Athletes have a point

So the regional director of the National Labor Relations Board says Northwestern University’s scholarship fullbacks, tight ends and linebackers are school employees, entitled to vote on whether to unionize.

We’ll see where this bold and disruptive unionization effort stands after NLRB officials, whole phalanxes of lawyers and perhaps nine U.S. Supreme Court justices pick its bones. For now, we’re having trouble seeing Northwestern’s players as doe-eyed victims, exploited by greedy overseers and cast aside to vicious fates.

Freshmen walk into scholarships valued at some $76,000 per year. By most Wildcats’ accounts, their coaches and administrators treat NU athletes with exceptional respect, and routinely make allowances for players’ academic schedules. What’s more, those freshman recruits know they’ll likely earn diplomas from a premier private university: 97 percent of Northwestern’s players graduate-the highest rate of any school in the top division of college athletics.

That said, there’s something troubling about how even a Northwestern, or a Stanford, or a Duke, or a Notre Dame-or any of many excellent public universities-takes in so much athletic revenue yet shares relatively little of it with the young people who do the real work. Even more disturbing is the extent to which these schools surrender control over their athletes’ labors to sports conferences, TV networks and the NCAA-influential industry groups, all headed by lavishly compensated adults, which gorge on the gazillions of dollars in revenues that . . . the athletes’ play generates.

We accept the adults’ sincerity when they say that student-athletes-a term invented to stress that athletes also are students-have their educations hugely enriched by all that they learn and experience in their college sports careers. But we also accept that colleges exert enormous control over athletes’ schedules, conduct, classroom performance, diets and more. The NLRB ruling, which Northwestern will appeal, concludes that the players’ relationship with the school is primarily economic: They spend more hours on football duties than on academics, and are subject to rules and policies that don’t apply to most NU students-and they receive scholarships.

Colleges and industry groups apoplectic about having to wrestle with unions have brought this predicament on themselves. They’ve worried more about protecting revenues than about exerting common sense in protecting the interests of athletes.

If we were in Northwestern’s cleats, we’d resent that while we’re making sure our players do get educations we stand criticized for enforcing policies that originated with, yes, the NCAA. But we also would have dark satisfaction: What has started at a private school quickly could go public. That is, athletes at public colleges can pursue unionization through state labor boards that tend to follow the NLRB’s lead on legal interpretations.