Sports and Academics

The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 26, 2001

Big-Time Athletics vs. Academic Values: It's a Rout

Allen L. Sack

When I played football for the University of Notre Dame in the 1960's, college sports had already long been a commercial spectacle, beleaguered by scandals and controversies. Nonetheless, universities in that period still held on, albeit tenuously, to the notion that athletes should have the same opportunities for intellectual growth and personal development as other students, and that education was the core mission of a university.

For instance, after we won the national championship in 1966, the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, then president of Notre Dame, refused to let the team play in a postseason bowl game, because that would make it difficult for us to prepare for final exams -- an inconceivable stand for a president of a Division I institution to take today. And back then, the National Collegiate Athletic Association still barred freshmen, even those with exceptional academic credentials, from participating in varsity competition. Although we had to endure the rigors of fall and spring practice, the freshman-ineligibility rule gave young athletes a year to adjust to college life with minimal interference from athletics. What's more, athletics scholarships were guaranteed for four years, regardless of whether the recipient actually competed in sports.

The gap between college sports and the fundamental mission of higher education has widened significantly since that time. In 1973, the N.C.A.A. replaced four-year scholarships with grants that had to be renewed on a year-to-year basis. Because coaches could now make athletic performance a condition for the renewal of financial aid, even academically oriented athletes had little choice but to make sports their main priority. Longer seasons, significantly lower admissions standards for athletes, and the growing power of coaches over all aspects of an athlete's life are just a few of the changes spawned by the unprecedented commercialism that has invaded athletics departments.

Scores of books and scholarly monographs, dating as far back as the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's report of 1929, "American College Athletics," have convincingly illustrated the basic incompatibility of big-time college athletics and traditional academic values. Yet despite the thousands of pages written about the same theme over the years, the commercialism of college sports has grown inexorably. Recently, we've seen a new crop of books that criticize big-time college sports and present various reform proposals. The authors' assessments of the power of the athletics-educational complex -- not only at the big public universities traditionally known to have major sports programs, but now also, to a lesser degree, at Ivy League and liberal-arts institutions -- give little hope that even minor improvements are possible. Instead, after reading the most recent books in the genre, the main message that I took away is that, despite all the lip service that university officials, policymakers, and others give to the need to reform college sports, most people seem to like college athletics just as they are.

To understand the roots of the commercialism that has dogged college athletics for decades, we should review the past. One recent book that examines three major periods of gridiron upheaval and reform over the past 125 years is John Sayle Watterson's College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy. Working with an impressive assortment of historical materials and documents, Watterson documents how, over the years, reformers have made the game less hazardous for players and more exciting for spectators. For instance, the forward pass added to football's appeal while reducing the reliance on physically dangerous mass formations like the flying wedge. But, the author concludes, attempts to control professionalism and to protect academic standards have generally failed. The book provides convincing evidence that the N.C.A.A., when forced to take sides, has put the commercial interests of its members above the ideals of amateurism and educational reform.

Watterson describes the association's refusal to support the American Council on Education's 1950 proposal to eliminate bowl games, spring practice, and the subsidization of athletes. "The N.C.A.A. managed to let the A.C.E. proposal for strictly amateur athletics go to the scrapheap of well-intentioned reform," he writes. Watterson's discussion of the evolution of athletics scholarships is one of the best that I have read, and leaves little doubt that the N.C.A.A. compromised amateur principles when it decided to allow financial aid to be tied to athletic performance.

Although he pays considerable attention to historical detail, Watterson should have placed the development of college sports in a broader context. For instance, unlike Ronald A. Smith, in Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics, Watterson fails to emphasize the British origins of soccer and rugby, and the contrasting American values that influenced how we transplanted and transformed those games into the hybrid we call football. Even more important, Watterson doesn't examine how universities became involved in the business of popular sports entertainment in the first place.

Part of the answer can be traced to the rapid industrialization of the United States following the Civil War, which eventually created large urban populations with the leisure time and the money to support mass spectator sports. In addition, the expansion of the railroads and advances in communication made interregional and intercity rivalries both possible and appealing to the public. The forces that transformed athletics from the folk games of colonial America to the entertainment spectacles of the late 19th century have received considerable attention from historians of sports.

Even given those forces, however, sport as a form of commercial entertainment could have never gained a foothold on college campuses if presidents and trustees had not welcomed it with open arms. Starved for students and financial support, presidents in the late 19th and early 20th centuries needed a bridge to connect the high culture of academe with the external constituencies upon which institutions depend for survival. Few campus activities could meet that need more effectively than intercollegiate sports. Nothing could better attract the attention of the public, and nothing had a greater appeal to the practical business leaders who were beginning to influence educational policy through their roles as alumni, trustees, and donors.

From the perspective of such captains of industry, the highly skilled athlete who tested his native intelligence on the playing field learned more about the game of life than he ever could in a classroom. In contrast to what businessmen often saw as the wasteful theorizing of intellectualism, sports demanded teamwork, discipline, and no-nonsense problem solving. Given such anti-intellectual and commercial instincts, naturally the university trustees who worked in the business world had few qualms about redefining the mission of education to include commercial entertainment for the masses. To this day, powerful trustees often embrace educational philosophies that resonate better among celebrity coaches than with leading scholars on the faculty.

