Speeches, Notes on the Meetings, and Documents
AAUP Governance Conference
October 9-11, 2003
Indianapolis, IN
[Note: The notes on the meeting discussions were prepared by Gary Engstrand, University of Minnesota, member of the Steering Committee of the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics. No guarantee is made of their complete accuracy.]
In the case of speakers, the prepared text is included, followed by the summary of the discussion/question and answer session.
The Coalition wishes to thank Gary Engstrand (University of Minnesota) for preparing these materials..
October 9: Myles Brand, "A Crossroads in College Sports"; Q&A
Carol Simpson Stern & Scott Kretchmar, "The Role of the Faculty in Intercollegiate Athletics Reform"
John Walda, "The Role of Trustees in Intercollegiate Athletics Reform"; Q&A
James Earl, "The Faculty Coalition's Role in Intercollegiate Athletics Reform"; Q&A
Peter Orszag, "The Empirical Effects of Collegiate Athletics: An Interim Report"; Q&A
October 10: Work Session A: "Best Practices, Faculty Athletics Representatives"
Work Session B: "Ensuring Integrity in the Academic Experience of Student-Athletes"
October 11: Work Session C: "Best Practices, Athletic Committees"
Appendix A: COIA Framework for Comprehensive Athletics Reform
Appendix B: AAUP Report: "The Faculty Role in the Reform of Intercollegiate Athletics"
Appendix C: Drake Group Proposals and Comments
October 9, 2003
Myles Brand (President, NCAA)
Speech
A Speech to the AAUP
October 9, 2003
“A CROSSROADS IN COLLEGE SPORTS”
By NCAA President Myles Brand
· Thank you and welcome to Indianapolis and the NCAA national office. We are pleased to host a portion of this important gathering, and I am especially pleased to be included in your program today.
· The schedule before you over the next three days is a full and interesting one. I commend your interest in discussing issues around the role and current status of intercollegiate athletics. The moment is right for your discussion, because college sports, in my view, is at a crossroads. It is that crossroads which I want to discuss with you today.
· Before I do so, I want to make sure we have a common understanding of what the NCAA is and the role it has within intercollegiate athletics. This is not as easy as you might think. There are some obvious facts about the NCAA. For example, there are three divisions of membership – Divisions I, II and III – and three subdivisions of football in Division I. More than 360,000 student-athletes will participate in college sports this academic year, and more than 44,000 of them will compete in the 88 championships sponsored by the NCAA in 23 different sports. These are the essential data, but they do not really define the NCAA.
· But, one of the facts that has become surprisingly apparent to me since assuming the position of NCAA president is the confusion that exists with regard to what the Association is and what it is supposed to do.
· It is an oversimplification to just say that the NCAA is an Association, and yet that is critical to understanding the organization. As an association, it is membership driven, self-governed and self-policing. Although the nearly one thousand institutions are all four-year, degree-granting colleges and universities, there is little homogeny among them. The budgets, missions, philosophies and levels of support are myriad.
· Even within the three divisions, there are great and dividing differences among the members. The budgets within Division I, for example, vary from less than a million dollars to more than $80 million. That is a profound gap to overcome for some 300 institutions trying to compete with a level of equity.
· Even more confusing to the NCAA membership and the public alike is the difference between the NCAA as a national office and the NCAA as an organization – an association. We are engaged in the most comprehensive strategic planning ever undertaken by the NCAA. Last week, we brought together a cross-section of constituents to provide feed back on such things as core purpose and values, as well as overarching and short-term goals. I was struck by the continued dialogue that took place about where the role of the NCAA as national office ends and the role of the NCAA as an association begins.
· The confusion is even more pronounced for the public and media. As the sensational and sometimes truly scandalous events of the last few months unfolded, there were increasingly strident expectations that the NCAA national office and I, as president, should exert authority to set things right. In fact, the Association, the national office and the NCAA president have no authority other than that explicitly granted by the membership. That is a critical concept. The NCAA is not an all-powerful presence and the NCAA president is not the omnipotent czar of intercollegiate athletics.
· But, I do have the bully pulpit, and I can help set the national agenda, as I am doing now.
· For good or bad, the NCAA is an association that acts only after considerable deliberation, reflects the majority will of the membership and authorizes the national office to execute its decisions. The member institutions retain far more autonomy over their athletics programs than they cede to the NCAA.
· But as the Association approaches its centennial in 2006, I sense that we also are approaching a crossroads. A neutral observer of intercollegiate athletics in 2003 would see a confusing picture. In some ways, college sports has never been more popular or in better shape.
o College football will likely set new attendance records again this fall, and there are more football games on television than ever before.
o Athletics participation for women has grown by 400 percent over the last 30 years, and it continues to increase.
o College basketball has created one of the true premier sporting events in the world – the Division I Men’s Basketball Championship that culminates in the Final Four.
o Revenues are greater than ever before, and fan support of intercollegiate athletics steadily increases.
o Graduation rates for student-athletes have been rising and in 2002 are at an all-time high.
· Visit any college campus this fall where college sports are conducted, and you will find vitality and excitement on campus. Alumni and fans will throng to sporting events to support their teams. Campuses across the country have come to appreciate the exposure athletics brings to the college or university.
· But the neutral observer would also read and hear about a disturbing set of facts that confront college sports.
o If revenues are at an all time high, so are costs. As a whole, intercollegiate athletics on all campuses combined brings in about $4 billion annually in revenue, but spends in excess of $5 billion.
o And while graduation rates for student-athletes on average are improving, the rates for football and especially men’s basketball in Division I are below those of the general student body.
o We have witnessed a series of scandals on a major scale over the last several months. Coaches have been acting badly in ways that damage not only the integrity of their own profession, but the credibility of college sports and, indeed, all of higher education.
o State legislatures are debating bills designed to address what they see as inequitable treatment of student-athletes, including in some cases, pay for play.
o Charges of academic fraud among student-athletes continue to plague some of the best institutions of higher education in the country.
o And the concept of amateur athletics within intercollegiate athletics appears to be an untenable principle in the face of million-dollar coaches, multi-million dollar budgets and facility expansions that could easily finance an entire academic department.
· So, we are at a crossroad.
· In one direction is the revitalized support and integrity of the collegiate model of athletics. In the other direction is a steady shift toward the professional model of athletics.
· The former – the collegiate model – is educationally based. The professional model is profit based. This is the critical difference between the two, and for many, the line is being blurred.
· Don’t misunderstand; there is nothing wrong with professional athletics. We know from our research that the American public enjoys and will support professional athletics. They accept the hype and understand what the motivation is for the athletes.
· But that same research also reports that the American public enjoys and supports the intercollegiate model and they do not want it to move toward the professional approach. What they like about intercollegiate athletics is the educational environment. They appreciate and value the connection between athletics participation and academic mission.
· The tag word most often associated with the collegiate model is “amateurism.” College sports is supposed to be the last bastion of amateur athletics. In the minds of many, our institutions of higher learning are supposed to be defenders of this noble concept, the purity of sport-for-the-love-of-sport.
· Others see amateurism so defiled by what they assume are the engorged profits of big time college sports that they call for an end to the sham. They argue that we should just pay the student-athletes to play and be done with it.
· I reject both positions. Amateurism in practice was never as noble and pure as some would claim it should be. As much as anything, the concept as applied to sport was an elitist notion designed to perpetuate class distinctions. The sanctimonious baggage associated with amateurism has raised expectations of conducting college sports without revenue, which is an impossible goal.
· I emphatically reject the notion that we should pay students to play sports. It is both impractical and philosophically wrong.
· What I support – and encourage you to do the same – is the intercollegiate model of sports. This model is firmly grounded in the education of students who participate in athletics. This is our target and should guide how we conduct intercollegiate athletics. If we fail at this, we fail at the notion that athletics should be associated with the academy at all.
· I am unbendable on this point. The education of students must be our first priority.
· How are we really doing?
· Better than most believe, but not well enough. Significant academic reform has taken place since the early 1980s. These began with what has come to be known as Prop 48. Prop 48 set new standards in Divisions I and II for determining freshman athletics participation eligibility based on a combination of successfully completing a selection of high school academic core courses and results on standardized tests.
· There have been refined iterations since then, and we have seen positive results in general as measured by the federally mandated graduate rate. The graduation rates of the last two years have been the most encouraging.
· If fact, the class that graduated in 2002 showed the average rate for all student-athletes at all Division I schools as 62 percent – the highest in the dozen years the Department of Education has been collecting the data. That 62 percent is three percentage points higher than the general student body average in Division I.
· Women and minorities are doing significantly better than their counterparts in the student body – 8 and 13 percentage points better, respectively. Football players in Division I graduated at a rate of 54 percent, somewhat under the 59 percent average for the student body and only a little under the 56 percent for other males in the student-body.
· But male basketball student-athletes in Division I graduated at 44 percent, significantly under the average for the student body or even males in the student body.
· The most discouraging news over the last dozen years has been the declining graduation rate of African-American male basketball players in Division I-A – the most visible level of college sports. The 2002 data shows a 10-percentage point increase for this group. BUT, the increase is from 28 percent to 38 percent -- a completely unacceptable graduation rate even if it is better than African-American males in the Division I-A general student body.
· We are making progress, but there is more to do. These improvements are the result of more than two decades of concentrated academic reform. Initial-eligibility standards, the criteria for being able to play when entering the institution, have steadily increased since the mid-1980s with the current emphasis on the use of academic core courses in high school as a predictor of success for student-athletes as freshmen. The number of core academic high school courses has increased from 11 to 14. Because of recent action by the NCAA, it will increase again to 16 in 2008. There is no question that this has raised the bar for high schools as they prepare student-athletes for college-level work.
· The NCAA membership has also adopted a new approach to academic reform for enrolled student-athletes. In the past, we called these standards continuing-eligibility requirements, which frankly were focused on keeping student-athletes eligible. They have been replaced with progress-toward-degree requirements that put and keep student-athletes on a track to graduation. Genuine progress toward a degree must be made semester by semester.
· These requirements are based on empirical data – the best database on academic progress ever available to us. We know what the data looks like for students who are on track to graduate, and student-athletes will either fit this empirically based profile for graduation or they WILL NOT COMPETE.
· These are significant steps toward sustaining the collegiate model for athletes – the education-based model. This is the road we should be traveling down.
· The next important step in the academic reform effort is passage of an incentives-disincentives package that provides a measure of institutional accountability for the academic success of student-athletes that has never existed before. In a number of ways, this part of the reform package is the pinnacle for the current approach.
· This initiative directly ties the academic success of student-athletes to the ability of member institutions to benefit fully from the revenue distribution and other incentives OR be penalized with loss of scholarships or championships participation opportunities as disincentives. This package will go the membership for review in October and will be before the Division I Board of Directors next April for final approval.
· I am encouraged about these current and future academic reform efforts. Much of my optimism comes from what has been accomplished to date and from what I see as a confluence of interests in assuring that the effort is sustained.
· There has been nearly universal support of the academic reform efforts, including an alliance of representatives from the NCAA, the Association of Governing Boards and the faculty-based Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics who met in Chicago during April to endorse the initiatives. You will hear from representatives of both the AGB and the Coalition later today as they share their perspectives, but the significance of the alliance is that academic reform in college sports is taking hold.
· We are also at a crossroads with regard to student-athlete welfare issues. The degree to which we keep student-athletes central to how we conduct intercollegiate athletics helps set the collegiate model of sports apart from the professional model. Again, there has been success. For example:
o After a troubling pre-season football workout period two years ago when three student-athletes died under alleged heat- and training-related circumstances, significant changes were made this year to help acclimate football student-athletes to late summer practice sessions.
o We are re-examining the time commitments for student-athletes to ensure that they have opportunities to be college students not just in the classroom but with regard to the full campus experience.
o We have passed legislation to provide health insurance anytime student-athletes are practicing or competing under supervision of athletics personnel.
· You may also have read that I support increasing the amount of an athletics scholarship to the full cost of attendance. Let me say again that I am categorically opposed to pay for play. But if we are to support the educational-based model of athletics in higher education, we must adjust the financial aid of student-athletes with the times. And it is time to ensure that athletics scholarships ensure that student-athletes can fully partake of the collegiate experience. One potential source for some of these funds is the three-quarters of a billion dollars that the NCAA will provide to institutions from the long-term CBS and ESPN contracts for the direct benefit of student-athletes.
· The collegiate model of athletics is also at a cross roads with regard to expectations for how coaches and others conduct themselves.
· Since the first of the year, there has been a string of violations, unethical behavior, peccadilloes and disturbing scandals. These events impugn the reputation of coaches, the stature of college sports and the integrity of higher education. I am convinced that the vast majority of coaches are doing their job well, in an ethical and professional manner. But a few are obviously not.
· Contrary to what is reported in the press, there is also something quite positive taking place. College presidents and athletics directors have stepped up to investigate the allegations, take swift action to rid their programs of these bad actors, and set new courses for accountability-based standards. The National Association of Basketball Coaches will hold a summit of its members October 15 to express their concern and announce an action plan for addressing the misbehavior of basketball coaches.
· I see all this as a good sign. There was a time not long ago when some campus leaders – including some presidents and ADs – would have been more interested in damage control than rectifying the problem. But, the rules have changed. The expectation for coaches to comport themselves in a manner appropriate for a representative of the university has risen. It may be that these higher norms of behavior have resulted from the greater visibility due to large compensation packages of a few coaches. The spotlight has become brighter, and the level of tolerance is lower.
· A year ago, when the NCAA Executive Committee hired me to become the chief executive officer of the Association, I said I was an advocate for the values that characterize college sports. I also said I wanted to integrate intercollegiate athletics into the academic mission of the university. After nine months on the job, I am even more convinced of both positions.
· The values of participation in college sports – teamwork, self-discipline, pursuit of excellence, learning to lose and win with grace – are important character-development tools that educate us all. Student-athletes are the prime beneficiaries of this developmental education; but all students gain from being exposed on campus to this approach. These values are worthy of preserving and supporting. They are a significant component of the relationship between athletics and education.
· One of the ways we ensure that the intercollegiate model of athletics – the educational-based model rather than the vocation-based model of professional sports – will be sustained is mainstreaming athletics into the university. Some institutions have done this already with good results – the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Notre Dame are two examples.
· Most institutions, however, have steadily moved athletics away from the university’s other units. The estrangement of athletics from academics on the campus is not a new problem. We can find evidence of concern about the role of college sports within the university as long ago as the 1920s. It also is not confined to so-called “big-time” college sports. William Bowen, head of the Mellon Foundation and former Princeton University president, has discussed the separation of both the athletics department and the athletes themselves from their counterparts on campus in his groundbreaking book, The Game of Life. In his just-released sequel, Reclaiming the Game, he examines those relationships within Division III institutions.
· But because of their high visibility, intense media coverage and size of budgets, it is the Division I programs where the separation between athletics and academics has become the most apparent. Here is where the charges of creeping commercialism and profiteering professionalism are made.
· It is also here where the “principle of self-sufficiency” has been institutionalized in the Division I philosophy statement. The statement declares that athletics programs in Division I should be as self-sufficient as possible.
· If you view athletics as a solely ancillary enterprise, devoid of standing or contribution to the academic mission, and an entertainment function to distract alums and fans, the statement makes sense. In fact, it will be perceived as commendable by those who want to place athletics as far outside the academy as possible.
· But it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work on either a practical or philosophical basis.
· From a practical point of view, it becomes less successful with each passing academic year. Fewer and fewer Division I institutions generate revenue from athletics sufficient to cover their costs. It is claimed that only about 40 programs in the entire nation have revenues that exceed expenses when institutional subsidization is removed.
· When all costs are factored in, the real number may be as few as a dozen or so. The rest are not only not self-sufficient, but the amount of subsidization has been steadily increasing. In Division I on average, the shortfall is approximately $2.2 million annually and rising.
· Self-sufficiency also does not work philosophically. Athletics departments have increasingly looked to outside sources for new revenue streams – corporate sponsors or large endowments. They have expanded stadiums and arenas to improve gate receipts, and built larger facility complexes to accommodate increased demand for participation opportunities. In the process, they have less reason to understand and relate to the university’s academic mission, less involvement with campus-wide strategic goals, and more reason to isolate themselves both physically and emotionally from the rest of the campus.
· Increasingly, athletics at the Division I level have become a bottom-line enterprise that fails to meet even the most rudimentary profit-and-loss test and increasingly are failing to be perceived as advancing the cause of higher education.
· The solution, in my view, is to utilize normal university budget controls in the case of athletics. The result may or may not be smaller athletics budgets. But the same system of priorities and controls that obtains for the rest of the university will ensure that athletics expenditures are producing values for the students and the campus.
· The principle of self-sufficiency, and with it autonomous budgets, has led to decision-making based on anecdote, isolated success stories, and assumptions that cannot be supported by empirical data.
· Earlier this summer, the NCAA released the initial results of a study commissioned by the Division I Board of Directors to examine the effects of spending in college sports. You will receive a full report this afternoon on this study from Dr. Peter Orszag, a Brookings Institution fellow and one of the study’s researchers and authors. I will leave the details of the report for Dr. Orszag to present this afternoon, but allow me to touch on some crucial points.
· The good news from the report is that intercollegiate athletics is not the tail wagging the dog. In fact, athletics spending is largely in line with schools or larger departments on campus. On average, the operating budget for athletics is about 3 to 4 percent of the entire university budget. This is not news to university presidents. College sports are not leading the university down the path to financial ruin.
· A number of the results of the study are myth-breaking. For example, there is no correlation between increased spending and increases in winning or between increased winning and increases in net operating revenue. One new dollar spent in the operations budget results in about one new dollar of revenue. That is, the return on investment of increased spending is zero.
· Does it hold, therefore, that spending can be reduced without risk to athletics programs? No. What it does mean is that decisions to increase spending as a way to increase wins or revenue – or alumni and fan giving, for that matter – have been made more on assumption than empirical data.
· In my view, the value of athletics to the institution is more in terms of the student-athlete experience, and pride and community building than in generating excess revenues. There is value in the character traits developed through athletics both in terms of the participant and students and other members of the campus community who follow athletics.
· Now what is your role – the role of faculty – in helping the university conduct college sports – under the unique collegiate model of athletics?
· Historically, faculty has taken one of several approaches. For those with little or only passing interest in college sports, the choice has been to either remain above the fray and say nothing or skirt below the radar and deliver jabs occasionally to the body athletics. For those who have trained their critical eye on the enterprise with research and writing, the result often is to paint with too broad and too dark a brush, portraying collegiate athletics as the bane of the academy. Most of these critics either want to eliminate college sports or capitulate and turn them into professional leagues.
· I propose an alternative approach…based on personal experience.
· As a university president and now as president of the NCAA, I have had the opportunity to observe intercollegiate athletics up close and personal. I have had the good fortune to follow a Division I basketball team to the pinnacle of success – the Final Four, in fact, to the championship game. I knew the players and understood their commitment both to athletics and to education as a university student. They worked hard and they achieved much.
· As president of the NCAA, I have also had the opportunity to attend other championships, including the Division III track championship last spring. I paid particular attention to the high jump event and watched as two student-athletes battled to the final jump, urging each other to new heights and sharing both the joy of success and the disappointment of finishing second. In their competition and camaraderie, they represented all the values we associate with participation in sports.
· I believe most student-athletes are like those I describe. They are students who have the skills and desire to compete athletically, understanding their good fortune to be able to do both. Their academic experience has been enriched by their athletics participation.
· I believe most colleges and universities are committed to the education of students and also to providing athletics participation opportunities to those with the skills and desire. Most coaches, in my opinion, want their teams to achieve in the classroom, as well as the field or court.
· Three years ago, I told the National Press Club in a speech that I did not want to turn off the game of college sports; I wanted to turn down the volume. Earlier this year, based on closer observation of this enterprise, I refined my remarks. I told the National Press Club in another speech that I want to eliminate the static so the game can be heard.
· Here is the approach I recommend to you. I challenge you to reconceptualize the value of intercollegiate athletics on the college campus. Educate yourself and your fellow faculty members to the role athletics can play in shaping the collegiate experience. Engage in the effort to move college sports toward its full potential as a contributing unit in the higher education mission.
· In my view, faculty must take a leadership role on academic reform issues. The good news is that I see this happening. Faculty involvement through campus athletics committees, faculty athletics representatives and the Faculty Athletics Representatives Association has historically been the pressure point where institutional faculty could assert their influence. That has been an important contribution and has been especially effective over the last 20 years as academic reform progressed from the earliest efforts to the most recent set of standards.
· But there are other signs of faculty involvement on a broader basis. The Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics, which consists of Division I-A faculty governance leaders, recently organized itself to address these issues. In a seminal meeting this past spring in Chicago, the Coalition joined with the Association of Governing Boards and the NCAA to form an alliance dedicated to the support of ongoing reform. I sincerely hope that this alliance will become part of the foundation for addressing issues on a campus-by-campus basis.
