===================================================

===================================================

We Should Speak the 'Awful Truth' About College Sports ...

By GEORGE H. HANFORD

A recent survey by The Chronicle suggests that the public supportsintercollegiate athletics programs far less than most college leaders believe and that the time has come when serious change in college sports might actually be possible. But can we truly reform college sports? For years, we have attempted that and failed, as I know only too well from personal experience.

Three decades ago, in 1973, Alden Dunham, then an officer at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and I, then the executive vice president of the College Board, had several informal conversations bemoaning the sorry state of intercollegiate athletics: its crass commercialism and growing "win at any cost" professionalism. Carnegie had issued a seminal report on the subject in 1929, and Dunham thought it was well past time for a reprise. He proposed that I conduct an inquiry into the need for a national study of college sports on behalf of the American Council on Education.

With the support of Carnegie and the Ford Foundation, several colleagues and I spent six months exploring all aspects of college athletics and submitted our report, totaling some 397 pages including appendices, to ACE in April 1974. We identified a number of critical problem areas, among them the advent of Title IX, the exploitation of minority athletes, the growth of professional sports, the influence of television, and the trickle-down effect of the competitive excesses in the major big-time sports on the "minor" collegiate ones and on secondary-school athletics. We concluded that an extensive follow-up study was needed to find solutions, and we prepared a proposal for ACE to submit to Carnegie requesting $1.8-million to undertake the task. It did not take long for the disillusionment that I have experienced over the years since then to set in.

The reactions to the report ranged widely. The National Collegiate Athletic Association complained that, while the report was motivated by good intentions, it was based largely on fantasy or preconceived opinions -- that we were outsiders who didn't know what we were doing. The president of a big-time athletic power commented, "Amateurs shouldn't get involved in things they don't know anything about." (His institution happened to be on probation for rules violations with the NCAA.)

At the same time, it was hard not to get a swelled head from adjectives such as "powerful," "landmark," "brilliant," "penetrating," which appeared in news publications, books, and personal letters. The press-relations officer at the Carnegie Corporation observed that no single Carnegie-sponsored project had generated more business for its newspaper clipping service. The author James Michener, who was then working on Sports in America, wrote, "In every area Hanford pinpointed the hot issues. ... His slim report should be published for the national audience ... and no one should make decisions in this field without consulting it."

But some reviewers thought we had pulled our punches -- that we had been far too easy on the intercollegiate-athletics establishment. Richard Margolis observed in the November 1974 issue of Change magazine, "He [Hanford] is less polemicist than administrator -- which may be why he presents us with a 'balanced' analysis that never flies. ... Page upon page of pros and cons, all equally weighted. No maladies are deplored; no remedies prescribed." In fact, even my wife told me that I had failed to "tell it like it is."

Yet we had been asked to produce an analytical treatise, not an expose. It did not seem to make sense, then, to offend the educational establishment with which I was associated. In other words, while we called attention to 15 specific examples of excess, all of which had been previously reported in the press, I chose not to sensationalize them. Nor did I think we needed to uncover some more new dirt; I felt that what we had reported was sensational and dirty enough as it was.

The Carnegie Corporation's response was most disappointing. While the staff was excited about the prospect of sponsoring the study we had recommended, the trustees were not. Influenced by the Eastern-establishment bias, they simply could not accept the proposition that anything as messy as big-time intercollegiate athletics was an important part of the nation's social fabric. Trying to clean up that mess just wasn't worthwhile to them.

Ultimately, they voted to set aside only a meager $200,000 to match whatever ACE came up with. And, for their part, many of the institutional presidents in ACE's membership weren't interested in looking for a philanthropic match. They believed they had more compelling needs on which to spend money -- a clear signal that they wanted to let sleeping dogs lie.

Such developments following the publication of our report led me to three disillusioning conclusions. One, the NCAA was not about to admit that anything was seriously wrong with intercollegiate athletics. Two, presidents were turning their backs on the problems in their sports programs. And three, foundations were not about to dirty their hands dealing with anything as unsavory as college sports.

Thirty years later, has anything changed? Is the NCAA in control? Not by a long shot. In the last decade, the almighty dollar has reigned even more supreme, as bowl games have been manipulated, conferences have been realigned, and coaches' salaries have escalated. At the same time, officials at the athletic conferences are not interested in having the NCAA invade their increasingly lucrative turf. Furthermore, it is not the healthiest of circumstances when a single agency, the NCAA, acts as the primary organizing body and legislative authority, the police force and the prosecutor, the judge and the jury in overseeing the conduct of college sports in America.