According to James J. Duderstadt, a former president of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the author of Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University: A University President's Perspective, many of the problems of intercollegiate athletics today can be traced directly to the inappropriate involvement of governing boards in the decision-making process about athletics. Duderstadt does not use the term "anti-intellectual" when referring to the attitudes of trustees who are sports boosters. But he does note that the culture of intercollegiate athletics -- which many trustees embrace -- is governed by standards that place the team above the individual, and obedience above creativity. In other words, athletically oriented trustees today may have a great deal in common with their late-19th-century predecessors.

Big-time college football and basketball, in Duderstadt's view, differ little, if at all, from professional sports, with "market share" and "commercial value" the key objectives. The welfare of players as students, he asserts, is largely ignored. Demonstrating candor that one would not expect from a president emeritus of a Division I-A university, Duderstadt argues that athletes at institutions with big-time-sports programs have been transformed into employees of the athletics department. He also recognizes that the "pay-for-play" system created by one-year renewable grants obligates athletes to make sports, not education, their top priority.

Much like Watterson, Duderstadt views the N.C.A.A. as a trade association whose primary function has been to protect the sports industry, not student-athletes. In his opinion, conferences like the Big Ten operate much like professional leagues, except that the college leagues do not have to pay income taxes on the millions of dollars they take in. Duderstadt also contends that the vast majority of Division I football programs are, in reality, cost drivers rather than revenue producers -- corroborating the financial analysis of the Smith College economist Andrew Zimbalist in his book, Unpaid Professionals: Commercialism and Conflict in Big-Time College Sports, as well as those of other observers.

Like most books on college sports, Duderstadt's contains a list of possible reform measures. However, rather than tackle the difficult task of coming up with one or even several proposals that might be effective and politically viable, he reviews the scores of proposals that have been put forth over the years. There is at least one for everyone.

I personally like the idea of spinning off big-time football and basketball programs as independent professional franchises. As it is, revenue-producing college sports are essentially professional franchises already; labeling them as such would at least cut through some of the hypocrisy and allow athletes tohave the same level of pride and self-respect as other working students have. Duderstadt presents that position so convincingly that one wonders if it might not also be his favorite. Watterson ends his book with the very same recommendation.

All the proposals set forth in the recent books are problematic, however, and for the same reason: The authors assume that a significant constituency truly wants to challenge the collegiate-sports juggernaut. But, with the exception of a handful of faculty members who think that a college education should mean more than merely staying eligible for sports, it may be that no one really cares if big-time-college athletes receive a meaningful education. In fact, anti-intellectualism may have progressed so far at institutions with big-time-athletics programs that providing a meaningful education to undergraduate students in general -- not just athletes -- is no longer a priority.

That is the major thesis of the most disturbing book reviewed in this essay: Murray Sperber's Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education. It is one thing to demonstrate that sport at many universities has entered the entertainment business, compromising academic standards for the relatively small percentage of students who participate in revenue-producing sports. It is quite another thing to say that colleges and universities with big-time-sports programs have been transformed into intellectual wastelands, particularly at the undergraduate level. Sperber, a professor of English and American studies at Indiana University at Bloomington and the author of several books on collegiate sports, moves the issue of athletics to center stage in debates about the quality of undergraduate education in America.

According to Sperber, many faculty members at universities that are striving to become prestigious research institutions give little attention to teaching. To have more time for research, faculty members enter into what he calls a "nonaggression pact" with students -- whereby professors, to discourage students from challenging their grades, give everyone in the class high grades. Students soon realize that they do not have to work very hard, and faculty members have time for what really matters to them: research and publication.

Sperber argues that such indifference and rampant grade inflation -- along with large lecture classes, wide use of teaching assistants, and the apparent toleration of cheating and spotty class attendance -- send a clear message to athletes and nonathletes alike that undergraduate education is not very important. It is Sperber's thesis that because research institutions cannot deliver a high-quality education, they have substituted a "beer and circus" environment to keep undergraduate students occupied. In place of an education that challenges students to critically examine their lives and the world in which they live, universities now sell a lifestyle that is centered primarily on big-time sports.

A key component of such a lifestyle is what Sperber calls "partying round the team." Throughout the year, students at institutions with major athletics programs rally around their teams in bars and dormitories almost every night of the week. For many students, college has become an endless spring break. To compete for students, many major universities have created a campus ambiance similar to that of major resorts. Instead of investing in education, universities have chosen to make entertainment their core product. Corporate America has contributed to the trend by using universities as marketing platforms for their products -- soft drinks, licensed apparel, alcoholic beverages.

