The New York Times, January 7, 2001

Do Big-Money Sports Belong in College? 

William H. Honan

Behind the pageantry and excitement of the big intercollegiate football championship bowl games broadcast last week to more than 50 million enthusiastic viewers lurked an open secret: Many of the players are mercenaries who are lured by extravagant scholarships and have little or no interest in the life of the mind.

At least some of the star athletes' term papers are routinely written for them, critics contend. What's more, with the complicity of university officials, the critics charge, these athletes secure their places on teams with false academic records and with fraud, plagiarism and other abuses of the admissions and grading systems, even going so far as to terrorize athletic department tutors.

In short, the spectacle on the field has a dark side. Many institutions of higher learning, including some of the most respected, have joined the national entertainment industry and have occasionally succumbed to corruption. As for many of the players, college is often for the pursuit not of learning but of lucrative professional sports contracts, even though relatively few will ever get to sign them.

Cedric W. Dempsey, president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which comprises 972 colleges and universities, calls such accusations greatly exaggerated. The N.C.A.A. oversees the games and has the power to punish those who disobey its rules and has done so. But by and large, Mr. Dempsey defends college sports.

"The N.C.A.A. has been criticized ever since it was founded, so that's nothing new" Mr. Dempsey said. "We continue to analyze and evaluate new information and look at significant possible changes - like restructuring, presidential control, the graduation rate of varsity players and student-athlete welfare."

But others insist that the N.C.A.A. is not to be trusted. In a detailed new book, "The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values" (Princeton), James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen report that the N.C.A.A. has been described as the fox watching the hen house of college sports.

And there can be no argument that scholarships for brawn at many big universities are far more generous than those for brains, calling priorities into question. Athletic scholarships are typically all-inclusive packages for tuition, room, board, fees and books, while academic financial aid is often a need-based package of grants, loans and low-paying campus work.

If John Henry Newman, the 19th-century English theologian and educational philosopher whose classic study "The Idea of a University" helped lay the foundations of the modern university, were to witness all this, he would undoubtedly be aghast.

To Cardinal Newman, the university was a place of impeccable honor, tranquillity and reflection where "inquiry is pushed forward and discoveries perfected and verified."

The closest Cardinal Newman ever came to accepting contact sport on the university campus was when he declared that truth would result from "the collision of mind with mind." His concept of collision, quite obviously, was not physical.

How, then, have the great American institutions of higher learning strayed so far from this wise man's vision? Have colleges and universities lost their bearings? Will posterity look back on a society in which the thrill of sports supplanted the love of learning?

Or can it be fairly said that despite inevitable imperfections most intercollegiate athletics programs strive to achieve the Greek ideal that holds mind and body in balance?

A flurry of recent activity has raised these and related questions - and some of the answers have been surprising. The Shulman-Bowen study contains a number of rude awakenings, for example. Dr. Bowen, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a former president of Princeton University, and Dr. Shulman, financial and administrative officer of the foundation, report that the competition for varsity-caliber athletes is so great today that even at academically demanding colleges sports stars are more likely to be admitted than minority students and children of alumni. Furthermore, contrary to the popular belief that high-profile sports events fill school coffers, the bad news, according to the Shulman-Bowen book, is that "almost all athletic programs lose money."

Wallace Renfro, a spokesman for the N.C.A.A., disputes this last assertion. "According to our data," Mr. Renfro said, "it is safe to assume that at minimum the 48 institutions that show revenue exceeding expenses for their overall athletics programs certainly have excess revenues in their football programs."

These differing conclusions arise from inconsistent methods of accounting for major sports programs. Cost is reckoned in the millions of dollars for huge stadiums (like the one now under construction in East Hartford for the University of Connecticut), along with insurance, scholarships, compensation for coaches, equipment, grounds-keeping and transportation. But these costs are sometimes offset by ticket sales, concessions and especially lucrative television contracts.

Earlier this year, Hodding Carter III, president of the Knight Foundation, which has a longstanding concern with the abuses of intercollegiate sports, reconvened the Knight Commission and held meetings of academicians in Washington to consider what might be done to change the system.

"You could just look at the uncontrolled commercialization and huge sums of money being spent," Mr. Carter said, "to see that things had gotten worse, not better, since the Knight Commission first studied the matter in the early 1990's."

In 1996, the N.C.A.A. adopted changes proposed by the Knight Commission - including greater control by university and college presidents of athletic departments. Mr. Carter said he hoped that the N.C.A.A. would again accept recommendations that the newly convened commission plans to make early this year.

A few months before the Knight Commission was reconvened, Jon Ericson, a professor of rhetoric and communication studies at Drake College in Des Moines, organized a small conference provocatively called "Corruption in College Sports: The Way Out." The way out apparently is difficult; the participants have now formed a permanent organization called the Drake Group, which includes representatives of the 45,000-member American Association of University Professors.