· Faculty members are also especially important in the effort to integrate intercollegiate athletics with the academic mission of universities. It will be critical to partner in this effort with athletics directors, who are both knowledgeable and have responsibility for the operations of college sports. Clearly, too, the presidents are key to accomplishing the goal. I expect that there will be resistance from both the athletics and academic community to these changes, but re-establishing an education-based nexus between athletics and the academics is crucial if we are to sustain the collegiate model of sports.
· Intercollegiate athletics is a unique enterprise worthy of your attention and certainly worth preserving. I recommend that you become advocates for academic reform in college sports, certainly, but also become advocates for the role of intercollegiate athletics as a full contributing partner in the collegiate experience.
· Thank you.
One person pointed out that nothing was said about grants-in-aid and why athletes are paid to play. Brand: They are paid to attend, not play. Universities offer money to a lot of students with skills; they are not paying the student for the use of the skill (e.g., music) but to get an education. That is why this is a collegiate model of sports.
Nothing was said about attendance requirements for football games in order to be a Division I member; that seems in conflict with an educational model of sports. Measurement of graduation rates is more consistent with that model. Brand: That is the way the business side of the sport is organized to ensure an even playing field and equity in competition; colleges with 400 students should not be playing football against colleges with 40,000 students. That requirement is not part of the collegiate model.
There is no evidence that team success has an effect on giving? Brand: There will be more on that later in the day. There are a lot of myths about the economics of athletics. Winning does not lead to more giving, nor is there evidence that giving to athletics reduces giving to the institution for other purposes. The report on the economics of athletics does not include facilities; they have not obtained capital expenditure data. The vast majority of institutions subsidize athletics and those subsidies are increasing. But funding is a zero-sum game; one does not know if the subsidies affect faculty salaries.
Football loses more than all the other sports. The collegiate model cannot contain costs if there is a significant economic reward for winning. 85% of NCAA funds go to Division I schools; with more significant revenue-sharing, the collegiate model could be strengthened. Brand: First, increased spending does not increase winning. With respect to revenue distribution, what power does the NCAA have? That is systematically ambiguous. The NCAA is two things: the home office and the membership. It is the members who have voted on revenue distribution. "I am not the czar," he said; institutions make individual decisions and they act in a capitalistic rather than socialistic model. Some money is redistributed, such as the men’s basketball tournament revenue; the NCAA has no control or say over the distribution of post-season football revenues.
How concerned is the NCAA with ethical issues, such as hiding money for athletics? Brand: With respect to moving money around, every campus operates through subsidization. It is OK for universities to work that way; if they did not, they would not be the comprehensive institutions they are (undergraduates pay for graduate programs and some undergraduate programs, e.g., Psych 101, pay for others, such as classics department courses). If college sports are seen as part of the educational enterprise, subsidization is OK--but only if athletic budgets are also subject to institutional budget controls with faculty involvement.
Our institution went from I-AA to I-A; the faculty's judgment is still out. The change cost thousands of dollars in increased facilities and grant-in-aid budgets. Brand: The majority of schools that make that move never recover the cost and they lose money, but there are a few who do make money. My point is that if an institution is going to make the change, it should do so with its eyes wide open about the additional costs and the likelihood of breaking even. Now there are data; there have not been before.
Faculty must understand finances, Professor Burgan (AAUP Executive Secretary) said. They have found that there is a screen between faculty and athletic funding; faculty governance must understand finances in order to achieve reforms. President Brand agreed; faculty senates can press to obtain the information, he said. Athletic committees play a key role. The faculty should not assume they know the answers; they need to get data. There is a lot of wishful thinking, myths, and anecdotes. Armed with data, faculty can play a constructive role. An institution that takes advantage of a good faculty committee and a good FAR can make good decisions.
The separation of athletics from the campus is a major problem. The faculty athletics committee is supposed to be involved in the hiring and firing of coaches. When the men's basketball coach was hired, the committee was told it was a negotiation between lawyers and the committee had no role. Separation limits faculty involvement even if the committees have the appropriate charge. How can this be overcome? Brand: I have been advocating that searches for coaches be similar to those for full professors and deans (although they need to be truncated). There should be search committees with faculty, and especially in the quest for African-American coaches. There are exceptions, but searches should parallel academic searches.
Is there any evidence that football winning brings in more students, even if no evidence that it increases alumni giving to the institution? Brand: The evidence is that a successful athletic program does not increase the quality of applications, even if the number increases.
There are two sets of problems when it comes to "mainstreaming" athletic budgets: in those institutions where athletics is subsidized by the institution and those where it is self-supporting. Successful (i.e., self-supporting) programs are independent and it is difficult to establish university priorities and administrative and faculty control with them. Brand: There are only 1-2 dozen such programs. One is Notre Dame, which uses excess athletic income for various purposes and decides how to do so through normal institutional debate. It is difficult to change history; it is not necessary for the programs to be separate; that is a campus-specific tradition.
One institution said it is following recommended practice but there is a double standard. President Brand suggests holding athletics to an ethical standard (coaches, athletes) that does not apply to the rest of the campus (e.g., consider recent research scandals). Brand: I do not want special standards in athletics; they should be held to the same standards. Except for the Medical School (which is dealing with life and death), intercollegiate athletics (which is only a game) is perhaps the most visible arm of an institution. It should be held to the same standards as the rest of the campus. The visibility might be different; the standards should not. There has been scandalous coaching behavior in the past; what is different now is that presidents are standing up to it.
Most would agree that pay for play is undesirable. What falls in between pay for play and athletes not having enough money to live on? Is there anything between the two? Brand: There is legislation looking at student welfare and he believes the NCAA should reconsider the financial aid package. An athlete cannot have a part-time job; the difference between the institutional costs and the full cost of attendance is about $2500. Low-income students are eligible for Pell grants but not the middle class. Most schools withhold Pell and other grants if the student has an athletics scholarship.
Who must the faculty fight, and why must the faculty fight, to obtain information? Brand: One must discriminate between the public and private institutions. The publics have audits and the information is available. The privates are not required by law to release information, but there are internal audits. In some institutions, the president does not have access to athletic financial information!
There is a difference in the mindset of athletic personnel in terms of taking the time of students. Brand: And some student-athletes want to give as much as the coaches want. So do professors of philosophy but they don't get as much time. Faculty cynicism has made athletic staff defensive, so they draw back. Mainstreaming must be both ways and must go beyond a faculty approach of "we are out to destroy you." I have been in contact with a lot of coaches and have come to be convinced that the vast majority are interested in the welfare of students and want them to get an education. Faculty will discover this as well. Both sides have to be involved in mainstreaming.
Carol Simpson Stern (AAUP, Northwestern University)
Professor Stern began by noting that the core text informing her remarks was the AAUP statement on the role of the faculty in intercollegiate athletics. The statement is appended.
The reform movement in athletics is at a crossroads; they also want to preserve intercollegiate athletics. Knight Commission I was intended to re-empower university presidents to reduce the number of scandals and increase integrity. Knight Commission II looks to the boards of trustees to take responsibility and says that if they duck the issues, they will harm public perceptions of their institutions. We cannot keep having Knight Commissions about who should take what role. When the AAUP group met in 1999, it narrowed its focus: it did not look at finances (although they know finances need more sunlight on them) but addressed the faculty role in shared governance, in determining the academic standards of the institution and the welfare of students.
The faculty need alliances; they can use the AAUP, accrediting organizations, and so on, but faculty must stop acting as if there are two faculty cultures--those closely connected to sport and seen as fans and a much larger group of faculty who distance themselves from athletics and act as though it is largely the concern of others, not theirs. It is necessary to try to remind faculty that their mission is education and sport is an enhancement of education; it is the darling of the culture but it can be improved in an educational institution. The AAUP has urged more accountability and responsibility for faculty (and that does not just mean the athletic committee). She said she was distressed by the constant erosion of shared governance in institutions. She said she was also alarmed at how institutions shield younger faculty and do not socialize them into service; she wants to see them involved.
Professor Stern said she understood the difficulties in Division I intercollegiate athletics; she looks at the difficulties of faculty with respect to athletics. She heard the questions directed to President Brand: the faculty want information on how to be more effective. She reminded the faculty that they place a premium on their role as academic guardians of academic standards—they are in the classes, they lose students to practice. There appear to be two standards, for the athlete and for the non-athlete.
The AAUP statement contains a number of observations about governance, administration, financial aid; they are trying to say that if modest things are done, institutions can avoid difficulties in athletics. Some are not so modest; it is difficult to get financial information about athletics. She said the AAUP wants to see an effective coalition that makes improvements in intercollegiate athletics, and not just return with more commissions to set forth a litany of woes, in increasing scale.
Scott Kretchmar (Penn State)
(On best practices.) Does reform require more than "best practices"? Does it require more than FARs, who can be part of the problem? Yes to both questions, Professor Simpson said. The best practices are not panaceas; the FARs might be those less likely to provide leadership because they are within the system, trying to make it work. But it is hard to do reform without best practices, for three reasons. One, institutions do better with better policies, structures, incentives, and so on, to change behavior; values should precede action, but actions can lead to right values; and reform looks for places to begin.
FARs may not be in a position to exert leadership and think outside the box but they must be involved. First, they are faculty, with faculty values, who believe athletics has educational values, and they are as appalled as faculty generally by reports of misdeeds. Some have been co-opted, but not many. Most of their day is spent in teaching and research and they share the values of those involved in reform movements. Two, they bring a knowledge of the system to discussions—timing, what is practical, etc. Third, FARS are on governance boards of the NCAA and are in a position to vote and convince others on reform issues, at the NCAA and in the conferences.
The best practices for FARs are only pieces of reform and they speak to the collective wisdom. More faculty involvement in athletics is healthy and essential. There is a hill to climb; many faculty feel resignation, fatalism, apathy, and see reform as not their problem—and if that view prevails, reform is doomed. It is important to get more faculty involved and to lean on the FAR, who is in a position to assist faculty governance. People need to check their campuses for best practices (how they are organized, who reports to whom, and so on).
What is the role for faculty with respect to bogus courses, one person asked? Professor Stern said it is a primary faculty role to propose and approve any course in the curriculum; that is a primary right. Look into when the courses were approved and what the content is supposed to be, she suggested. Professor Kretchmar said that at Penn State the academic counselor reports to the Executive Vice President and Provost and the employees are screened by academic employees; they also examine suspicious courses.
One thing that should be done is to report to the faculty senate the distribution of student-athletes by major. If the institution is doing a good job in recruiting students, there should be a reasonable profile.
What recommendations do they have about appointment of the FAR, one person asked. Professor Kretchmar said the NCAA calls for a presidential appointment. The president, however, should only appoint from a slate nominated or reviewed by the faculty (the faculty senate).
There has been a growth in compliance staff that have no link to the faculty, it was said; how do the faculty obtain information? They have a compliance coordinator, Professor Kretchmar said. They have three or four, was the response, and the faculty do not even know they exist.
How does one bridge the cultural gap, asked another? With some diplomacy, Professor Stern responded. With the understanding they are committed to a common goal. Integrating the athletic director in the academic community is one step, Professor Kretchmar said; if the athletic director is isolated, the problem is exacerbated.
Many faculty involved in reform are not cynical or resigned, said one, and they are also not on tenure-track appointments (60% of their instructors are not). So 40% of the faculty are doing governance, a small group of men who are ex-athletes and who are co-opted. If one is not tenured, one is not in a strong position. The administration ignores recommendations from the athletic committee in dealing with budget problems, so the faculty are moving through collective bargaining.
How does one get the faculty to be more considerate with respect to make-up work when students are going on trips? That is a two-way street.
John Walda (President, Association of Governing Boards)
Speech
A few facts about the AGB:
1,187 institutions – 35,000 trustees
dedicated to strengthening the performance of boards of public and private universities and colleges
Advances concept of citizen trusteeship
A continuing education resource to trustees
Contributes to building good working relationships with chief executives.
In order to carry out the mission we:
Educate trustees on matters that affect responsibilities
Strengthen relationships between trustees, CEO’s and stakeholders in higher education
Stimulate cooperation with public-policy makers, government agencies, and private organizations that have a stake in the quality of higher education institutions
Identify and study emerging public-policy issues of concern to higher education by providing forums for their discussion and encouraging members to take action where needed
At the AGB, we remind our members frequently that they must, in their own institutions, keep the mission of the institution as their beacon. All decisions should be made against the backdrop of mission as both a goal and a boundary. Our decision as an organization to become more involved in the movement for reform in intercollegiate athletics was made with our AGB organizational mission in clear focus. Problems in college sports continue to emerge and threaten not only the mission of our institutions, but also values we support in our society. At the AGB, we fully appreciate and accept the challenge of educating our members about needed reform, and leading them to actions which may be needed in their colleges and universities. We have a rare opportunity not only to strengthen the trustee/CEO relationship around an important set of issues, but also to build bridges to the faculties of our colleges and universities. This meeting and the growing partnership between the AGB, the COIA and the NCAA demonstrate a joint recognition that something needs to be done about the status of college sports, and, more importantly, that we stand a much better chance of actually doing something, if we are, to use an appropriate metaphor, all on the same team and committed to one game plan. More on this later.
Myles Brand has done a great job of painting the landscape of the current status of college sports in America, including disturbing facts which demand our attention:
Revenues, and costs, are at all time highs
Academic achievement for student athletes needs to improve
Scandals, which implicate athletes, coaches, Presidents and sometimes trustees are way too common
The threat of governmental intrusion into our institution grows
Academic fraud condoned by athletic programs erodes our institutional values, and
Commercialization of the athletic enterprise undermines the traditional concept of amateur athletics.
So, as Myles has observed, we are at a crossroad. In order to make the right choices at this crossroad, boards must become more engaged. But what’s most important for local boards is the nature of the engagement to be undertaken. We cannot, as trustees, limit ourselves to being engaged in reaction to an incident, a crisis, an unruly coach or a financial challenge. Board engagement must come to mean critically analyzing athletic programs through a real and thorough understanding of its relationship to the achievement of mission for the university, of its cost to the university, and of its benefits to its most important and most profoundly affected constituents, the students, athletes and non-athletes alike.
In order to better examine the nature of the issue presented to the board members by intercollegiate athletics, and the needed level of involvement, let’s examine for a minute a real life example of a crisis in the life of a fine university and how trustee involvement, and the lack of it, can lead an institution down the path to perdition. I won’t name the institution – I choose this example not to single anyone out, but because it provides a great example for discussion. This is not a recent story, but one which has enduring lessons. We will use a fictitious name for this university, just in case someone here attended or taught there – we will call it University with Governance Headaches (UGH).
UGH had a governance structure which was a bit odd, and which clearly contributed to its problems. The full board, which was quite large, met only 2 times a year. Another structure, which was a subset of the entire board, met monthly and functioned as an executive committee.
Some very nasty things were going on in the athletic department of UGH. Athletes were essentially on the university payroll. They received rent free apartments, they drove cars which were purchased with loans from alumni that had no repayment expectation and they received cash for living expenses. Ultimately, following an investigation which I will briefly describe, the NCAA suspended UGH’s football team for a year, for what were found to be flagrant and persistent payments to players.
The following facts about the investigation make UGH’s history worthy of reexamining to derive a few lessons for trustees:
During the investigation, the Board Chair assured the President of UGH that he, the Board Chair, would "manage the situation." He suggested that the President should stay far away from the situation. The Chairman also assured the board that all violations within the athletic department would cease, immediately, and of course, they didn’t. Matters only got worse when the Board Chair decided to run for Governor of his state. Suddenly, the focus turned to keeping the lid on the situation to avoid a nasty scandal. The Board Chair, still "in charge" of the situation, decided to "wind down" the payments-to-athletes program.
On one occasion, the President had a meeting with the Athletic Director and his staff and told the AD that the payments were to cease, immediately. Moments after the message was delivered and the President had left the room, the AD reminded his staff that it was the board chair who ran the university, not the President. Payments continued.
Shortly thereafter, a player who had left the program and had wanted to return (and to resume his payments), and who was refused re-admission, blew the whistle.
Ultimately, the media discovered that the Board Chair, the President and the AD were all aware of the payment-for-athletes program, and had, to varying degrees, condoned them. Each ultimately confessed to this knowledge, and each, again to varying degrees, attempted to justify their complicity by claiming that they needed to honor commitments that had been made to players.
What lessons can we take for trustees from the example I have labeled UGH? I suggest the following:
An effective board must meet regularly and when they meet they actually need to DO something. They must organize in ways to promote learning and understanding amongst all the members of the board, not just a select few. More importantly, not only must a board do something, they must stand for something.
The "something" that they must stand for is the purpose or purposes for which their university was created, - it's mission.
This sounds axiomatic, but it does not happen easily or automatically. It takes work and active reexamination of the mission of an institution. More to the point here, it requires trustees to contemplate the relationship between the core missions of discovery, debate and learning and big time athletics.
At the same time that we are attempting, at the university, to increase knowledge and understanding in our students, we are also helping to shape their character. While our students are wrestling with the content of the subject matter in our higher education curriculum, in literature, music, science, history, the professors, etc., we challenge them also to consider the underlying issues of justice, opportunity, power, truth, honesty, and other ethical issues. A good trustee must be equipped and willing to evaluate the impact on character building that intercollegiate athletics will have upon the universities’ students and are the values expressed by the athletic program consistent with good character building, or are they in opposite? A good athletic program can demonstrate and teach the value of hard work, teamwork, sportsmanship, civility, perseverance, and striving for excellence. A bad program can condone greed, incivility, dishonesty, and injustice. Trustees must pick, shape and protect a model program which brings out the best in our students.
A board's most important job is hiring the right president. This statement has become a cliché, but that does not diminish its truth. In this context, this means the board must pick a president who will actively monitor athletics, and keep it in its proper perspective within the university.
The board must support a CEO who strives to manage athletics in a way that is consistent with the values of the institution. Support starts with a board that engages with the President in vigorous and informed discussion about intercollegiate athletics. Unlike our example at UGH, the board must then allow the President to exercise his rightful power to manage the athletic enterprise and set policies that protect the universities purpose, without interference and undercutting.
The athletic department at UGH was allowed, perhaps encouraged, to evolve as a free standing, nearly autonomous, ancillary operation for the university. Since it was fully responsible for the management of it revenue and expenses and balancing the budget, the department developed the attitude that it would spend its assets as it saw fit. The divide between the athletic department was also evident in the way it related to students/athletes. It began with recruiting and admitting student athletes with lower academic credentials, and grew as athletes were encouraged to choose the majors of least resistance, were allowed to stay and participate despite poorer grade point averages than non-athlete peers, and graduate at rates that did not meet those of the student body at large. Though the UGH example is dated, we know that these issues persist, and worsen in some places, thanks to the work done by Dr. Bowen and Dr. Shulman in their book, “The Game of Life” and the more recent publication, “Reclaiming the Game” by Dr. Bowen and Dr. Levin.
In his address this morning, Myles Brand has called for the use of the same sets of priorities and controls that are used in the normal university process, to be used in athletics. He has noted the need to progress in the areas of initial eligibility and continuing eligibility for student athletes. We, at the AGB, wholeheartedly concur.
I am very pleased that the still new coalition between the AGB, the NCAA and the Faculty Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics (COIA) has reached agreement on other issues of athletics reform. We have agreed to work towards the establishment of the NCAA's incentives/disincentives initiative, which is aimed at holding colleges and universities accountable for the academic success of student athletes. We also have agreed that there is a need for more transparency in the fiscal condition of our athletic departments, and that uniform reporting standards are needed to achieve this goal. We all agree that student athlete welfare is a core concern, and that issues like nonacademic time commitments need to be addressed. We all acknowledge the value and importance of integrating faculty athletic representatives with the work of faculty athletic committees. We also recognize the growing challenge of commercialization and the need to ask probing questions about its impact on our institutions.
Reform efforts in intercollegiate athletics are not new. They go back at least to 1929 when the Carnegie Commission started asking some important questions about intercollegiate athletics. Recently, a flurry of activity has served to kick start the reform agenda – with the second report of the Knight Commission, the formation of the Drake Group, the President’s Coalition for Athletics Reform and the AGB/NCAA/COIA group. What is clear to me is that the success of a reform movement is dependant on a critical mass of reform minded individuals from multiple constituencies must continue to work together. The faculties’ role in this process is vital. Their prime role in defining and protecting the academic values of our institutions make the faculty responsible to be engaged on the issue of the impact of college sports. As trustees, we welcome and are thankful for the partnership and support that many of you have expressed and provided for our efforts to move the agenda along. It is important work. If we are successful in achieving our reform goals, we jointly will have achieved one of our finest hours. We must continue to develop and pursue a proactive and aggressive agenda, together.