Are the presidents in control on their own campuses? The litany of rules violations, as reflected in the number of institutions on probation with the NCAA, suggests that they are not -- that the chicanery indulged in by trustees, alumni, athletics administrators, and athletes persists under the not-so-watchful eyes of many college leaders. Like their predecessors, today's chief executives want to avoid the whole bloody mess; they do just enough to ease their consciences and appear sufficiently involved to keep critics at bay.

And what about the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, which issued its first report in 1991 and a second one in 2001, and which now plans to reconvene, yet again, in the near future? According to its Web site, it has pursued an agenda built around a central recommendation: presidential control of college sports. But while many of its suggestions are reasonable, they treat only the symptoms of the problem, not the root causes. That should be no surprise. The commission has always been heavily loaded with representatives of higher education who have vested interests in college sports. Moreover, like the NCAA, having members of a fraternity judge the integrity of its brothers doesn't make sense.

There are many reasons why college sports remains in serious disarray, but one of the most important is that no one has been willing to call a cancer a cancer -- that is, to decry the rampant commercialism of big-time college sports, the denigration of academic values in the interests of athletic ends, and the unethical means that "friends" of a given sport (coaches, faculty members, alumni, and local businessmen) employ to recruit and financially support athletic talent. I know. I had the opportunity in 1973 and 1974 and did not. I worried about offending the educational establishment with which I was associated and instead created the impression that what I knew to be a cancer was perhaps only a headache.

My own experience aside, it is difficult to speak the "awful truth" about big-time college sports. Those programs have the public's eye and generate loyalty and support among people throughout the country that is akin to patriotism. That is why it is hard for any individual or commission within higher education to generate much more than palliatives, not real reform. The recent Chronicle survey gives new hope, however, that the public may now be much more interested in change than many higher-education leaders may have realized.

But to begin to find the cure, we can't look to the same old organizations and groupsthe usual suspectslike the Knight Commission. We need to establish a truly independent, unbiased body outside the educational and athletics establishment that could take a serious, in-depth look at big-time intercollegiate athletics within the context of the role of sports in the broader society. That last qualification is crucial. Sports are said to reflect the societies in which they exist, and many problems that attend intercollegiate athletics are manifestations of similar ones that exist in our society today. They should be dealt with in that context.

For instance, is not the crass commercialization of college sports but one manifestation of society's worship of the dollar as evident in the case of Enron or WorldCom? Is not the star basketball player's perfecting his slam dunk instead of focusing on teamwork akin to the corporate executive's leaving a company that nurtured him for a more lucrative post elsewhere? In the matter of social equality, is the preponderance of black athletes in big-time football and basketball evidence of the success of the civil-rights movement or the exploitation of minority students? What about Americans' physical health? One of our society's problems is obesity, which comes in part from sitting around watching sports, not participating in them. These are just a few of the ways that the abuses in college athletics are connected to far broader societal concerns.

Any group established to deal with those issues from that broader perspective should therefore include not only representatives of the professional, collegiate, and secondary-school athletic establishment, but also recognized leaders from the fields of sociology, philosophy, psychology, medicine, law, business, and religion. It should be chaired by someone with impeccable credentials, like a Supreme Court justice, and include public-spirited individuals with enough credibility and stature that college leaders and the public would truly listen to them. An organization like the American Council on Education should once again take the lead in organizing such an effort and seek sponsorship from a major foundation.

Almost 75 years after Carnegie's first report, we must finally come to terms with intercollegiate athletics. Before it's far too late, we need people who are willing to speak the truth about college sports -- and to take the heat for having done so.

George H. Hanford is president emeritus of the College Board.

====================================================================

... or Does the Public Like the Status Quo?

By MILTON GREENBERG

As a sports fan, I have taken note of almost daily bad news about collegiateathletics -- the seemingly endless stories of rule breaking, violence, drugs, and outright corruption, as well as the excessive expenditures (known as the "arms race") for teams, facilities, and coaches. It seems that the way that we as a society attempt to deal with athletic excesses resembles the war on drugs. No one really believes that we can eliminate drugs or big-time athletics, so we occasionally penalize certain behaviors, cry "shame," and merely tweak the edges of the problem.

In the case of drugs, we alter marginal rules like how much marijuana use constitutes illegal behavior. Similarly, in athletics, we have an encyclopedia of rules -- for grades, test scores, and behavior -- that we amend every few years, and then pretend to have allayed the problem. Meanwhile, we continue to satisfy the perverse urgings of colleges and universities for the prestige, publicity, and money that sports programs supposedly bring.

