“In the Arena”: Reflections on Critical Public Engagements on College Sport

In this paper, we reflect on the challenges, opportunities, motives, imperatives, and strategies of engagement associated with public scholarship about college athletics. Public scholarship has become a trendy topic across the academy as universities increasingly push academic workers to boost institutional brands suffering from chronic underfunding through highly visible engagement in the public sphere. We argue that although public scholarship is a vital part of academic work, principal imperatives driving this form of labor should be political/ethical rather than promotional. It is therefore not enough for academic workers to simply generate data for academic audiences, as without public dissemination, the impact is inherently limited and exclusionary. While public engagement is a necessary and important part of our work, it is fraught with the contradictions inherent to the critique of the same institutions that demand that engagement in the first place, as well as the associated collateral intellectual and personal damage that comes from wading into public debate. Through an autoethnographical account of our personal experiences, as scholars intervening in public discourse around the rights of campus athletic workers and our own encounter with ESPN college basketball personality and former college coach Dan Dakich, we will trace some institutional and personal strategies for educators to create protective measures, build community, and mobilize solidarity against real or perceived harassment. Such tactics aim to help scholars produce public work that genuinely contributes to societal conversations, challenges prevailing misconceptions, and centers the voices of minoritized, abused, and exploited athletes above all.