Intercollegiate athletics is under assault from all sides. Its economic model is yielding increasing and unsustainable deficits and widening inequality. Coaches and athletic directors are the highest paid employees at FBS universities (NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision) by factors of five to ten, or more. Athletes are being cheated on their promised education, do not receive adequate medical care, and are not allowed to receive cash income. Substantial change, either toward reasserting the intended primacy of education for intercollegiate athletes or a further surrender to commercialism, is coming. This book lays out the starkly different paths that college sports reform can follow and what the ramifications will be on the athletes and on the institutions in which they are enrolled.

​For several decades in America, athletic programs in colleges and universities received financial support and resources primarily from their respective schools and such sources as alumni and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). More recently, however, college coaches assigned to athletic departments and the presidents and marketing or public relations officials of schools organize, initiate, and participate in fund-raising campaigns and thus obtain a portion of revenue for their sports programs from local, regional and national businesses, and from other private donors, groups, and organizations. Because of this inflow of assets and financial capital, intercollegiate athletic budgets and types of sports expanded and in turn, these programs became increasingly important, popular, and reputable as revenue and cost centers within American schools of higher education.​​

Arguing that college athletics actually represent a large-scale commercial interest that is hostile to the values of higher education, the author explores the tension between big sports revenues and academics across the board in college sports.

After modern science turns every human into a genetic time bomb with men dying at age twenty-five and women dying at age twenty, girls are kidnapped and married off in order to repopulate the world.

Friends and foes of international cooperation puzzle about how to explain order, stability, and predictability in a world without a central authority. How is the world governed in the absence of a world government? This probing yet accessible book examines "global governance" or the sum of the informal and formal values, norms, procedures, and institutions that help states, intergovernmental organizations, civil society, and transnational corporations identify, understand, and address trans-boundary problems. The chasm between the magnitude of a growing number of global threats - climate change, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, financial instabilities, pandemics, to name a few - and the feeble contemporary political structures for international problem-solving provide compelling reasons to read this book. Fitful, tactical, and short-term local responses exist for a growing number of threats and challenges that require sustained, strategic, and longer-run global perspectives and action. Can the framework of global governance help us to better understand the reasons behind this fundamental disconnect as well as possible ways to attenuate its worst aspects? Thomas G. Weiss replies with a guardedly sanguine "yes".

An engaging look at the ways economic thinking can help us understand how sports work both on and off the field "Mr. Oyer writes clearly and ranges across all sorts of sports as well as across the globe, introducing fascinating observations."--Henry D. Fetter, Wall Street Journal Are ticket scalpers good for teams? Should parents push their kids to excel at sports? Why do Koreans dominate women's golf, while Kenyans and Ethiopians dominate marathon racing? Why would Michael Jordan, the greatest player in basketball, pass to Steve Kerr for the game-winning shot? Paul Oyer shows the many ways economics permeates the world of sports. His topics range from the business of sport to how great athletes use economic thinking to outsmart their opponents to why the world's greatest sports powerhouse (at least per capita) is not America or China but the principality of Liechtenstein. Economics explains why some sports cannot stop the use of performance-enhancing drugs while others can, why hundred-million-dollar player contracts are guaranteed in baseball but not in football, how one man was able to set the world of sports betting on its ear--and why it will probably never happen again. This book is an entertaining guide to how a bit of economics can make you a better athlete and a more informed fan.

A critical look at the tension between the larger role of the university and the commercialization of college sports Unwinding Madness is the most comprehensive examination to date of how the NCAA has lost its way in the governance of intercollegiate athletics—and why it is incapable of achieving reform and must be replaced. The NCAA has placed commercial success above its responsibilities to protect the academic primacy, health and well-being of college athletes and fallen into an educational, ethical, and economic crisis. As long as intercollegiate athletics reside in the higher education environment, these programs must be academically compatible with their larger institutions, subordinate to their educational mission, and defensible from a not-for-profit organizational standpoint. The issue has never been a matter of whether intercollegiate athletics belongs in higher education as an extracurricular offering. Rather, the perennial challenge has been how these programs have been governed and conducted. The authors propose detailed solutions, starting with the creation of a new national governance organization to replace the NCAA. At the college level, these proposals will not diminish the revenue production capacity of sports programs but will restore academic integrity to the enterprise, provide fairer treatment of college athletes with better health protections, and restore the rights and freedoms of athletes, which have been taken away by a professionalized athletics mentality that controls the cost of its athlete labor force and overpays coaches and athletic directors. Unwinding Madness recognizes that there is no easy fix to the problems now facing college athletics. But the book does offer common sense, doable solutions that respect the rights of athletes, protects their health and well-being while delivering on the promise of a bona fide educational degree program.

The Golden Football How Greed and Athletics Changed a College Town After a hard day at work, Dr. James Conway, president of Western Montana College (WMC), settled into his favorite arm chair and opened the morning edition of the Missoulian. As he stared at the headlines, a shock wave of anger flowed through his body. It read: “WESTERN MONTANA TO JOIN THE SOUTH ALABAMA CONFERENCE.” His athletic department, primarily the football program, had unilaterally accepted a massive television deal worth millions to bolt from the Western Conference and join one two time zones away. He was the last to know. The writing was on the wall—he had lost control of his beloved college to big money interests and booster organizations. In a war of good versus evil (i.e., spiritual warfare), meet the main characters in this fast-pace saga: Bo Jensen: fantastic running back for the Western Montana College Bears with a promising future in the NFL. Changes in NCAA regulations allowed him to prosper from the sale of a variety of items including ladies thongs. Milton (Milty) Douglas, Esq.: senior partner at The Douglas Law Firm and former Bears football star. His practice was limited to defending “student-athletes” and fraternity/sorority members in their encounters with the law. Almost all the students on campus were familiar with the expression: “If you’re guilty, call Milty.” Bob (“Rooster”) Jones: ill-mannered, corrupt, and abrasive billionaire; and financial supporter of Bears football and former player. Queen Esther: Sigma Phi Beta sorority president, Madam of the sorority’s prostitution ring, and occasional student at WMC after her daily beauty treatments. Jimbo (“The Bear”) Collins: unscrupulous head football coach for the Bears. Mark and Hannah Anderson: pastors at Calvary Chapel, Missoula. They served as counter-weights to an immoral culture that was quickly sliding Missoula and the country into the sewer. Jill Hansen: 20 year-old sophomore at WMC. Raised in a small farming community of Darby, Montana, she was the woman nearly every parent hoped their son would someday marry.

The New England Small College Athletic Conference has won glowing appraisals in the sporting press since its founding in 1971. Established to strengthen intercollegiate sports in harmony with the high academic standards of its members--11 prestigious liberal arts colleges--the NESCAC is committed to equity and inclusion in athletic programs, and to providing only need-based financial aid. The Conference's reputation attracts many gifted student athletes. Drawing extensively on campus archives, media reports and interviews, this book compares the NESCAC's lofty strategy to reality, with a focus on recruiting, admissions, financial aid and diversity goals.

There was a time when crises on college and university campuses were relatively rare and episodic. Much has changed, and it has changed quite rapidly. Drawing upon original research, Crisis Leadership in Higher Education presents a theory-informed framework for academic and administrative leaders who must navigate the institutional and environmental crises that are most germane to institutions of higher education.