R. Bowen Loftin
But again, I’ll come back to a couple of key things. Students have the money, it may be gotten from all kinds of sources, but in particular is there an athlete’s may have a lot of resources financially, because of NIL. Number two, mental health issues are abundant already on campuses. During my time as an A&M president, I lost 72 students to death. A number of those deaths were suicides. I see this as one more, as as George said, one more bit of gasoline on the fire here, which is of great concern to me, because I really care about individual students, I care about their mental health and their physical health. And here’s one more challenge to their mental health.

Keith Edwards
Hello, and welcome to Student Affairs NOW, I’m your host Keith Edwards. Today we’re discussing colleges partnering with gambling entities. We’ll discuss the why the concerns, the implications. I’m really grateful to be joined by three guests to help us understand the complexities of this from many different angles, including finance, athletics, and well being and addiction. I’m so excited to have our guests here today for this discussion. Student Affairs NOW is a premier podcast and online learning community for 1000s of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays find the details about this episode, or browse our archives at studentaffairsnow.com. Today’s episode is sponsored by Symplicity. A true partner Symplicity supports all aspects of student life with technology platforms that empower institutions to make data driven decisions. And this episode is also brought to you by sStylus, visit styluspub.com and use promo code SAnow for 30% off and free shipping. As I mentioned, I’m your host Keith Edwards, my pronouns are he him his. I’m a speaker, consultant and coach and you can find out more about me at keithedwards.com. I’m broadcasting today from the cold and snowy Minneapolis, Minnesota at the intersections of the ancestral homelands of both the Dakota in the Ojibwe peoples. I’m grateful today to have Dr. McClellan, Dr. Fong and Dr. Lofton here to share with us their expertise and many different angles on this. We had a great conversation before we hit record, we’ll try and bring some of that back to all of you. But some really exciting connections here. So let’s hear from each of you here. Just a little bit about your background and then we’ll jump into our topic today Bowen and why don’t you kick us off

R. Bowen Loftin
Alright, I’m Bowen Loftin ne’er do well, I guess is my best description. But my current title is president emeritus of Texas A&M University. I’ve learned the emeritus is the Latin word for has-been. So that’s sort of where I come from. But I’ve run three campuses in my career. Texas a&m University, University of Missouri, Columbia, and one of the Texas a&m branch campuses in Galveston, Texas. At Texas A&M, I was kind of notorious for the fact that during my time as president there, Texas and left the big 12 and joining the SEC, that was quite an adventure for over two years, and I wrote a book about it called the 100 year decision. That was my memoir about all the things went going on behind the scenes there. Most recently, I joined two of my colleagues John Heike, former Fox Sports southwest General Manager and VP of Fox Sports. In gay box, a local TV, radio personality in the sports world. Here, Bryan College Station to do a podcast. Ours is every other week, largely, it’s called college sports follow the money. Along with Christie dodge, who is the other person I know of who has a podcast on kind of the financial aspects of college sports. That’s our focus. And not surprisingly, that focus has a piece devoted what today’s comp topic is. So looking forward to hearing from my colleagues here, and having an engaging conversation about this.

Keith Edwards
Yeah. Thanks for being here. Dr. Fong, let’s hear from you.

Timothy Fong
Thank you, and thank you for having me, Keith. My first one I saw Keith Edwards was invited me on I thought it was gonna be playing with the Rolling Stones. Right, right.

Keith Edwards
KEITH RICHARDS happens all the time happens all the time.

Timothy Fong
So my name is Dr. Timothy Fong. I’m a Professor of Psychiatry here at UCLA in Los Angeles. I’m the co director of the UCLA gambling studies program. And what that is, is a clinical and treatment program looking at the causes of gambling addiction, and developing effective science based treatments for them. So I’ve been working with men and women and families affected by gambling and gambling addiction for nearly 15 years now, a few years ago, also started working in our UCLA Athletics Department in our UCLA sports medicine to provide mental health, wellness and substance use support for our UCLA athletes. So clearly, over the last few years, one of the most significant issues is that intersection between athletes, gambling, mental health, well being policies, and certainly where I have a lot of information is just the athlete experience and what they’re seeing with all of this expansion of gambling, how it impacts them physically, and mentally. So thank you for having me here. Today.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, great. And George McClellan. You were just on an episode on eSports. We brought you back in again. Tell us a little bit more about you.