Sperber is careful to point out that, at certain institutions, teaching remains a high priority, and students look to the academic side of campus life for personal fulfillment. Prominent among such institutions are Ivy League colleges and members of the N.C.A.A.'s Division III. Because those institutions do not grant athletics scholarships, they are unable to recruit the caliber of athlete necessary to sustain sport as a commercial spectacle. In such a low-key athletic environment, says Sperber, players are students rather than entertainers, and rallying around the team consumes far less of the average student's energies than it does at institutions like Florida State University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Pennsylvania State University at University Park. In fact, overindulgence in the sport subculture at academically oriented colleges is apt to be intellectually suspect.

Over the years, I, too, have viewed highly selective liberal-arts colleges as the last refuge for students who love sports but are also interested in an education. The athletics experiences of my two sons, both of whom attended liberal-arts colleges, have reinforced such feelings. My older son attended Dartmouth College, where he played lacrosse for one year before deciding that mountain biking gave him more freedom to focus on his academic goals. Giving up lacrosse had absolutely no impact on his financial aid, and his memories of Dartmouth include biking, running, and skiing in New England's rugged White Mountains, as well as intellectual discourse with some of the finest teaching-faculty members in the United States.

My younger son attended Wesleyan University, where he majored in history and played lacrosse for four years. I know firsthand that when conflicts arose between sport and the demands of the classroom, it was coaches who had to accommodate the needs of players rather than vice versa. Athletes often showed up tardy for practice because of late-afternoon classes; some athletes missed entire seasons because of study abroad. In the absence of athletics scholarships, athletes like my son were able to set their academic and athletics priorities without fear of losing financial aid. It was college sport at its very best.

I am well aware that some of the abuses so common at the Division I level have begun to filter down to institutions at lower levels of competition. However, I must admit to being somewhat taken aback by the findings of a recent book by James L. Shulman, a financial and administrative officer at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and William G. Bowen, president of the foundation and a former president of Princeton University. In their groundbreaking study, The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, they focused on 90,000 undergraduate students -- athletes and others -- who entered a total of 30 academically selective colleges and universities at three points in time: the fall semesters of 1951, 1976, and 1989. What the authors found is that the gap between sport and education has been broadening not only at Division I institutions, but at Ivy League and selective liberal-arts colleges as well.

Athletes at Ivy League and coed liberal-arts institutions, like Oberlin, Swarthmore, and Williams Colleges, have graduated at about the same high rate as nonathletes. But when compared with athletes who entered those institutions in 1951, the athletes entering in 1999 -- whom the authors also looked at -- had a substantial statistical advantage in the admissions process. At one nonscholarship institution included in the sample, recruited male athletes had a 48-percent greater chance of being admitted than other male students with comparable SAT scores. Recruited female athletes had a 53-percent greater chance than their peers with similar scores. The admissions advantages for athletes exceeded those for any other targeted group, including minority students.

Furthermore, once in college, athletes who attended in the more-recent years were found to do less well academically relative to their classmates than was the case in decades past. Perhaps most disturbing was the finding that athletes underperform academically relative not only to their classmates, but also to how they themselves might be expected to perform based on their academic qualifications. In other words, Shulman and Bowen found that some of the most academically selective colleges recruit significant numbers of students who possess specialized athletics skills but have little interest in taking advantage of the intellectual opportunities that those institutions have to offer.

It is noteworthy that, although athletes from Ivy League and selective liberal-arts colleges tended to underperform in the classroom, male athletes in both high- and low-profile sports in all three of the classes the authors studied earned higher incomes than their classmates after graduation. One possible explanation is that athletes have effectively exploited the network of influential alumni who come out of such institutions. Another intriguing hypothesis is that athletes possess character traits, like competitiveness, gregariousness, and the ability to work in teams, that are not necessarily acquired in a classroom. Athletes may not be intellectuals, but they possess qualities that give them an edge in the competitive world of business and finance.

Shulman and Bowen present convincing evidence that the athletics culture described in Sperber's Beer and Circus is beginning to make inroads at institutions like Dartmouth and Wesleyan. However, it seems safe to say that because they eschew athletics scholarships and have yet to make large investments in the sports-entertainment business, such colleges still have time to reverse the slide toward academic mediocrity that generally accompanies institutional efforts to gain national prominence in sports. Swarthmore's decision to abandon football suggests that it is still possible, at that level of competition, to institute policies that maintain athletics as an integral part of the educational process rather than as an arm of the entertainment industry.

Big-time college sports, however, is all about entertainment -- and, as the recent books remind us, no important constituency seems to care. Fans love such commercial spectacles, and alumni rank them among their most memorable college experiences. Faculty members are too preoccupied with research to give the decline of undergraduate education much thought. Powerful board members know that the classroom experience of athletes is far from ideal, but console themselves with the belief that the lessons learned on the court and playing field are more important anyway. Presidents generally acquiesce in the decisions of trustees and alumni.

In fact, short of a precipitating event -- one comparable to the fall of the Soviet Union -- it is difficult to imagine what could bring about reform of such a national obsession.

Allen L. Sack is a professor of management and sociology at the University of New Haven. He is a co-author of College Athletes for Hire: The Evolution and Legacy of the N.C.A.A.'s Amateur Myth (Praeger Publishers, 1998).

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