'For the Athletes': Bringing Justice to Big-Time College Sports

Featuring Ramogi Huma, inaugural recipient of the Sports @ Humanities Institute community service award

Sponsored by Sports @ Humanities Institute

Description: The growth of the big business of college sports has accelerated over the past quarter-century, and the pressures athletes have faced to balance academic and athletic roles and responsibilities have exacerbated in tandem. For over two decades Ramogi Huma has served as the nation’s leading advocate for athletes’ rights, serving as Executive Director of the National College Players Association, testifying before Congress to improve conditions and protections for athletes, convincing state legislatures and federal courts that athletes’ economic justice is a racial justice issue, and creating the conditions for a massive general public shift in perspectives on college sports. For this work, the Humanities Institute at Arizona State University is honored to be awarding Ramogi Huma its inaugural Sports @ HI community service award.

Event Details: Join us Thursday, April 4, 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. Pacific, in Armstrong Hall 101 for a conversation with Ramogi Huma about the state and future of college sports from an athlete-centered position, and also what broader lessons can be drawn and applied to address systems that produce and perpetuate injustice. Register here to attend in person. This event will also be livestreamed; register here to attend online.

Program: 5:45-6:45 p.m.

Courtyard Reception: 6:45-7:30 p.m.

More about Ramogi Huma: Ramogi Huma is a college athletes’ rights advocate with over two decades of service pursuing college sports reform by educating and empowering college athletes, helping to usher in new laws, leading efforts to affirm employee rights of football and basketball players, and supporting pivotal lawsuits. Huma, who played football for the Bruins, earned his Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Master of Public Health at UCLA.

Huma’s advocacy has been covered in many media outlets such as “60 Minutes”, ABC, CBS, CNN, ESPN, Fox Sports, “Good Morning America”, MSNBC, NBC, the Los Angeles Times, and NPR. In 2024 Huma was recognized by Time Magazine as one of 18 Black leaders who are “Closers” working to end the racial wealth gap (2024), by Sports Illustrated as one of “The 20 Most Influential Black Figures in College Football” (2023), by ESPN as one of “The 11 biggest power brokers and advocates shaping the future of college football” (2022), one of the “12 New Faces of Black Leadership” by Time Magazine (2015), and was included in Yahoo! Sports list of College Football’s Top 25 Most Intriguing People in Suits” (2014).

More about Sports @ HI: Sport enables an interdisciplinary investigation of the social, economic, political and cultural elements of societies as well as the complexities, contradictions and liberations that get to the heart of the human condition. The Sports @ HI Initiative brings together scholars across The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and throughout the university and broader community to make meaning out of sport. We do this by:

1) Providing opportunities to learn from each other and create new knowledge in research seminars and public events.

2) Supporting work that provides solutions to complex cultural, societal and ethical challenges in sports institutions as well as the broader societies that sporting spaces inevitably always reflect and influence.

This is a hybrid event. Virtual audience can attend it via Zoom webinar.