Cheering on the Collegiate Model: Creating, Disseminating, and Imbedding the NCAA’s Redefinition of Amateurism

In January 2012, during his “State of the Association” address, National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) President Mark Emmert urged members to fix the “collegiate model.” Imbedded in the speech’s framework, this relatively new term in the NCAA national office’s lexicon has received spontaneous consent from the association, member universities, and other college-sport constituents including administrators, coaches, athletes, reporters and journalists, and college-sport fans. This anchor—“The Collegiate Model of Athletics”—has been adopted without disclosure regarding its genesis, dissemination, and insertion into college-sport’s institutional consciousness. This process of achieving spontaneous consent among constituents provides a case study illustrating the NCAA’s position as a hegemon, the institutional logics that sustain such hegemony, and the effective use of propaganda to quell critical examination of and dissent to the created collegiate model of athletics. Such examination reveals this process has not only been detrimental to higher education and the general public, but particularly harmful to college athletes.