Swarthmore Kicks Football Out of the College

By WELCH SUGGS

Peter Alvanos sat at his desk and held his head in his hands early last week, staring out his door with bleary eyes that didn't focus on anything.

Scrawled on the whiteboard behind him was a football play in X's and O's, as well as a name and telephone number under the word "PROSPECT."

Neither one was of much use to him anymore.

Last Monday, December 4, Mr. Alvanos, Swarthmore College's football coach, was still trying to process the news that the college's Board of Managers had disbanded his program two days earlier. He had spent the past three years turning it around, bringing in good players with stellar academic records, and now he was in shock at the thought that his team was gone, along with the wrestling squad. The women's badminton team also was demoted from varsity to club status.

"You're crushed," Mr. Alvanos said. "You're crushed as a coach, an educator, a father figure to these kids, a psychologist. ..."

If the rest of the people on this idyllic campus near Philadelphia weren't crushed, they weren't exactly jubilant. Most students and alumni evinced surprise and dismay that the board, having received a recommendation to eliminate the teams the previous Friday, acted as swiftly, decisively, and controversially as it did the next day.

Swarthmore, founded by the Society of Friends in 1864, still abides by the Quaker tradition of acting by consensus. Last weekend, for the first time anyone can remember, the board decided to abandon that method and, instead, voted on the issue. Football, wrestling, and badminton lost, 21 to 8. And one of the eight -- a former president of the National Football League -- is threatening to resign if the decision is not reconsidered.

Along with a week's worth of student protests and bitter words from football players and other athletes, the decision has attracted national attention. Swarthmore made headlines last year when the Garnet Tide snapped a 28-game losing streak by beating Oberlin College, 42-6, a sign that the college was making a stronger commitment to fielding a competitive team.

But such a commitment, administrators say, was just an experiment. The cost isn't a problem: Like most liberal-arts colleges, Swarthmore doesn't award scholarships. Instead, what's at stake is Swarthmore's most precious commodity, its admissions slots. An incoming class of 375 can only hold so many athletes before they start to overwhelm the campus, according to the president, Alfred H. Bloom.

"We have to have enough students on each team with specific talents for that sport," said Mr. Bloom. "But there are not that many to go around, because we're looking for something so specific."

Swarthmore is one of the most exclusive colleges in the country, admitting only 21 percent of its applicants. Enrolling the smartest offensive tackle in the country might well mean rejecting the smartest flutist.

"When you look at the development of a full class, how many spaces should you reserve for bringing in students with talents in given sports, as opposed to other students?" asks Mr. Bloom.

The irony of the situation is that Mr. Alvanos was just starting to get Swarthmore football going in the right direction. In 1998, after years of mediocrity on the field, the college hired him away from the University of Chicago, where he was defensive coordinator. At the time, Neil Austrian , a member of the board, assured him that Swarthmore was committed to maintaining a healthy football program.

Mr. Bloom and J. Lawrence Shane, the chairman of the board, remember it differently. They say their support for football -- including the recruitment of athletes who might not be admitted otherwise -- was an experiment for the 1,400-student college. Last December, the board convened an Athletics Review Committee to assess the college's commitment to all of its sports, and the percentage of admissions slots it wanted to devote to athletes.

In order to have a successful football team, Swarthmore must find running backs, quarterbacks, linebackers, and linemen who together have about as much talent as those of the other institutions in the Centennial Conference, like Western Maryland College (which beat the Garnet Tide 41-21 this fall) and Muhlenberg College (31-14 victors over the Swatties).

But the pool of running backs and other players with test scores and grades comparable to those of other applicants is minuscule. As a result, elite colleges like Swarthmore, Amherst, and Williams reach a little deeper into the applicant pool to get talented athletes.

It's an ethical dilemma for the colleges, which don't have to reach as deeply for talented musicians, dancers, or students with other interests, said James L. Shulman, director of the "College and Beyond" program at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in New York.

"It's difficult to reconcile athletic excellence, and the specialized roles for different kinds of athletes with the degree of academic excellence that's going on at highly selective institutions," he said.