George McClellan
Hi, I’m George McClellan. I’m a professor of higher education at the University of Mississippi and I’m delighted to be back on Student Affairs now. Yeah, we had a great conversation about eSports a few weeks ago and there is a connection between esports and gambling that I’ll mention later, but I’ve been writing about and presenting about and working with students about for 20 years about gambling in college. And sometimes it’s about students in gambling. And sometimes it’s about students who compete in athletics and gambling related intercollegiate athletics, and sometimes it’s about gambling on intercollegiate athletics. But for 20 years in one in lots of different places I’ve been writing and talking my first my first foray was a monograph series in from 2006 that I did with Tom Hardy, and, and with Jim Caswell from Southern Methodist University on called gambling on college and 20 years later, we’re still talking and working on these issues.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, great. Well, I’m so grateful to have the three of you here. This kind of popped up on our radar with New York Times article about college sports partnership with gambling entities, as many states have made gambling legal in, in varying ways, it has opened the opportunity for gambling entities really wanting to connect with the market for college students and alumni and fans, and that’s who they’re trying to reach. And so some of them have built partnerships with different athletic departments, different institutions of higher education, much like they might commit to be a Pepsi school, or a coke school, or a Nike school or an Under Armour school getting in with a particular entity that offers gambling, and then access to email students or provide risk free gambling, which is we can talk about what exactly that means. But we started seeing some of this and New York Times of about a month ago did a piece on that. And I think that really, I see that as something new. And I think something we’re gonna see a lot more of, and then that, of course, raises concerns about George pointing to student athletes, athletics, implications, all of that. So really glad to have the conversation, we’re going to talk about it from lots of different angles. George, you’re gonna lead us off, help us understand the full context here, because you have a lot of history, a lot of expertise about where we’re at here with gambling and where we might see ourselves going.

George McClellan
Sure. So you know, it’s spring. So we’re talking about gambling, it seems like every year those of us who who talked about this subject never fails Super Bowl, football championship, March Madness, and here comes the media and wants to talk about college gambling, but it’s year round. And it’s not just now but this is, this is a historical issue in college, but also in the United States. So most recently, I’ve packed up some things like for leadership exchange, on what I call the fifth wave of gambling history in the United States. And the long and short of it is, you look at the history, in the United States of gambling, there are these waves. And the thing about the waves is they rise, and then something happens and they drop off, but they never drop off below where they started. So it’s an inevitable ratcheting up of gambling activity in the United States. And building off of the work of, of I know some Rose, who wrote about three waves of gambling then, then Ken and Jim and I talked about a fourth wave. And now talking about a fifth wave. And the fifth wave, I’ve argued, is really a function of the change in the Supreme Court decision to clear the way to legalize sports, gambling, the rise of eSports, and fantasy sports. And then the gambling connection to eSports, and fantasy sports. So these are, these are sort of the latest gasoline on the gambling engine, if you will, right. And the other thing that’s going on is that, in professional sports, professional sports used to have this really arm’s length position relative to, to gambling activity. In a very short amount of time, we’ve moved to a place where every one of the major professional leagues now has a contract and endorsement deal with gambling interest. So that that I would argue those are the factors that have sort of set the table for colleges to enter into this. There’s more of it going on, it’s more socially accepted. Their major league cousins aren’t looking down at it, and talking about why colleges do it, but I’m talking about the individual institutions, but I’m talking about sort of the larger societal factors. And the other reason of course, the I think we it’s important understand why colleges do it, but it’s also important to understand why the gambling industry is interested, right. So estimates vary because you’re trying to get a handle on both legal and illegal gambling. But generally speaking, something like $70 billion gets wagered in In an average year on intercollegiate football, another 20 billion gets a wager just on March Madness, forget the rest of the season. So let’s just conservatively say that college that betting on intercollegiate athletics is $100 billion. And that doesn’t count all the other gambling that those people who bet on college sports because not all of them, but some of them are also playing poker and the slots, and bingo, and Keno and whatever else, right? So it’s a huge, huge to connect a Bowens point, it’s a huge, huge economic driver. The other thing is that college is that the gaming industry is they’re very clear, like you can go to gambling conferences for the industry. And they’ll say very openly, they see college students as a primary growth market for them. Right. So

Keith Edwards
we have when I was younger, and every elementary school got an Apple TV computer, because they were really trying to get or, you know, create that pipeline.

George McClellan
So that’s sort of how we get to here like, like there. Now we have eight to 12 colleges that are involved in contracts, either colleges or their foundations, because sometimes colleges play this neat game where they go, Well, that’s not us. That’s our foundation. That’s not us. That’s the foundation. Whether it’s the college or the foundation, something like eight to 12 programs are involved in contracts. And those contracts range from what I will call a pretty traditional sponsorship deal. You know, the our casino is the X LAN based casino or it might be an online casino, all the way up to in stadium presents so that there’ll be billboards or electronic media inside where the games are being played. And to me at least one of the most troubling versions of this is that some colleges are actually getting paid a referral fee so that if you access online gambling through a link provided by a college or a foundation, they get what amounts to a finder’s fee. And I’m I’ll say right here, I’m not opposed to gambling. Personally, I don’t gamble on college sports, because I don’t think it’s an ethical thing for me to do. But, but, but I really am deeply troubled by this idea that were somehow getting a headhunter fee. How did that?

