Individualizing conflict: how ideology enables college athletes’ educational compromises

ABSTRACT

This article explores how the ideology of individualism sustains a conflictual school/sport intercollegiate system within the neoliberalism university [Giroux, Henry A. 2014. Neoliberalism’s War Against Higher Education. Chicago: Haymarket Press]. Life-history interview with 47 U.S. collegiate athletes reveal how institutional conditions cultivated an individualistic subjectivity [Althusser, Louis. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy and Others Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press] that led participants to internalize school/sport conflict and alter their behavior rather than to externalize conflict and alter the institution. Upon entering University, athletes named the institutional challenges created through combining elite athletics and academics. Rather than identifying structural solutions to conflicts, athletes’ interactions within a neoliberal university codified an individualistic subjectivity in which participants internalized institutional conflict as something they must singularly defeat. Athletes then mitigated the conflict by compromising their educational ambitions. By individualizing conflict, higher education remained insulated from meaningful change. Findings demonstrate why future reform platforms must encompass broad institutional change alongside an ideological critique to temper the reproduction of an incompatible educational and athletic system.

KEYWORDS:

• Individualism
• ideology
• neoliberalism
• college sport
• life-history interviews

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Lisa García Bedolla, Raka Ray, and Zeus Leonardo for their continued support and feedback to advance my research agenda. I would also like to thank the team at CEDaR for their assistance to revise, format, and polish this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Kirsten Hextrum is an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Dr Hextrum earned her PhD in Education specializing in Cultural Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her professional career in college athlete academic support services and personal experience as a Division I athlete inform her research, teaching, and activism. Dr Hextrum’s research positions school-sponsored-sports as social settings that can maintain and/or contest power systems. A variety of top-tier journals published her research including Harvard Educational Review, Sport, Education and Society, and a forthcoming article for Teachers College Record. Her work has also received public coverage in The Atlantic, San Francisco Chronicle, and Inside Higher Education.

ORCID

Kirsten Hextrum http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1683-6609

Notes

1 ‘Revenue sports’ (men’s football and basketball) have commercial potential and ‘non-revenue sports’ have limited commercial potential (all other sports) (Fountain and Finley 2009). I use the terms ‘college athlete’ or and ‘athlete’ instead ‘student-athlete’ because the NCAA invented the latter to limit athlete compensation (Southall and Staurowsky 2013).