Individualizing Conflict: How Ideology Enables College Athletes' Educational Compromises

This article explores how the ideology of individualism sustains a conflictual school/sport intercollegiate system within the neoliberalism university [Giroux, Henry A. 2014. "Neoliberalism's War Against Higher Education." Chicago: Haymarket Press]. Life-history interview with 47 U.S. collegiate athletes reveal how institutional conditions cultivated an individualistic subjectivity [Althusser, Louis. 1971. "Lenin and Philosophy and Others Essays." New York: Monthly Review Press] that led participants to internalize school/sport conflict and alter their behavior rather than to externalize conflict and alter the institution. Upon entering University, athletes "named" the institutional challenges created through combining elite athletics and academics. Rather than identifying structural solutions to conflicts, athletes' interactions within a neoliberal university codified an individualistic subjectivity in which participants "internalized" institutional conflict as something they must singularly defeat. Athletes then "mitigated" the conflict by compromising their educational ambitions. By individualizing conflict, higher education remained insulated from meaningful change. Findings demonstrate why future reform platforms must encompass broad institutional change alongside an ideological critique to temper the reproduction of an incompatible educational and athletic system.