Timothy Fong
How did that get passed, because in every state, it’s 21. And over, you know, and that’s the part for me when 1819 20 year old student is getting that email with the official university logos on that. That’s very clearly violating state laws. As we’re looking at it, it’s a public health issue. It needs to be regulated like alcohol, tobacco, cannabis. I go here on our campus, I see gambling ads inside our basketball arena. I don’t see handouts of and this is the first year actually, we now sell alcohol inside our basketball stadium. So but again, very, very regulated. I view this very simply as a public health issue. And universities really need to look at that and say, Well, wait a minute, are we treated with the same equality that we treat with tobacco, alcohol and cannabis. And we all know that there’s a wide range of how they treat with that on campus there as well. So the other part George, we really want to highlight the other synergy why it’s such a massive issue right now is technology. That’s number one. Rarely, interestingly, before we met George, I know George from back in the 90s. He was at my medical school, he was our Student Affairs support team. Back in the 90s. I had no phone, no internet, no anything but there was still gambling. I had no money. That’s not 2023, every college student has a casino in their pocket. And not only a casino, a very sophisticated casino that offers an unlimited amount of games and innovative new forms of gambling we’ve never seen and you combine the second thing, and that’s the access to money. This you know, right and Bowen you’re gonna say this as well, right? College students today have more access to money than I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, many of our patients come in I said, Where did you get the money to gamble not mom, not dad, not the mom and dad’s credit card. They got loans themselves, payday loans, online loans, their own credit cards, and that’s that synergy. Of course the technology and the access to money. You can’t gamble if you don’t have access. You can’t gamble if you don’t have money. And a lot of those promotions are not put money there teasers. But when the risk free bets run out. They need real money. And that’s where I think the caught a lot of higher education pay very close attention to what If you’re allowing credit card companies and payday loans on your campus to gain access for using money,

George McClellan
and so your question about 21 is a really smart one. And I’ll say a couple of things. One proponents will say, Oh, we have this under control. Like there’s all these control systems. I think it’s Massachusetts, forgive me if I’m not naming the right state, but at least one of the states and I think it was Massachusetts has recently fined a number of its providers for allowing lapses, or I won’t say allowing for having lapses in their security around 21. And the other thing I’ll say about this is, okay, let’s say that system works perfectly. And the less than 21 year old students don’t get to do it legally. Do you think they’re not going to do it? Anybody who’s ever worked with students think that the law is right, if we send them messages that gambling is cool, and acceptable and fine? And part of the school pride? Right? And Right, exactly. They’re gonna figure out a way to play.

Keith Edwards
Yeah. Well, let’s, I’m glad we’re talking with each other. Bowen you you have been involved in college athletics for a long time. As you mentioned, you’ve run several different campuses, help us understand what’s in it. Why would colleges do this? Why would they partner? What’s the benefit? What’s what’s, what’s driving this, on their end to this perspective?

R. Bowen Loftin
You’ve heard a word, it’s money.

Keith Edwards
That’s one reason

R. Bowen Loftin
already already said. But one word is money. I’ll say more than that, obviously, but but let me remind all of us that gambling has been around as long as we’ve been around, there’s records back as far as we ever recorded history of gambling. So it’s a human thing. So that’s the reality we live with. We try to regulate it, and has been set already most of the regulations but directed at age. It’s a state kind of thing, too. So states vary quite a bit. But as George said, the Supreme Court opened the door, while back with their ruling, which really allowed gambling of this nature to be to be illegal in a federal sense. And now it’s up to the states to make that decision. I really got interested in this big time, about about two years ago, a year and a half ago, I should say, July 2021, When news broke that LSU had partnered with Cesar to create a relationship that would not only send money to LSU, but also provide a great deal of visibility to sportbook, among LSU, fans and students. So as a university president, Chancellor CEO, my number one priority has been the welfare of our students. So that’s where I come from. And I’m glad that Timothy is here today to talk about the the health aspects of this because it is a health issue, a mental health issue. But I want to emphasize a couple of things, has been said already in this group money available. But I want to remind you, there’s a particular group of people now have money they haven’t had before. Beginning in 2021, thanks to another court ruling at a federal level NIL became an issue for us.

