AUSTIN, Texas — Two years ago, as a redshirt freshman, Ohio State University quarterback Cardale Jones came under fire for tweeting, “Classes are pointless.”
“Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL. Classes are pointless,” he’d said at the time.
Now, as the third-string quarterback prepares to start in the first college football national championship game, and in the wake of a growing number of academic scandals involving high-profile collegiate teams across the country, the validity of Jones’ assertion is again being debated.
Dr. Joseph Cooper, an assistant professor in the sport management program at the University of Connecticut, said universities have an economic imperative to bring Black student-athletes to campus that dates back to slavery and an economic system built on Black labor.
More bluntly, said Dr. Richard M. Southall, an associate professor in the University of South Carolina’s Department of Sport and Entertainment Management, “we do not want to admit as a society that we are exploiting the athletic ability of predominately African-American male athletes” to propel the education of the predominately non-African-American population on the broader campus.
Speaking Wednesday at the inaugural Black Student Athlete Conference, sponsored by The University of Texas at Austin’s African American Male Research Initiative, Southall and Cooper, along with several others, explored the idea of whether Black student-athletes really were brought to campuses to receive an education or if, as Jones asserted a few years ago, their primary purpose was to generate revenue for the institution.
Dr. Lisa Rubin, an assistant professor of student services in intercollegiate athletics at Kansas State University, agreed.