In many ways, the future of our educational enterprise and our ability to self govern our institution depends upon our success.
He advocates a more activist role for boards, one person noted; he would be more comfortable with that solution if he thought boards were part of the solution rather than part of the problem. There are a lot of examples where boards have gotten involved in athletics in the wrong way. That is why faculty are concerned. Boards spend more time on hiring the football coach than they do on hiring the provost. Mr. Walda said the AGB recognizes that problem. Not all boards spend more time on hiring the football coach than the provost and the AGB tries to educate trustees about this. He suggested a committee of board members and agendas as a way for the board to understand athletics and their impact on the university—financial, on academic programs, on students.
What is the president's coalition, one asked? President Brand explained that there are a number of presidential groups. The Bowl Championship Series group has two presidents from each conference in a group that is setting the agenda for reform, and the Division III presidents are also leading a strong reform effort.
There are a number of institutions in the AGB that have said they would support athletic reform. Has the AGB acted on this? They have not polled their members, Mr. Walda said. There was significant interest at the last national meeting; the consensus was that reform is essential, although they did not agree on the agenda. The work of the AGB is done by its board of directors; it unanimously endorses the reform agenda.
Does he have any feelings about whom the athletic director should report to, one person asked Mr. Walda. It is more appropriate that the presidents answer that question, Mr. Walda said, but his view is that there is divided opinion on the issue. It should be the president or a vice president. He said he did not believe it made any difference (between those two options); what is important is that the athletic director is in a reporting role like other members of the academic community (e.g., the deans). The reporting relationship must be normalized and regular.
Does he see any role in implementing Title IX for boards of trustees? Mr. Walda said the board role is to set a policy with respect to adherence and the importance of women's sports; it is up to the athletic director to implement the policy. The board should not go beyond the point of holding the athletic director accountable.
Professor James Earl (COIA, University of Oregon)
Speech
THE FACULTY COALITION’S ROLE IN INTERCOLLEGIATE ATHLETICS REFORM
Speaking for the COIA, let me begin by thanking first of all our gracious host organization, the AAUP, not only for the unique opportunity this conference is providing, but also for articulating “The Faculty Role in the Reform of Intercollegiate Athletics,” the powerful and useful report authored by Carol Simpson Stern and her committee a year ago. The AAUP continues to live up to its great history. The COIA is also pleased to be here in partnership with the NCAA and the AGB, as part of a newly-forged alliance for athletics reform, less than six months old. So we also want to thank the leadership of those two organizations for their friendship, advice and support. These four organizations are hardly traditional allies! That we’ve found common ground here is an indication of this issue’s importance. I hope our unity is lasting, and is a good omen for higher education.
I know that the COIA (I’ll just say “the Coalition” from now on) isn’t the first faculty group to devote itself to athletics reform; the Drake Group deserves credit for that, and the AAUP, and many reform-minded FARs have also worked within the NCAA for some of the goals we've identified. Many of the major players are in this room. It’s good to be among friends. The Coalition may be the new kid in class, then, but we believe that we have our own distinctive contribution to make to the athletics reform movement. I’ll try to outline what that is in these remarks.
Speaking for myself now, and not for the Coalition, of course I’m pleased to be here; and I’m also perfectly astonished to find myself a faculty spokesman on an issue of such importance to American higher ed. I feel pretty awkward in the role, though, for two reasons. First, because it’s Bob Eno of Indiana who should be up here instead of me–but he’s on sabbatical in China. Many of my remarks will be from notes he sent me just before he left. (So there are really two voices in the following talk; by and large, when I’m being rational, calm, organized and to the point, that’s Bob.) Second, it’s always awkward being a faculty spokesman, on any subject, because as we all know the faculty can’t agree on anything, and that includes athletics–so how could anyone be a spokesman for the faculty? I don’t want to cover over the diversity of faculty opinions about athletics, and the Coalition can’t ignore it either. I’ll come back to that issue.
It’s one of the many ironies of life, then, that I’m here today. I’d like to take a few minutes to explain how it happened. Most of you should be able to identify with my story, at least in the beginning, because most of you are professors, and in many respects I’m a very typical professor.
I wasn’t hired by the University of Oregon to worry about intercollegiate athletics; those who hired me weren’t counting on it, and now, believe me, they wish I’d never gotten into it. I was hired to worry about the Old English language between the seventh and eleventh centuries, and Beowulf, the epic poem written in it.
It’s hard to explain to non-academics, but not to you, that I actually get paid to keep myself expert in these subjects, to study them and write about them, and teach them, and train graduate students to do the same. I also teach other ancient and medieval literatures; and in my spare time I study ancient languages, translate an epic poem of Provence, chip away at a study of Indian literature, and run adult seminars in the humanities for the community. This is my profession. And as every professor in the room knows, in addition to all these things, I advise students, direct dissertations, serve on numberless committees and occasionally on the university senate.
Is it beside the point to talk about my professorial occupations? I think not; because when I talk about college sports, I talk as a professor. In this company, obviously, I don’t have to defend the faculty’s role at the university! But when it comes to athletics, I have to defend it every day. I have to explain what I do and how it embodies the university’s mission, over and over again, to everyone, from the fans in the stands right on up to the trustees and the President.
Only the faculty seems to understand that professors are real stakeholders in the university, living as we do, totally immersed in it and devoted to its traditional mission. No one can stake a more genuine claim to the university than the faculty. What we do at the university isn’t some sideshow; we are the main event.
One of the witty things that sports fans are always saying to me is, Don’t you wish you could pack 60,000 people into the stands for a lecture on Beowulf? This extremely tiresome question is supposed to remind me that more people care about what happens at the stadium than in my classroom, that classrooms are in fact boring, that literature isn’t nearly as exciting or as popular as football–so who am I to be criticizing athletics? Obviously I’m just envious.
My answer is, no, I’m not motivated by envy. The parents of America aren’t shelling out ten, twenty or thirty thousand dollars a year to send their kids to watch football games, I remind them, but to get an education. There are tens of millions of parents out there refinancing the house and going into lifelong debt, because they consider the classroom experience that I provide just that valuable. I have no doubts about the value of what I do. And for all of our concern about athletics, athletics is still just a sliver of the total university budget (about 4%). It’s an auxiliary; and even if sometimes it seems like the tail wags the dog, nobody thinks that athletics is the dog and education the tail. A lot of the fans I talk to know an awful lot about sports, but they have no idea what a university is. That’s one reason I run adult seminars for the community.
We are the university. We are the chief guardians of what makes it so valuable, what makes it worth the high price parents pay, guardians of its traditional high ideals, its academic excellence. Derek Bok says in his latest book,
Of all the major constituencies in a university, faculty members are in the best position to appreciate academic values and insist on their observance. Since they work on campus, they are better suited than trustees to observe what is going on. They have the most experience with academic programs and how they work. Most of all, they have the greatest stake in preserving proper academic standards and principles, since these values protect the integrity of their work and help perpetuate its quality.
Reading a passage like that at an AAUP conference is preaching to the choir, I know, but it’s an issue now, because it’s clear that if we don’t continue to set the standards, someone else will–or something else, by which I mean money, and the Marketplace–and the standards won’t be ones we’ll want to defend.
To some people the university’s a business; to others it’s a state agency; to others it’s an engine for the economy; and for others–many, many others–it’s little more than a great team, like the dazzling Ducks. And the university is all these things; but for you and me, for the faculty, the university is obviously something else and something more: it’s academic freedom; it’s the arts and sciences; it’s the library, the all-nighter, the seminar table; it’s liberal education, pure research, the sharing of ideas, the love of books, and the Socratic method; it’s young people on a steep learning curve; it’s Phi Beta Kappa and lifelong learning. And also, to be honest, it’s the absent-minded professor–Einstein with his bad hair, Einstein who can’t remember his phone number. I love the stereotype.
So to get back to my question, how did this absent-minded professor get involved with athletics? It’s a question I ask myself every day. For the first thirty years of my academic career I had no occasion and no reason to worry about sports. I followed the Cavaliers, then the Rams, then the Ducks, all from the un-luxurious skybox of my ivory tower; until a few years ago, even the amazing Ducks had no connection to my life as a professor.
It’s as if there was a firewall between the slightly disheveled intellectual enterprise the professor inhabits, and the glamorous athletic one thriving over there on our north campus. The two cultures, redefined for our day. It’s been possible to carry out my entire academic career, then, at three schools, hardly aware that athletics was there at all. Maybe I should have been alarmed by the total disconnect all along.
But if I’m here now, I’ve obviously finally become aware of athletics. Why? Is it because the role of athletics on campus has changed, so I can’t ignore it any more? A breech in the old firewall? Probably not: many of my colleagues remain sublimely uninterested in sports, happily focused entirely on their work. Many of them wonder why I’m so interested. I don’t bother them with it. I envy their focus on their research and teaching, and I’ve become resigned to being, for the time being, their firewall.
That’s one of the functions of faculty leadership; a few of us at a time take our turns in the senate, or on the athletics committee, precisely so the rest of us don’t have to worry about it. By and large, I’ve learned, the faculty don’t really want to be bothered about athletics–even those who enjoy sports; and even those who know there’s a real problem.
My story began when I became senate president three years ago. It didn’t take long to figure out that those who get involved in faculty governance, on my campus and on virtually every campus, quickly become very bothered with athletics. Once you’re in a position to feel a little responsible for the university’s direction, it dawns on you that the firewall between academics and athletics is in fact very, very thin; in fact, it can barely hide an awful contradiction in the university you love.
Shortly after I became senate president, the athletic department announced a $90 million expansion of our stadium. I first learned about it reading the front page of the local paper, over breakfast one morning. Oddly, on the same front page I also read about the latest round of cuts to the university’s budget by the state legislature. I saw suddenly several things at once: a looming crisis in our academic budget; a second crisis in the relation of academics to athletics, which suddenly looked ironic, if not comically inappropriate; and a third crisis in faculty governance, since I never would have believed the university could launch such a huge and expensive project without even informing the faculty.
Only a few weeks later, I read something else in the morning paper, that Oregon’s annual “Civil War” game against Oregon State had been rescheduled several weeks, right up to finals week, at the request of ABC. And this time it wasn’t only the faculty who read about it in the paper: not even the provost had been consulted–his precious “Dead Week,” with its elaborate rules forbidding distractions, had just become the biggest party weekend of the year. Earlier today Scott Kretchmar called final exams “sacred”–but not for us. Are you all aware that for many West Coast schools the March Madness basketball finals fall during finals?
Well, I know now that faculty leaders at almost all schools have similar stories to tell. I don’t mean to imply that Oregon is special.
In any case, one afternoon a few of us new faculty-leadership types, senior professors who had never thought about athletics during our long careers, found ourselves sitting in the student union, wondering about athletics. That day we hatched a very simple plan, to contact the senate presidents at the other PAC-10 schools, to see if they had the same concerns; if so, perhaps the ten senates could act together to urge our presidents to discuss the issues. We were very, very naive; but this little plan turned out to be much, much better than we could have imagined.
For this is what we discovered: although the PAC-10 teams are tough competitors, and to some extent the presidents also see the ten schools competing in the academic marketplace, the faculties by and large don’t feel this competition. Maybe the faculty don’t disagree about everything; like other professions, our allegiance to our professional ideals is almost always higher than our allegiance to our individual institutions–when those two things come into conflict.
We belong to a profession with a shared mission and shared ideals no matter where we work. If you set faculties–at least faculty leaders–talking to each other, they see the issues surrounding athletics and academics the same way, and they’re more eager to cooperate than compete. It’s not our faculties who conduct arms races.
So the PAC-10 faculties cooperated, and in the spring of 2000 nine of them passed resolutions endorsing Myles Brand’s new “Academics First” movement, urging their presidents, in Brand’s words, to “turn down the volume” of intercollegiate athletics. Faculty leaders in other conferences read about our little campaign in the papers, and the following year they too were cooperating to urge athletics reform on their presidents. In the Big-10 Bob Eno led the effort.
Some of you will have read James Duderstadt’s Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University: A University President’s Perspective. But you may not have read the epilogue to the paperback edition, written just after the PAC-10 and Big-10 passsed faculty resolutions. Myles hadn’t yet been chosen to head the NCAA. At that point Duderstadt doubted that the NCAA could be trusted with reform. Just short of despair, however, he wrote,
All hope is not lost. There is one important ally remaining that could challenge the mad rush of college sports toward the cliff of commercialism: the university faculty. After all, in the end, it is the governing faculty that is responsible for its academic integrity of a university. . . . It is now time to challenge the faculties of our universities, through their elected bodies such as faculty senates, to step up to their responsibility to defend the academic integrity of their institutions, by demanding substantive reform of intercollegiate athletics. To their credit, several faculty groups have responded to this challenge.
At about the same time, Carol Simpson Stern’s AAUP committee was issuing its report, which said,
Notably missing from reform efforts, at least until recently, has been the collective voice of the faculty. The increasing prominence of faculty senates as vehicles for faculty engagement in sports reform is a particularly promising development.
The Knight Commission’s second report also noted the first stirrings of our faculty senate movement for reform.
It was Bob Eno who brought the local conference movements together under one umbrella. No one had to be asked twice. This is how the Coalition was born, from a grass-roots movement among faculty leaders across the country. Since these statements by the Knight Commission, the AAUP and Duderstadt were written, the Coalition has found support from faculty leaders in virtually all Division I-A schools. Its steering committee, representing all six BCS conferences, has forged a “Framework for Comprehensive Athletics Reform” now being considered for formal adoption by faculty senates in every conference.
The Framework lays out in some detail the chief directions for reform in the areas of academic integrity, athlete welfare, governance, finances, and over-commercialization. Its language is flexible enough to allow for debate and local difference without weakening the drive for a national consensus.
Last week, senates at Iowa, Vanderbilt and Duke endorsed the Framework, and dozens of others are considering it as we speak. We’ve publicly vowed to bring home from our work sessions at this conference two “best-practices” documents for member schools to adapt and adopt–one on the appointment and function of FARs, one on the design and appointment of campus athletics councils.
Now faculty senate presidents, if I may say so myself, tend to be a rather responsible lot of leadership types, not so much firebrands, malcontents, or radicals. Every campus has professors who hate sports and want to see them slashed or eliminated; but the Coalition, following Myles’s lead, adopted from the start a moderate long-term reform agenda. We admired the Knight Commission’s second report, we were buoyed by Myles’s selection as NCAA president, and we’re eager to see reform take place under NCAA leadership if possible.
Our immediate goal is to have faculty senates from coast to coast agree on clear, achievable, practical, enforceable and meaningful reforms, starting with academic standards and governance practices most clearly within the purview of the faculty. Unlike earlier faculty movements, ours relies on well established faculty governance procedures, so that our efforts can take official legislative form through faculty action.
Beyond these first achievable goals we are in for the long haul. The ultimate goal is to assist all the other stakeholders in bringing about comprehensive reform in the entire industry, for the sake of the long-range health of both college athletics and the university system. Our long-range goals lie outside faculty purview, and require the sort of alliances this conference represents. These goals include adjustment of season length and team size, cost cutting, re-commitment to amateurism, particularly in revenue sports, and reduced dependence on commercial contracts. Our ambitions are confined to Division I-A, but we encourage colleagues in other divisions to consider formulating and evaluating the issues that pertain to their athletics programs, and initiate a similar process of faculty engagement.
This is a propitious moment. This is the moment when forces converge. I think we all know that if reform misfires now, we may have missed our best opportunity to accomplish it. We also know that the immediate future is likely to present a variety of obstacles that will slow the pace of reform, and tempt us to say that we've gotten as far as we can get, well before we've set a framework for comprehensive reform in place. Bob Eno wrote out for me this list of obstacles we can expect:
1. The completion of the NCAA's initial academic reforms (the incentive/disincentive package), if and when it is accomplished, is likely to take the steam out of reform by appearing to be an adequate result. Without going further, to eliminate of the tremendous financial incentives that undermine reform, our efforts won’t make a difference.
2. The process of approval by faculty senates of the Coalition Framework will be slow, and will only partly succeed. That's in the nature of faculty senates and in the unusual nature of what we're trying to accomplish; so we’ll have to persist.
3. Some aspects of reform are truly difficult–truly workable solutions haven’t yet been envisioned. The most obvious of these are in the area of cost reduction, where conferences and the NCAA encounter anti-trust strictures that make agreements to restraining the arms race difficult to design and sustain. And presidents–the only people who can attack these issues–have many other priorities. Inducing them to work together to arrive at practicable solutions that aren’t half-measures will also require persistence.
The path of least resistance will always be to answer funding needs by negotiating ever more lucrative commercial contracts; anti-reform is easier than reform. Faculty will have to keep up the pressure; we have to create and maintain a national network of faculty, monitoring movement or the lack of it, and holding presidents and boards accountable for their efforts. (This also means straightforward support for positive work.) Lack of movement among presidents will tend to suck momentum from the faculty effort–silence will disperse our focus. So the Coalition cannot slip into reactive mode. The Steering Committee will have to generate ideas, to report, and to maintain a constant pressure for reform.
4. We are one year into the faculty reform movement. While we've made progress, the momentum of disintegrating factors is keeping pace. For example, there are the destabilizing forces of conference realignment and legal infighting initiated by a bid to capitalize on economic advantages; congressional scrutiny inspired by the messy battle over bowl access and dollars; and what seems an unprecedented series of scandals in the player and coaching ranks.
The acceleration of these phenomena create additional pressure for reform, and in that sense they create positive opportunities, but unless we respond quickly, universities could lose substantial public credibility, and forces beyond our control will take away some of the options available to us.
Faculty, presidents, trustees, and others need to reach an understanding about the timetable for reaching a comprehensive reform plan, and stick to it–two years from now seems long enough. Implementing the plan may take a decade, of course–whatever it takes to induce all parties to agree (after all, we've had a century of abortive effort; a decade to reach a truly reformed equilibrium is a small price to pay). But this year and next need to be a time of intense, cooperative effort to reach long-term solutions to complex problems.
5. (You notice that these obstacles get longer as we move down Bob’s list!) Fifth, faculty need to be both impatient and realistic. It is not hard to imagine solutions to athletics issues that conform to widely held faculty values, but that violate anti-trust laws, have strong negative unintended consequences on athletes with personal and academic integrity, or unnecessarily raise vocal public (and thus political) opposition. To be true partners in this endeavor, faculty can't voice simplistic solutions based on impressions rather than good data. We need faculty leadership to become well educated on the issues, and pragmatic in their thinking.
The goal is concrete–to achieve a reformed model for athletics that can persist over time in spite of real-world pressures. That means working towards a model that is not only practicable once in place, but achievable in the first place. The design is an intellectual challenge we must participate in; the accomplishment is a political challenge we must be disciplined enough to contribute to.
As if bob’s list of obstacles weren’t long enough, I’d like to add two more.
The first is, that the millions of avid college sports fans who crowd the stadiums or watch on TV have little reason to believe us when we say that college sports is in big trouble. After all, the games have never been better: beautiful facilities, great coaching and playing, amazing TV coverage and analysis. . . . From the fan’s point of view, bigger is better, and there’s no such thing as too much.
The fans, of course, can’t be expected to consider it from the owners’ point of view–the owners in this case being institutions of higher learning, mostly public, and almost all in deep financial trouble. Most fans would be surprised to learn that these tremendous popular spectacles make no money for their owners, and in fact cost most universities precious millions they can’t afford. How could fans know about the danger posed by athletic budgets that rise at twice the rate of academic budgets? If they did understand these things, perhaps they’d worry that what they were watching was really the college sports bubble, not unlike the dot.com bubble or the Enron bubble. Rapid growth often spells disaster. But the fans probably wouldn’t worry anyway. It’s not in the nature of fanhood. So it’s up to the owners, it’s up to us, to slow it down before the bubble bursts–but the fans are not going to understand why, and they’re going to scream bloody murder if they think professors are interfering in their fun.
The final obstacle is the constant temptation for those of us who get into this movement just to throw in the towel. Derek Bok writes very perceptively and eloquently about the problem of athletics, and comes to the “melancholy conclusion” that “it may already be too late to turn back.” Reading his book, and Bowen’s, and Duderstadt’s in quick succession last week, I felt a terrible heaviness come over me. What will it take for faculty to sustain a long-term commitment, when the forces working against reform are so great, when some of the best spokesmen for reform consider it impossible?
I’ve described the Coalition’s reform agenda as a moderate and realistic one, and I myself try to walk the middle path; but let me confess, my personal feelings do fluctuate between extremes. Sometimes you hear the crowd roar, and you root for the team, and your students are on the field, and you see how much the whole city enjoys the games, and the local economy is thriving because of them–and you say, Why can’t I just join the crowd, and go with the flow of history? Why complain, and make them all so mad at me? Why should I feel responsible for reforming this giant? And please, please, let the Ducks win on Saturday!
