Well, whether you like it or not, to make a winning team you need money. One could argue that Leicester has won the Premier League title even though they invested far less money than, for example, Manchester United or other clubs, but that was an exception. Fact is, in the long run, if you want to be a big club, you need money. Bayern Munich is Bayern Munich, Barcelona is Barcelona, Real Madrid is Real Madrid and so on. You cannot build a great team without money. I think you have a good example with Lazio. When I was at Lazio, Sergio Cragnotti was the chairman and owner of the club, and he invested a lot of money. And then, after he left, all changed. Lazio are still a big club. Maybe they have the chance to win the Serie A title now and then, but they are not Juventus.
The statement reminds me of why I stopped being a baseball
fan many years ago. The Baltimore
Orioles were my Lazio. They would never be the
Red Sox or Yankees.
It struck me that this almost self-evident assertion is true
of more than football and baseball—indeed, is true of higher education. And in higher education, disparate resources play
an out-sized role in perpetuating socio-economic disparity and widening the gap
of opportunity and wealth that afflicts the United States.
In Arkansas, where I started in academics, the public higher
ed system was loosely and unofficially divided in just this way. The well-resourced University of Arkansas—the
top tier never needs a geographic locator (Fayetteville)—served the state’s
elite. The slimly resourced University of
Arkansas at Little Rock served an urban working class. And the resource-starved University of Arkansas
at Pine Bluff served the rural and poor—disproportionately African American. The same dynamic described the state’s law
schools in Fayetteville and Little Rock (with few graduate options in Pine
Bluff). Incentivized by monied
interests, as usual in politics, the state legislature perennially resisted calls to level the playing field. The schools themselves were complicit in maintaining the status quo.
I thought Massachusetts would take a more progressive
approach with its first and only public law school in Dartmouth. It hasn’t, at least not yet. Boston’s many private schools fill in the
top-tier options in Massachusetts, while the law school, affiliated with UMass Dartmouth, fits in at the Little Rock-like
mid-level, focusing on the working-class South Coast. The otherwise elite “UMass” (Amherst), the state
flagship, has legal research resources—for that matter, research resources in
any field—superior to UMass Dartmouth’s, even with no law school there. UMass Boston might be the state’s Pine
Bluff. Each campus knows its place and
stays in its socio-economic lane.
There is limited revenue sharing to level the playing field
in European soccer and in American baseball.
Those measures resulted when, and only insofar as, the un-level playing
field was recognized as a threat to the survival of the sport business model. That’s OK; sport is business.
Higher education isn’t business. Higher education is supposed to be about
opportunity for all those who merit it. To
be clear, this is a libertarian ideal.
Higher education is about teaching people to fish, not giving fish away. It’s potentially the best social welfare program
ever conceived.
I was reminded of this sport-ed money analogy this morning
when I received a text alert that the main library at UMass Dartmouth is
closing because of an air conditioning failure—again. I wonder how often the A/C fails at UMass (Amherst).
You cannot build a great library, law
school, university, or team without money.
As a society, we have to come to grips with the role of money
in higher education—especially the money managed by foundations that purport
independence and entitlement to opacity despite being under the direct control of supposedly transparent public universities.
We have to decide whether higher ed will continue to be part of the
wealth-and-opportunity gap problem or part of the solution. The UMass campuses east of Amherst deserve more than an occasional title. They should all be Juventus.
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