Keith Edwards
People are familiar

R. Bowen Loftin
name image likeness. So the courts recognized based on a lawsuit resolution at the first of all, the district court level and then later on the appellate court level, but not the Supreme Court totally pieces of that, but not all of it, that a student athlete has the right to make money from their name, image and likeness usage. And that has changed a lot. We’ve gone through a lot of growing pains with this, it happened, not surprisingly, but it happened rather abruptly. And all of a sudden, we had a world where regulation really wasn’t present. Many states worked hard. We have 30 to 40 states now with state laws, or different kinds of structures that govern this, but not all states do it. And so all of a sudden a student athlete can sell themselves. And guess what that does, it generates money for them. Many student athletes, if not most, don’t have a lot of spare change, typically, but all of a sudden, some have, in fact, if you guys have millions of dollars, so when you have money, as Timothy said, you know, people can get loans and other sources of money but all of a sudden, people get paychecks, who are student athletes. I think about this you not only have students but also those who play college sports with money in their hands. Humans. And guess what they’re tempted to do. They’re tempted to gamble on themselves others. We’ve seen so much of this. Well, one of my old friends was the chair of the Gaming Commission in Nevada about that job. And he was famously told by the governor of Nevada who appointed him, You’re the only man I can trust in the whole state. And so it gives you a sense that you know, that here’s a state which has a history, history of gambling, and a big scale. And, and part of it has been tied to boxing, other kinds of sporting events of their professional nature. But again, now Caesars and others have this direct connection into into this world of college athletics. And it’s not just the fans. It’s not just the average student. It’s also the student athlete who has not only the ability and the access, but the wherewithal possibly to be able to engage in gambling at a level they haven’t been able to before. And that gives me great concern. When this whole broke back with LSU doing this, the podcast I do with my colleagues to gay buck and John Heike, we invited Casey Smith, you wouldn’t know her. But Casey works for Barstool Sports. barstool has moved rapidly into the gambling side of the equation here. And we had our own app, Episode Six, I think of our podcast, we’re in Episode 40 is coming out next week. It’s episode six early in our history of our podcast on follow the money, we were looking at this particular issue, and we come back to it in a small way ever since. And I’m glad you’re having here having this particular opportunity for us to talk about this. But again, I’ll come back to a couple of key things. Students have the money, it may be gotten from all kinds of sources, but in particular is there an athlete’s may have a lot of resources financially, because of NIL. Number two, mental health issues are abundant already on campuses. During my time as an A&M president, I lost 72 students to death. A number of those deaths were suicides. And you begin to go down this pathway of why a student dies. Sometimes it’s a car wreck, a medical issue, a drug issue, but it’s also a suicide issue. And that has not gotten any better in the years since I left that presidency, okay, and perhaps two or three years, or more directly. And I see this as one more, as as Dora said, one more bit of gasoline on the fire here, which is of great concern to me, because I really care about individual students, I care about their mental health and our physical health. And here’s one more challenge to their mental health. I look forward to hearing more of them from especially Timothy and George about their engagement here at this level. But I think this is a topic it’s very timely. And again, we now have about probably a dozen or so schools that have formal relationships with gambling entities, like Caesars, there may be others I’m not aware of, and we’re about dozen of these things right now. And they’re growing. And again, it’s all because the schools are an insatiable mall for money. It’s not just athletics, it’s also the other parts of the university which which weren’t money. I’ll remind you you know, two of us come from a well three of us come from a Power Five institution, you know, the pack and the SEC are here and in this in this podcast, and Texas A&M, Texas A&M rings brings in perhaps $200 million a year, Texas does a similar number. Others are close behind the big 10 Just now got a new contract recently over over a billion dollars per year, and you divide it up by whatever number you might want to use with the big 10 The SEC is close behind the pack is sort of struggling right now there’s lots of rumors about their situation where there there are new contracts. But my point to you is simply that money is something even on how much you have of it. You want more and universities are insatiable in this regard as are their individual units like athletics.

Timothy Fong
What do you think goes in that in the in the in the boardrooms and conference rooms as universities were meeting with gambling industry? Do you think there was any sense of this is not something we should be doing? Or did it feel like a much more dark, seductive back room deal? You know, old school I mean, that’s that’s where I would love to be flying to all in that boardroom to find out what what was being said? Well, it

R. Bowen Loftin
has happened to me personally because we’ve never had this issue. Texas is one of those states, which has pretty strict laws still in place, which which do not allow gambling. So Texas is kind of free for now. For now, and I think there’s a as always, there’s going to be a very large effort in this current session of a Texas Legislature to legalize gambling some extent. You may know the name Tillman Fertitta Fertitta as a Texan, he owns Landry’s, he owns golden nuggets, casinos, and he has for decades, lobby the legislature in Texas to change the law and allow gambling, he has lots of properties in places like Galveston, which he would like to be able to use for gambling of all types. So there’s a hunger here, there’s all kinds of play throughout Texas going over the border to Louisiana, or to Oklahoma all the time to gamble. And it’s certainly true, you can see it firsthand if you want to. So this year may not be the best year because Texas has a surplus. Many factors we all know about from the last year or two. But that won’t be true for very long, the money gets sucked up and as always a hunger for more. And so I think that will drive this this train here. Universities have multiple sources. Privates, like, like you were at Northwestern are one dimension of it. But publics are a different one. And there are all kinds of drivers that always result in the desire for more revenue. And one clear place to get that is going to be athletics, and in the power five conferences, lots of money flows, from athletics, even into other parts of the university. But it will only get more in terms of its need. And therefore I see this to be an insatiable situation, it’s gonna be very, very difficult to manage.

