A comfortable deal

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat

The sooner you realize that, the better for you. So strap on your Nikes, grab your can of Pepsi and your Saguaro Credit Union CatCard, and prepare to be educated. Join CEO Peter Likins and his crew of corporate crusaders as we all embark on a voyage into the expanding frontier of the business known as college education.

I've got my Nikes, and frankly, I'm glad the athletic teams do now too. The athletes don't have to pay for them under the new contract, however. Meanwhile, I paid $125 for my new pair of Nike Air Pippens. While it doesn't exactly sit well with me that some impoverished Asian factory worker had to inhale toxic glues without the proper safety equipment in order to make my new shoes, and that she couldn't afford a pair with a whole year's earnings, I must say nonetheless that she did a wonderful job with them.

These are the most comfortable shoes I've ever worn. They have excellent grip on the court, and provide ample foot and ankle support.

Our high-caliber athletes agree that Nike does manufacture the finest shoes and athletic equipment available, so it seems like a pretty good deal to me that our corporation - I mean school - is getting them free, along with millions of dollars just to have our players wear them on TV.

The university gets free shoes and apparel, and all they have to do is use it. Sounds like a pretty damn good deal to me.

That frees up more of the athletic department's $20 million budget for things of truly monumental importance, like perhaps more seats for old, wealthy alumni at McKale Center.

The biggest flaw in the whole deal seems to be that UofA Inc. only gets $7 million out of this. If I were CEO Likins, I would have held out for more than that.

We did, after all, just win a national championship in 1997, and our basketball team has a better winning percentage over the last 10 or so years than such hulks as North Carolina, Kansas, UCLA and Duke.

I'm thinking $15 million, minimum. Plus all the goods, of course. You bear 'em, and we'll wear 'em.

As for all this whining about human rights violations, I think all the bad publicity nationwide has prompted Nike to clean up its act some for their dollar's sake.

But in the end, there is only so much they can do in some of those places, where they don't care for foreigners poking around their factories and telling them how to treat their own people.

Of course, Nike knew that, and it no doubt factored into their decision to set up shop in those places.

In a clever public relations move, CEO Likins arranged the contract so that UofA Inc. can pull out if Nike gets caught abusing human rights again. The university can even call for surprise inspections, although I doubt they would want to catch Nike in a material breach of the ethical code even if they knew it was occurring. As long as the bucks keep rolling in, keep the gates wide open.

For anyone disgruntled at the heedless greed of UofA Inc., all I can say is that it's a nationwide trend in which schools must participate in order to stay competitive. Higher learning is now a business. However, we students can still get a good education out of it if we really want to. We just have to drink Pepsi while we do it.

Jon Ward is an astronomy and creative writing junior. He can be reached via e-mail at Jon.Ward@wildcat.arizona.edu. His column, "Who's the Bull Goose Looney?" appears every Thursday.