Several cases in recent years have heightened public interest in the push for reform. About a year ago, for example, Linda Bensel-Meyers, an associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, filed charges through university channels that the athletics department had altered grades, created "friendly" courses and plagiarized papers to help varsity players remain eligible despite a weak academic performance. She also said that on occasion some athletes had treated their tutors with "verbal and physical disrespect."

Professor Bensel-Meyers made her first accusations of "institutionalized fraud" against the university athletics department in 1991, and in September 1999, her criticism was at the center of an investigation of fraud in the university's athletics tutoring system in a report by ESPN, one of the major cable-TV sports channels.

News of the ESPN report led to the suspension of four football players pending the result of an investigation. A few weeks later, the players were reinstated, and J. Wade Gilley, who became president of the university in August 1999, announced that a preliminary investigation had found no wrongdoing by the four players and that there would be no further investigation by the university or the N.C.A.A.

Later, the athletics committee of the Faculty Senate made recommendations aimed at ensuring the academic integrity of the university in its handling of varsity athletes. "We believe that most of our recommendations - such as the oversight of the tutoring of athletes - have been adopted," said Burton English, a professor of agricultural economics and chairman of the faculty committee.

Professor Bensel-Meyers, however, criticized the Faculty Senate action as merely "tailoring the emperor's new clothes."

Plagiarism, she declared, has become "part of the subject matter" of freshman English courses taken by poorly prepared varsity athletes.

In a notorious case that attracted national attention, Bob Knight, a Hall of Fame basketball coach, was dismissed from his job at Indiana University last September by the university's president, Myles Brand, who cited a pattern of "uncivil, defiant and unacceptable" behavior that culminated with the accusation by a freshman, Kent Harvey, that Mr. Knight had manhandled him and verbally abused him. In 1988, a previous Indiana president who had tried to discharge Mr. Knight wound up being forced to apologize to him.

That memory gave Mr. Knight's supporters reason to hope that this second effort to dethrone "the emperor of Indiana," as Mr. Knight had become known, would be reversed as well. Thousands of students marched on the president's house in protest, but they were dispersed by the police in riot gear, and the dismissal took effect. One highly placed college administrator said wryly that it would have been easier to discharge half a dozen Nobel prize winners.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, one of the authors of several current books that have added fuel to the fire of reform teaches at Indiana University. In "Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education" (Holt), Murray Sperber, a professor of English and American Studies there, blames the obsession with intercollegiate athletics for almost every imaginable collegiate sin from binge drinking and gambling to dumbing down the curriculum and destroying what was once an idealized campus life.

Professor Sperber also takes aim at the N.C.A.A., which, he says, has been patrolling a river of corruption "in canoes, not speedboats."

While Professor Sperber focuses chiefly on the big public universities, Mr. Shulman and Mr. Bowen in "The Game of Life," which is scheduled to be published on Jan. 17, report their findings about the athletic programs at elite colleges and universities.

Packed with charts and tables of data, the Shulman-Bowen book does not assign a catalog of sins to sports-minded colleges and universities as does Professor Sperber's book. But it argues compellingly that the influence of intercollegiate sports has greatly intensified in recent years.

Professors Shulman and Bowen use the same database that informed "The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions" (Princeton, 1998), which Professor Bowen wrote with Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard.

James J. Duderstadt, president emeritus of the University of Michigan and professor of science and engineering, has weighed in with "Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University: A University President's Perspective" (University of Michigan Press) in which he argues vigorously that big-time college football and basketball have become largely independent enterprises and that "it is time for universities to reassert control over intercollegiate athletics and to realign them with the academic priorities of higher education."

Other scholars are studying the football industry as well, and trying to debunk oft-heard arguments. For example, conventional wisdom has it that stellar sports teams, especially football and basketball teams, excite the alumni and inspire large financial gifts. "Right now we are in the midst of a major fund-raising campaign," said the chairman of the board of trustees of a large Midwestern university, who declined to be identified, "and the entertainment value of football has a way of helping by keeping our name before the public."

Earlier this year, two economists, Thomas A. Rhoads of Towson University in Maryland and Shelby Gerking of the University of Wyoming, reported that, yes, winning teams do stimulate donors, but only in the short run.

Their study of data from 87 universities from 1986 to 1996 showed that a victorious football team increased alumni gifts per student by about 7.3 percent on the average, and conversely that having a team placed on probation lowered these gifts by 13.6 percent. However, such effects were not long lasting.

Furthermore, the professors wrote in the journal Contemporary Economic Policy, improvements in the quality of faculty and students were more important than victorious sports teams in inspiring significant gifts.

