UCLA Faculty Association: Two Interesting Reads

Monday, June 12, 2023

Two Interesting Reads

The ongoing issue of whether college athletes should be paid (something) is discussed in a recent article in Inside Higher Ed on NIL payments:

It’s been two years since the National Collegiate Athletic Association established policies allowing college athletes to profit off of their name, image and likeness. The NCAA had argued for years that allowing athletes the same rights as every other student would ruin collegiate sports. Critics feared NIL would usher in a pay-to-play era, and many decried the early NIL landscape as a Wild West of unlimited possibilities—and hidden dangers...

Full story at:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/athletics/2023/06/07/two-years-nil-fueling-chaos-college-athletics.

The NY Times has a lengthy piece on the failure of California voters to repeal the anti-affirmative action Prop 209 via Prop 16 in 2020:

The 2020 campaign to restore race-conscious affirmative action in California was close to gospel within the Democratic Party. It drew support from the governor, senators, state legislative leaders and a who’s who of business, nonprofit and labor elites, Black, Latino, white and Asian. The Golden State Warriors, San Francisco Giants and 49ers and Oakland Athletics urged voters to support the referendum, Proposition 16, and remove “systemic barriers.” A commercial noted that Kamala Harris, then a U.S. senator, had endorsed the campaign, and the ad also suggested that to oppose it was to side with white supremacy. Supporters raised many millions of dollars for the referendum and outspent opponents by 19 to 1. “Vote for racial justice!” urged the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.

None of these efforts persuaded Jimmie Romero, a 63-year-old barber who grew up in the working-class Latino neighborhood of Wilmington in Los Angeles. Homelessness, illegal dumping, spiraling rents: He sat in his shop and listed so many problems. Affirmative action was not one of those. “I was upset that they tried to push that,” Mr. Romero recalled in a recent interview. “It was not what matters.”

Mr. Romero was one of millions of California voters, including about half who are Hispanic and a majority who are Asian American, who voted against Proposition 16, which would have restored race-conscious admissions at public universities, and in government hiring and contracting...