George McClellan
Let me let me tie to a couple of things that have been said and and one is I want to go back to NIL. Because I Bowen raised a really important question about NIL. And it’s not just those students who have NIL deals and what their money, what they might choose to do with their money. But imagine one of your Imagine your quarterback who signs an NFL deal with Caesars because it’s not just your ad, because before you as an athletic department, you might have said, look, as a matter of recruitment, we want to tell you ahead of time, we don’t want anybody doing NIHL deals with alcohol, tobacco, gambling, pornography, right? And you might have written that into your deal. But if you got to deal with the casino company, it seems pretty hard to imagine how you’re going to write a deal in with your student athletes. Hey, you can’t do NIL over there. Right. The other thing I wanted to connect to Tim, the ask about people institutions deciding not to do this. And, of course, we’ll never know the ones that said no, unless they choose to stand up and publicly say we said no. And anybody who’s watching this, if you say no, I encourage you to stand up and say here’s we said no, and here’s why. But, for example, kind of hard to imagine Notre Dame would ever get into one of these deals. Now maybe I’m wrong. But given given their affiliation, it seems like that would be a very interesting institutional joins. So you could imagine certain institutions making those choices because of their vision or values. I hope that when they do that, they will stand up and say we said no. Yeah.

Keith Edwards
Timothy you have all this expertise about gambling and addiction and well being and you your mental health and and you’re also working directly with students. What what do you want to make sure we also add into this conversation from what we talked about so far.

Timothy Fong
So let me give a kind of a zoom out and give folks a vast understanding. Number one, gambling behavior, as we’ve mentioned, is part of human nature. The vast majority of people who gamble on regulated legal forms do not develop gambling addiction. They just don’t. Lots of people don’t game. Really, it’s like alcohol, only about 60% of people actually gamble. That means there’s still a lot that don’t. So gambling disorder, or gambling addiction, which I’m most concerned about, by definition is a mental health psychiatric condition like alcohol, tobacco drug addiction, and it impacts about 1% of the general population. It’s about one out of 100 people walking around inside the college campuses for men and women 18 to 24. That number actually is a little higher depending on which community you look at. So male college students a little higher than female and college athletes, particularly in certain sports, football, basketball, have higher rates of gambling index, say rowing or women’s golf or volleyball. So we know that it’s a condition that’s there. It’s not rare. And it is absolutely fairly prevalent. The problems that I have by the time patients see me it’s really severe, right? Substantial generational debt, co occurring mental health problems, depression, anxiety, co occurring substance use issues, arguments, fights, stalled life develop. So the first thing we think about is our number one goal is how do we make sure that people gamble in quote, responsible, healthy, non damaging ways. And it goes back to the models we’ve learned from alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis, which I’d argue we kind of haven’t learned as well as we’d like for college in terms of how do we really take college students who we know are at risk to develop addiction and mental health issues, and not protect them, but empower them to do the right choices. So as I’ve been doing this, over the last few years, I’ve kind of stumbled on a few general points, number one, and that’s advertising, we don’t advertise gambling in a way that I think makes sense. Most of the patients that I see they come in, they see gambling as a solution, a solution for money problems, a solution for a mood and anxiety, a solution to make themselves feel better. That is not what it is. At its core gambling is entertainment, it’s supposed to bring you together with people, I’ll share a quick story and I’m gonna bring George in here, George and I know each other back from the 90s in medical school, and back then, we were part of a fantasy football league that was at the Northwestern Medical School that brought our friends together. George was part of that, and I’m gonna save probably George was on kind of a mentor to us students. That was partly gambling, but it was it was aboveboard, it was fun, it connected us. That’s Entertainment. So the first message is for young people to recognize gambling is not a substantial way to make money. It’s entertainment. It is not a solution. But unfortunately, I see a lot of young people getting in and thinking that they’re going to make generational wealth, they can change their lives forever, by hitting a five leg parlay, or going on the same game parlay getting 10. Right. So that’s number one. Number two, again, the real issue, again, is going back and teaching young people not how to gamble, but how to deal with loss, how to deal with imperfection, how to deal with the fact that you may miss out on something else. And I think these are the messages that I’ve encouraged colleges to really think about. Because we cannot stop this intersection between gambling and popular culture. It’s too much. It’s too fast and involves too many forces, from social media, to cable networks to professional and amateur sports organizations to Congress, we can’t stop it. So prohibition, Sue is not the way to go. And that’s true. He’s not going back in the bottle. It is not and he’s never left the bottle because it’s always. So instead, that when the message I say to a lot of patients, I’ll say, I’ll say the first thing, I don’t want you to stop gambling, I just want you to stop gambling in an unhealthy way. And that’s the messaging that I’d really like to see the young people in college get, which is a hey, this is a entertainment. But are you willing to pay $1,000 to go see a movie? Probably not. But that’s the difference where it’s considered normal to spend $1,000 on a bet. I think the messaging I would say to universities are absolutely install more resilience training, install basic education, programming, and invest in mental health treatment for our students, because unfortunately, many mental health providers do not have training on gambling, addiction treatment or knowing how to do that. So you have to invest a lot of things. For athletes, it’s really important for athletes, we also have to invest in athlete health and wellness. And one of the unexpected, unintended consequences of expanding gambling for college campuses is the impact on athletes. I’ve seen athletes develop anxiety disorder because they’re worried about their performance. And they’re not even gambling at all. Because they know that they underperform. They could become a target. I’ve had a number of athletes, we’ve had death threats, because they had a bad game. Can you imagine the anxiety and dread that must come for a college athlete who had no interest in gambling, suddenly to be getting punted DMS and messages on social media saying you better score 28 tonight and if you don’t, I’m going to come after your mom. As ridiculous as that sounds. That is what’s happening for some of our college athletes. We have to protect the college athletes as we expand gambling in our in our American culture.

