Listen to the full version of Off Our Rocker’s, Julia.

“Julia” is the last track that our 1960s college band recorded for a 2008 tribute CD to the Beatles. Our weekend reunion was a musical lark, but Lennon’s haunting solo made us hesitate. With some trepidation, we finally decided to go ahead with slight touches of harmony.

Anyone can find samples from two commercial CDs we released as the mock cover group, Off Our Rocker. Or you can simply wait to hear the full songs for free. We did them for fun, anyway–lots of fun–for friends rejuvenated by music. So we’ll post other songs from time to time with our compliments.

The three of us are scattered, with many aches and a few grandchildren, but Off Our Rocker may soon sing again.

Still, with the NCAA’s March Madness approaching, more questions arrive about my recent foray into college sports.  In The Cartel, I concluded that fans and educators have recoiled from basic issues of fairness.  A rationalizing inertia undermines not only the rights of college athletes but the integrity of higher education.

(It is not particularly easy to find quick links to purchase The Cartel as an e-book or paperback on Byliner’s site. As such, I have provided them at the bottom of the blog post)

Here is a question to ponder as the annual frenzy over college basketball builds again in the coming weeks.  Would it matter if the NCAA’s amateur rules were nullified at the vast majority of its 1,066 member schools that do not pursue commercialized sports?

More than 700 Division II and Division III institutions sponsor intense but relatively inconspicuous games, with few athletic scholarships or none.  If permitted, would Pomona College, Florida Southern, and Saginaw Valley barge into the athletic marketplace?  Would Middlebury and Texas Lutheran scramble to give athletes salaries on top of new scholarships?

Invariably, officials at such schools tell me no.  They could not and would not pay players any more than they would offer wages to the drama club or dance troupe.  They say professional shows would violate their educational mission.

I applaud this stance.  No college should be compelled to start a side business or to pay anyone.  We should recognize, however, that this focus at most colleges is grounded in principles and practicality wholly independent of NCAA rules.  Indeed, the heads of smaller schools bristle at any suggestion that they shun commercialized sports because the NCAA requires it.

Here then is the rub.  By lending—or renting—their educational idealism to the NCAA, the smaller colleges create a façade of universal amateurism that shields rapacious, predatory sports programs.  Roughly a tenth of the NCAA membership has chosen to commercialize campus sports to the hilt.  These big-time sports schools chase multimillion-dollar license and broadcast deals to finance a vast, lucrative complex for all but the core talent.   No voices—not even the blue-ribbon reform commissions—forthrightly justify the amateur vows imposed on college players.

A few academic thinkers have begun to cut through this bedrock presumption.  In “The Illusion of Amateurism in College Athletics,” for instance, Warren Zola of Boston College dismantles the NCAA’s claim to exist solely for the educational enhancement of students through sports.  Zola makes clear that education and big-money athletics are separate worlds, with distinct standards.  Managing them starts with honesty.

Suppose for a moment that the 700 smaller colleges either withdrew from the NCAA or used their super-majority within it to renounce one-way amateurism.  Nothing would change for most of these schools.  They would retain proper responsibility both for their athletes in the classroom and for their students in the sports arena. To address conflict, they could apply the three-point agenda I gleaned from campus consultations last year: [1] Transparency (in academic and financial records); [2] Balance (in goals for education and sports); and [3] Equity (in governance).

By contrast, the powerhouse sports programs fail a key test of equity: “No freedom shall be abridged because of athletic status.”  The schools strip from athletes many basic freedoms that all fellow students—let alone other citizens—take for granted.  These include the rights of due process, equal opportunity, consent, representation, labor, and fair market value.  Such blanket deprivation lies beyond the reach of any single university or conference.  It has prevailed by NCAA collusion and fiat, without sanction in law.

March Madness brings into focus the commercial engine of college sports.  CBS-Turner pays $771 million directly to the NCAA in broadcast rights for the one-month event.  This huge sum accounts for more than 90 percent of the NCAA’s annual income.  Of the NCAA’s 340 Division I basketball teams, the 68 entrants selected each year come mostly from 124 BCS (Bowl Championship Series) schools that also dominate college football.  An occasional “Cinderella” advances beyond early rounds, but last year, typically, 15 of the “Sweet 16” were BCS teams.

The BCS and NCAA are nervous rivals.  Last month, in an interview with NPR host Tom Hall, I described them as “overlapping cartels.”  The BCS schools, which negotiate separate football contracts, have been jumping around wildly to consolidate bargaining strength in the BCS conferences that will launch a four-team football championship in 2014.  Competitive complaints and legal pressures will push toward a three-round playoff structure, mimicking basketball’s “Elite Eight,” but one thing is certain: the NCAA will have no say or stake in the mammoth television bonuses to be reaped from a BCS gridiron tournament.  It was precisely to avoid sharing revenue with NCAA Headquarters, and with its myriad small colleges, that Big Football revolted from NCAA control in the 1980s.

