ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the discursive construction of the student-athlete and its role in denying the labor of what are perhaps the most visibly public of university workers. In 2014, football players with Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, voted to form a union in order to gain "adequate health care and educational assistance". The ensuing controversy was widely discussed in a variety of media, including those devoted to sports coverage and higher education. One of the most persistent methods employed to deny the labor of individuals within higher education is to discursively construct the university as an imaginary that exists outside the "real world" and thus not a space where labor, in any form, can be bought and sold. One of the primary concerns raised by the Northwestern University case, and the one that perhaps caused the most consternation for campus administrators, is discursively embedded in the title of the House report, which refers to "Big Labor on Campus".
