College athletes need to unionize. Just look at Northwestern.

What was most important when Liebman got aboard was that the hard hats were resolving a lawsuit brought against them by women who said they were being sexually harassed as they entered the men’s ranks.

“Groups of women who had been subject to hazing,” Liebman recounted to me. “There was some pretty ugly stuff.”

But the union, under Liebman’s guidance, protected its neophyte members and started educating those in seniority about the pitfalls of pigheadedness, the same kind of behavior being spotlighted now in college sports after what appears to be systemic hazing in Northwestern athletics, replete with sexual and racial abuse.

What is being uncovered at Northwestern, my alma mater, is exactly why college athletes should be unionized. That LeBron James Jr. last week became the second USC basketball player in consecutive summer practices to suffer cardiac arrest is precisely why college athletes must unionize. That in the wake of all of this, Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) — the former college football coach who made millions heavily off unpaid Black male labor, then compared that class to criminals at a Trump rally last year — introduced a bill last week to control how much college athletes can earn on their own, rather than a bill to protect those athletes’ health and welfare, is indeed why college athletes need a union.

College athletes need to be protected from themselves. They need to be protected from those who take advantage of them as Tuberville did in his previous employment, which the architect of the modern NCAA, Walter Byers, explained in his confessional, “Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes.” And the institutions of supposed higher learning that have let the tail of sports wag their societal mission need to let their athletes organize to protect the institutions themselves from the lawsuits and reputational harm done by college sports gone awry.

Had Northwestern’s fired football coach, Pat Fitzgerald, and the administration that employed him supported an effort by its football players to unionize nearly a decade ago, he likely would not have been unceremoniously unwaged. And maybe all his former players would have fonder memories of playing for him, rather than telling potentially felonious tales.

“What a union can do is … provide a place where the athletes can go to report abuses and problems like that,” said Liebman, whom President Barack Obama made the second woman to chair the National Labor Relations Board in 2009. “And they have the…