He and his boss at Mellon, William G. Bowen, are the authors of The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, due out early next year from Princeton University Press. They contend that athletes at elite colleges and universities do not perform as well as their peers academically, and that the athletes tend to be somewhat isolated from the rest of campus life because of the intense pressures of practice and competition, even at a college like Swarthmore. They question whether most athletes are able to take full advantage of the educational opportunities available at such institutions.

"The people who play football at Swarthmore are terrific academically, but the fact that their athletic prowess has played an appreciable role in the admissions process means they're probably not the same people who would have been chosen otherwise," Mr. Shulman said. "The question is whether having a winning lacrosse team or football team is worth guiding how you use scarce resources."

The majority of Swarthmore's Athletics Review Committee came to the conclusion that only 10 to 15 percent of each class of Swarthmore students should be "recruited" athletes -- those for whom their sport is their primary extracurricular activity.

Thomas J. Krattenmaker, a college spokesman, said the committee believed that 32 percent of each incoming class would have to be athletes in order for the programs to be competitive. At the moment, only 17 percent of Swarthmore students are recruited athletes. With 55 players on the roster, football was an obvious candidate for the chopping block, in order to get the number of athletes down.

Although the committee met for a year, and included members of the football team, Mr. Alvanos said the decision came as a shock.

"To go 4-5, our best record since 1995, you just feel all the hard work was starting to mean something," he said. "In my own little world, the success we'd had finding quality student-athletes, getting the community behind us, I guess I took it for granted."

According to all parties, Mr. Alvanos had done everything by the book. The committee found that athletes had slightly lower grade-point averages than non-athletes, but that the football players were, on average, exceptionally qualified. Mr. Alvanos knows their average SAT score by heart: 1397.5, which isn't all that far below the median 1460 score for students accepted at Swarthmore last year.

"This was absolutely not motivated by any sense that athletes bring anything but very positive enhancements," said Mr. Bloom. "All of our athletes bring a wonderful range of other things to Swarthmore."

Other observers aren't so sure. Students say there are two kinds of athletes at the college. One group, mostly football players, is cliquish; many of its members belong to the lone fraternity on the campus, Delta Upsilon. The rest are more fully engaged in the Swarthmore's social life and activities.

Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology, said that many athletes -- football players and others -- he has had in class lack a certain zeal for intellectual pursuits. "There's less evidence of a spark, of real interest in what they're studying. At other institutions, that wouldn't even be noticeable."

Eugene M. Lang, a member of the Board of Managers and a philanthropist who has helped to send many underprivileged young people to college, is blunter. "Having a football team is like trying to live peacefully with an 800-pound gorilla," said Mr. Lang, who graduated from Swarthmore in 1938. "You can't have a football squad of 70 in a coed student body of 1,400."

The Athletics Review Committee made its recommendations to the board on Friday, December 1, over the protestations of Mr. Austrian, the board member and former president of the N.F.L. Mr. Bloom, Swarthmore's president, insists that the committee considered all sports, but Mr. Austrian, a member of the group, said its deliberations were about football from the start.

Swarthmore's other 21 teams "weren't on the table in any way, shape, or form," said Mr. Austrian, a member of the Class of 1961. Despite his feelings and those of others on the committee, the group made a single recommendation -- to drop football and wrestling and to demote badminton.

The controversy has centered primarily on football, because the wrestling program has been in decline for years. The coach resigned before the start of the season, and only three wrestlers were available for the first match of the year. The team had not decided whether to finish out the season.

Badminton players do not get any help in the admissions process and will continue competing against local clubs and colleges.

The next day, December 2, the board met and, according to members on both sides of the issue, agreed to make a decision immediately rather than deliberate until February, as had been planned. Coaches would have a hard time recruiting athletes during the winter months, knowing that their teams might not be around the next season, Mr. Bloom explained.

The board also quickly ascertained that its members could not reach a consensus on the issue -- a situation perhaps unprecedented in the college's history. In the past, members of the board who dissented from the majority opinion would simply "stand aside" to allow the group to reach a unanimous opinion. Not even on an issue as contentious as whether the college should sell off its investments in apartheid-era South Africa, in the mid-1980's, did the board have to resort to a vote, Mr. Lang said.

However, Mr. Austrian and other members of the board insisted on having their opposition to dropping the sports put on the record. So the group took a vote, producing the 21-to-8 result.

