For decades, a small but passionate group of academics has offered a potential balm for the fraught relationship between athletics and education at major universities: Allow students to major in sports.
One such educator is David Hollander, a clinical professor at New York University’s School of Professional Studies. He has spent years espousing the intellectual value of basketball — positionless play, he says, can teach entrepreneurial thinking, and fast breaks can teach interpersonal communication. Mr. Hollander lobbied for the Catholic Church to name a patron saint of basketball (it did) and helped convince the United Nations to declare Dec. 21 World Basketball Day.
Within the next year, in what he sees as a small step in the road toward athletics being taken seriously in the academy, Mr. Hollander is planning to teach a course for varsity, Olympic and professional athletes in which their experiences playing and practicing their sport will be part of the curriculum.
“You can get a degree right now in higher education, in dance and art and music, drama,” Mr. Hollander said. “And I think those are totally valid degrees. They’re portals into the human condition.”
He added: “I don’t see how athletics is any different. How that ancient cultural form, like those ancient cultural forms that I’ve mentioned, are not intrinsically academically meritorious.”
Recently, the ideas of educators like Mr. Hollander found a notably influential audience: the sports apparel company Nike, which pumps hundreds of millions of dollars into college sports through its numerous sponsorship agreements.
Nike wants to lobby universities to offer minors or majors in athletics. Students would earn credits for time spent working on their sport (in other words, practicing and playing it) and also for taking classes in a more theoretical curriculum that helps them understand the social, cultural, anthropological and physiological elements of athletics.
Some models suggest the major could include sport-specific strategy courses, along with courses in nutrition, performance psychology and physiology. It is an idea that has gained momentum in an era when athletes are now able to be compensated for their name, image and likeness, or N.I.L., which allows some of the most popular student athletes to be paid as much or more than some professionals.
“We think that there’s enough interest from the colleges that Nike works with to be able to make this happen,” said John Jowers, vice president of communications at Nike.
Mr. Jowers said he believed that while N.I.L. was disrupting the financial models of college athletics, the direct focus on money took college sports “further and further away from the kind of core principles around education and college athletics in general.”
Giving athletes the opportunity to major in sports “closes that gap by offering something really, really radical, really new and actually really beneficial to colleges and universities,” he said.
Mr. Jowers said the notion of offering a major in sports interested Nike because it would allow them to create cultural impact in a way that benefits athletes and be on the forefront of important conversations.
Nike has a new chief executive, Elliott Hill, who has been tasked with reviving its business. During an earnings call in December, Mr. Hill said he wanted to see Nike return to its roots by focusing on sports rather than lifestyle apparel, and centering on its athletes. It’s an ambition that dovetails nicely with its push for a sports major.
Some skeptics, however, postulate that for Nike to help bring about this change in the way colleges treat sports would be a marketing coup for the company, and a way for it to further ingratiate itself with young athletes.
“I think the sports major is basically being proposed to rationalize and justify the time on the field,” said Nathan Tublitz, an emeritus professor of biology at the University of Oregon. “And it certainly wouldn’t be as intellectually rigorous as any other academic subject.”
While the rise of N.I.L. has invigorated the argument for a sports major, the idea of making sports a more integrated part of the curriculum has been around for decades.
In 1995, The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article by professors from Oregon State and Miami University in Ohio saying the academy needed to take the study of sports more seriously.
Drew Hyland, an emeritus professor of philosophy professor at Trinity College, argued for integrating athletics with education in a book chapter published in 2017. In a 2020 column, Sally Jenkins of The Washington Post cited this argument, saying that by not including sports in academia, “we’ve taken one of the most critical fields of human learning and dumbed it down with our own prejudices and guilt.”
Erianne Weight, a professor of sport administration at the University of North Carolina, started researching the idea after a 2014 meeting with faculty that followed a wide-ranging academic scandal involving their sports programs. Athletes had been guided to register for classes that didn’t exist or lacked rigor, and often had grades artificially improved so that they could stay eligible to play.
Ms. Weight remembered that some of her colleagues, angry at the damage to the school’s reputation, wanted its storied athletic department, that of Michael Jordan, Lawrence Taylor and Mia Hamm, dissolved.
She asked a colleague what the difference was between an athlete and a musician or dancer who pursued a degree at the university.
“The response I got, from a distinguished faculty member, was, ‘I can have an intelligent conversation with one and I cannot with the other,’” Ms. Weight said.
A few years later, Cameron Johnson, who now plays for the Brooklyn Nets, became a masters student in Ms. Weight’s department and often discussed the perception of athletes and the idea of a sports major with her.
“I’ve been told in the work force being a college athlete is valuable,” Mr. Johnson said. “You learn teamwork, you learn dedication, you learn about adversity. These are real things. These are real topics. And I also just think bringing them to light would enhance their benefits.”
Another one of Ms. Weight’s students, Molly Harry, wrote her masters thesis about how people perceived an athletics major. In a survey she conducted, participants were told that such a major would connect learning that happens in an athletic environment with a classroom component, with the students getting credit for both. An example she gave was that strength training could be paired with a course on applied exercise physiology.
Among the groups surveyed — coaches, athletes and faculty — the faculty respondents were the most resistant to the idea.