But then there’s another part of me which sometimes takes over, which is simply outraged about the situation American higher ed now finds itself in in relation to athletics. Oh, I’m lucky: the University of Oregon has a relatively clean, self-supporting, well-managed and pretty successful, sometimes even inspiring athletics program, and an enlightened administration; but still, the faculty leadership at the U of O is at this moment absolutely and totally furious about athletics. Nike is about to build us a new basketball arena. I suppose we should be grateful, but the fact is we don’t need it and don’t want it. Oregon is becoming a test case, an extreme example, a spectacle of arms race mentality and commercialization, a cartoon of what’s going wrong in higher ed today. Many of you have local issues like this, I know. Oregon isn’t really so special, and I don’t want to be angry up here; I’d rather be moderate, thoughtful and persuasive.
I’ll probably never have another opportunity as good as this to make my case. Oh for the tongues of angels. Oh for that rhetorical silver bullet that might convince not only you, the choir, but even the most diehard, single-minded, anti-intellectual booster who loves sports but hates universities on principle, that despite all the ratings, and the crowds, and the excitement, and the beauty of the game, and the glory of young athletes in their prime, not to mention the billions of dollars pouring through this huge success story of a sports entertainment industry, despite all appearances, college sports is not in good health. Health depends on moderation, and intercollegiate athletics, at least at Oregon, is nothing now if it’s not a culture of wretched excess.
It was inevitable, I knew it, that the longer I spoke the sadder I would become over what has happened to college sports and what has happened to our universities during my thirty-three years as a professor. So I’ll stop. I’ll end with Bob Eno’s final paragraph. Bob seems always to see the silver lining. He’s the creator and the head of the Coalition, and I wish he could be here to see all these groups together–because this was his final thought before leaving on sabbatical:
“Already, in Division I-A, faculty leaders and presidents are working together more closely than before because of this convergence of effort on athletics. Today (here Bob imagines himself at the podium with me), today the chairman of the board of the AGB, the national arm of trustee boards at the vast majority of our institutions, has spoken to us at the invitation of the AAUP, the largest national arm of our faculties–a situation we could not have imagined a year ago. The potential benefit to higher education of such enhanced communication and cooperation among faculty, governing boards, and administrations is enormous, and our response to the endemic problems of intercollegiate sports might just be the groundwork upon which a new understanding of shared governance is built.”
Thank you.
Said one person: With respect to [former Michigan] President Duderstadt's book, when he was at Michigan, they had basketball problems but he dealt with other issues. He was not involved with the faculty senate as president. With respect to corporate sponsorship in athletics, that is seen as something to avoid—but what of corporate sponsorship of research or buildings? It is not clear there should be different standards. What is fair for the rest of the school is fair for athletics. That is a problem across the academy, Professor Earl agreed, but it is aggravated in athletics.
It is said athletics are losing millions of dollars. One should not think about athletics that way; why judge athletics on the basis of profit and loss? Most faculty would say that football is costing millions of dollars. The biggest resistance to reform will come from BCS football coaches. The values driving an athletic department are different from the rest of the university, Professor Earl said. It is a business that runs on a business model and the potential for abuse is greater. He said he would think more about mainstreaming; maybe football has educational value. But his experience, he said, is that when institutional dollars subsidize athletics, it is the poor man subsidizing the rich man. The faculty are broke; at his institution, they said so and stopped a $2 million subsidy of athletics that was instead spent on faculty salaries.
Asking about the plans for a new basketball arena at Oregon with major corporate sponsorship, one person asked how such a decision would be made in a more perfect world, with more faculty involved. Professor Earl said that there is a campus plan that went through the Senate with a lot of faculty participation. One expects the plan would be followed if the institution builds a major facility. In this case it was not; the need is too great to wait on faculty participation. The faculty are naïve on finances, he said. The university is engaged in a $600-million capital campaign; he asked how much of the money will be for athletics. At first he was told about 20% and he guessed 30%; the development office now says it will be about 40% and he guesses 50%, Professor Earl said. As the percentage for athletics increases, the amount to be directed to academic purposes goes down.
At one institution athletics is self-supporting, a speaker said, and there are not a lot of problems, but the revenue sports support the rest of athletics on campus; without the revenue sports, they would not have the others. In those other sports, the students have no interest in being professional athletes and play for the love of sports. Making money is not all bad; the speaker, noting she was in the business school, pointed out that commercialism is not all bad. Commercialization is not an area the faculty have a lot of control over, Professor Earl responded. In the long term, changes must be put into effect by the entire athletic industry. COIA is not trying to cut or eliminate college sports, it is trying to slow down the rate of growth; institutions cannot sustain the rate of the last 10 years. The goal is to guarantee the continued health of college athletics, not lead an ideological attack on them.
There are people who hate athletics, it was said; there is the danger of COIA getting the wrong followers. Professor Earl agreed; COIA needs moderate rhetoric if it is to accomplish reform.
The COIA principles are excellent, said one, but one of them is very specific and is very different from the way they do things: playing seasons in only one semester/term. That does not make sense for schools on a quarter system; given sports like baseball, track, and swimming, student-athletes practice 12 months a year. Why is that provision in the COIA statement? Professor Earl said that was not the first time that question had been asked; he has heard it a lot. The statement is likely to disappear. He said he wanted to stress two qualities of the COIA Framework (appended to this summary): First, it is in process, not set in stone, and ongoing criticism will lead the COIA leadership to rewrite it. Second, for a school to endorse the Framework does not mean it endorses every item in it; the statement can adapted to local situations. No one document will be adoptable by every institution.
Since there has been a lot of talk about money and where it is directed, said one person, it was noted that they have a corporate sponsor for their arena, which is also a conference center. This relates to where universities get money in general. In their case, one corporate sponsor complained about the speakers that were invited to a conference so the institution watered down the conference—and this at a Jesuit school where ethics are the mission!
It has been said the Framework document reflects a general consensus, one person said, and not all institutions must agree on every point. If so, what is one to say to the senate, and where is the consensus if all institutions endorse it with reservations? It will be difficult to make it operational if there is no agreement on the statements. That is why COIA needs to be a clearinghouse, Professor Earl said, to ask those questions.
One person, a FAR and member of the institution's student-athlete welfare committee, asked where the student voice in the statement was. She hears a lot from student-athletes who are confused by the national rhetoric; what does COIA hear from them? As a faculty group, COIA has not gathered student-athlete opinion, Professor Earl said, but he has talked with them at his own school. Another person observed that the athletes think all the talk means they will get paid.
The Empirical Effects of Collegiate Athletics: An Interim Report (Dr. Peter Orszag, Brookings Institution)
Executive Summary
[Dr. Orszag walked the group through the findings, explaining the data tables and the conclusions they drew.]
Executive Summary, "The Empirical Effects of Collegiate Athletics: An Interim Report" by Robert E. Litan, Jonathan M. Orszag, and Peter R. Orszag.
Observers of college athletics hold dramatically different views regarding the empirical effects of athletics on institutions of higher education. One view, reflected in the so-called Flutie effect, suggests that athletic programs generate a variety of direct and indirect benefits for the school sponsoring them. Another view, reflected in two reports from the Knight Commission, suggests that college athletics is suffering from "a financial arms race" and college athletics "threaten to overwhelm the universities in whose name they were established." Unfortunately, the debate between these two schools of thought is often based more on assertions and anecdotes than on empirical evidence.
The purpose of this paper is to examine empirically the effects of college athletics, with a particular focus on the financial effects. In particular, the paper draws on evidence contained in previous academic studies; statistical analysis of a new, comprehensive database compiled from school-specific information collected as part of the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act (EADA) merged with data from other sources (such as the Integrated Post-Secondary Education Data System managed by the Department of Education); and a detailed survey of chief financial officers from 17 Division 1 schools. These various sources of data have important limitations, especially in areas such as the treatment of capital expenditures, but they nonetheless represent a comprehensive empirical effort to shed light on key issues related to college athletics.
The paper specifically examines ten hypotheses about college athletics, focusing primarily on Division I-A schools. Using our data and the existing academic literature, we examine each of the hypotheses. Our analysis confirms five of the hypotheses; the other five are not proven and require further empirical analysis:
Hypothesis #1: Operating athletic expenditures are a relatively small share of overall academic spending.
According to Department of Education data, reported athletic spending represented roughly three percent of total higher education spending for Division I-A schools in 1997 (the most recent comprehensive Department of Education data publicly available).
In 2001, NCAA/EADA data suggest that operating athletic spending represented roughly 3.5 percent of total higher education spending for Division I-A schools.
The share of operating athletic spending in a university's total budget is higher for smaller schools than for larger schools because of the .fixed costs associated with an athletic department.
The share of operating athletic spending in overall higher education spending has increased only slightly over time. In recent years, there is indirect evidence of a modest acceleration in athletic spending relative to total spending, but comprehensive data are not yet available to confirm such a trend.
We conclude that operating athletic expenditures in the aggregate are a relatively small share of total higher education spending for Division I-A schools.
Hypothesis #2: The football and basketball markets exhibited increased levels of inequality in the 1990s.
A common measure of inequality is the Gini coefficient, which would equal one if one school accounted for all spending and zero if spending were the same across schools. Increases in the Gini coefficient represent increased levels of inequality and vice versa.
Between 1993 and 2001, the Gini coefficient for Division I-A football spending rose from 0.26 to 0.29. To put that increase in perspective, it is approximately equal to the increase in income inequality in the United States during the 1980s. The Gini coefficient for Division I-A basketball spending rose even more sharply, from 0.26 to 0.31.
Inequality also increased among top-spending schools. The Gini coefficient for football spending among schools in the top 25 percent of the spending distribution, for example, rose from 0.08 in 1993 to 0.11 in 2001.
We conclude that the football and basketball markets exhibited increased levels of inequality between 1993 and 200 I.
Hypothesis #3: The football and basketball markets exhibit mobility in expenditure, revenue, and winning percentages.
More than two-fifths of the schools that were in the top quintile of Division I-A football spending in 1993 were no longer in the top quintile by 2001. Nearly 60 percent of the schools in the middle quintile in 1993 were no longer there in 200 I; more than one-third had moved up and more than one-fifth had moved down.
Net revenue also exhibited some degree of mobility: Among the schools in the middle quintile of football net revenue in 1993, roughly two-thirds were no longer in the middle quintile in 2001.
A school's winning percentage exhibits only modest levels of persistence. For example, the correlation of winning percentages from one year to the next is only about 50 percent. Tbe correlation dissipates over time: The correlation betWeen winning percentages ten years apart is 20 to 30 percent.
We conclude that the football and basketball markets exhibit some degree of mobility in expenditure, revenue, and winning percentages.
Hypothesis #4: Increased operating expenditures on football or basketball, on average, are not associated with any medium-term increase or decrease in operating net revenue.
Our statistical analyses suggest that between 1993 and 200 I, an increase in operating expenditures of $1 on football or men's basketball in Division I-A was associated with approximately $1 in additional operating revenue, on average. The implication is that spending an extra $1 was not associated with any increase or decrease in net revenue, on average, from these sports.
These results, although based on better data than previous studies, nonetheless have limitations. For example, our database extends only from 1993 to 2001. It is possible that increased spending on athletics has long lags - that is, it produces significant benefits or costs after a long period of time. If this were the case, our database may be too short to capture the "true" effects of increased spending. In addition, the NCAA/EADA data do not adequately record capital expenditures; our analysis therefore focuses on operating spending. It is possible that the effects of operating spending differ from the effects of capital spending.
We conclude that over the medium term (eight years), increases in operating expenditures on football or men's basketball are not associated with any change, on average, in operating net revenue.
Hypothesis #5: Increased operating expenditures on football or basketball are not associated with medium-term increases in winning percentages, and higher winning percentages are not associated with medium-term increases in operating revenue or operating net revenue.
A variety of econometric exercises suggests no statistical relationship between changes in operating expenditures on football and changes in football winning percentages between 1993 and 2001.
A variety of econometric exercises also suggests no statistical relationship between changes in winning percentages and changes in football operating revenue or net revenue between 1993 and 2001.
We conclude that increased operating expenditures on football or basketball are not associated with medium-term increases in winning percentages, and higher winning percentages are not associated with medium-term increases in operating revenue or operating net revenue.
Hypothesis #6: The relationship between spending and revenue varies significantly by sub-groups of schools (e.g., conferences, schools with high SAT scores, etc.).
We examined the relationship between spending and revenue across various subsets of schools. We were not able to detect evidence of systematic differences when separating the schools by characteristics such as: public vs. private schools; schools with high SAT scores vs. schools with low SAT scores; large student populations vs. small student populations; schools that were ever in the Associated Press (AP) rankings; and schools that were ranked in the top 25 in the AP poll in 1993.
Some schools benefited from moving up to Division I-A, but the experience varied across schools. For example, two schools experienced significant increases in football net revenue after moving to Division I-A; one school experienced a decline in football net revenue after moving to Division I-A.
In many cases, the sample sizes for the subsets of schools were quite small; given the paucity of data in some cases, it is difficult to reject the hypothesis outright. Instead, we conclude that the hypothesis that the relationships vary significantly by sub-groups of schools is not proven.
Hypothesis #7: Increased operating expenditures on big-time sports affect operating expenditures on other sports.
Our statistical analysis suggests that each dollar increase in operating expenditures on football among Division I-A schools may be associated with a $0.21 increase in spending on women's sports excluding basketball and $0.35 including basketball, but the results are not robust to changes in the econometric specification. Such a potential spillover effect may be expected given Title IX and other pressures to ensure equity between men's and women's sports.
Previous studies have found that increases in football spending are associated with increased spending on women's sports.
Given the lack of robustness of the results, we conclude that the hypothesis that increased operating expenditures on big-time sports affect operating expenditures on other sports is not proven.
Hypothesis #8: Increased operating expenditures on sports affect measurable academic quality in the medium term.
Our statistical analysis suggests no relationship--either positive or negative--between changes in operating expenditures on football or basketball among Division 1-1\ schools and incoming SAT scores or the percentage of applicants accepted.
The academic literature is divided on whether athletic programs affect academic quality. While our results suggest no statistical relationship one way or the other, our data are limited to eight years and such a relationship may exist over longer periods of time. In addition, the relationship between athletics and academic quality may manifest itself in ways other than the effect on SAT scores or other directly measurable indicators.
We conclude that the hypothesis that changes in operating expenditures on big time sports affect measurable academic quality in the medium term is not proven.
Hypothesis #9: Increased operating expenditures on sports affect other measurable indicators, including alumni giving.
Econometric analysis using our database shows little or no robust relationship between changes in operating expenditures on football or basketball among Division I-A schools and alumni giving (either to the sports program or the university itself).
The academic literature is again inconclusive on this issue. As with the previous hypothesis, our results suggest little or no statistical relationship - but our data are limited to eight years and such a relationship may exist over longer periods of time.
We conclude that the hypothesis that increased operating expenditures on sports affect other measurable indicators, including alumni giving, is not proven.
Hypothesis #10: The football and basketball markets exhibit an "arms race" in which increased operating expenditures at one school are associated with increases at other schools.
Analysts have used the term "arms race" to describe a variety of phenomena. We use the term to refer to a situation in which increased spending at one school are associated with increases at other schools.
Some of our econometric analyses suggest that increased operating expenditures on football at one school may be associated with increases in operating expenditures at other schools within the same conference, but other specifications suggest no relationship.
We conclude that the hypothesis that the football and basketball markets exhibit an "arms race" in which increased operating expenditures at one school are associated with increases at other schools is not proven.
It is important to emphasize that the existence of an "arms race" may be concentrated in capital expenditures, which are not adequately recorded in the NCAAIEADA data, rather than in operating expenditures.
Conclusion
This interim report reflects an effort to advance the debate over college athletics by using data to assess the validity of different hypotheses. We find that many widely held perspectives about spending on big-time sports by colleges--by both proponents and opponents of such spending - are not supported by the statistical evidence.
Our results must be qualified, however. Although the data in this paper are more comprehensive than other datasets that have been used in the past, they are nonetheless imperfect: They are available only since 1993, and they fail to capture fully various components of athletic activities (especially total capital expenditures and staff compensation from all sources). Further efforts to improve and analyze the data are likely to provide additional insights into the effects of college athletics on institutions of higher education. Given the available data, neither the proponents of the Flutie effect nor those who argue that big-time college athletics are imposing directly measurable financial harm on higher education have proven their case.
Dr. Orszag noted some of the caveats of the study: He pointed out that the study only covered 8 years, 1993-2001, and perhaps that was a strange period. There could be "secret" factors that they did not include. Many of the relationships in the report are subject to inter-related causality. The data may be inaccurate, and even if operating expenses were perfectly measured, the data still do not capture capital expenditures.
Does athletic success cause an institution to attract more students? Dr. Orszag noted that the literature has addressed the question of applications/enrollment and alumni donations. Their finding is that athletic success does increase applications; a weaker relationship is that the median SAT score for incoming students increases; there is no relationship between athletic spending and SAT scores of incoming students (they did not look at resident versus non-resident student scores). They did not look at state appropriations; one study suggested a relationship between winning and an increase in state appropriations.
Did they look at good will generated from increased spending in football? Dr. Orszag said they do not know how to measure good will; if there is increased good will, it should show up in licensing and student applications.
The bottom line, Dr. Orszag said, is that athletics is a wash. Neither they nor the data say whether an institution should have or not have intercollegiate athletics, but it should not have athletics with the expectation that they will produce income. The institution needs to evaluate whether the benefits of athletics outweigh the costs. (If a university could open a bakery that would break even, should it?) The debates about athletics have perhaps been through the wrong lens.
What do operational expenses include? Everything that is recorded, Dr. Orszag said. Financial aid, the athletic director, coaches' salaries, game expenses, etc. There is a gap in that they do not include supplemental coaching compensation (they expect to have that data in the future). Even if the numbers are all off because they miss $500,000 in coaching compensation, that would have no effect on the results because in Division I-A that amount is a rounding error. It would not change the numbers by very much.
One speaker noted that Dr. Orszag issued a caveat that there could be a hidden variable accounting for the variations. There is a variable that is not hidden, it was said: not televising football and basketball games would solve most of the problems. There are data on that proposition and television is the 800-pound gorilla: What is the interjection of the media doing to all of us? They tried to look at television revenue, Dr. Orszag said, and looked at whether there was a spending effect when TV contracts were re-negotiated. They could not identify such an effect. They thought they would find a strong effect perhaps in one case: when an institution was low in the sport rankings (e.g., AP coaches' poll) and the moved up, there would be increased revenue. They did not find that effect.
One speaker, a sports economist, said the study had few surprises. Athletics does not generate revenue for the institution and there are not a lot of externalities. These findings are consistent with the previous academic literature, Dr. Orszag agreed, the results of which have not been captured in the media. Institutional support provides 65% of the support for athletics, it was then said. Accurate financial reporting does lead to a problem: Students are sometimes paying in athletic fees over twice what it would cost them to buy a season ticket to every sport at their school. One trustee refused to look at the data; the buyer of athletics is not the student, it is people with no connection to the institution. The buyers do not care about the academic mission. That is why the debate should be on another plane, Dr. Orszag responded. But commercialization is not limited to athletics; it is a problem faced across higher education.
One speaker pointed to a positive link between (1) basketball and (2) a capital campaign and the number of student applications at his institution. Dr. Orszag said they do not say that increased spending in athletics and/or increased athletic success will have no effect. But one always hears the good stories, not the bad; institutions don't talk about when they invest a lot in athletics but lose money even so--but those institutions do show up in these data. Looking across all schools, however, one cannot say they do not have different experiences.
One person pointed out a table in the report (plotting expenditures in football, growing from $4.7 million in 1993 to $6.3 million in 2001, in constant 2001 dollars) and said "that looks like an arms race to me." Dr. Orszag said it depends on what one means by arms race. The used a specific definition: increased spending at school A triggers increased spending at school B; they also looked at spending within conferences. They could find no arms race, by their definition, in the statistical analyses they performed. Dr. Orszag also pointed out that overall spending in the institutions increased 3.9% per year, 1985-2001; education and general spending increased 2.7% during the same period while athletic spending increased 4.5% and football spending increased 2.9%. Football grew less than other sports; the growth in spending during this period was in women's sports. He agreed, however, that the absolute dollar amounts are larger--a 10% increase in the base for football would be much more than a 50% increase in other sports.