That's why I read with particular interest the results of a national poll of public opinion, conducted by The Chronicle recently, in which two-thirds of the respondents said that "four-year colleges anduniversities place too much emphasis on athletics." Barely more than a third of those surveyed said that sports were somewhat or very important for colleges and universities. And, when asked to select among 21 goals for colleges and universities, people ranked "play athletics for the entertainment of the community" dead last.

Do most people really think higher-education institutions focus unduly on their sports programs? Do they really want to change and reform intercollegiate athletics? The enormous commitment to intercollegiate athletics by most of the nation's highly rated institutions, large and small, would indicate that academics and athletics are very related. Otherwise, we wouldn't do it, right?

The question of whether big-time intercollegiate athletics is in conflict with, or connected to, the best expectations of college life in America has so intrigued me that, well before the publication of the Chronicle poll, I ventured forth on my own totally unscientific survey. More than a year ago, I began to engage friends, neighbors, e-mail contacts, athletes, sports fans at games, strangers on planes, and even telephone solicitors ("Say, let me ask you a question ... "). And I found that people just love to talk about this topic.

"Tell me," I'd begin, "how does intercollegiate athletics serve the purposes of higher education?" With few exceptions, the first answer was, "It builds school spirit." Academic sophisticates phrased it as, "It builds a sense of community."

Then I would ask, "Assuming that to be true, what does that have to do with higher education?" Blank stares were followed by a look that asked, "Are you weird or something?" That was followed by a stumbling, "Well, you know, it's fun. I mean, you know, it's like what college is all about: It makes you feel part of something."

I learned that at Duke University, students are so "spirited" by the basketball team that they have to wait overnight in tents supplied by the university for the few tickets available to students. When a neighbor's son visited Duke as a prospective freshman, he asked (at my suggestion) whether that was true. A high-ranking university official proudly told him that it was true and that "it was part of the spirit-building at Duke."

I read that the University of Memphis, winner of men's basketball's 2002 National Invitational Tournament, with a student body of 18,000 and a basketball arena seating 20,000, has sold more than 17,000 season tickets to "nonstudents." That leaves only about 2,500 for spirited students. One could conclude from such data that most students are scholars and not basketball fans. Yet what colleges rarely comment on, but what is widely noted, is that many of those 2,500 student tickets at Memphis, like those at Duke and elsewhere, are so hard to get that they are scalped for hundreds of dollars, openly advertised in classified ads.

Isn't the "spirit" argument a bit overdone? After all, many outstanding colleges and universities have mediocre to poor athletics teams, and the overwhelming number of people attend institutions where athletics is barely on the radar screen. I confess that I went to such a college, and all I remember is that during the only football game I attended during my four years there, the punter on our team kicked the ball backward over his head. (I hasten to add that our basketball team was jailed for fixing games, so we were not entirely out of the shenanigans loop.)

The next most frequent response to my informal survey was that sports raise a lot of money for higher-education institutions. That makes sense, but unfortunately it is not true. What is especially not true is that success in athletics encourages alumni and other fans to donate money to regular academic programs.

The NCAA estimates that college sports earned about $3-billion in 2000 but spent $4.1-billion. Many colleges would close down with a cost-benefit ratio like that for their academic programs. Very few institutions, including those in Division I, make enough to cover the costs of their athletics programs. At about 50 top powers, enough is available from football and basketball to support other sports teams and to embellish athletics facilities. But more typical is the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, one of the largest in the nation, which has subsidized its $41-million budget for athletics programs to the tune of well over $10-million a year from state and university funds. In fact, the athletics-department deficit has been projected to reach $21-million in the next five years. Academic purists might be alarmed to know that, according to the Star Tribune, Minnesota athletics units employ about 70 people in administrative positions, and that the university buys parking from the athletics department for $1-million a year.

People who answered my informal survey unfailingly turned next, and aggressively, to what they felt was a clear academic plus: "A lot of young people who ordinarily would not get an education are given an opportunity." Many compared athletics scholarships as similar to those given for musical talent. (Surely there must be a better example than music, but that was the only one mentioned.) From there it took just a few seconds for people to add, "and so many of them are minority students who might not otherwise get admitted." This was usually followed by a "gotcha!" smile.