“It is a complex sort of concept,” Ms. Harry, now an assistant professor at the University of Florida, said. “We have to be adaptable and creative with our ideas. And I think sports is a space where creativity runs rampant. Right? So why couldn’t we come up with a rigorous, innovative curriculum through sport?”
Ms. Harry has yet to urge her university to create such a program because, she said, she would like to have a well-researched degree plan before doing so. She envisions a degree program in which athletes and nonathletes can participate.
Ms. Weight, who recently connected with Mr. Hollander, is interested in building a major on “expertise” that would explore what it takes to be a highly trained athlete, and possibly instruct students about skills they need to take full advantage of N.I.L. opportunities like marketing and branding. These types of courses, she said, would “pair their passion with science.”
Mr. Hollander has not formulated a full curriculum for a major yet, but believes participation in a sport could be treated like a for-credit internship, supplemented with relevant courses about the founding principles of sport or about what can be learned through athletics.
“You have to ensure the validity of it,” Mr. Johnson of the Nets said. “Because the immediate criticism will be athletes will go in there to do nothing.”
For some skeptics that’s part of the concern.
Mr. Tublitz, the emeritus biology professor at Oregon, who was the president of the university senate, said that most of the athletes who took his courses were excellent students, but he did not think sports satisfied universities’ goals of “critical thinking skills and improving oral and written expression.”
He added: “One argument for this type of major is that sports, and the competitive sports specifically, contribute to the formation of a holistic integrated person. Makes persons more mature. And that’s true. But so does traveling. So does reading. So does gardening, cooking.”
Mr. Tublitz thinks the amount of money involved in college sports makes it difficult to compare to subjects like dance or theater. If a dancer misses a performance because they become ineligible because of poor grades, that doesn’t affect a university’s bottom line in the way it could if a star football player misses games.
John Davidson, a professor of Germanic language and film studies at The Ohio State University and the school’s faculty athletics representative, said he worried about conflicts of interest if coaches were allowed to weigh in on their players’ grades. Those coaches would have an incentive to have the athletes pass courses so that they maintained eligibility, whether their work deserved it or not.
He said he also had concerns about the new financial models for college sports and how they would interact with offering majors in sports. College athletes can now be paid for sponsorship deals, and some universities are working on revenue sharing deals that would allow the athletes to earn some of the money they help generate.
“That simply complicates the potential pressures that come to bear in this world,” Mr. Davidson said. “I could see that being problematic for the attempts to put some kind of academically-based frame around athletics.”
Mr. Davidson thinks that universities already have majors that would satisfy the desire for an athlete to be able to focus on a career in sports — such as kinesiology and sport industry. Those, he said, meet “academic and intellectual tests” better than some ideas he’s seen about sports majors.
Right now, however, it’s unclear exactly how Nike will lobby for this to happen. One possibility is that the company might help to convene groups of educators, administrators and others involved in college sports to discuss how best to execute an athletics major.
Duncan Robinson, a forward for the Miami Heat, has ideas. He majored in sports management and political science at the University of Michigan and said he believes that majors like sports management are not enough, because they focus more on the business of athletics than the intrinsic participation in the sport.
Mr. Robinson began his college basketball career at Williams College, a liberal arts college with Division III basketball, and later transferred to Michigan. The Miami Heat signed him after he was not drafted out of college. Mr. Robinson has now made more than $70 million.
In his mind, the resiliency required to navigate so many changes and disappointments to establish himself in the N.B.A. is an example of the life skills one can learn through sports, which merit formalization in an academic major. The only way to develop that particular skill, he said, “is to be in these sort of complicated situations where you’re questioning all sorts of realities around you and you’re wondering why you’re doing this. And you come out on the other side of that, you just get a little bit better.”
He added, “I haven’t found a better teacher and better challenger of that muscle than athletics.”
Mr. Robinson isn’t sure he would have majored in basketball, or sports in general, had it been an option in college.
“Athletes are people,” he said, chuckling. “I have a lot of interests outside of just sports.”
The filmmaker RaMell Ross thinks this way, too.
Mr. Ross, who played basketball at Georgetown University, said he would “definitely not” have majored in sports had that been available. His career path, which was influenced by photography and literature courses, would seem to be an argument against it. Still, he thinks offering a major in sports is a “beautiful idea.”
“I think what this maybe speaks to is what needs to be a complete reconfiguration of the way that student athletes are treated and opportunities that are offered to them,” Mr. Ross said in a phone interview a few hours after his film “Nickel Boys” received Academy Award nominations for best adapted screenplay and best picture. “I wasn’t allowed to take any classes after 3 p.m. For my entire five years. Tons of majors were cut off for me.”
Mr. Ross majored in English and sociology at Georgetown and later earned a masters of fine arts in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design. He constantly sees connections between his career now and sports: the way photographers and basketball players must mentally suspend time; the fact that quarterbacks in football and point guards in basketball “deal with space the way cameras deal with space.”
“The athletes that I’ve had the pleasure of playing with are some of the smartest people I’ve ever met,” Mr. Ross said. “The language is so physiological and so cellular and so ineffable that I think there’s ways to tie it into more traditional disciplines, and that really excites me.”