The data do include athletic financial aid, Dr. Orszag said in response to a question, and there is an upward bias in the data because of the tuition increases at public institutions in recent years. State appropriations have dropped about 20% and tuition increases have not made up for that loss, so one may be seeing a substantial decline in quality in public institutions, as faculty salaries do not increase and class sizes do.
When spending is calculated, how did they deal with overhead, one person asked? Overhead is calculated very differently at different institutions. Dr. Orszag agreed that this is a problem. The solution was to compare changes over time at schools A and B; they did ask about changes in accounting methods and found that institutions did not alter them. The problems with overhead expenses do, however, contaminate the data about the athletic share of total institutional expenses. They are hoping to get better data on this point.
One person said he was struck by the 3.5% of institutional spending that is attributed to athletics. Most of what an institution spends is on salaries and there is little left for things like academic technology. They see small things needed in the academic sector, year to year, that are not provided. How does athletics affect the distribution of funds? Dollars go out and come in; where do they go? Dr. Orszag noted that they used IPEDS data, which are only available through 1997, so they only had four years of comparable data (1993-1997). They were limited in their ability to explore budget allocations.
In terms of dollar for dollar spending, in football and basketball spending an extra dollar does not guarantee an additional dollar of revenue. And any extra funds that athletics generates stays in athletics.
At one institution they paid for the expansion of the stadium with revenue bonds. Are those costs included in operating expenses? They are not, Dr. Orszag said. They expect to collect additional data, but it will take time to collect and accumulate the data so there are longitudinal measures.
One person said he was told that spending now in athletics would show up in revenue in six years; did they deal with that lag? They did not, Dr. Orszag said; they only had eight years of data. That hypothesis may be correct.
It is puzzling to conclude that it is mistaken to think that money is the problem in athletics, said one, when the report leaves out capital expenditures. In many places, capital expenditures are the largest expense of a program--and they also reflect opportunity costs. Is there a problem with buildings, a sense of a limit on what an institution should build; does building a stadium being to reach that limit? It is difficult to know how to measure capital costs appropriately. Dr. Orszag mentioned several factors concerning capital costs. First, to properly account for displacement effects, one needs to know if the funds for athletics would be available for other uses (the anecdotal evidence suggests they would not). Similarly with alumni donations; it appears that athletic donations do not supplant other donations. Analyzing displacement requires more data and even then they could probably not answer the question.
October 10, 2003
WORK SESSION A: Best Practices, Faculty Representatives
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- PROPOSED DISCUSSION DRAFT - Best Practices, Faculty Athletics Representatives Prepared by Professor Scott Kretchmar, Pennsylvania State University
Introduction
The NCAA Constitution requires that all member institutions employ a faculty athletics representative (FAR). This individual must have faculty rank and not hold either an administrative or coaching position in the athletics department. The FAR is supposed to play a central role in the overall checks and balances system designed to insure academic integrity, sound governance and commitment to rules compliance, attention to equity, and student-athlete welfare.
Some duties related to these functions are stipulated in the NCAA bylaws. Others are left to the discretion of each institution or the individual who occupies the position. Both mandated and optional duties are listed in The Faculty Athletics Representative Handbook. The Faculty Athletics Representative: A Survey of the Membership further itemizes FAR duties under the categories of: a) academics, b) compliance and rules interpretation, c) student-athlete welfare, and d) administration.
The overall success in performing these functions varies considerably from campus to campus. At some institutions, the FAR enjoys a considerable amount of visibility and influence. At others, the position carries less prominence and clout. Even at schools where a long history of support for the FAR exists, some parts of the job may go well while others languish.
Given this variability in the role of FAR and inherent difficulties in carrying out all parts of the job well, the following guidelines have been developed. They are designed to provide principles and strategies for strengthening the FAR position and thereby increasing faculty voice in overseeing intercollegiate athletics.
Using the Guidelines
The guidelines are designed to provide a method for quickly and efficiently checking the strength of the local FAR position. They are not meant to be comprehensive. Readers are encouraged to use information identified in the Bibliography or consult with individuals listed under Resources in order to gain a more complete picture of effective practices.
It is not expected that each guideline will be applicable to every institution. Different histories, administrative structures, institutional missions, and personnel at each school affect what will work. In addition, institutional needs and practices vary considerably between NCAA Divisions. Many of the guidelines below are targeted, in general, toward Division I institutions, but some should be useful at the Division II and III levels as well. (See The Faculty Athletics Representative: A Survey of the Membership for reported differences in FAR functions between NCAA Divisions.) The practices described below are utilized at many colleges and universities where FARs enjoy high degrees of influence and productivity.
Principles that Inform the Guidelines
Certain values or principles inform many of the guidelines in this report. Five of them are identified here to clarify the foundations on which the guidelines rest. In effect, these principles provide, singly and in different combinations, a rationale for the recommendations contained in the practices described.
1. Independence/integrity. The FAR is part of the checks and balances system for administering and overseeing intercollegiate athletics. While this individual does not report to the faculty (In nearly all cases, the FAR is appointed by the CEO.), he or she is expected to provide a faculty perspective on intercollegiate athletics issues. Both the appearance and the reality of this perspective must be maintained. This leads to a number of policies and practices that are designed to provide some distance between the FAR and the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics. This principle is implicit in the NCAA constitutional requirement that FARs not be coaches or administrators employed by athletics. It is also undergirds recommendations that funding for the FAR and his or her duties not come from Intercollegiate Athletics.
2. Stature/visibility. According to the Handbook, the FAR is to enjoy a degree of visibility and stature “beyond the level of a typical service appointment.” Both of these factors—the stature and the visibility—should allow the FAR to perform duties with a greater degree of effect. Any number of policies and practices can both symbolically and concretely elevate the position. For instance, the amount of fiscal support provided, the method by which the position is searched, and the degree of access to the CEO affect stature and visibility.
3. Communication. The FAR works at a crossroads where the interests of student-athletes, the department of intercollegiate athletics, the NCAA, the faculty and administration, and other interest groups need to be heard. Policies and procedures that insure clear and regular communication are needed. For instance, some FARs are required to provide informational reports to the Faculty Senate, and they sit on athletics committees that put them in contact with the student-athlete leadership or the head of the academic advising center for athletes.
4. Influence. The FAR must carry out duties that promote the integrity of the intercollegiate athletics program at his or her institution. To do so, this individual must be involved in the internal workings of athletics—from administration to compliance; from eligibility to student welfare. Consequently policies and procedures are needed that place the FAR in a position to know, advise, and act. A clear job description, for instance, that spells out FAR responsibilities is helpful in this regard. So too is mandated membership on key committees.
5. Uncertainty/fluidity. The position of FAR is not fixed once and for all. Intercollegiate athletics itself is in a period of dynamism, and the role of FAR can be expected to change as well. Consequently, policies and procedures for FARs may require revision from time to time.
Guidelines: (1) The Position
-- Is defined by a written job description -- Has been reviewed and approved by the CEO -- Is comprehensive -- Carries financial support consistent with the job description. (This may include a stipend and/or release time for the FAR, clerical assistance, travel and other support.) -- Carries financial support that comes from the general budget or other non-athletic source -- Is filled through a publicly-announced search -- Is filled only after input from the Faculty Senate (or main faculty governance body) -- Carries term limits and specifies limits on re-appointments -- Includes membership on committees or other governance bodies that facilitate communication with such constituencies as: 1. faculty governance; 2. the athletic board or committee; 3. the athletic administration; 4. student-athletes. -- Provides regular access to the CEO of the institution
Guidelines: (2) The Person
-- Is tenured -- Holds a senior academic position, preferably the rank of professor -- Has experience in faculty leadership prior to accepting position of FAR -- Enjoys campus reputation in a role unrelated to intercollegiate athletics (e.g., excellent teacher, successful researcher, well-respected administrator) -- Operates from an office that is located outside the department of intercollegiate athletics -- Operates from an office that is located outside the academic student-athlete advisement center -- Is careful to avoid both the reality and appearance of any conflict of interest, particularly in relationship to accepting perks or other fringe benefits
Guidelines: (3) Functions
(Related to Student-Athletes)
-- Meets with the student-athlete advisory board (SAAB) -- Attends start-of-season and other special events -- Participates in exit interviews -- Attends a variety of athletic events, not just football and basketball games -- Fulfills all roles related to student eligibility (See the Handbook) -- Is available to meet with student-athletes on an individual basis
(Related to Faculty)
-- Reports regularly to the Faculty Senate (or other primary faculty governance body) -- Provides substantive information to the faculty on such matters as graduation rates for athletes, admissions statistics including any special admits for athletes. -- Sits on an Athletic Board or Committee where: a. a majority of voting members are faculty b. the Board or Committee has specified relationship to faculty governance
(Related to Administrators)
-- Meets regularly with the CEO -- Meets regularly with the AD -- Meets regularly with others (depending on structure of operation) Examples: -- Head of the student-athlete academic advising center -- Advisor for the SAAB -- Compliance Coordinator -- Director of Admissions -- Director of Financial Aid -- Holds conversations with administrators related to institutional control, academic integrity, budget, NCAA legislation, and the like. -- Sits on search committees for athletic administrators -- Serves as leader or committee member for NCAA Athletic Certification
(Related to Conferences & NCAA)
-- Serves on conference and/or NCAA committees -- Meets regularly with conference FARs and governance organizations* -- Holds local conversations on institutional position for conference and NCAA legislation* -- Exercises authority (vis a vis conference bylaws) on matters delegated to FARs (e.g., academic responsibility, student welfare)*
*Since the NCAA governance reorganization in 1998, some believe that FAR influence at the national level has decreased. Much legislation, for instance, is now shaped by conference commissioners and by college and university Presidents who sit on the Board of Governors. Input from FAR’s on legislation and influence on other matters may now take place more at the conference level. Thus, these particular functions may take on added significance.
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John Nichols (Penn State) asked the group to provide its best advice on the draft best practices; the Steering Committee will develop a document that the NCAA will publish (it was subsequently agreed that FARA would take the document and review it as well as the suggestions made at this meeting). Scott Kretschmer reminded people that it is a “best practices” document that should frame the mindset, not something that every institution can or would necessarily follow in every detail. No best practice will fit every university.
Professor Streb, president of the Faculty Athletics Representatives Association, reported that his organization does have contentious moments; some have asked by a group outside FARA should tell them best practices. He said he assumed all were working toward the same end--and that there should not be documents from AAUP, COIA, FARA, etc., from which institutions can pick and choose elements. The FARA executive committee accepted a resolution with four points; there was controversy on three of them.
-- The FAR should be appointed through a process that includes consultation with the appropriate group from the faculty governing body. Some believe, however, that the position is not the faculty's representative, but rather the faculty representative.
-- (In opposition to the draft best practices document,) there should be no time limit on the term of the FAR. The arguments in favor of term limits include that the FAR becomes co-opted or appears to be co-opted—the FAR gets too close to the athletic department, people in the department become friends, and they are no longer able to see things objectively. In addition, term limits would help to get rid of the old boys network and allow more diversity in FAR ranks. The argument in favor of no term limits is that they stifle the faculty voice at the national level. At that level, FARS chair division management councils, a level they would not rise up to if they are only in office for 3-6 years. It is exceptional to get to the top in a short time; it takes time to figure out the job, NCAA rules, and to get on committees. Time limits could be disastrous in stifling the faculty voice.
-- (This was controversial with the executive committee): FARs should be faculty. The NCAA rule provides that the FAR must be a member of the faculty or an academic administrator with faculty rank. If the person is an administrator, that creates a problem with providing a faculty voice. If the faculty voice in athletics is through the FAR, there is a problem with non-faculty. Some on the FARA executive committee are administrators, not active faculty. The problem is not that they cannot do the job but with whether they will represent the interests of faculty. What impression is created when the FAR is not even part of the faculty and has no communication with it? The best practices document does not have power; it cannot tell a president he or she cannot appoint a vice president as FAR. The problem with consultation, moreover, is that if it is too strong a role, if the faculty senate forwards three names but the president wants someone else, the president can either ignore the faculty senate slate or appoint one of the three—and then marginalizes the person.
-- When there is turnover in the FAR position, institutions should be encouraged to consider the appointment of women and minorities; Mr. Streb said he could not emphasize that enough. Right now FARA is a lot of 50-ish white males; it needs more diversity.
Suggestions/comments from the small groups (each bullet represents one small group):
-- The FAR should be involved in the hiring of coaches; change the language to add clarity, such as by adding examples (the FAR should. . . .); support for the FAR should come from OUTSIDE the athletic department (there should be a clear division so that the FAR is not beholden (and the same is true for perks—none should come from the athletic department); there should not be term limits but there should be periodic review that is public and includes the faculty senate.
-- They do not care where the funds for support of the FAR come from; what is important is that the athletic department have no control over the decisions made about the use of the funds, and it is perhaps appropriate that the athletic department pay for the expenses of the FAR; there is need to better address the relationship between the FAR and the president—the FAR represents the INSTITUTION with a faculty viewpoint; there should not be term limits when an AD may be in office for 20 years or more, but there should be periodic review of performance (the intervals between which are up to individual campuses); broaden the definition of support so it might include released time, etc.; what is essential is that the FAR has the support to do the job, and it would be helpful to include examples; having a "conversation about compliance" is woefully weak and a Division I FAR has responsibility for oversight and compliance.
-- It is critical that the FAR have the confidence of the faculty so the appointment process should be consistent with the appointment process for administrative appointments; there should not be term limits but there should be regular review or review at the end of the stipulated term of appointment; the review process should include information from coaches and the athletic director and the review results should be provided to the president. (They favored renewable terms.)
-- The FAR should have a total of 4 renewable 3-year terms, with a maximum of 12 years; should not be an administrator; in terms of the athletic board or committee, they had conversations about different types of committees and it is clear that the faculty senate or equivalent body must appoint a majority of the committee the FAR would serve on.
-- The FAR should attend practices in order to really see how the coaches interact with the athletes (some coaches will not allow anyone to attend); should have 4-5-year terms with review; the FAR should conduct exit interviews with athletes; the FAR should be a tenured, active member of the teaching faculty; if the FAR is not the athletic council chair, the responsibilities identified for the FAR could be divided among the chair and members of the council.
-- The FAR should have five-year renewable terms; there should be faculty participation in the selection and the review; the selection should be an open process with a slate provided to the president; the appointment should be confirmed by the faculty senate or equivalent; the athletic council or board should report annually to the faculty senate (including report on progress-to-degree data); the FAR should be an active member of the teaching faculty; if the FAR sees a problem and cannot get the athletic director to make a change, some suggest the FAR go to the president, some to the regents, and some to the faculty senate; institutional support is imperative and there needs to be an agreement about released time.
-- Guideline #3 needs to be more specific and identify more information needed; financial support for the FAR should be part of the annual budget, not part of the athletics budget; with respect to tickets as a conflict of interest, they should be discounted in price and not provided by the athletic department (e.g., come from the president's office); the FAR should be selected through a publicly-announced search; there should not be term limits; the president, athletic director, and FAR should all sign off on the position description, making it a contract.
-- Most important, the best practices document should include a transition time so a new FAR can be brought up to speed (most importantly on compliance rules)—it is not clear what would be workable and the document might specify several options; the FAR should not be a well-respected administrator ("administrator" does not include department chairs); the FAR should receive both a stipend and released time and the structure of the support must allow the FAR to do an independent oversight job; the FAR should have a fixed term renewable appointment, made through the faculty senate.
-- The FAR should have a performance review and vote of confidence/no confidence every 3-4 years; the FAR should be an active member of the teaching faculty, not a full-time administrator; women and minorities need to be appointed—and they need to volunteer for the position.
Professor Kretchmar suggested there appeared to be consensus on a few issues: the FAR should be involved in compliance, should not be an administrator, should have renewable fixed terms with review, the appointment should be made in consultation with the faculty governing body, and gifts/perks need to be carefully monitored. Professor Shepherd noted that governance can be slow so the FAR may need to meet with the faculty executive committee in the summer.
Comments after the small groups made their reports (the group of 40-50 people included, by Professor Streb's count, 15 FARs):
-- Agree with the need for a performance review but much of the work of the FAR is with private/confidential information (students records, conversations with faculty); some may not be shared by law and some should not be because it may be no more than rumor; there has to be thought given to how the FAR is reviewed.
-- If the FAR is to observe coaches, listen to student-athletes, interact with boosters, etc., that inevitably means the FAR must go on trips with teams. The FAR cannot do the job without being present at informal settings; the "perk" is often an obligation. The AAUP prohibits specific benefits, but it is necessary to trust to the FAR to decide if a perk compromises his or her integrity--and why the perks need to be built into the review process.
-- FARs should be able to obtain tickets, perhaps through the president; the faculty would not say that the president or regents could not have them but the FAR must be closer to athletics than either of those. The FAR should receive tickets, that should be part of the job description, and the tickets should come through the administration, not the athletic department.
-- One group argued that a publicly-announced search and involvement of the faculty senate were redundant; they are not; it is the difference between a committee on committees appointment, drawing on who the members know, and seeking applicants.
WORK SESSION B: Ensuring Integrity in the Academic Experience of Student-Athletes
[The full Framework document is appended.]
Professor Shepherd began by saying that there would be no "best practices" document at this session; she would present a few ideas and then ask for discussion. She did, however, refer to two documents: one, an excerpt of two items from the COIA Framework, and two, an overview of NCAA academic reforms in progress. The COIA language is as follows:
3. Grading and program integrity. At some schools athletes are given preferential treatment to ensure continuing eligibility, either through academically unchallenging programs or differential grading practices. Such practices can only be addressed at the institutional level. Faculty at all schools should be provided with data concerning the majors and academic performance of all athletes, disaggregated to the highest degree permitted by law and distinguished by sport; procedures should be developed that allow faculty to determine there are no pressures to lower academic standards, and that permit abuses to be easily reported.
4. Academic advising and related services. Because athletes have such heavy burdens on their time, schools typically provide them enhanced support. Advising programs supervised through the Athletics Departments are a common source of academic violations. COIA recommends that Athletics Department advisors be appointed in the regular campus advising system, report through the academic advising structure, and be assessed by an academic-side review.
Before getting into discussion, Professor Lawry spoke to the group about the work of the Drake Group (the content of the two documents Professor Lawry distributed are appended). He began by issuing two caveats: (1) In any athletic reform group, he is always farthest to the "left." He makes a distinction between academic reform and institutional reform; they are not the same. His view is that if tomorrow morning every athlete had an ACT/SAT score in line with the regular student body, took no "gut" courses, and graduated in four years, athletics would still need reform because of the over-emphasis on athletics in the educational system. The Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported a survey on athletics; the public thinkgs it is overemphasized, too, so his position is not so radical. It is over-emphasized in the messages sent to the public and to alumni, in the way athletics is treated, in the time it takes. That compromises the institutional integrity—but is also a separate issue from the matter at hand in this session.
(2) What are the aims of reform? What does the group want to accomplish? If one thinks there is a need to eliminate institutions seeking after fame and money, then the reform must include dismantling television. If one wants that kind of reform, then one must get changes to match. If one wants athletes as a regular part of the student body, then reforms should match the objective (e.g., eliminate recruiting—after students are admitted, then pick the athletes, which obviously will not happen). If one does not match reforms to goals, the actions might be counter-productive, such as the NCAA reforms. They will make the life of the athlete more complicated, with more and more rules.
The Drake Group is a group of individual members to who are interested in finding hard-hitting reforms that will accomplish the ends they seek, so they have specific proposals. With respect to academic integrity, there have been problems in athletics from the very beginning; Professor Lawry said he was not sure any reform would solve the problem. The problems increased geometrically in the 1980s and 1990s when departments consolidated advising/tutoring in a central office under the athletic department and in its buildings.
One person asked for evidence to support that proposition. Professor Lawry said it was not the number of violations, it was their systematicity. Another suggested that the evidence would not show what was being suggested. It is not the athletic departments trying to cheat, Professor Lawry said; it was that the cheating occurred in a single place in a systematic way. Another person argued that they moved academic advising for athletes into a separate place where there would be oversight—it was centralized to reduce abuses. That happened because there had been systematic cheating, Professor Lawry responded.
One individual said his institution could not afford to implement COIA suggestion number 2 (above). They can provide intense advising for 300; they cannot do so for 20,000 students. He said he interviewed two football players, who told him the academic counseling in athletics was the best experience they had at the institution: they could call anytime and meet with a counselor within 30 minutes, and the counselors did not give them answers to problems but pointed the way to finding them.
The point is not to take away that counseling/advising but to deal with the jealousies of other students, one maintained. The question is how to make such service available to other students. It is absolutely clear that such advising/counseling is a major tool in recruiting; the COIA proposition is totally off base.
Professor Earl pointed out that the discussion reflected the fact that different campuses have different experiences and stake slightly different claims. Is it possible to agree on any recommendations in academic advising, he asked, rather than engage in fractious disputes?