Keith Edwards
Timothy you mentioned some of the folks who are coming to you who are really underwater who are really struggling who are really addicted who are really owe a lot of money. What would you say to the students who are not in that situation. I’m imagining students who are coming. They’re seeing this. They’re curious. They’re wondering that maybe gambled a little bit, but not really. And they’re they’re trying to think about what would you sort of what’s the proactive message versus sort of the reactive where people who are,

Timothy Fong
you know, again, it’s saying the folks in the beginning that this is not a reliable way to make money. Gambling is not a way to handle negative emotional states like depression, anxiety, if you’re gambling to escape life problems, that is a concern. So what I instead say, you know, it’s not like, Oh, you need to take a class on money management and the odds and all those years that are things, instead, what we really need to do for our generation of college students, again, is teach resilience. Teach how to handle the fact that you are not perfect, that you may make bad choices, and that college is a time to try out different things. But it is not a time to try things that are illegal and not available. When I was at northwestern the 1990, they had an alcohol policy they put into place and everyone got all upset. I remember as a freshman saying, but can’t you isn’t it illegal to drink until I’m 21? And then there was this weird acceptance that colleges were going to do that. But it was technically illegal. So I think colleges have to go back and say, Do you have a gambling policy? For your college students on your campuses in your ability? And example, George and Bowen? Do you? Are you aware that in your facilities, we don’t have one here at UCLA, to a college student that is inside a UCLA dorm that logged on to a gambling website in California? That’s technically breaking the law, they’re under 21. The universities don’t have any sort of official policies. I think universities really should have those sorts of policies in place. It gives students an expectation, and then resources for anyone who starts to have problems related.

Keith Edwards
George what else would you add?

George McClellan
or what have you, or worse, we have policies that just say, you can’t do anything illegal, but many students because gambling is so common, or they don’t think what they’re doing is gambling. Have you ever gambled? No, I never have. Have you ever been in? Squares? Have you ever bought squares for the Super Bowl? Oh, yeah, I’ve done that. Yeah. Hello. So that was one thing and a great question. But the other thing I wanted to pick up on something Timothy said about things to help educate people. So in the fourth wave, not the fifth wave, but the fourth wave of gambling was driven by one of the factors was the poker wave, everybody remember when poker was the biggest thing? If you were part of that, if you watched any of that, how often did you see the gambling industry say to you, and so on, so as a college student, but they left college because they can now make all this money playing poker. Now, I’m not picking on Barstool Sports, I subscribe to their Twitter feed. But how often does Barstool Sports tweet out, this person had a 20 leg parlay for 99 cents, and they are about to make a gajillion dollars. The industry sells the dream, right? It’s one of the reasons like you know, so the end of the Tallgrass about gaming because you got to understand how they work as companies. But casinos the casino industry now has giant mega like Mega bill, even the lottery Mega Millions lottery, right? Because people don’t tend to take risks if they think they’re not going to make life changing money. But if they think they’re going to make life changing money, they’ll make life destroying decisions. Right? So, you know, am I gonna go play for 1000 bucks? That’s hard earned 1000 bucks if I think I might walk out with 1200? I don’t know. But if I think I can throw 1000 bucks at $200 million. And so the gaming industry has changed to reflect the changing human interest.

Keith Edwards
George, you mentioned you had some tips for institutions. And Timothy was talking about his work with individuals and then we’ll can institutions use what what would your tips be for institutions?

George McClellan
Thank you. So um, and we talked about some of these in a couple of ways. But first of all, you have to stay root institutions. It’s like any other decision we make, you have to stay rooted in your ethics and your values and your mission. Everything has to flow from there as an institution. So any decision you make you need to reevaluate in that context. I don’t think that’s necessarily happening in some cases. And, and also then you have to be consistent and act with integrity. If you have policies that say to students, hey, we don’t want you gambling and stuff then should you really be sponsoring smokers to raise money. I was at an institution. I won’t name it but my first Saturday there that they sent student athletes up into the stands to sell 5050 raffle tickets to help fund travel. This was a small institution. So if you think this is only a D1 phenomenon, you’re wrong, this is happening D2 and D3 and NAIA and NCAA, like I’m telling you, this is happening. So so we got to act with integrity and consistency on our values, not enough just to talk about our values got to be consistent with them. And then the final advice that I would offer is this, and that is, don’t wait for the bus to hit you get ahead of the bus. I’d see too many institutions, it doesn’t happen so much anymore. Now that I’m in a sort of faculty life, but I used to get these calls from schools, people who the student affairs colleagues, hey, we think we might have a problem. We don’t want to tell anybody about it. But we think this might have happened. And I tried to help them might ask like, Well, do you have these policies kind of intending someday with these policies that you know, do you have a counselor who does addiction therapy? Or what are the resources? Well, no, no, no, no. Try to be ahead of this. If you’re reacting all the time, you’re gonna get run over. So don’t wait until you have a problem to have a conversation. talk now. And plan now. Right? That’s so that’s a set of tips that I would share with any institution. Right,