So the NCAA remains dependent on a basketball monopoly while the BCS builds its competing football juggernaut.  Nearly a thousand humbler colleges and universities give this unstable raw casino a fig leaf of amateur purpose.  They may see no reason to question their minimal participation, which serves tradition and unity.  Yet if dollar-driven campus games rest on the exploitation of athletes, as I contend, corrective action is never wrong.   It might spur a broader wake-up to skewed values in higher education.

To the inevitable howls from our college sports empire, amateur schools have a truly educational response: “If you don’t want to pay your students, don’t use them for business.”

BUY THE CARTEL ONLINE

Electronic media: iTunes | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo
Paperback: Blurb

Simon & Schuster has prepared this trailer of sample enhancements:

An activation link appears in the ebook text at the appropriate spot for each enhancement. Some of my favorite ones, not shown in this trailer, are audio/only excerpts of dramatic phone conversations with President Lyndon Johnson. I helped find and select the illustrations, but I admit seeing the final enhanced ebook only on our son Franklin’s iPad. Frankly, I’m a lifelong lover of hardcover print who has not quite accepted even regular ebooks, and I don’t own a device that can handle the enhanced version.

Inevitably, there are adjustments in new technology. I am told that the enhanced version works beautifully on popular platforms except for Kindle. Because Kindles can access only the ebook text, and some Kindle readers have been disappointed not to have the A/V enhancements, Simon & Schuster issued a guideline statement: *Audio/Video content only available for iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touch devices in iBooks, or a Nook color/tablet (NOT Kindle).

This too will change, and enhanced ebooks probably will expand as publishers master the difficulties of locating and licensing A/V illustrations. Already, I hope, enhancements can help bring The King Years alive for new generations of teachers, students, and general readers. An author like me can describe in words the powerful influence of music in the civil rights era, but it is something else to hear our ebook enhancement of Rutha Harris leading a 1964 freedom workshop in “This Little Light of Mine.”

This class will be experimental and exciting for me in several respects. Most important, the in-class seminar will be accessible without charge via Web connection to a selected group of registered auditors. They will pay no fees and receive no college credit. All we seek from auditors is candid feedback about the content and delivery of this special prototype course.

We hope to develop for the future an in-class seminar that can be shared via the Web by an expandable group of participants from diverse places and backgrounds, registered individually or through institutions for credit. Therefore, for this trial run, the University of Baltimore will accept interested auditors from a wide variety of groups: students and teachers (high school through college), non-degree candidates, general lay readers, and specialists in subject areas from race relations and social movements to government and nonviolence.

Several of the technical departments at the University of Baltimore have cooperated to make the in-class seminar available via the Web to registered auditors simultaneously, by live-stream connection, and also by delayed retrieval and review.

I have taught a similar course several times before, most recently last spring as a visiting Honors professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. Those courses carried intensive reading assignments from texts that included my 2,306-page King-era trilogy. This new course is designed to introduce the most salient events and issues through a more compact core curriculum. The weekly readings are built around the eighteen chapters of my newly released book, The King Years, which is a 190-page guided distillation of the longer work.

Information about the book is available from my website: www.taylorbranch.com.

Information about the course, including registration for potential auditors, is available in the official announcement by the University of Baltimore. The seminar will meet on Wednesdays from 5:30-8:00pm, starting with an introductory session on January 23.

I am especially pleased to have this article published to coincide with the release of my new book, The King Years. Long ago, when I was a graduate student who had not yet even thought of a writing career, the Monthly published excerpts from the diary I kept as an awed voter registration worker in southwest Georgia during the summer of 1969.

Those experiences in civil rights work and journalism opened new paths for me, and in the summer of 1970, on completing my graduate work, I took my first full-time job as an editor for The Washington Monthly. Its founder, Charlie Peters, became a lifetime mentor for me (and many others) in politics and journalism.

The current Monthly article tells one of many small stories buried in our forgetful history of the civil rights era: how Martin Luther King tried and failed to get President John F. Kennedy to abolish racial segregation by executive order in January of 1963, on the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to end slavery.

Lincoln’s historic work to end slavery is very much remembered in contemporary culture through Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated film, Lincoln. The unsuccessful collaboration between MLK and JFK is only a minor echo of that history, but it is well worth remembering in this month of poignant anniversaries about racial politics in 1863, 1963, and 2013. They are sketched in last week’s publication blog for The King Years.

