From the issue dated September 3,
2004
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i02/02a04301.htm
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Mellon Fund Tackles College SportsNew 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.
http://chronicle.com Section: Athletics Volume 51, Issue 2,
Page A43
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