Professor Shepherd suggested that the Drake Group ideas might stimulate thought and discussion. Professor Lawry said that the idea of the Drake Group in the second item is that academic counselors belong to academic people, not athletic people. It may be that some schools are doing well in this regard but there are some where a clean-up could help. The Drake Group idea is that advisors/counselors should be answerable to the academic side of the institution.
Part of the difficulty, Professor Lawry said, is that even where academic counseling is by counseling departments, sometimes there is academic help offered to athletes after they have seen the regular counselors about the courses they should take. He related that he had spoken with the director of student academic services at his own institution; they have a model program, the people are fabulous to work with, they help student-athletes through the rigors of their courses to graduation. He was told that the students who came in in 1998 in the football program will have a 100% graduation rate. One must ask if there is something strange about that. Some of the players are no doubt brilliant, but on average, when one asks about the preparation, ACT scores, etc., the group does not seem to be as prepared as the rest of the student body. If they have 100% graduation while the general student body only graduates at a 55% rate, that indicates something. What? Is the institution putting so much money into helping these students get through? Or are the players in certain courses, beating the system, and thus deprived of the regular courses that students take? At one institution, it was discovered that 56% of the football team was in one major. That seems unusual. The problems may be a single "gut" course, an entire major, or some friendly faculty. How is it possible to figure out if students are getting through and graduating (and graduating may not equal getting an education)? One response is full disclosure and a rigorous analysis of programs so that it is possible to identify whether athletes are in "gut" programs or someone is getting them through.
What happens if you find out there are "gut" programs or faculty are helping out, Professor Granof asked? Professor Lawry said that Professor Ericson, founder of the Drake Group, prepared full disclosure information at Drake, found problems, and tried to fix them. He believes that just disclosure will help to fix it. They found at Drake, said one person, that if students were clustering in fields or courses, the faculty felt they had a duty to clean up the problem. And academic advisors say it's not their problem; the faculty allowed the course, Professor Granof said. One can do little about it; one cannot tell faculty members their course is too easy.
At one institution, when the data were published, the chancellor was so unhappy that he will no longer provide the information because he did not want the institution to be embarrassed.
The goal is to point to discussions in the future, Professor Earl said. He said it is interesting that with respect to the Drake Group proposal, Professor Lawry is at one end and Professor Eno is at the other. Professor Eno is an extremely practical reformer who sets achievable goals to change behavior. The difference between the Drake Group and COIA is the way to achieve the goals, individual versus institutional. It is interesting that with respect to academic integrity, there is nearly universal agreement there are abuses; the COIA Framework language is very close to that of the Drake Group, Bowen, and every other discussion about academic integrity in athletics that he has ever read. Despite that overwhelming unity, when one gets people in a room—such as this session—it is very difficult to find institutional agreement.
The Framework has four sections. It seemed wise to pick the low-hanging fruit. With respect to advising, its design and reform is almost completely within the faculty purview; it is a curricular issue over which the faculty have control, Professor Earl said.
One person, who said she had been on the NCAA Infractions Committee for several years, said that they have not seen the things referred to in the COIA language. What they have seen is a number of cases of faculty cheating or shading, and cases from tutors (and not tutors exclusively in the athletic department). The problem is not location, it is having the right people. An isolated service can be overseen. Professor Earl said it was his notion about the discussion that in some areas of reform one can spot abuse and stop it. In some, COIA identifies values it is trying to protect. The COIA language may not be accurate; student-athletes do need advising.
Other students work 30-40 hours per week and perhaps commute for 60 minutes; at one institution they have set up advising centers away from campus for students. The institutions cannot treat athletes differently, nor can they treat students who work. The NCAA requires a compliance review every four years of athletic advising; they do it through their athletic board. If there are rampant difficulties, they are not necessarily with athletics, it is a problem with university administration. This language focuses on the wrong thing. Would better language for all institutions be to require oversight of academic advising from outside the athletic department, asked another? At his institution, Professor Earl related, everyone agreed that advising for athletes should be under the oversight of the main advising office--but they found that the athletic department hired a vast team of advisors for the advising office, whom the athletic department pays. There can be a tremendous variation in practice, he said; some of them technically might fit within the COIA language but nonetheless cause discomfort.
Professor Granof said a fundamental difference between COIA and the Drake Group is that the Drake Group assumes student-athletes should be drawn from the student body and not treated differently. COIA recognizes they are different and have different needs--needs that should be met with academic integrity.
Athletes do not have a heavier burden than other students, one said; they have a more inflexible burden. Students have to practice music 60-80 hours per week, but they have control over when they do it. Student-athletes can register early so they can get around scheduling problems, but a biology student is best advised by a biology advisor/professor.
There is a difference between advising and tutoring, one person said. There should be oversight of tutoring as well. Has any national body looked at advising for non-athlete students? If one takes advising out of the athletic department, where there is interest in seeing the student-athlete succeed, they will be less likely to succeed because the university overall does not do well with advising. All are concerned about that, Professor Lawry responded. Athletic advising could be more concerned about staying eligible than about achieving educational goals.
There is a paradox, Professor Earl said, that part of us says the student-athlete is not so special and should be part of the regular system while another part says they are special and the institution can invest a lot in them.
One person said that 90% of athletes do not change courses or drop them and are in good shape. But most have tutors provided by the athletic department; that is where there are problems. It is necessary to distinguish between advising and tutoring. The problem comes after the regular academic advising, Professor Lawry said; after seeing a regular advisor, the athlete sees an athletic advisor, who makes changes in the athlete's schedule. There could be good reasons because the regular academic advisor did not think about athletics and so proposed a schedule that screwed up the athlete. But in some cases they see the advisor to register, said another person, and then see the athletic advisor, and completely change their schedule. Bringing the normal university processes to guide student-athletes through the process works; it is when the athlete uses processes outside the normal ones that institutions get in trouble, said another.
Professor Streb said that he felt uncomfortable at the session discussing the best practices for FARs until he learned that 15 or more of those present were FARs. He felt equally uncomfortable talking about academic advising when none of those present were academic advisors; he suggested COIA be in contact with the national association of athletic advisors. They could speak about the importance of academic advising and where it should be housed.
With respect to the COIA language about grading, said one person, if an athlete is given preferential treatment it would be a major violation of NCAA rules, as would it be to direct an athlete to programs that keep them eligible (unless the same offer is made to other students as well). Data collection is a great idea; there is no FAR who would not approve that proposal. But when a course is found that is not academically rigorous, but that all students can take (not just athletes), what is to be done? Athletes in that case are not treated preferentially--everyone can take the course! Professor Lawry said he has found that athletes are treated preferentially--or worse than other students. But they are not regular students, he maintained.
One person said he was concerned about the level of publicity that might be generated upon finding that all football players are in Sociology. The institution does not check to see where others enroll; they hold student-athletes out in a variety of ways. If made public, that would hold a department up to ridicule in ways that are not fair or appropriate. In one institution, the entire football team was in the economics department; that was a problem for the economics department, which was not a "gut" department, but most of the football students were interested in business.
Watching a football game, one person related he saw players identified as majoring in leisure studies. All the players in economics is one thing; one can imagine what the public thinks when they see that players major in leisure studies. That is a legitimate field, someone else commented.
When data are collected on students, Professor Earl pointed out, they are not looking for student abuse, they are looking for faculty abuse. This is faculty looking for faculty. Any student can take any easy course. This is his least favorite point about reform, Professor Earl said, he believes he can trust his colleagues, and he is uncomfortable with more personal data collection.
In an effort to make student-athletes go through the same effort as other students, the pendulum is swinging the other way, it was said.
One person said he had a 180-degree difference from Professor Earl on the issue of data collection. As an MD, he is subject to peer review; if he falls down, he should not practice. COIA should not shy away from peer review; if the faculty are not doing their job, is that fair to students? Professor Earl agreed that faculty are reviewed constantly. But that is different from examining student records; all know there are easy courses and a little dead wood.
A different grading practice equals academic fraud, one individual said, and a faculty member should be brought up for it. But he does not know of anyone doing that; the language should not be in the statement. Another said that "at some schools" it is blatant. Student-athletes should not be given grades; all can agree with that. The most important point is whether preferential treatment is bad, Professor Earl said. Is early access to registration bad?
The national conversation is steering away from eligibility and toward getting a degree, said one person. His concern, when he was a coach, was to keep the student eligible; that's what coaches do. The school gets in the way, even though it provides the paycheck. He said he preferred the approach President Brand has taken, to shift the emphasis from eligibility to getting a degree.
(At the end of the meeting people did talk very briefly about athletes not being allowed to continue with their teams in any semester they failed to make a 2.0; there was little agreement that that was a good idea.)
October 11, 2003
WORK SESSION C: Best Practices, Athletic Committees
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Best Practices, Athletic Committees/Boards Prepared by Professor Scott Kretchmar, Pennsylvania State University
Introduction While the NCAA Constitution does not require colleges or universities to have an athletics committees or boards, most institutions have them. These boards typically have both advisory and legislative functions. Depending on the blend of these responsibilities and the specific duties that have been delegated to them by the CEO of the institution, boards may play central and highly influential roles in athletic governance. They establish policy, monitor compliance, and promote a strong academic climate for athletics—always with the understanding that the chief executive officer has final responsibility and authority for intercollegiate athletics.
Athletics boards, along with the Faculty Athletics Representative, are supposed to play an important role in the overall checks and balances system designed to insure academic integrity and athletics rules compliance. This intent is made clear by board membership requirements established by the NCAA. According to Article 6 of the Constitution, each athletics board must include “at least a majority” of full-time academic administrators and regular faculty. Where parliamentary procedures require more than a simple majority to enact policies, faculty and administrators “shall be of sufficient number to constitute at least that majority.”
Such guidelines help to keep the operation of intercollegiate athletics in line with the central educational mission of each campus. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of athletic boards varies considerably from campus to campus. Some provide a strong counterweight to the economic pressures on athletics, pressures that are particularly forceful at Division I institutions. Others seem unable or unwilling to enact and enforce academic policies that would assure, for example, sound admissions decisions for student-athletes and standards for academic progress that are consistent with regulations used for the rest of the student body.
The guidelines in this paper have been developed for the express purpose of strengthening faculty voice in the governance of intercollegiate athletics through athletic boards or committees.
Using the Guidelines
The guidelines are intended to allow an institution to check its athletics governance board structure and function in an efficient way. It is not designed to provide a comprehensive look at all potentially useful practices, nor does it reflect different needs that may be present at Division I, II, and III levels. Readers will need to review the recommendations critically to determine which ones may be helpful for their institution or their particular circumstances.
As was the case with the Guidelines for NCAA Faculty Athletics Representatives, different institutional traditions, personnel, missions, academic standards, league affiliations, and the like will influence what will work and what will not. In general, however, it is suggested that the specific guidelines provided below reflect sound educational values and principles that are shared by all institutions, including those that belong to the NAIA and other intercollegiate organizations.
Principles that Inform the Guidelines
Independence/integrity. The athletics governance board is part of the checks and balances system for administering and overseeing the intercollegiate program. It is essential that, both in appearance and in fact, members of the board have the best interests of the core academic mission of the institution at heart. This leads to a number of policies that provide some distance between athletics and the operations of the board. This principle supports the guidelines that a majority of board members be academic administrators or faculty members. It also undergirds the recommendation that individuals of academic and/or administrative stature and integrity be selected for the board, and that the campus-wide faculty governance body has a say in who serves in this capacity.
Consistency. If a single guideline were given for athletic governance boards is might be this: Academic policies and standards for student-athletes should be consistent with the regulations that apply to the student body at large. This leads to a number of guidelines that affect the functions of athletics boards. For instance, guidelines for establishing policies on admissions, normal progress, grade point average requirements and the like stem from this principle.
Sunshine. This may be one of the more difficult principles to follow. Sunshine informs and enlightens but it also exposes. Nevertheless, the ethical concept on which this principle is grounded is broadly accepted: Always act in ways that you would be willing, in principle, to make public.
Integration. If faculty are to take a more active role in monitoring intercollegiate athletes, they must be connected to athletics operations in some way or another. One connection is provided by regular and effective communication, including an open, two-way flow of information. Athletics will not be integrated into the larger campus community so long as members of that community do not know what is going on in that program. But it is also important that the athletics board not be isolated from other elements of faculty governance. This leads to a number of recommendations that would connect the Faculty Senate or other faculty governance board to the athletics committee.
Uncertainty/fluidity. Higher education and the intercollegiate athletics programs within it are both undergoing change. Thirty years ago, many athletics units were housed in physical education or other departments and most coaches were on academic appointments. Today, in most institutions, athletics resides (administratively and, often too, culturally) outside the academic mainstream, and few if any coaches hold academic rank. Faculty governance of athletics must change as the institutional landscape for intercollegiate sports continues to evolve.
Guidelines: (1) Board Charge and Composition
-- Has clearly established functions and responsibilities that are acknowledged by the CEO of the institution -- Has both advisory and legislative functions -- Has legislative functions that have a substantial effect on academic integrity. These may include the following: admissions policies, standards for normal progress and good academic standing (GPA), and limits for missed class time for competition. -- Includes faculty and academic administrators who are highly respected by peers for their research, teaching, service, or administrative work outside intercollegiate athletics. -- Includes the institution’s Faculty Athletics Representative as a voting or ex-officio member -- Includes the Athletics Director and other athletically-related personnel (e.g., Senior Women’s Administrator, Director of Admissions, Head of the Student-Athlete Advisement Center) as ex-officio members -- Has a specified relationship to the regular faculty governance body (hereafter FGB).* This relationship may be established in one or more of the following ways, listed (in general) from weaker to stronger connections: -- A member of the board is designated as the official liaison to the FGB. -- A specified number of board members must also be members of the FGB. -- A specified number of board members are appointed or elected by the FGB. -- The board is required to send all legislation that affects the academic well-being of student-athletes through the FGB. -- The board is required to provide regular informational reports to the FGB, minimally on an annual basis -- The board is a standing subcommittee of the FGB.
*The FGB is often called a Faculty Senate, Faculty Assembly, or Faculty Organization, though it may go by other names on various campuses. Whatever it is called, this is the group that has legislative and advisory functions related to curricular and other academic matters as well as the overall intellectual climate on campus.
Guidelines: (2) Board Functions
-- Reviews data on admissions decisions, including progress and graduation success rates by admission category -- Promotes admissions policies that are consistent with admissions policies outside intercollegiate athletics -- Reviews data on normal progress and grade point averages -- Establishes policy for normal progress and grade point average that meets minimal NCAA and any conference requirements -- Establishes policy for normal progress and grade point average that exceeds NCAA and conference requirements, where this is consistent with the institution’s standards for other students -- Reviews information on all athletic schedules -- Establishes policy for excused absences and maximum amount of missed class time for athletic competition -- Certifies the academic eligibility of students of athletic grants-in-aid -- Reviews major requests for waiver of any institutional athletics policies -- Delegates responsibilities for review of minor requests for waiver of institutional athletics policies to the Faculty Athletics Representative -- Develops a method to determine needs, interests, and concerns of student-athletes -- Reports activities, on at least an annual basis, to the FGB
Guidelines: (3) Board Communications/accountability
-- Communicates information beyond won-loss records (and other athletic achievements) to the broader campus community and specifically to the FGB -- Shares information, within boundaries established by institutional policy* and Federal regulations, on such matters as the following:+ -- the number of Presidential or special admits -- a comparison of the number special admits for athletes and similar admissions for other reasons (e.g., unusual musical talents) -- an analysis of the academic success (including graduate rate) for all special admits in comparison to other student-athletes and the entire student body -- a longitudinal analysis of student athlete graduation rates in comparison to the entire student body -- information on the grade point averages of student-athletes in comparison to the entire student body -- information on the distribution of majors selected by student-athletes in comparison to the entire student body -- information on academic honors (e.g., academic All-America) won by student-athletes -- Coordinates informational reports to the FGB, given by the Chair of the Board and/or the Faculty Athletics Representative -- Encourages informational reports to the FGB by the Director of Athletics
*Some colleges and universities, for instance, have policies that prohibit the publication of employee salaries or limit information that can be shared on institutional budgets.
+It is expected that schools will vary considerably on their willingness to share some of the information listed here. Where athletic operations traditionally have been more closed, it may be impractical to move quickly to a different policy. However, these guidelines are presented here as worthy ideals under the principle of “sunshine.”
Professor Granof observed that this was the third working session, devoted to the relationships between the FAR and the athletic committee and the rest of the faculty. Usually the relationship is close, but there are differences among institutions. The goal is to try to achieve consensus.
Professor Nichols said the goal is a deliverable that COIA can distribute to campuses and perhaps can work with President Brand to see if there are any potential pieces of legislation that should be considered. The draft document distributed to the group for consideration, best practices with respect to athletic committees, was also prepared by Professor Kretchmar at Penn State (as was the draft on best practices for FARs). The draft represents the purist form of the intersection between governance and athletics. The NCAA is almost silent on governance; it identifies the president's responsibility and only says that if there is an athletic board, it must be composed of a majority of faculty or academic administrators.
The major outline of the best practices for athletic committees is this:
-- who are the members? -- how did they get there? who appoints them? -- what kinds of power does it have? are they advisory? cheerleaders? -- what are the reporting lines--who hears it? -- what is the nature of its accountability?
The assembled multitude broke into small groups to review the document and offer comments. Professor Nichols suggested identifying the 1-2-3 most important recommendations and the problem areas--as well as changes that could help resolve them. The small groups reported back as follows (each bullet indicates a different small group):
-- the board should receive financial information; it should receive information on compliance and the compliance officer should report regularly, at least once per year; it should make sure that systems are in place so that financial and compliance reporting is correct and can assure the institution there are no violations; the board should determine the content of reports to the faculty governance body, in collaboration with the athletic director (not just coordinates reports); a faculty member should chair the board and set the agenda; information on student-athletes should be made public to the lowest level of aggregation permitted by law; the director of admissions should not be identified as "athletically-related personnel," nor should that person be ex officio on the board, but should be required to report information to the board; the board should approve schedules before the schedules are set and it should also review practice schedules to ensure consistency with policies and academic values; the board should develop a method to discover the needs, interests, and concerns of student-athletes.
-- communication from the board should be about substantive matters; the board should track junior-college transfers; there is concern about the vagueness of the language about admissions and special admits and information about them should be shared, in conjunction with progress-to-degree reports; the chair of the board should be appointed by the president or the faculty governance body; the board should not be both advisory and legislative (it was suggested that "legislative" should be replaced by "decision-making"); the board should play a role in student-athlete appeal proceedings; it should have two distinct functions, oversight and student welfare (and should not confuse the two); perks to board members should be addressed.
-- the board should have a function in reviewing schedules (especially in the "minor" sports); the tenor of the second section, about board responsibilities, suggests an oversight role, not that the board should do all those things; the board should conduct an annual review of any courses taught by coaches; there is nothing about alumni and student members on the board, but a clear majority should be faculty.
-- there should be flexibility in membership to allow diversity; the functions include too much detail about eligibility and so on, some of which are more appropriate for the FAR, and the board should be concerned about oversight and policy; the board should have oversight over the academic support for athletes; the NCAA requires exit interviews and the board should be involved in them so it can help advance student welfare.
-- the function and responsibilities of the board should be written down; board members should have set terms that are renewable; the FAR may not be a part of the faculty so the faculty majority should be in addition to the FAR; student leadership should be part of the board; the language about what happens between the board and the faculty senate should be couched in "should" terms, not must.
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Professor Granof inquired if there is anything in the best practices that would not work or that is wrong; no one said there was.
Professor Earl said the group he was in urged an admission policy consistent with policies outside athletics and getting away from special admits. Professor Cohen pointed out that the institutional admissions policy can itself provide for special admits, so athletics is operating under the general institutional policy (and other units may use special admits as well). At one institution, it was reported, the athletic department must present to the faculty board the case for every student-athlete who will receive financial aid, even if the student has a 3.8 GPA. One person cautioned about comparing athletic and non-athletic special admits; those can get confused with affirmative action goals.
In terms of approving schedules, that could be a hot-button issue; what if the athletic director goes to the president on approval? At one institution, they are told the conference sets the schedule and the board cannot interfere. "My heart is with you on approving the schedule but we can't do it."
This document identifies the ideal world; that's what a best practice is. Not all of it may work at an institution, but one tries to achieve it. The board CAN approve schedules and grant exceptions if they conflict with policies; at his institution, this person said, the teams have exceptions if they are in events imposed by the NCAA or conference, but they may not participate without the board approval.
What drives a lot of problems is NCAA scheduling. But the institutions all have different academic schedules and there is no way a schedule of events would not affect somebody. What should be high on the list of COIA, and perhaps the FARs could do this, is to see if it is possible to better align academic calendars--although then it would appear that athletics is driving everything else.