Simon & Schuster has announced a publication date of January 8, 2013 for my new book, The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement. The timing honors a month of epic anniversaries in the unfinished history of freedom in the United States. Consider these three:

1. 150 years ago, in January of 1863, Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation declared forever free nearly 4 million slaves then living under Confederate control. Two years later, as dramatized in the current Steven Spielberg film, Lincoln pushed through the 13th Amendment shortly before his assassination.

2. 50 years ago, in January of 1963, Democratic Governor George Wallace of Alabama delivered his defiant inaugural speech pledging, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” One century after the Civil War, Wallace tried and failed to preserve an old order of unequal rights in the midst of a citizens’ upheaval called the modern civil rights movement (1954-68).

3. Now, in January of 2013, a re-elected Barack Obama takes his oath as the first African-American President of the United States. Equal rights and opportunity have advanced broadly, perhaps miraculously in historical context, but racial issues still are muted as solved, unsolvable, or both. Group voting sharply divides the major political parties.

This compact, 190-page book is a venture for our time of rapid change in communication. Professors and teachers long have complained that while story-telling history is accessible for their students, my multiple thick books are difficult to handle. From another angle, general readers who appreciate narrative have pressed for some distillation of key questions and lessons that have evolved over the thirty-plus years since I began research for Parting the Waters.

It was hard for me to revisit my work, in part because I believe personal detail is vital in cross-racial history. The goal here is to preserve detail from the original language of my civil rights trilogy, sometimes stitched together between volumes, achieving economy by painful selection among the stories told. There is literary blood on my office floor, but I take responsibility for the choices. Combined with new summary introductions for each chapter, which are necessarily more analytical, I aim to deliver accurate narratives that raise salient questions across the full sweep of the civil rights era.

For more information on the nature and content of The King Years, please consult Simon & Schuster’s full press release. Also, my introduction to the book is available for listening in a sample from the audio edition read by Leslie Odom, Jr. The current January 2013 issue of Atlanta Magazine contains an exchange on my personal background for the book since childhood in Atlanta. Finally, there is a January 5 pre-publication interview with Linda Wertheimer on NPR’s “Weekend Edition.”

Postings over the next few days will introduce other new projects related to the book. An enhanced digital edition, for instance, offers audio and video links to illustrate material in the text, including news footage, music, and excerpts from presidential recordings. On the educational front, I hope to build on experience as an adjunct teacher of civil rights history at Goucher College and the University of North Carolina. Starting in this spring semester of 2013, the University of Baltimore will offer to a potentially expandable group of on-line students my weekly seminar built around The King Years.

Thankfully, some things endure in the digital age. The civil rights era has kept me enthralled over a long career writing history. It remains an unsurpassed source of learning on our capacity for justice and free government.

Nocera & Robinson: Student Athletes Only Taught Cynicism from on FORA.tv

Tomorrow morning, in Dallas, I will appear at the national convention for all the college athletic directors in the United States. Here, on page 41 of a voluminous 58-page agenda, the panel features three respected sports leaders.

My role will be to explain and advocate the 3-point reform agenda I first presented in a blog this month. I am nervous in anticipation of controversy, as I will warn that the crucial reforms of transparency and balance are doomed until colleges recognize basic rights for their athletes. Moreover, I plan to argue that the vast majority of schools have blindfolded themselves unnecessarily, and corrupted their core educational mission, by tolerating national rules that impose “amateurism” on athletes to enrich only a hundred or so of the 1,200 NCAA schools among the nation’s 4,000+ colleges overall.

The next day, Thursday June 28, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, I join what should be a fiery panel, entitled, “College Sports at a Crossroads: Entertainment or Education?” Vice President Wallace Renfro will represent the NCAA. New York Times columnist Joe Nocera and I will renew our urgent criticism. Our fellow panelist Craig Robinson, the head coach for men’s basketball at Oregon State University, is better known nationally as the older brother of First Lady Michelle Obama. This conversation could go in a hundred directions. Most of them will be new to audiences, and we hope to find some clarity.

On Friday, from 5:30 to 6:30pm at Aspen’s Hotel Jerome, I will be in one-on-one public conversations with actress Anna Deavere Smith about sports as the window to possibly a larger crisis in higher education. Anna is a treasure of innovation for American theater and film. She is best known for her own one-woman plays in which she inhabits a panoply of real-life characters.

I met Anna about twenty years ago, when she was playing Anthea Burton in the Tom Hanks-Jonathan Demme film about AIDS, Philadelphia. She is from Baltimore, where I have lived the past 26 years. Beyond her stage talent, I admire Anna for her creative spirit of free inquiry into crucial dramas and issues in American life. She sees college sports in the larger framework of an impending crisis for higher education. I think she’s right. We’ll see how the illustrious and assertive Aspen audience responds.