R. Bowen Loftin
George, like, thank you for that. That’s a pretty good list of things to think about. Let me emphasize one thing here that we as college leaders tend to be reactive, when something really bad happens, we throw resources at it. Look at Michigan State just the other day. So you have a huge investment in this in the moment, mental health resources, but is that sustained? Probably not. So my point to you is we don’t necessarily see a crisis in gambling of a huge scale. So we don’t think about the fact that we need to invest in this on an ongoing way. That’s not reflective of this spike, in terms of a particular event or, or, or activity. But I think we need to think about gambling, like drinking other mental health related issues that are ongoing, and they need to be consistently dealt with. And it means you have to budget for that you have to really build into the student affairs and student health budgets, the pieces you need to sustain an effort over the long run. And that’s what’s missing right now, in most places, as far as I know.

George McClellan
Keith just real quick, because you asked about institutional Tips Tips for India, because our audience is student affairs folks, most of them right? What can you do as an individual member? Encourage your institution to collect data on gambling? How much are students doing and what’s going on? Inform yourself, go to conference programs, read what’s out there, we’ll share some resources along with go and visit websites, educate yourself about this stuff, so that you can help make a difference in a positive way for your students.

Keith Edwards
I guess what’s striking to me here in this conversation is we’re talking about wanting to treat it like a public health issue, which is very macro and a grand scale. Yet we often think about gambling as an individual issue. Well, that’s Keith’s problem. And why did he make those decisions, and that was irresponsible of him. Yet we have institutions in the middle, forming these partnerships for lucrative resources and money. And, and I really love the perspective you all brought. I want to move us to a final thought we were going to try and get a question here about the future. So we’re going to kind of merge our last questions. What do you see ahead on this issue? And what is your focus on this issue? Now? George, we’re gonna start with you, Bowen and Timothy.

George McClellan
Imagine that you’re in a football stadium, or, or watching a game. But I’d say imagine you’re in a football stadium on a Saturday, where they have one of these deals. And you become aware that instead of the crowd really actively cheering for their team and rooting for their team, that they’re cheering for a particular outcome, because one of the things in now is what’s called in game betting. So you bet on whether the next plat play is going to be a pass or a run or whatever. Imagine what happens to the students who are competitors in the game. Imagine what happens to your campus culture. When instead of rooting for, for sort of pride and an outcome, you’re you’re now rooting for your financial interests. Just imagine how that changes campus culture. That’s, that’s, that’s the future. And that’s, you know, that if we don’t do something, that’s the future. And then And then the last thing I’ll say is this. We’re educators, we have an obligation to educate this issue. isn’t any different than any other issue, we have an obligation to educate. Let’s do that. That’s the future. Right? That’s what we’ve always done. And that’s what we need to do now.

Keith Edwards
Bowen, as you have alluded to, you’ve been along around, if you’ve been around a long time, what do you sort of see, given all that context? And all that history? What do you see now and into the future?

R. Bowen Loftin
Well, I am the oldest person among the four of us. No question about that. I’m hoping that we will take this in a very serious way that leads to making good decisions, for example, most schools are recognizing NIL as a new issue for them. And they are putting resources behind the idea of educating their student athletes about how to manage money better. Okay, well, why not augment that a little bit, and add the gambling dimension to it, and bring in a Timothy or whoever to talk about this specifically, with your students develop an educational program, that not only can stay in athletics, but also spread beyond athletics, to encompass the entire campus community. So I think there’s a, there’s a reason, so much money hosting the college for us. And that’s because people love it. And so let’s be responsible about it. Let’s encourage ADs, and even coaches, to say, let’s put resources behind this for our own your own athletes, but let’s spread that beyond athletics, and even funded from athletics to support the entire campus community.