What should the COIA focus on and work with the NCAA on developing legislation to cover, Professor Nichols asked? One clear answer appeared to be that the NCAA should require a faculty committee. There were comments that the best practice model was the best approach to take; institutions might not do everything in it but it provides ammunition to move an institution along. It was also suggested that the revised best practice document be sent out to faculty governance groups for further comment before being considered final.
The COIA portion of the conference was then adjourned sine die.
-- Gary Engstrand
APPENDIX A
A Framework for Comprehensive Athletics Reform
Recommended by the COIA Steering Committee, August 2003
The need for reform of intercollegiate athletics is serious and requires immediate action. The problems are not new, but they are worsening. During the 1990s, universities and the NCAA responded to the 1989 Knight Commission report, yet in 2000 the Commission concluded that intercollegiate athletics was more troubled than ever. The Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics (COIA), a national network of Division I-A faculty leaders, believes that reform requires a comprehensive approach that addresses five issues: (1) academic integrity, (2) athlete welfare, (3) governance of athletics at the school and conference level, (4) finances, and (5) commercialization. Some of these issues may be resolved quickly, but others may require as much as a decade. With a comprehensive plan, however, we can avoid the ineffectiveness of the piecemeal approach of the 1990s. The present document reflects a consensus within the COIA; not every faculty leader associated with the Coalition will agree with all points. It is our hope that in conversation with other groups and individuals-such as the NCAA, the Association of Governing Boards (AGB), the AAUP, and university presidents-it can contribute to a plan of action for the coming decade. The Coalition encourages efforts to compile and analyze relevant data, and remains open to rethinking its positions as information becomes available.
There is wide diversity among college sports. While some issues may be of general concern, others may pertain very differently to team and individual sports, or to sports where the highest levels of competition are professional or amateur. A document as brief as this cannot attempt comprehensiveness. The process of reform we envision would appropriately adapt to each sport the general approaches we advocate. While some aspects of reform can and should be carried out immediately, others may involve complex solutions and significant lead time. The goal of the Coalition is to work with all groups over the next two years to develop a comprehensive plan that can be practically implemented as a series of scheduled steps.
The goal of reform is not negative; it is to bring out the positive aspects of intercollegiate athletics, which contributes to the personal development of athletes, connects schools to their alumni and communities, and enhances life on campus and off.
I. Issues of Academic Integrity
1. Initial eligibility and admissions. In football and men's basketball especially, many athletes are academically under-prepared, and have such heavy commitments to sports that they have little or no prospect of graduation. Students should not be enrolled if they do not have reasonable prospects of graduation. The Coalition supports the NCAA's initiative to raise initial eligibility standards through strengthening core course requirements, and supports the proposal to increase this requirement to 16 courses within five years. The NCAA's sliding scale of GPA and SAT/ACT scores has significantly increased reliance on high school grades. Universities should be required to inform high schools of the academic success rates of their graduates by sport, so that they can assess whether graduating athletes are really prepared to succeed academically. Admissions decisions regarding athletes with scores below institutional standards should involve academic review procedures no less rigorous than apply to other types of students; faculty review is recommended.
2. Continuing eligibility. The COIA supports the NCAA's recent strengthening of continuing eligibility standards, and its incentives/disincentives proposal. Exceptional cases may occur with regard to both GPA and progress-towards-degree requirements; appeals in such cases should involve faculty and NCAA review.
3. Grading and program integrity. At some schools athletes are given preferential treatment to ensure continuing eligibility, either through academically unchallenging programs or differential grading practices. Such practices can only be addressed at the institutional level. Faculty at all schools should be provided with data concerning the majors and academic performance of all athletes, disaggregated to the highest degree permitted by law and distinguished by sport; procedures should be developed that allow faculty to determine there are no pressures to lower academic standards, and that permit abuses to be easily reported.
4. Academic advising and related services. Because athletes have such heavy burdens on their time, schools typically provide them enhanced support. Advising programs supervised through the Athletics Departments are a common source of academic violations. COIA recommends that Athletics Department advisors be appointed in the regular campus advising system, report through the academic advising structure, and be assessed by an academic-side review.
II. Issues of Athlete Welfare
1. The 20-hour rule. The NCAA places a 20-hour weekly maximum on in-season non-academic athletics activities to ensure that athletes can give adequate time to academics. Athletics departments must not permit coaches to schedule explicitly or implicitly mandatory training beyond the limit. Athletes often wish to devote more time to training individually, and this is their prerogative, but coaches and advisors should discourage it when it appears to interfere with academics. The Coalition supports efforts underway among NCAA Faculty Athletics Representatives (FARs) to develop better methods for enforcing the limit. Not only training, but all explicitly or implicitly required activities should be considered part of the 20-hour limit. Schools should empower Athletics Governance Committees to develop principles for training schedules and to monitor compliance. Evaluation of coaches should include their compliance with training limits, and encouragement of a balanced approach to academic and athletic needs. Athletics conferences should consider training-limit violations an infringement on conference rules, and review practices at member schools.
2. Schedules for competition. Schedules should provide an adequate competitive season with the least possible interference with the academic needs of athletes. In recent years, seasons in many sports have grown in length and number of competitions; no further expansion should be adopted, and efforts should be made to reduce season schedules. The Coalition recommends that the NCAA and FARs lead an effort to develop and adopt optimal scheduling principles for each sport. Certain principles should apply generally: seasons must be confined to a single academic term; "non-traditional" seasons must be eliminated; weeknight competitions during the regular season should generally be eliminated; seasons must be designed to minimize travel. In this same spirit, spring football practice should be curtailed and closely monitored.
3. Scholarships. No athlete should feel the need to shortchange academic commitment in order to retain scholarship support. Scholarship support should never be terminated for a student who has demonstrated effort in athletics, who wishes to continue in athletics, and who has met standards of academic and personal conduct. Lengthening the term of athletes? scholarships should be explored.
4. Integration in campus life. Athletes on campus are students first, and should have the opportunity to participate fully in campus life. They should not be segregated in their own dormitories. They should participate in normal orientation activities. Athletic advisors should make athletes aware of the full range of campus opportunities available to them. They should help them coordinate major requirements and the demands of athletics. No athlete should be discouraged from pursuing a major because of athletics.
5. Professionalization. Athletics departments should make their goal the development of well-rounded students. While coaches work to win, those who win at the cost of the balanced development of their athletes should not be rewarded or retained. The NCAA, through the work of FARs, athletics directors, and coaches, should develop "best-practice" criteria for the evaluation of coaches and other athletics staff, to reward excellence that conforms with the best amateur ideals, rather than the standards of professional sports.
III. Governance Issues
The ultimate authority for athletics governance must lie with university presidents. Athletics programs must enhance the academic mission. For presidents to be effective in aligning athletics with the academic mission, they must have the backing of governing boards and effective input from faculty. Our focus here is on the faculty role.
1. Faculty Athletics Representatives. The effectiveness of the FAR is central to athletics governance. The appointment and evaluation of the FAR must be credible to administration and faculty, and the FAR must be supported with funds, release time, and authority. Guidelines designed to assess FAR offices have been developed at Penn State University. The Coalition proposes these be used to develop a "best-practice" model for other schools during 2003-04. Individual schools must be responsible for the effectiveness of the FAR office, but NCAA review should be part of a best-practices model.
2. Athletics Governance Committee. An Athletics Governance Committee should exist on every campus, bringing faculty (including the FAR), administrators, and students together to oversee intercollegiate athletics. It should be the chief policy-setting organ for athletics programs, and should review special admissions, major personnel decisions and reviews, and assessment of budgets and financial performance. The constitution, appointment and authority of the committee must ensure credibility. The Coalition proposes that Penn State Guidelines be used in this case too, as the basis for a best-practices model.
3. Faculty senates. Faculty senates or their executive committees should receive detailed reports on campus sports programs at least annually from the FAR and Athletics Governance Committee, including academic performance of athletes, program budgets, and NCAA infractions. Faculty senates should be involved in the appointment of both the FAR and faculty members of the Athletics Governance Committee. A best-practices model should be developed for faculty senates in these regards.
4. Financial reporting principles. Uniform reporting standards for athletics budgets should be established, to allow the development of common guidelines and practices, and to provide more transparency in how colleges and universities account for revenues and expenses. At most schools, athletics program expenses exceed revenues and require funds from the academic side or the assessment of student fees. These should be determined through an open governance process, in which governing boards, administration, and faculty participate.
5. The role of conferences. Conferences enhance the role of athletics by creating traditions of rivalry central to school identity, and alumni and community loyalty. As a level of athletics governance, the conference can create or influence policies concerning academic standards, athlete welfare, limits of program scale, and so forth. The conference has its fullest effect when its members share regional identity, academic standards and goals, or longstanding common traditions. Lasting reform of college sports requires stable conference structures that represent academic rather than simply financial relationships. Conferences that also serve as academic consortia, such as the Big Ten, and recent initiatives by faculty leaders in the SEC to create structures of conference-wide faculty governance to complement and monitor athletics relationships, are models of the direction the Coalition believes conferences should take. Coalition partners such as the AGB and the AAUP can play a role in promoting models for intercollegiate relationships, but ultimately, university presidents and conference commissioners must set long-term conference goals beyond athletic revenues.
IV. Financial Issues
The rising costs of athletics programs place a strain on schools at a time of budget scarcity, and attempts to solve this problem through increased commercialization can lead to an impairment of institutional control over athletics, increased financial commitments (e.g., facilities), and violations of taste that can alienate donors. Reform in this area is likely to take longer than in the others, because of the complexity of the issues. However, so many problems can be traced to issues of cost and commercialization that no reforms will be effective unless these are successfully addressed. Gradual but firmly scheduled changes pertaining to cost and commercialization must accompany the more rapid implementation of reforms in the areas of academics, welfare, and governance.
1. Winning and revenues. Winning is the goal of athletes and coaches, and programs appropriately promote winning. In the revenue sports, winning is also generally viewed as essential to financial health. However, to the degree that financial success is tied to winning, intercollegiate athletics cannot be healthy on the national level: not only do half of all competitors lose, but the emphasis on post-season tournaments and national championships raises the bar and increases the number of programs that fall short. The link between winning and financial success induces programs to invest in sports with the goal of financial returns, and drives a competitive cost spiral. The Coalition supports increased revenue-sharing (beyond the participants in events) to minimize revenue-driven incentives for winning. To the degree allowable under federal anti-trust laws, conferences should also seek to control expenses and capital investment, to create as level a playing field as possible. Increasing revenue-sharing and limiting expenses may disadvantage programs that are currently most successful financially; developing a plan that buffers these effects during the period of reform is necessary and will take time.
2. Professional standards and costs. Increased media attention and rising expectations among fans have led to the application of professional standards to college sports, including increasingly sophisticated equipment, facilities and specialized coaching staffs. Training for professional sports careers is not a goal of intercollegiate athletics, nor does it benefit the vast majority of college athletes; higher education gains nothing from serving as a minor league for professional sports. Conferences should establish standards for equipment, facilities, and coaching staffs appropriate to amateur competition, and restrain excesses as violations.
3. Other cost reduction possibilities.
a. Scholarships. The present number of athletic scholarships may be too high, and should be reviewed for each sport, with the goal of fostering amateurism and reducing the impact of commercial expectations. Scholarships based on need should be considered as an alternative to the current system, consistent with the concerns raised in the earlier discussion of scholarships and athlete welfare.
b. Football squad sizes. The size of football squads should be reassessed.
c. Season length and design. Shortening seasons (and post-seasons) is justified on student welfare grounds and would also cut costs. Schedules should be designed to emphasize conference play, reducing travel costs.
d. Off-campus recruitment. Off-campus recruitment by coaches places a heavy demand on coaches' time, requiring more staff, and it encourages students? self-identification as athletes rather than students. This costly competition for prospects provides no net gain for higher education, and rewards coaches for success as recruiters, rather than for adding value as teachers, mentors, and coaches. The Coalition recommends exploring limitations on off-campus recruitment.
V. Over-commercialization
Televising games can deepen the loyalties of nationally dispersed alumni and raise public awareness of higher education. However, the marketing of intercollegiate athletics impairs institutional control, and may undermine support for academics. It may link universities to products and corporate sponsors that present conflicts with institutional values; may impair institutional control over scheduling and contracts; and may lead to misjudgments of taste that damage public perception of higher education. ?Name recognition? and ?fan loyalty? based on televised sports has not been demonstrated to contribute to the academic mission, and is costly and unproductive for American higher education; it contributes to a misperception by young people and parents of the nature and purpose of higher education, and reinforces an emphasis on athletics over academics in high schools. Moreover, college programs increasingly emulate features of professional sports, raising costs that eliminate revenue gains. Stepping back from over-commercialization entails cost-cutting and the articulation by presidents and conferences of firm standards of presentation and control.
APPENDIX B
The Faculty Role in the Reform of Intercollegiate Athletics
Principles and Recommended Practices
The report that follows was approved for publication by the Association’s Committee on Teaching, Research, and Publication in October 2002. Comments are welcome and should be addressed to the Association’s Washington office.
Introduction
Athletics first appeared on American college campuses as an intramural activity, a much-needed recreational complement to academic life. During the past century this form of athletics, usually organized by students and overseen by faculty, was gradually transformed on many campuses into a highly commercial, increasingly professional enterprise whose control, audience, and venues became ever more divorced from campus life. The subsequent record of excesses, exploitation, and abuses in intercollegiate athletics proved impervious to repeated efforts at substantive reform.
A decade ago, concerned about these abuses and their increasingly corrosive impact on the core academic mission of American institutions of higher education, the AAUP published two reports on the subject: “The Role of the Faculty in the Governance of College Athletics: A Report of the Special Committee on Athletics” and the “Statement on Intercollegiate Athletics.”1 Both reports described the major problems in intercollegiate sports that were judged to require substantive reform and offered recommendations to improve the educational experiences of college athletes. The reports argued that Association-supported standards of governance in colleges and universities, and the need to protect and preserve traditional educational values and academic standards, demanded more active faculty engagement with and oversight of intercollegiate athletics programs than had previously been the case. The reports went on to call for reforms in admissions and financial aid practices, closer faculty monitoring of college athletes’ educational experiences and academic progress, and better management of the financial operations of the athletics program.
In the decade that has passed since those reports were written, a large and growing body of literature has continued to detail the baleful influence of intercollegiate athletics on higher education.2 Many of the same academic and financial improprieties—and lack of accountability—that occasioned the earlier AAUP reports are still present, some in more extreme forms. The Association has been especially concerned about the continuing preferential treatment of athletes with regard to admissions and scholarship aid, disappointing graduation records for athletes, and ethical breaches of academic standards by coaches, students, administrators, and faculty. The problems associated with intercollegiate athletics have involved not only the quality of education offered to athletes but also the effects of bad practices on the academic well-being of the student body at large. They have also included exploitation and abuses of students by coaches, practice and contest schedules incompatible with commitments to academic priorities, improper intervention in academic matters by athletics administrators and staff, undue reliance on sports programs for institutional status, subordination of the academic progress of college athletes to the demands of athletics, and outside interference by overzealous alumni and boosters in college and university governance. For many years such issues were thought to be problems only at major institutions with big-time sports programs—in particular, institutions with Division I-A football and basketball teams. Recently, however, as some smaller institutions have coveted the potential revenues and public notice associated with high-profile sports programs, the temptation for these institutions to promote athletics has been intense and at times irresistible. The problems noted above exist, to a greater or lesser extent, at most institutions that engage in competitive intercollegiate athletics.
Across the spectrum of higher education, budgetary allocations made to intercollegiate sports have continued to rise exponentially, often at the expense of academic programs. Moreover, the allocation of spending within athletics programs may unfairly disadvantage some college athletes, with programs for women and non-revenue-producing sports in general suffering. The escalating commercialization of intercollegiate athletics and the lack of transparency in policies and their implementation have contributed to the erosion of the role of the athlete as a student.
The abuses and scandals in intercollegiate athletics programs that continue to beset the academic community have prompted the Association to examine this subject again and to offer this report. Though addressed primarily to the faculty, the report seeks to provide guidance to all campus constituents on the principles that should inform sound institutional policy governing intercollegiate athletics. The report also recommends practices that can strengthen the particular role of the faculty in institutional governance, provide an agenda for faculty action, and significantly improve the educational climate not only for the college athletes most immediately affected but also for the entire academic community. Some of the recommendations involve the development of greater consensus among the faculty as well as between the faculty and other campus constituents about the importance of ensuring that athletics programs are conducted with integrity and that students who are athletes receive a solid education and fair treatment. These proposals are offered to temper, if not entirely to cure, the excesses of intercollegiate athletics. Absent better practices, we believe, the stature of higher education is diminished and athletically gifted students are done a singular disservice.
Efforts at Reform
The best-known efforts at reform of intercollegiate athletics have been initiated by organizations beyond our college and university campuses. The most notable of these external groups is the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. The commission, which includes leaders from higher education, business, and athletics, issued its first report on sports reform in 1991. That report, Keeping the Faith with the Student-Athlete, focused on the primary responsibility of college and university presidents to ensure the appropriate educational and ethical operation of their institutions’ athletics programs. Although there have been isolated cases of presidentially led institutional reform, the general situation has, if anything, deteriorated rather than improved, prompting the Knight Commission to issue in 2001 a second report on athletics reform, A Call to Action: Reconnecting College Sports and Higher Education. It argues that academic values and competitive athletics may be in irreconcilable conflict and concludes that “if it proves impossible to create a system of intercollegiate athletics that can live honorably within the American college and university, then responsible citizens must join with academic and public leaders to insist that the nation’s colleges and universities get out of the business of big-time sports.” Whereas the commission’s 1991 report focused primarily on the role of the president in athletics reform, the latest report emphasizes the role of the institution’s trustees: “Presidents cannot act on an issue as emotional and highly visible as athletics without the unwavering public support of their boards.”
Notably missing from these and most other reform efforts, at least until recently, has been the collective voice of the faculty. The situation has begun to change.3 The AAUP, in its earlier statements, urged faculty participation in the cause of reform. On most campuses, however, advocacy of significant change in college athletics has been mostly limited to individual faculty members; the faculty as a whole has been largely disengaged or indifferent.
We have been heartened by the actions that some faculty members have taken recently to raise their voices and assert their governance responsibilities as they relate to intercollegiate athletics. The Drake Group, a national alliance of more than one hundred faculty members from across the country, was established in 1999 with the stated aim of “closing the ever-widening gap between athletics and education” and “working to restore and defend academic integrity in college sports.” The alliance has issued a series of position statements and attracted considerable media attention to the cause of faculty-initiated reform. More recently, faculty senates at institutions in the Pacific-10 Conference have adopted resolutions decrying the commercialization of college athletics and condemning the use of scarce resources to fund lavish sports facilities as well as the intensified competition for recruiting and retaining athletes. Similar efforts have also been undertaken by faculty governance leaders at universities in the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), a group comprising Big-Ten Conference institutions and the University of Chicago, which in November 2001 endorsed a resolution on intercollegiate athletics that they agreed to propose to their respective faculty senates. The resolution, posted on the Indiana University Web site at <www.indiana.edu/~bfc/BFC/circulars/01–02/B16–2002.htm>, calls on “the faculties of CIC institutions [to] join with colleagues in the Pac-10 conference in urging the presidents, faculty athletics committees, and faculty conference representatives of Big-Ten conference schools and of other institutions engaged in intercollegiate athletics, to join in a concerted effort” to deal with the problems that have been identified. Several of the CIC campus senates have already responded positively to this call.
The increasing prominence of faculty senates as vehicles for faculty engagement in sports reform is a particularly promising development. As one commentator has observed, “The size and legitimacy of a senate offers a much stronger voice for faculty.”4
Despite the serious problems we have identified, the AAUP, recognizing that intercollegiate sports can benefit both students and institutions, continues to believe that meaningful and constructive reform can and should be pursued. The Association appreciates that not all campuses will be prepared to endorse every one of the principles set forth in this report or to implement all of the recommended standards and procedures described below. We hope, however, that faculty members will evaluate their own campus practices and, where appropriate, work toward implementation of these recommendations.
