I think I'll probably go with the first topic I mentioned (how college sports affect academics and help or harm the school's finances) if only because the other topic I mentioned was too similar to the paper we just wrote.
I found sources mentioning how very few sports programs actually make any money for colleges. The first one I found was this one, as well as this one from investopedia. I also found some articles mentioning how college sports are funded, and how football and men's basketball are the only sports which actually make money. The key terms that were the most useful were "do college sports make money" and "college sports and academics/"
The articles I found all seem pretty useful for my point. I also want to try to use a book we mentioned in class, called Confessions of a Spoilsport, especially since it is about Rutgers and will probably give me a good deal of information on the topic.
There doesn't really seem to be much controversy on the topic. The universities which seem to support sports look like they do it because they think it will generate money, which the facts seem to be that it either generates no gains or very minimal gains. I'm not sure what I'll uncover in further research, but I think I will probably see that the cost of college sports pretty much outweigh the benefits.
Sorry for not commenting sooner, but I am glad you settled on the sports topic. Professor William Dowling's Confessions of a Spoilsport is a good place to start, even if it is a little dated, not quite an 'academic' source, and a bit too self-congratulatory. I used to have a copy but loaned it out to a student and never got it back. Dowling (who appears to be on leave this term and will probably teach his last classes in Spring 2016) was among the first to make the argument you suggested in your first post that college sports might damage academics, and he offers a number of angles on that, and all with a Rutgers perspective in mind. He discusses former president Richard McCormick's mixed feelings about college sports, and I can get you the chapter from McCormick's Raised at Rutgers where he offers more of a status quo position on football.
ReplyDeleteAnother important book for you would be Beer and Circus, parts of which I have posted in our supplemental readings on Sakai.