Would someone please explain to me why the term “intercollegiate athletics” contains the word “collegiate”?

I don’t pretend to be a sports writer. I’m treading on this unfamiliar turf only because certain aspects of sports have societal implications that go far beyond the stadium or arena.

Commercialization of college athletics would have to top that list. This realization struck me with the force of a slap shot, when University of Maine athletic director Steve Abbott announced on April 12, that UMO was firing its men’s hockey coach of the past 12 years, Tim Whitehead.

In a carefully worded press release, Abbott explained the reason for the termination. “This is about the future of our marquee program,” Abbott stated. “Since 2008, UMaine has experienced declining Hockey East success, season ticket sales and overall ticket revenues, and waning student engagement in men’s ice hockey.”

In a later interview, Abbott commented, apparently without appreciating the irony of his words, “Tim has done a good job as a coach and a tremendous job mentoring our players.” Likewise, UMO president Paul Ferguson praised Whitehead, saying his “positive character and demonstrated commitment to developing our hockey players as student-athletes have been outstanding.“

But isn’t the job of modeling positive character and mentoring and developing student-athletes at the core of what coaches at institutions of higher learning are supposed to do? Apparently not in big-time interscholastic sports!

It seems Whitehead’s sin was that his teams had started losing more games than they were winning. During his first six years at the helm, the Black Bears went 154-69-26, but, during his last six, they sank to 96-102-28, culminating with a final season of 11-19-8. As a result, attendance at home games and sales of season tickets dropped sharply.

In big-time collegiate athletics, like professional sports, a few bad seasons are enough to get a coach sacked, regardless of whether he’s doing a “tremendous job mentoring” his players.

That’s because losing teams adversely affect the bottom line for revenue-generating spectator sports, which, after all, are about the bottom line.

Seen in this light, there are few differences between Division I college teams, especially in football and basketball, and major-league professional sport franchises. Both are operated with the ruthless efficiency of a business, relentlessly seeking to maximize income through ticket sales, merchandising, licensing agreements and broadcast contracts. The only essential difference is that student-athletes don’t get paid to play. They just receive free tuition, books, room, board and training.

Sometimes revenues from a “marquee” university sports team are so substantial they subsidize other athletic programs at the institution. But even when a major intercollegiate sport doesn’t break even, universities consider the prestige of having such a team a magnet for attracting potential students and alumni donations and hence a worthwhile investment.

Division 1 college coaches in football and basketball are rewarded handsomely for success. Top coaches can make as much as $1 to $5 million a year, usually far more than the presidents of their universities. Ice hockey coaches are several rungs down the ladder, the most successful being paid about $200,000 annually. Still, that’s not too shabby!

Coach Whitehead, for instance, was making $195,000 a year at the time of his termination, which wasn’t that much less than the $270,000 earned by UMO’s president.

The only requirement for coaches to get big paychecks, it seems, is for their teams to keep on winning. In fact, winning coaches may end up holding onto their jobs even when they engage in the kind of behavior which, if they were students, would result in their expulsion and criminal prosecution.

Exhibit 1 for this theory is Jerry Sandusky. At Penn State, where legendary coach Joe Paterno led Nittany Lions football teams to 298 game wins and 18 bowl wins from 1966 through 2011, Sandusky served as his assistant coach for 30 years, retiring in 1999 (when he received emeritus status, including an office in, and full access to, the university’s football facility).

Sandusky, as we now know, was a pedophile. When Penn State’s athletic director and its senior vice president for finance got an assistant coach’s eyewitness report in 2001 that Sandusky had anally raped a 10-year-old boy in the shower room of the football building, they neither informed the police nor barred Sandusky from the campus. Indeed, it wasn’t until November 6, 2011, the day after Sandusky was arrested on 40 counts of child sexual abuse occurring between 1994 and 2009, that Penn State banned him from campus.

Exhibit 2 is Mike Rice, former Rutgers University basketball coach, who was caught on video angrily cursing and hurling basketballs at his players during practice. That conduct merely earned him a three-game suspension and a fine after the school’s athletic director saw the videos in December 2012. However, when ESPN subsequently obtained and screened the videos in a cable broadcast on April 2, it created such a public scandal that Rutgers fired Rice the next day. Rice, who had been hired in 2010, had been trying to turn a long-time losing team into a winning one. He had succeeded in getting Rutgers an invitation to join the Big Ten Conference (a move which would have brought substantial new revenues to the school) three weeks before his initial suspension for the incident.

College athletics weren’t always run this way. Teams used to be organized more like clubs, with students playing an important role in making the rules, scheduling the contests and, of course, competing. Intercollegiate contests started with rowing in the 1840s, baseball in the 1850s, soccer in the 1860s, and track and field in the 1870s. The matches were initially held between teams from such venerable Ivy-covered institutions as Harvard, Yale, Amherst, Williams, Cornell and Princeton.

Perhaps early interest in American college athletic competitions was inspired by the English tradition, which encouraged team sports at upper-class private schools like Eton and Harrow in order to promote the sort of manly discipline, courage and leadership that could later be practiced in war and politics. This spirit was captured in the oft-quoted phrase that the Battle of Waterloo (in which Great Britain finally defeated Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815) “was won on the playing fields of Eton.”

But the advent of TV sportscasting and the increasingly corporate character of Division I football and basketball in the late 20th century indelibly changed the club-like atmosphere and scholar-athlete-leader ethos of intercollegiate sports. Now, it’s less about molding student-athletes than about dollars.

All of which brings me back to my initial question. Why does the term “intercollegiate athletics” contain the word “collegiate”?

Put another way, why should an essentially commercial enterprise be carried on under the aegis of nonprofit institutions of higher learning instead of through professional, minor-league feeder systems for aspiring major-league athletes?