Lincoln – With the announcement of a University of Nebraska football schedule this fall, questions need to be asked. If games are televised, who will be the sponsors? And why does this matter?
I'm surely not the only person who likes to watch the games but grimaces through the commercials. The ads are sometimes so bad I think it would be better not to watch at all, and certainly it should be beneath NU to accept money from inexcusable exploitation of unwary viewers.
In 2010, Nebraska played the University of Washington in the "Bridgepoint Education Holiday Bowl." This immediately raised eyebrows. Bridgepoint Education, a for-profit company that operated Ashford University, among others, was under investigation for fraud that year, a fact widely known. Its recruiting methods included the typical boiler-room call centers that contacted potential students incessantly with high pressure tactics.
The PBS program Frontline exposed Ashford tactics: “Create a sense or urgency … Push their hot button … Don’t let students off the phone .. Dial, dial, dial.”
Bridgepoint Education put thousands of students into debt before they dropped out, their lives ruined financially.
Yet all during the 2010 bowl game, commercials ran over and over touting this institution alongside the names of Nebraska and Washington, in an attempt to associate legitimate universities with a dubious one. There was no avoiding it, as the announcers continually repeated the name "Bridgepoint Education Holiday Bowl" and promoted Ashford University. NU lost the game but got a $2,130,000 payout. To my mind, that money is tainted.
The NU Regents should never have agreed to such a notorious sponsorship.
In 2016, two of us watched NU play in a televised game shortly before the November elections. We were astonished to see a political commercial imply that the Democratic candidate was a murderer and traitor. It was malevolent stuff, running three times in the midst of the game during time-outs. The idea of the commercial placement was obviously to create a sense that the allegation must be true, or else NU would not allow its close juxtaposition with Nebraska football, and the implicit endorsement of the content of the commercial.
The NU Regents should never have allowed their most visible sports program to have partisan political sponsorship, implicitly or explicitly. There is always an option not to sign on the dotted line unless NU has the ability to protect its reputation.
Now it is 2020 and the student loan mess, driven in part by unscrupulous for-profit colleges, has burgeoned. The coronavirus pandemic, abetted by a failure of presidential leadership, has nearly killed off the football season (and it may yet).
Those commercial sponsorships of NU football didn't look good at the time, and they decidedly aren't looking any better in retrospect. They were shameful then, and they are appalling now, given what has happened since. As a Nebraska citizen and taxpayer (and two-time NU graduate), I expect more of the NU Regents, to defend the university as a center of scholarship and integrity, and to take action so that these missteps are never repeated.
