Heidi Alexander: “the Senator from North Carolina and I were both involved in intercollegiate athletics. He was a scholarship athlete at…”

“the Senator from North Carolina and I were both involved in intercollegiate athletics. He was a scholarship athlete at Wake Forest University and I was a nonscholarship track person at Vanderbilt University several years before that. We are here today to make a few comments on the recent ruling by a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board that defines student athletes as employees of the university. It affects only private universities for now--not the University of Tennessee. But it would affect Wake Forest, where the Senator from North Carolina was an outstanding football player, and it would affect Vanderbilt, where I attended. I guess our message to the NCAA and intercollegiate athletes is: We hope they will understand the opinion of one regional director of the National Labor Relations Board is not the opinion of the entire Federal Government. That is the message I would like to deliver. I would refer back--and then I will go to the Senator from North Carolina--to 25 years ago, when I was the president of the University of Tennessee, and I was asked to serve on the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. It was headed by the president of North Carolina, Bill Friday, and the head of Notre Dame, Father Hesburgh--a pretty distinguished group of individuals from around the country--to take a look at intercollegiate athletics. The major conclusion they came to was that presidents need to assert more institutional control over athletics.…”