"I think the board will always want to follow Quaker influence as much as it can," said Mr. Shane, the chairman. "I think a combination of circumstances this time, and the feeling that the best thing for Swarthmore was to make a decision, made this special and rare."

Mr. Austrian said that unless the board reconsiders its decision, he will step down after 22 years as a member. "I've been totally compromised," he said, explaining that as a member of the board, he assured Coach Alvanos and many prospective students and their parents that Swarthmore was committed to football for the long term. The swift decision to excise the program is a fatal blow to his credibility, he said.

News of the board's decision spread quickly, provoking furious reactions among students and alumni. At what was supposed to be a private meeting with members of the football team on Sunday, Mr. Bloom, Mr. Shane, and Jennie Keith, the college's provost, were shouted down by an angry crowd of students and parents.

More protests were registered at a "fireside chat" with the president on Monday, and students staged a sit-in on the first floor of Parrish Hall, the main administration building, the following day. Even non-athletes came well-equipped with markers and poster board to make signs supporting their classmates.

"I'm a non-athlete, but as a friend of athletes I feel it's important we all support them," said Amy Robinson, a first-year student. "These people are our friends."

Athletes and former athletes alike say they felt that the decision showed that the college wasn't committed to supporting its athletics department.

"Nobody's happy about the way it was handled," said Jeremy Shweder, a member of the Class of 1994 who competed on Swarthmore's one national-class sports program, the tennis team. "They are claiming that this is a way they can recruit better, but it's basically a step saying, 'We don't care about athletics very much, and we don't want to support it.'"

Mr. Bloom disagreed vehemently. The decision "says we will make a larger commitment to bringing in athletes than any other group," he argued. "We hope that we will have absolutely as many kids who come here with a particular interest in athletics, and a talent or history of achievement in athletics, as we did before."

The president said the college's goal was for each of its teams, over time, to record a .500 won-lost record and occasionally to compete for conference and national titles.

Most of the country's top liberal-arts colleges -- Williams, Amherst, and Bowdoin, to name a few -- as well as Ivy League institutions, maintain very broad sports programs, and most of them compete on a high level nationally. But they all struggle with the problem of how many athletes to admit, and how much they're willing to lower their standards to get talented players in the door.

Officials of other selective colleges say Swarthmore's decision caught them by surprise. "In certain ways, I don't know what to make of it all," said Thomas H. Parker, dean of admissions at Amherst. "If Swarthmore can't do it, who the heck can?"

Mr. Parker and Peter N. Gooding, Amherst's athletics director, say they are engaged in constant monitoring to make sure that the admission of athletes doesn't compromise the college's standards. They have had problems in the past (The Chronicle, November 19, 1999).

But Amherst has a much stronger athletics program than Swarthmore, and Mr. Parker said he doesn't understand why Swarthmore officials think they would need so many more athletes to be competitive. "That figure, of [around] 30 percent, is preposterous for 24 sports," he said. "We bring in 75 kids a year, 17 percent of the class, of athletes, and we have 27 sports. How are we doing that? We're bringing in athletes who are terrific students."

Mr. Gooding said he thinks that Swarthmore is capable of fielding a competitive football program, although he notes that there are not many football-playing colleges nearby that attract the same academic caliber of students -- part of the reason for Swarthmore's football woes.

Despite the hard feelings, professors and even some alumni disappointed with Swarthmore's decision acknowledge that dropping the team probably will not change the college much in the long run.

"I don't think the school needs football, but it doesn't not need football," said Mr. Shweder, the 1994 graduate. "The spotlight on the football program has skewed what Swarthmore is really about, but I think Al Bloom has skewed it a little, too. Football is never a huge part of anyone's experience, except the players."

The players are, of course, upset and angry, and many are considering transferring. "We've already heard from two," said Amherst's Mr. Parker.

In his office, Mr. Alvanos fished out a recruiting leaflet that he had been sending out to prospective players. Its title: "One Heartbeat -- The Resurrection of Swarthmore College Football." At the bottom of the page is the phrase, "The rebuilding is over."

Mr. Alvanos shook his head at the irony. He, too, has some tough decisions to make.

"What happens next? I don't know," he said, his voice a rasp. "I haven't even sat down to talk to my wife about it."

Copyright 2000 by The Chronicle of Higher Education