Keith Edwards
Well, you’re really highlighted for me today. As more money flows into athletics, more money flows out of athletics, which then creates a need for more money to flow into athletics, and then we’re spending more money on coaches and more money on resources, and private planes, and then we need more money to flow in. So it seems like there will never be enough, there’s always a need for more because then we’ll spend more and then we’ll need more, the more we give them more we spend. And it’s a competitive game around, not just what’s on the field, but what you’re spending and what you’re incoming. So insatiable. Timothy, what would you like to close this out with? What do you see ahead, and what’s really on your mind now,

Timothy Fong
there’s so much and it’s wonderful. You know, number one, the field of studying gambling, there’s not a lot of us, there’s not a lot of money to study gambling, there’s not a lot of support, to really analyze it. There’s not a lot of experts. And so many schools don’t have folks like myself that spent a lot of time thinking and working with a gambler. So we definitely had to build that up that workforce capacity. Number two, I think we have an opportunity here and that this is the optimistic view on it really to say we’re innovating entertainment or cross sectioning between games and money and what people want. But we have to be very careful, because if we do it poorly, there’s a chance that I can see this ended up like the opioid crisis. And that’s not hyperbole, because if you just raise the prevalence rate of an addiction by, let’s say, a half a percent, or 1%, every couple of years, suddenly, we’re talking about millions of lives that had been destroyed. And that’s where I think colleges would say, if we didn’t do something to protect our athletes and our students, we didn’t do our duty. So I think that’s super, super important. I think that’s where I’ll leave a couple of really important resources. Right now. There’s a national helpline, 1-800-gambler that any human can call. Students, athletes, administrators, people concern about their own gambling behavior and can get access to help. We also have a lot of national organizations and National Council on problem gambling, our own organization here at UCLA gambling studies program that can do trainings. Now, one of the things that pandemic has allowed me to do a lot of training without leaving my office, so I don’t have to go I would love to go to college station, but I don’t have to do the really good trainings for mental health providers there. But I think for all the administrators here is a really think and get familiar with gambling. Many folks aren’t familiar with gambling at all. They don’t know what a same game parlay is. They don’t know what a teaser, they don’t know. DraftKings and FanDuel, they don’t know the difference. And if you are a college administrator, and it’s if it’s regulated in your state, I would encourage you to visit a casino. I’d encourage you to download the apps and encourage you to sit with your students and get a sense of it. And I’ll tell a quick story last last week, I was in Minnesota, youth hockey tournament with our son. And it was amazing to me how many of the players had active gambling accounts. They were trying to gamble inside the state of Minnesota. I said to them, What do you mean, how do you guys have these accounts? Where is it happening from? And many of them said, Well, we’re a travel hockey team, we go to different states. We ended up having accounts that are allowed by our parents funded by our parents to gamble with. And it was a really striking and the conversation a lot with about gambling and money and sports, the conversation wasn’t about other things. So we have a new world where gambling is a major source of entertainment. So these kids aren’t talking about the books they read or, or the movies they saw. It’s all part of it, we need to embrace that and actually bring that in rather than try and prohibit that. So again, one 800 gambler for anyemergency related to gambling, take a look at our website, UCLAgamblingprogram.org, and you’ll have all my contact information, I’m happy to come back and do trainings for any college administrator or agency that will happen.

Keith Edwards
And we’ll get all of that and more in the show notes that people can find on this episode page on our website. So thanks to all three of you. I’ve learned a ton. today. This has been really great. I really appreciate all of your expertise, and offering that with us today. Thank you all so much. And thanks to our sponsors of today’s episode Symplicity and Stylus. Symplicity is the global leader in student affairs technology platforms with state of the art technology that empowers institutions to make data driven decisions specific to their goals. A true partner to the institution Symplicity supports all aspects of student life including but not limited to career services and develop development, Student Conduct and well being student success and accessibility services. To learn more, visit symplicity.com or connect with them on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. And Stylus is proud to be a sponsor of Student Affairs. Now podcasts browse their student affairs, diversity and professional development titles at styluspub.com. You can use the promo code SAnow for 30% off all books plus free shipping. You can also find Stylus on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter @styluspub. As always a huge shout out to our producer Nat Ambrosey who does all the work behind the scenes to make us look and sound good. And if you’re listening today and not already receiving our weekly newsletter, please visit our website at Student Affairs now.com. Scroll to the bottom of the homepage to add your email to our MailChimp list. While you’re there, check out their archives. I’m Keith Edwards. Thanks again to our fabulous guest today. And for everyone who’s watching and listening. Please make it a great week. Thank you all.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/college-sports-follow-the-money-ep-6-w-kayce-smith/id1573626057?i=1000536409917

https://www.ncpgambling.org/files/NPGAWcollegefactsheet.pdf

McClellan, G. S. (2019, Fall). Fifth wave rising: Esports, fantasy sports, & the expansion of legalized gambling. Leadership Exchange, 17(3), 24–29. (https://www.leadershipexchange-digital.com/lexmail/2019fall/) – Article outlining the contemporary context for gambling issues on campus with recommendations for student affairs divisions and practitioners

National Council on Problem Gambling (https://www.ncpgambling.org/) – Lots of information and resourcesA Call to Action: Addressing College Gambling (http://www.divisiononaddiction.org/html/publications/College_Report_Full.pdf) This is a 2009 report, but the recommendations are solid.