From the issue dated September 3, 2004

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i02/02a04301.htm

Mellon Fund Tackles College Sports

New project focuses on academic requirements for athletes and the role of coaches

By WELCH SUGGS

The controversies may have died down, but the final whistle hasn't blown yet on The Game of Life.

William G. Bowen's book on admissions, academics, and sports at elite colleges (Princeton University Press, 2001) and its sequel Reclaiming the Game (Princeton, 2003) have spurred numerous debates and calls for reform at Ivy League institutions and New England's small liberal-arts colleges. Now the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, of which he is president, is sponsoring an effort to carry the books' message to other colleges.

Or at least two portions of that message -- that colleges ought to ensure that coaches and athletes are integrated into campus life and that athletes ought to be academically representative of other students. The foundation has gathered the presidents of approximately 130 liberal-arts colleges to work on a new effort, the College Sports Project, to ensure that colleges are not cutting corners in the athletes they recruit, or in the experience they give those athletes on campus.

The project is unlike anything yet attempted in college athletics. It isn't a league or an association like the NCAA. It isn't a panel issuing recommendations, like the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics.

Instead, it is two working groups of college administrators trying to hammer out plans to fulfill two basic ideals: making sure that coaches and athletics administrators are an integral part of college communities, and making sure that athletes on a campus have the same range of academic credentials as other students.

"If you look at college athletics, there's been a drift toward competitiveness, championships, won-lost records," says Robert A. Malekoff, one of the leaders of the project and a former athletics director at the College of Wooster. "We're not going to turn back the clock to 1958, where everybody plays three sports. But what you want to do is shift the culture to a small degree, where you're more closely aligned with the general educational mission of the school."

Leaders of other Division III colleges applaud Mellon's efforts, but are quick to point out that they are already engaged in their own efforts to keep sports in line with their institutional missions.

A Two-Pronged Approach

Mr. Malekoff and Amy Campbell, athletics director at Bryn Mawr College, are leaders of the College Sports Project's group composing principles on integrating coaches and players into campus life. Mr. Malekoff describes that as the easier of the two goals, simply because nobody would argue against it.

But it's an issue on many campuses where athletes complain of being stereotyped as "dumb jocks" and coaches are isolated from other faculty and staff members.

"The way I see it, we want people in other parts of the school, like faculty, student-life personnel, and other employees, to understand the educational value that a well-run athletics department has to offer," Mr. Malekoff says.

To build those bridges, colleges are having coaches collaborate with professors who teach classes on subjects like sport and society, allowing coaches to participate in faculty senates and campuswide committees, writing coaches' job evaluations so they are based on how well their athletes do in class, and having athletics administrators meet with new faculty members, as Mr. Malekoff did at Wooster.

"It's a two-way street," he says. "I don't look at it as, This is a way for these athletic numbskulls to get in line."

The committee plans to put together seminars for college officials, and to organize teams of its members to visit campuses and advise presidents and provosts when invited. Such teams would not be ready before the 2005-6 academic year, however.

By far the most controversial findings of The Game of Life and Reclaiming the Game were that elite colleges were recruiting athletes with lesser academic credentials than those of other students, and that athletes were doing worse in college courses than their high-school grades predicted.

Athletics Directors Protest

Many athletics directors protested that the differences were too small to be significant, or that Mr. Bowen and his co-authors (James L. Shulman for the first book and Sarah A. Levin for the second) used the wrong set of standards.

However, members of the Ivy League and the New England Small College Athletic Conference decided to revise admissions standards for athletes in the wake of the books' findings.

The College Sports Project's members backed away from focusing on admissions criteria for athletes, choosing instead to examine how athletes fared academically during their college years compared to other students.

"A focus on the outcomes tends to align all the people who are involved," says Michael S. McPherson, co-chairman of the working group studying the issue and president of the Spencer Foundation, which seeks to improve education. "If you say what you really care about is what folks look like when they're coming in, athletics directors and coaches aren't necessarily going to be on the same page as faculty and administrators, as opposed to what happens to those kids once they're in school."

Ideally, says John Emerson, a professor of mathematics at Middlebury College, athletes as a group ought to have close to the same distribution of grades, major choices, and other academic criteria as the entire student body does.

"My goal would be that academic class rank, by the time athletes graduate, would be pretty much indistinguishable from other students, including other students committed to music, student government, and so forth," says Mr. Emerson, the other co-chairman of the panel looking at representativeness.

Mr. McPherson, a former president of Macalester College, says the group envisions a two-step approach to encouraging colleges to recruit athletes who look academically like other students. The first step would involve colleges' sharing data on students and athletes. Using class rankings is preferable to grade-point averages and other academic measures, he says, because of variances in grading standards among different colleges.

The second step is still being developed, but Mr. Emerson and Mr. McPherson say it would involve examining athletes' academic profiles and judging whether a college is actively recruiting athletes who are not academically representative of the student population.

Focus on Small Colleges

At the moment, the College Sports Project consists of these two committees and of advisory groups of college presidents for each of them. Mr. Bowen and his co-authors have moved on to other projects, and coordinating the project as a whole is Eugene M. Tobin, a senior adviser to the president of the Mellon Foundation and former president of Hamilton College.

Without giving any names, he says that roughly 130 liberal-arts colleges have indicated an interest in the project, most of them after a panel discussion on the subject at a June meeting of the Annapolis Group, a consortium of liberal-arts colleges and universities.

"It's very hard, when you're serving as a college president, to be sure you're getting an accurate degree of information about your own athletic program, because you're always hearing anecdotal stories about the handful of students that are truly exceptional," Mr. Tobin says. "These stories are quite true, but unless you're able to look at the data and have someone explain that data to you, you won't get as full a picture of the athletic experience as you need."

All 130 institutions belong to the NCAA's Division III, but so do nearly 300 other institutions -- public universities, small regional colleges, and others.

Daniel T. Dutcher, the NCAA's chief of staff for Division III, says that while the division has several efforts under way to deal with both the integration and representativeness issues, these may be issues that the NCAA can't handle. Instead, colleges, conferences, and groups like the College Sports Project may be the best venue to deal with them.

"To me it represents something very positive, to have a group of schools of like mind coming together to resolve problems on their own, rather than saying this is a problem that needs to be resolved on a national level," he says.

New Division III Rules

Officials at other Division III colleges say that the ideals being espoused by the sports project are fine, but that they are already dealing with the problems on their own.

"The fact that you have a cadre of self-selected institutions working on this is a credit to each of those institutions," says Douglas N. Hastad, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Lacrosse, "but to assume that because others are not involved in the discussion suggests that they're working at cross-purposes is the wrong conclusion."

The division took several steps to reduce the intensity of the athletics experience for players at the NCAA's convention last January, adds Robert C. King, athletics director at Trinity University in Texas. Members need to see how the new rules -- limits on playing and practice seasons and requiring athletes to finish their eligibility in four years -- work out, Mr. King said.

"I know that you can win, the kids can graduate on time, and everybody can have a good experience" in Division III, Mr. King says. "We're already doing it, and we've proven it can work."

The College Sports Project may move on to other issues, but the model -- groups of colleges solving athletics problems together, outside the NCAA framework and apart from cumbersome rules -- is a topic of discussion beyond Division III.

Some presidents at Division I universities have discussed a similar pact binding them to recruit athletes with much higher academic standards than the NCAA requires, taking a sort of moral high ground in college sports.

However, participants in the project say they need more time to get it off the ground and connect with athletes on the field.

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Volume 51, Issue 2, Page A43