Hey, look! James Madison University wants to move its football program up from the Football Championship Subdivision to the Football Bowl Subdivision, and certain faculty are bent out of shape about it, for obvious reasons.
First, there's the simple matter that the NCAA exists largely to make money off of grossly underpaid labor, and its history is one of redefining its role as is convenient. That doesn't sit well with some of the JMU profs, for obvious reasons, one of the big ones being that they don't want to be in the "subsidizing athletic endeavors" business, but rather in the "educating young people for the world" business.
There's also the little matter of cost. There's nothing wrong with wanting to pay for something fun and nice, which an FBS football team can be, but let's not dance around the point that JMU (and all schools starting from scratch in this regard) will have to actually pay for it. Playing at that level isn't just an automatic money-maker, and apparently, it appears it's fallen to the profs to point this stuff out and make it explicit.
If you want to see the downside of leveling up, go to Philadelphia and see what's happened to Temple University since it brought its football team to the FCS. Yikes.
Ultimately, the problem is a matter of framing. If we could start over the athletic-industrial complex in the United States today, would we tie big-time athletics to universities? Of course not. We'd set it up like the old minor league baseball days, or like the club soccer system overseas, where independent minor league teams would sign players and develop them either on behalf of major league teams, or on their own behalf before selling their rights to major league organizations. As Tommy Craggs put it a couple years ago (and as should be framed at the entrance of every NCAA basketball and football complex): "You begin from the assumption... that the NCAA is a worthwhile institution with flaws. I begin from the assumption that the NCAA should be dynamited."
Shift the starting point and put it on the NCAA to explain why it should exist, and the pretense falls apart. It's all one unending shell game: Universities exist to provide academic development... Universities make a bunch of money from athletics... The athletes making a bunch of money for the universities, however, have to be seen as being there for their academic development, per the universities' mission, otherwise the academics lose their integrity... Enter the NCAA, which exists, ostensibly, in order to ensure universities' academic integrity by enforcing eligibility requirements based on athletes' maintaining student status... Which is only necessary because universities don't want to be seen as accepting students only because they're athletes; after all, universities exist to provide academic development.
It's not just colleges. High schools suffer from the same bullshit, too. But if JMU (and UNC-Charlotte, and Appalachian State) only want to focus on some grand fantasy of winning a national championship in football someday, instead of focusing on being the best university they can be, while fielding football teams that do well enough in the FCS and already do the job of providing a community rallying point at that level, they're bound for disappointment.
Be happy with having a successful FCS team. Unless you're already there, it's not worth playing FBS (and sometimes, even if you are, it's not).
(Image cc-licensed: "Zane Showker Field" by Taber Andrew Bain)