"That is a point that may make you feel good," I responded, "but instead of raising and investing millions of dollars in athletics plant, promotion, recruiting, and staffing, why not use those billions to give need-based scholarships to minorities who can choose or not choose to play a game, just as an academic scholarship does not require you to major in a specific field?" I haven't gotten an answer to that one yet, except for that stare that says, "You gotta be kidding."

I tried to get a rise out of people by equating athletics scholarships with affirmative action, but few took the bait. Many of the people I spoke with knew that the graduation rate for athletes at universities with big-time sport programs was poor (zero in some cases of Division I basketball teams). They also had read of the special courses and tutoring for athletes, as well as the pressures on professors to give them unmerited good grades. But few seemed offended because the players allegedly "do so much for their schools." (Build spirit, raise money, I presume.)

Moreover, those I spoke with frequently pointed out that intercollegiate athletics are demanding, and student-athletes don't have time or energy to study. To the millions of nonathletes who worked their way through college, this probably sounds like so much palaver. Nevertheless, I found a sincere belief among people that athletics does demand extraordinary commitment and requires athletes to be off campus several days at a time.

Next in line of responses was something like this: "Sports teaches sportsmanship, team building and sharing, winning and losing, prepares you for the real world and stuff like that." But shouldn't you be taught most of those behaviors at least by grade school? If pushed, I noted that it is clear that the notorious basketball coach Bob Knight missed kindergarten because his sportsmanship skills feature screaming obscenities, manhandling players, and throwing furniture.

I always hated to ask this obvious question, but I did: "What would happen to a history or biology professor, or a clerk in the registrar's office, who cursed at students, put them in a stranglehold, or threw a chair?" A smirky smile and sigh of disgust accompanies the typical response: "Well, that wouldn't happen, and anyway in sports you get caught up in the emotion of the game and so much is riding on it for the coach." Really? And how does that benefit higher education?

In a search for better answers, I called and wrote several times to the NCAA and asked for any material they had or could recommend that indicated the benefits of intercollegiate athletics to higher education or demonstrated its consistency with academic values. A senior official -- who will remain unnamed, but who was direct and honest -- finally called me back. He essentially told me that magazines and newspapers, especially The Chronicle, are anti-athletics and only print the bad news, and that claims by some in higher education about "academic values" are largely undefined and illusory (to put it nicely).

The NCAA official also contended that complaints about the poor academic performance and class attendance of athletes can be compared with the poor teaching of some faculty members and their own frequent absences from campus. In addition, he pointed out, a coach who doesn't win is fired -- the only such victim on a campus. Finally, he said, the model of physical education in schools and colleges has given way to professionalism of sports as a skill and livelihood, bolstered by huge financial considerations -- "just like most academic disciplines."

The last point is most important. Don't we all go to school to improve our chances for a livelihood? Aren't colleges and universities expected to adjust to new and growing career fields, like information science, and isn't sports one of the richest business enterprises in the world? Support of the economy is clearly one of higher education's greatest contributions.

One need not be an economist to appreciate the place of all levels of sports in the national economy. Just consider its role in construction, manufacturing, tourism, transportation, media, entertainment, and advertising. It is huge and unstoppable.

While few college athletes make it into the professional world of megadollars, many do get jobs in coaching, community health-and-recreation programs, and the business world. Such results are not without merit nor unworthy of academic support. What is wrong with wanting a career as a professional athlete? Or a related enterprise? We could offer more academic majors or minors in various aspects of the sports world that could rival many existing academic majors or minors. Then we could grant credit, and perhaps modest pay, for playing on a team while in college -- much as we do for internships in other fields.

But do I hear any meaningful cry for change from the NCAA, the athletics conferences, the presidents of colleges and universities, the boards of trustees, the faculty members, the students, the legislators, the media moguls, and the millions of fans who watch and bet on games? Of course not. They may pay it lip service, but I find their meager utterances unconvincing.

That's why, whatever people may say in polls and surveys, we'll just keep reading articles like one in The Chronicle quoting Tonya Moten Brown, then vice president and chief of staff of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, who bemoaned the deficits generated by her university's huge athletics program and the movement toward eliminating minor sports like gymnastics, golf, tennis, wrestling, and swimming: "There is a sense that we are eliminating opportunities in those sports that still retain what is noble and pure about amateur athletics, at the expense of dealing with sports ... that every day look more and more like their professional counterparts." She hoped that someone would resist the pressure and "stand up and take this on."

Sorry, Ms. Brown. Many people have taken it on -- and they like it just the way it is.

Milton Greenberg is a professor emeritus of government at American University.

_________________________________________________________________
Copyright 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education