Controversy at Clemson highlights racial inequities in college sports
Like nearly every industry on the planet, the Covid-19 pandemic has done a number on college athletics in the United States. Not the big-ticket sports you see on TV on a Saturday afternoon, although even those are going through belt-tightening at some universities. So-called olympic sports such as swimming and tennis – the ones that don’t bring in money – are getting whacked altogether to cut costs across the country.
The casualties include the men’s track and field program at Clemson University, which has prompted a campaign by alumni and current team members to push the school to reverse the decision. In the process, their initiative, #SaveClemsonTF, shines a spotlight on the racial inequities that underpin the billion-dollar business of college sports.
The group released a video presentation that sums up its case:
The long and short is that Clemson is discontinuing men’s track and field, which has a majority Black roster, to save money to reinvest in olympic sports, whose team members are predominantly white. #SaveClemsonTF points out that the track and field program currently accounts for two-thirds of the Black male athletes in the school’s non-revenue sports. (Baseball, golf, tennis and soccer comprise Clemson’s other non-revenue/olympic sports on the men’s side.) Overall, more than 70% of athletes involved in olympic sports at Clemson are white.
So consider how the Clemson athletic department is balancing its books. The money being used to fund all of its endeavors comes from two sports with high Black participation rates, football and men’s basketball. Funds are flowing out from those sports to sustain sports played by a population of majority-white students. Now, the school is zeroing out funding for a majority-Black program and transferring that spending to predominantly white sports.
The demographics of students involved in Clemson athletics mirror participation rates all over the university level. Even though the specifics of this campaign apply narrowly to the men’s track and field program at Clemson, it still illustrates the broader dynamic across the college landscape that bounties made possible by Black players by and large flow to white-dominant programs. So when administrators in higher education and influential figures in college sports laud the enriching opportunities afforded to “student-athletes,” we should apply more rigorous scrutiny to the ways in which schools allocate those opportunities.
