save a system that is crumbling by the hour.

14/

In order to prop up a house of cards built on chips and soft drinks sponsoring games and pumping out insipid commercials, we're asking young men to sacrifice their futures, their health, and possibly the lives of their families and friends.

15/

And if you have watched even a single college football game, you know that NONE OF THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH HIGHER EDUCATION.

The only connections are the logos, the bands, and the fans. Everything else?

Minor league sports.

16/

The disturbing truth is that the current system exists because the NFL and NBA aren't interested in paying for robust minor league programs.

America's colleges have taken over that responsibility, leading to this really disgusting system.

17/

A healthier world would look like NCAA baseball and the Minor League Baseball system, where players could be signed out of high school while some others played for colleges.

But the NFL and NBA are being saved TONS of money and college were happy to takeover for profit.

18/

This is part of why higher education was so commodifed and perverted into a business.

Taking care of big-ticket sports meant you needed more administrators, and administrators needed to build more buildings, fund more programs, etc. etc. etc.

19/

A lot of what you and your children and family members are paying for are the salaries of administrators and programs meant to continue this messed-up minor league sports system.

Meanwhile, educators continue to get paid less, tenure is being destroyed, and students suffer.

20/

There have been grotesque consequences to the commodification of higher education.

Student debt has skyrocketed, leaving a generation with unbelievable burdens.

But it's also corroded the heart and soul of higher education.

21/

Like other corporations, colleges now hide scandals, use PR tricks and rhetoric to get beyond issues while never actually addressing them.

It is corporate avoidance along with forever delegation of responsibility.

Like other businesses, it just gets worse and worse.

22/

Now, public education on the college level is being turned into a soulless entity unwilling to take responsibility for failures and unwilling to gift people even basic human dignity.

It uses its students, its student-athletes, its faculty, its staff as disposable cogs.

23/

We are approaching a moment of reckoning.

In a country that functioned, we wouldn't have gotten here, we wouldn't be thrusting young people into the maw of a generation pandemic.

We need a giant bailout and a massive restructuring. We need it badly and we need it now.

24/

Everything in this country is falling apart because everything was falling apart for years. Trump is only hastening the decline and making it obvious.

We have to diagnose these systemic problems, reckon with what went so wrong, and change course.

We don't have much time.

25/25

PS/ If you haven’t noticed, the crisis in higher education is a microcosm of the US crisis, a sibling to so many other crises.

The through-line is hypercapitalism, the need for unending greed and ceaseless “growth.” Everything is out of whack and needs massive restructuring.

PPS/ It is not enough to keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them. We are marching into an ever-worsening tragedy and we got here through so many mistakes.

We need a reflection, a reconsidering. We have to change course and it needs to happen as soon as possible.