The N.C.A.A., it should be said, has not been an uncompromising villain in all this. In 1986, the N.C.A.A. began to raise entry standards for freshman athletes (they needed a 2.0 average in their high school core curriculum and a combined math and verbal score of at least 700 in Scholastic Assessment Tests - which is about 200 points below the national average, yet certainly not off the charts.

A decade later, the N.C.A.A. raised standards again, requiring athletes who wished to participate in their freshman year to have a 2.5 core curriculum average and a combined test score of 820. A welcome increase in graduation rates for athletes resulted.

But always-creative coaches still found loopholes for admitting champion players who were weak academically. One technique has been to guide athletic stars first to junior or community colleges, then to transfer to major universities - a process in which requirements are minimal.

The N.C.A.A system, because of its dependence on controversial test scores, however, is now being challenged in court. If found illegal, it is likely to be replaced by another set of rules and circumventions.

The impediments to reform can hardly be exaggerated. Policy options for administrators are repeatedly frustrated by formidable historical, economic, institutional and political forces. Among the opponents of reform are not just outspoken graduates and potential donors, often joined by harried academic administrators, but also thousands of coaches, athletics directors, sports equipment makers and marketers and other representatives of a big-money sports-industrial complex.

Professor Sperber's recommendations are sweeping, and he himself is not optimistic about the chances of their acceptance. Not only would he ferret out corruption and put an end to athletic scholarships, but he also calls on big state universities to "slim down, losing millions of students" so as to "offer quality undergraduate education to all students who legitimately qualify for entrance."

In contrast, the recommendations in the Shulman-Bowen study are cautious. The authors call for a frank recognition of the tensions created by "the ever-increasing intensification" of intercollegiate athletics, the elimination of such "blatant abuses" as cheating, falsification of academic records, gambling and violence; a lessening of emphasis on high-profile sports; the reduction if not elimination of athletic scholarships; and finally the banding together of colleges and universities to work "in concert" for reform.

Would-be reformers differ on what approach to take. The chief disagreement is between those who would largely banish big-time sports programs from the academic campus, and those who would bring these programs under ever-greater control by university or college authorities.

For example, Professor Bensel-Meyers of the University of Tennessee said she and her like-minded colleagues conceived of segregating sports programs as have German universities, which have created institutes for sports science to deal with sports issues outside of the universities, making the universities less susceptible to corruption.

A related approach, she said, would be farm teams - "something like the farm teams in baseball." They would dispense with the sham of awarding academic degrees to players unworthy of them, and they would pay salaries rather than award scholarships, she explained.

The National Basketball Association is now in the process of establishing something along that line. The so-called National Basketball Developmental League, which is expected to get under way in November, will be a minor league that, unlike the minor leagues of baseball, will have no direct links with individual N.B.A. teams.

The brouhaha concerns a small minority of athletes, mainly those awarded scholarships in the big Division I universities that are athletic powerhouses. In a letter on the N.C.A.A.'s web site, Mr. Dempsey says: "There are nearly one million high-school football players and about 500,000 basketball players. Of that number, about 150 make it to the N.F.L. and about 50 make an N.B.A. team."

But some doubt that the developmental league will be a practical model for football.

"Football teams are so much bigger than basketball teams, and they need to be so much more expensively equipped, that it would be much more difficult to have minor league football," said Iris Molotsky, who heads the committee studying intercollegiate athletics at the American Association of University Professors. Ms. Molotsky said her committee would try to come up with a series of practical recommendations early next year.

Others argue that the key to reform rests in control of intercollegiate sports by college presidents as opposed to athletics department.

Professor Duderstadt of Michigan, for example, said: "If university presidents would take a stand together and call for the de-emphasis of big-time college sports, they would likely be successful."

Professor Ericson, founder of the Drake Group, agrees wholeheartedly with Professor Duderstadt. "The answer is not separation of the athletics program from the school, but an even closer relationship to restore academic integrity to college sports," he said. Professor Ericson suggested that any serious reform must begin with disclosure of the courses taken by the athletes and who their professors are.

Some faculty members oppose this disclosure, contending it would invade students' privacy rights. Professor Ericson responded: "That's easy to fix. Remove the student's name and include his grade or include the student's name but omit the grade. The point of disclosure is not to reveal the student's behavior, but rather the institution's behavior."

Both Professors Duderstadt and Ericson call for reducing the length of the season for major athletic teams, and making sure that when varsity athletes need help with their homework they get it from the academic side and not the athletic department.

"Despite the obstacles, the situation isn't hopeless," Professor Ericson said. "If we work at this, we can succeed."

[http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/07/education/07EDLIFE-JOCK.html]

 Copyright 2001 by The New York Times

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