Hidden away, largely out of public view, the vast majority of U.S. colleges still do emphasize classroom teaching within a student-centered governance and curriculum. These are the nation’s fast-growing community or “junior” colleges. Last week in Denver, I spoke to 400 students from their Phi Theta Kappa honors society. They were an inspirational group.

Three-Point Reform Agenda for Sports in Higher Education

1 . TRANSPARENCY

At any college or university that hosts an intercollegiate sports program, the principal stakeholders must be assured candid, complete, and verifiable records for athletic revenues and obligations as well as for academic standards and performance. These records should be open for public inspection and accountability, subject only to appropriate privacy protections for the identity of individual students.

The body of sports stakeholders should include representatives of the school’s trustees and administrative leadership, its athletic department, its faculty, and students both on and off its sports teams.

2.  BALANCE

Stakeholders must exercise joint responsibility for the separate spheres of academics and sports. To uphold integrity in both areas, they must manage conflict and competing goals.

They should, for instance, address in detail any variance allowed for athletic recruits in college admissions. More generally, they could allocate a percentage of sports broadcasting and advertising receipts to the academic budget. They could adjust the class calendar to accommodate seasonal demands on athletes, and take steps to encourage interaction in campus life between athletes and non-athletes. They should seek external alignments to compete athletically with schools of comparable balance and purpose, as reflected in conference rules.

3.  EQUITY

Colleges and universities shall respect the basic rights of all students, applied consistently to athletes and non-athletes alike. On campus, as under the law, adult students retain the full attributes of citizenship. These include the rights and duties of informed consent, equal opportunity, representative government, and due process.

No freedom shall be abridged because of athletic status. To meet practical needs and aspirations, all students are eligible to seek fair compensation in full- or part-time jobs, entrepreneurial ventures, teaching appointments, work-study programs, and all other legitimate enterprise whether for or separate from their school.

Three-Point Reform Agenda for Sports in Higher Education (PDF)

Photo from IMDB

Sadly, he did not quite make it to the show in Baltimore of the forthcoming film from Fox Searchlight, Beasts of the Southern Wild. Jed Dietz of the Maryland Film Festival worked diligently to arrange a closed screening while Dudley was still alive, because Dudley was so delighted for his young cousin Lucy Alibar, co-screenwriter of the film based on her stage play. Advance reviews are stunning, as Beasts has captured top prizes at both Sundance and Cannes. The theater release coming soon in July almost certainly will make new stars of the untrained lead actors, Dwight Henry and 6-year-old Quvenzhane Wallis, while opening bright career doors for Alibar and the visionary director, Benh Zeitlin.

To safeguard public impact, and prevent pirate videos, gremlins confiscated for later return all cameras and cell phones from the lucky patrons who entered the June 5 screening. After the film, which transported viewers through a world of grim and fantastic apocalypse into the healing mysteries of nature, Lucy Alibar answered questions on stage in an interview with WYPR radio host Tom Hall. Emotions from the audience ran deep over the film as well as Alibar’s remembrances of the senior cousin she knew as “Unca’ Dudley,” whose funeral had taken place only the day before.

Tom Hall conducted a remarkable series of 25 public radio interviews with Dudley about his swiftly approaching death at the hands of the intimate killer he called “Lou.” Those conversations served as raw material for a book Dudley was writing until his final day. The book project had grown from a stark essay he wrote last July for his beloved New York Times, where Dudley had been a reporter in the 1980s. With its courageous reflections on how to die, his essay “The Good Short Life” attracted worldwide attention from terminal patients as well as ordinarily reluctant mortals. Algonquin Books, a division of the Workman Press, plans to publish Dudley’s posthumous memoir within a year.

In one of our closing moments, I got to pass along from Julian Bond the inside story of the NAACP’s surprise endorsement for full equality rights in gay marriage. This news was especially important to Dudley because of his youthful travail as a closeted homosexual and his mature work with Adam Nagourney of the Times as historians of the gay rights movement (Out for Good, 1999). The news was equally important to Julian, a pioneer of the civil rights movement and long-time Board chair for the NAACP, because of his long quest to make gender rights an issue of human freedom and respect like racial justice. Julian and I have been friends for nearly 45 years. At our home for dinner, with his wife Pam Horowitz, he told Christy and me of the parliamentary breakthrough at the NAACP Board’s May meeting—of the inspiration to embrace gay marriage not only in discussion but in a formal vote, and how he drafted a simple statement of principle that evaded snares over wording and procedure. Struggles continue as always, but word of the victory cheered Dudley, which cheered Julian, and should cheer us all for the long run.