The Nation's Dave Zirin: All Hail the Attempt by Northwestern Wildcats Football Players to Form a Union

Dave Zirin's column at The Nation is linked below.

Dave Zirin: The Northwestern Wildcats vs. the NCAA

"Whether or not the Northwestern players succeed in their efforts to unionize—and the NCAA will spend however many billions it takes to make sure this does not happen—their efforts today will long be remembered as the opening shot that cracked the NCAA Cartel. They deserve our support. They deserve our respect. Most of all, they deserve our solidarity. In 1922, that author of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair wrote, 'College athletics, under the spur of commercialism, has become a monstrous cancer.' I do not know what Sinclair would make of a twenty-first-century world where coaches make 100 times the salaries of professors. I think we can say safely, however, that the actions of the Northwestern football team would have made Mr. Sinclair very proud indeed."

---Dave Zirin, The Nation