Principles and Recommendations
Under generally accepted principles of academic government, the “faculty has primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, . . . and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process.”5 The faculty, it follows, is properly involved in all matters with significant educational implications and has an obligation to ensure academic primacy in an institution’s athletics programs. It further follows that “the faculty has primary responsibility for those aspects of an athlete’s experience that involve education. Thus, it is the faculty’s duty to ensure that the athlete has a full opportunity to participate in the educational process, and that a proper balance is achieved between the athletic and educational experiences.” Indeed, the preservation of integrity in the college athlete’s academic life is directly dependent upon the faculty’s ability to assert its primacy in “defining and monitoring the educational experiences of athletes,” while reducing “the pressures in college sports that would subvert the athlete’s educational effort.” This goal “can be achieved only by removing all decision making that relates to academic matters from the commercial incentives that otherwise affect the daily functioning of the athletics department.” In short, colleges and universities must make certain that college athletes remain students first, and that they have available, and are able to take full advantage of, the same opportunities for intellectual development and personal growth as other students. Therefore, it should be the responsibility of the institution to have the decisions that affect their lives as students made by those who know them as students—the faculty.6
If principles are to have their desired effect, they must culminate in practice. We recognize that the internal functioning of an institution’s athletics program is subject to a range of external rules and standards promulgated by athletic conferences and by regulatory bodies such as the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, and the National Junior College Athletic Association. In some cases, however, these rules represent minimum standards, and we believe that it is the responsibility of members of the faculty to work to strengthen these standards, consistent with the mission of their particular institution. We focus on the overall faculty role in governance as it relates to intercollegiate athletics, with particular emphasis on the areas of admissions and financial aid, academic standards and support services, and finances.
Faculty Governance and Athletics
As noted above, generally accepted principles of shared (or collaborative) governance call for the faculty to play a substantial role in determining educational policy and in resolving educational problems within the academic institution. The nature and degree of the faculty’s involvement will vary depending on the particular issues or area of concern. Given the seriousness of the concerns that have been raised about intercollegiate athletics programs, we believe that mechanisms should be established to enable the faculty to participate meaningfully in the formulation of an institution’s overall athletics policy and that the faculty, through its senate (or a similar institution-wide, elected representative faculty body) ought to place the oversight of athletics programs squarely within its purview and be prepared to devote the time and energy necessary to accomplish what needs doing. We also believe, following the Association’s 1989 report titled “The Role of the Faculty in the Governance of College Athletics,” that “the athletics department should not be allowed to function as a separate entity,” and that “the goal of structural reform in the governance of college sports should be more fully to integrate athletics into the educational mission of the institution.”7 To this end, we urge consideration of the following recommendations.
The Association’s 1991 “Statement on Intercollegiate Athletics” recommends that
a committee elected by the faculty should monitor the compliance with policy relating to admission, the progress toward graduation, and the integrity of_the course of study of students who engage in intercollegiate athletics. This committee should report annually to the faculty on admissions, on progress toward graduation, and on graduation rates of athletes by sport. Further, the committee should be charged with seeking appropriate review of cases in which it appears that faculty members or administrators have abused academic integrity in order to promote athletic programs.8
We agree, and we recommend that this duly constituted faculty body have a direct and formal relationship with the senate. We further recommend the following:
1. Reports presented to the senate should include financial information relating to the athletics program. The senate may need to appoint ad hoc faculty committees to examine data and determine whether or not the institution is realizing its goals and maintaining academic standards consonant with the institution’s educational mission.
2. Reports should provide academic profiles of college athletes in comparison to the rest of the student body.
3. In addition to receiving regular informational reports on the institution’s athletics program, the senate should make recommendations where appropriate, and legislate when possible, on athletics policies affecting academic standards. Legislative actions should be taken by the senate to ensure that academic standards for college athletes are comparable to those for the rest of the student body.
4. The faculty member designated to serve as the institution’s representative to external agencies like the athletics conference or the NCAA should enjoy the general support of the faculty. Accordingly, the senate should have a significant advisory role in the presidential appointment of the individual who serves in that capacity.
5. The athletics representative should be kept fully informed about all aspects of the institution’s athletics program. The representative should, in turn, provide regular reports to the administration and the senate on his or her activities.
6. The senate should adopt legislation prohibiting the faculty athletics representative and any other faculty members involved in oversight responsibilities for athletics from accepting special benefits, such as paid trips to games.9
7. The senate should have a direct and formal relationship with a committee charged with oversight responsibility for the institution’s athletics program. This committee should be composed of a majority of faculty and academic administrators, and its chair should be a faculty member who is elected by the faculty senate. The committee should include the athletics director and other university administrators with applicable governance authority (for example, the director of admissions) and the faculty athletics representative as ex officio members.
8. The athletics director should serve as a resource for the senate and respond to inquiries from the faculty. He or she should prepare periodic reports on the operation of the athletics program.
9. The athletics department should be required to submit a report on compliance with Title IX to the faculty senate for review, comment, and possible approval on an annual basis.
Admissions and Financial Aid
“With regard to student admissions,” according to a recently adopted footnote to the Association’s “Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities,” “the faculty should have a meaningful role in establishing institutional policies, including the setting of standards for admission, and should be afforded opportunity for oversight of the entire admissions process.” The faculty’s central role in establishing policies on admissions as well as on financial aid entails faculty responsibility for ensuring adherence to these policies with regard to college athletes. To this end we make the following recommendations:
1. Faculty should exercise their principal responsibility for formulation of admissions requirements for educational programs, ensuring that the academic integrity of the admissions process is not compromised by pressure to produce winning teams.
2. Faculty should ensure that applicants for admission are treated fairly, and that those admitted have the preparation deemed necessary for academic success. In particular, admissions standards for athletes should be comparable to and consistent with those for other students.
3. Faculty should ensure that financial-aid standards for athletes are comparable to those for other students, and that the aid is administered by the institution’s financial-aid office. In accordance with existing AAUP policy, faculty should also ensure that continuation of need-based aid to students who drop out of athletic competition or complete their athletic eligibility will be conditioned only on their remaining academically and financially qualified.10 Other financial aid to athletes should be continued so long as they are students in good academic standing and are meeting the obligations consistent with accepting the aid.
4. Faculty should ensure that athletes on financial aid receive adequate support to cover their living expenses as well as their educational expenses.
5. Faculty, working through the senate and with members of the athletics committee, should monitor compliance with policies relating to admissions, insisting on full disclosure of information necessary to discharge this function.
6. Faculty should work within their own institutions and assist in lobbying the NCAA to change regulations in order to ensure that scholarship recipients enjoy the same financial opportunities as other students.
Academic Standards and Support Services
Colleges and universities have an obligation to create appropriate opportunities and conditions for students—athletes and nonathletes alike—to pursue their educational goals. Primary responsibility for creating and maintaining those opportunities and conditions should rest with the faculty, which sets general academic policy, oversees the curriculum, teaches the courses, assesses student academic performance, and recommends the conferral of degrees. Athletics programs should carry out their activities in a manner that is respectful of the faculty’s right to teach as well as the student’s right to learn. Achievement of these aims, we believe, will require adherence to the recommendations that follow.
1. Consistent with principles of academic freedom, control over how courses are taught and how students are evaluated, including the assignment of grades, should rest exclusively with the faculty and not be delegated to noninstructional staff.11
2. Athletics programs should structure their activities so that participants have the same opportunities as other students to pursue a recognized degree program, as determined by the faculty, and to choose courses and schedules that are consistent with their making normal progress toward fulfilling degree requirements and completing those requirements within a reasonable period of time. The faculty should guard against courses or degrees whose main purpose is to keep athletes academically eligible to participate in intercollegiate sports.
3. Athletics programs should schedule their activities so as to conform with the academic calendar and to minimize intrusions on the classroom and pressures on athletes’ academic obligations. In particular, athletic events and team travel should be arranged to permit participants to meet the academic standards set by the faculty for all students in their courses, including attendance, completion of assignments, and evaluations. Athletics schedules should also respect campuswide study and examination periods.
4. Policies governing class absences for athletes involved in intercollegiate sports should be approved by the faculty. The athletics program should be required to provide statistics on such absences to the faculty senate and its relevant committees through regular yearly reports to those bodies.
5. Faculty have a responsibility to ensure that athletes obtain appropriate advising and other assistance in meeting their academic obligations. Whatever the special needs of athletes, the support programs for tutoring and instruction in study skills available to them should be the same as those offered to nonathletes. Athletes should be accorded no favoritism or special treatment in the affordance of counseling or academic support services.
6. Faculty should ensure that any academic support unit that is charged with advising athletes should be established and overseen by the faculty and report to an academic officer.
Finances
Intercollegiate athletics, especially on campuses that have “high-profile” programs, with their ever-mounting costs of new facilities and coaches’ salaries, requires a major allocation of financial resources. Examples of skewed or misplaced fiscal priorities abound. The faculty is properly concerned about decisions respecting the allocation of institutional resources in the context of more general institutional needs and goals, and it has a vital role to play in assessing the budgetary implications of decisions concerning the overall size and scope of the athletics program.
Institutions of higher education, with their sundry programs and auxiliary enterprises, have as their principal mission the discovery, transmission, and preservation of knowledge in the service of the larger society. In furtherance of their mission, most colleges and universities are supported by public funds, whether through grants, tax exemptions, or direct government appropriations, and they are expected, in turn, to exercise proper stewardship of this public trust. Faculty members have an important role to play in advising administrators and trustees on the integrity of athletics programs, thereby helping to ensure the public’s trust and its continuing support. The faculty is but one voice in the budgetary process, but that voice is a vital one. Colleges and universities must handle accounting matters in a manner that does not raise questions about the institution’s fundamental mission and purpose. Therefore, members of the faculty must acquire the information they need to monitor the educational and financial aspects of their institution’s athletic programs.
Meaningful accountability in the financing of college athletics requires full disclosure of financial information and openness of debate. Since a great deal of money is involved—either on the credit or the debit side of college and university budgets—the issues of finance are critical. Resources invested in athletics enterprises should be justified by the general purposes of the educational institution and not by measures of (potential or actual) financial return or profit. In carrying out their legitimate functions, institutions have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure that resources are used judiciously and appropriately in the public trust and in compliance with legal and ethical obligations of nondiscrimination. Transparency in reporting revenues and expenditures, including the compensation of coaches and athletic directors, is essential. The athletics program should therefore be required to submit its annual budget to the faculty senate for review and comment.
The need for sound handling of financial matters related to sports leads us to urge consideration of the following recommended standards and procedures:
1. Athletics programs and enterprises within the athletics department should be fully integrated into the control and governance structures of the institution, and those responsible for these areas should be held accountable for their budgetary actions in accordance with the institution’s educational mission.
2. Cost-cutting measures should be considered along with revenue-enhancing strategies in balancing the athletics budget line in a manner consonant with the institution’s educational priorities. Athletics personnel and programs should not be exempt from institutional retrenchment plans. The assets and operational costs of the athletics program should be included in determining whether a state of financial exigency exists in an institution and in implementing the remedies necessary to alleviate such a fiscal emergency. Consistent with Association-supported standards, which require meaningful faculty involvement in decisions relating to retrenchment, recommendations made by the faculty should incorporate revenues and expenditures of the athletics program.12
3. Commercial activities sponsored by the athletics program must be consistent with the institution’s educational mission.
4. The choice of athletes’ uniforms, shoes, or other equipment should not be based on any financial arrangements or contracts between vendors and the institution, the athletics department, or individual coaches. College athletes should not be employed for purposes of commercial advertisement or marketing.
5. Institutions should refuse to sign contracts with apparel or equipment manufacturers, or allow coaches or other members of the athletics program to sign contracts, which contain “nondisparagement” clauses. Such clauses, which typically prohibit college or university personnel from making any critical remarks about the company, its policies, or its products, are inconsistent with principles of academic freedom.13
6. The athletics program should follow accepted accounting and auditing procedures implemented by the institution that accurately record internal and external sources of income (including general fund appropriations), reflect operational and deferred expenses, and identify indebtedness.
7. The athletics program should bear the same share of indirect costs as other programs and departments, and these costs should be recorded in its budget.
8. Gifts for the purpose of endowing positions on athletic teams or staff positions in the athletics program should be received and managed through the institution’s central financial office and disbursed with the purpose of supporting the academic progress of students and the educational mission of the institution.
9. Athletics program personnel, including coaches, should not use campus facilities for personal gain, and they should eschew endorsements and other personal contracts with third parties that would compromise or conflict with their responsibilities to college athletes or the institution. Athletics personnel who seek outside employment while they are under contract with the institution should be governed by the same provisions that apply to the institution’s academic and support staff. The terms of any internal or external contracts should be fully disclosed.
10. Financial arrangements with booster clubs should be open to scrutiny by the campus community.
11. Allocation of financial resources among men’s and women’s athletics programs should reflect: (a) the recognized educational benefits of these programs common to each gender; and (b) the intent of federal legislation addressing gender equity. In particular, reduction of the size of men’s teams in revenue-producing sports should be considered as an alternative to the abolition of teams in non-revenue-producing sports.
12. The faculty senate should review and comment on contracts between the athletics program and commercial enterprises when such contracts have a potential impact on the academic life or educational experiences of college athletes.
Conclusions
“Universities must be judged by their achievements as academic institutions, not as sports franchises,” observed Indiana University president Myles Brand, recently appointed president of the NCAA, nearly two years ago. We need, he added, “to make certain that athletics programs enhance and support the larger academic mission of the university.”14
Given the principles and the recommended practices set forth above to implement change, what can be done to ensure that they are enacted and enforced? As the recent Knight Commission report states, “Change will come, sanity will be restored, only when the higher education community comes together to meet collectively the challenges its members face.” As for the faculty’s role in this process, on some campuses a fundamental reordering of the structures and practices of_institutional governance may be needed before the faculty can begin to assume its appropriate responsibility for the oversight of the institution’s athletics program. However, in those institutions with a strong tradition and practice of shared governance, campus-wide recognition of and dedication to these principles as part of institutional governance should make it much easier for the faculty, if it is willing to become engaged, to assume its appropriate role in athletics reform. We hasten to add that, as was observed in “The Role of the Faculty in the Governance of College Athletics,” “It is doubtful that faculty efforts alone will be sufficient to refocus the priorities of major athletics programs. On the other hand, faculties are in a unique position to advocate adherence to meaningful academic standards.”
Enactment and enforcement of the requisite reforms to establish a proper balance between sports and education will require members of the faculty—working as much as possible with supportive, or at least sympathetic, administrators, trustees, and athletics program staff, including coaches—to invest time and energy in this project. We urge the adoption by faculty senates of resolutions embodying the principles set forth here, and we call upon administrations to work with the faculty to implement policies consistent with the practices recommended in this report. We also encourage individual faculty members to continue to speak out with independence and candor about the issues we have addressed. At the same time, we want to emphasize the need for institutions to ensure that faculty members who do bring public attention to these matters and who actively work for reform are afforded protections against retaliation for exercising their academic freedom.
As with the efforts being undertaken by the Drake Group and by faculty senates at Pac-10 and Big-Ten universities, faculty members at one institution may find it useful to form coalitions with members of other senates at other institutions and with other external groups who share the same principles and goals in order to promote these recommended practices and assist in advancing the reform of intercollegiate athletics programs. But ultimately faculty must take responsibility at their own institutions for the proper functioning of athletics programs and the appropriate treatment of college athletes as students.
CAROL SIMPSON STERN (Performance Studies), Northwestern University, chair
Members: LINDA L. CARROLL (Italian), Tulane University; NORMA C. COOK (Speech Communication), University of Tennessee, Knoxville; MARY W. GRAY (Mathematics and Statistics), American University; SCOTT R. KRETCHMAR (Kinesiology), Pennsylvania State University; SEAN F. MORAN (History), Oakland University; DANIEL P. MURPHY (History), Hanover College; JAMES T. O’BRIEN (Physics), Montgomery College; STEVEN J. OVERMAN (Physical Education), Jackson State University; PHILLIP H. SMITH (Cell and Developmental Biology), State University of New York Health Science Center at Syracuse; IRIS F. MOLOTSKY, Association consultant; B. ROBERT KREISER, Association staff.
1. AAUP, Policy Documents and Reports, 9th ed. (Washington, D.C., 2001), 242–47, 240–41.
2. Among the most important recent books on the subject, see James L. Duderstadt, Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University: A University President’s Perspective (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); Allen L. Sack, Ellen J. Staurowsky, and Kent Waldrep, College Athletes for Hire: The Evolution and Legacy of the NCAA’s Amateur Myth (New York: Praeger, 1998); James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen, The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); Murray Sperber, Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2000); Rick Telander, Richard Warch, and Murray Sperber, The Hundred Yard Lie: The Corruption of College Football and What We Can Do to Stop It (Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1996); John R. Thelin, Games Colleges Play: Scandal and Reform in Intercollegiate Athletics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
3. In its 2001 report, in a section titled “The Need to Act Together,” the Knight Commission notes that “Faculty, too, have a critical role to play. Above all, they must defend the academic value of their institutions.” A Call to Action, 25.
4. John R. Gerdy, “Athletic Victories, Educational Defeats,” Academe: Bulletin of the AAUP (January–February 2002): 35.
5. “Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities,” Policy Documents, 221.
6. The quoted passages are from “The Role of the Faculty in the Governance of College Athletics,” Policy Documents, 243–45.
7. Policy Documents, 242, 243.
8. Policy Documents, 240.
9. In the section headed “Conflicts of Interest,” the “Statement on Intercollegiate Athletics” provides that “Paid-for trips to games, and other special benefits for faculty, administrators, or members of governing boards involved in the oversight of athletics, whether offered by the university or by outside groups, create conflicts of interest and should be eliminated.” Policy Documents, 241.
10. Policy Documents, 241.
11. See “The Assignment of Course Grades and Student Appeals,” Policy Documents, 113–14.
12. See Regulation 4(c) of the “Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure,” Policy Documents, 23–24, and “On Institutional Problems Resulting from Financial Exigency: Some Operating Guidelines,” Policy Documents, 230–31.
13. See, for example, W. Lee Hansen, ed., Academic Freedom on Trial: 100 Years of Sifting and Winnowing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 11.
14. “Presidents Have Cause, Means to Reduce Arms,” NCAA News, 12 February 2001.
The Drake Group proposals
1. Retire the term "student-athlete."
This proposal affirms that athletes are an integral part of the student body. There is no more need to call them student-athletes than there is to call members of the marching band student-band members. The term student-athlete was created by the NCAA in the 1950s to deflect the threat that its newly implemented athletic scholarship policy might lead Workers Compensation Boards to view athletes as paid employees. The words faculty use to refer to athletes should not be determined by the public relations needs of the NCAA. Replacing the term with "student" or "college athlete" in university documents is an action faculty can take immediately.
2. Make the location and control of academic counseling and support services for athletes the same as for all students.
The proposal further reinforces the notion that athletes are students and should be integrated into the general student body. Separate athletic counseling centers have been spawned by the same "student-athlete" philosophy the Drake Group rejects. The goal of academic counseling is education not athletic eligibility. This goal cannot be accomplished in a setting that is compromised by pressure to produce winning athletic teams. Faculty Senates can and should act to ensure equal access to education for all students.
3. Establish university policies that emphasize the importance of class attendance for all students and ensure that the scheduling of athletic contests not conflict with class attendance.
To protect the athletes' right to have equal access to educational opportunities, faculty need to enforce the policy that class attendance should take priority over athletic participation. Whenever there are scheduling conflicts between sports and course requirements, faculty members have a professional responsibility to enforce attendance policies that support quality instruction. In some instances, the problem arises because faculty, rather than athletic personnel, does not demand that students attend class. Faculty Senates can and should require faculty to establish attendance policies that treat all students equally.
4. Replace one-year renewable scholarships with need-based financial aid (or) with multi-year athletic scholarships that extend to graduation (five year maximum).
As long as coaches and athletics directors can use factors related to athletics to determine whether financial aid will be renewed, athletes are under considerable pressure to make sports their main priority. This highlights the inherent hypocrisy in the term "athletic scholarship," a term that should be related to educational opportunities. To ensure that education remains the priority, renewal of athletic scholarships should be unrelated to athletic performance or athletic scholarships themselves replaced with educational grants awarded on the basis of financial need. In either case, universities should be committed to athletes as students whose value to the university exceeds their role in athletics. The Big Ten Conference and the Knight Foundation have listed the creation of multi-year scholarships among possible reform measures they could support.
5. Require students to maintain a cumulative grade point average of 2.0 each semester to continue participation in intercollegiate athletics.
Students whose cumulative grade point average falls below 2.0 in any given semester need to give immediate attention to academic performance. Some will argue that this is an unfair standard because the standard for student academic eligibility on some campuses may be less than a cumulative 2.0 GPA in a specified semester. given the steady decline in graduation rates for athletes in the revenue- producing sports (rates that declined despite the rise of multi-million dollar academic support units) and the acknowledged stressors on the lives of athletes, this measure would provide a safety net for those athletes who are most academically at risk.
6. Ensure that universities provide accountability of trustees, administrators, and faculty by public disclosure of such things as a student's academic major, academic advisor, courses listed by academic major, general education requirements, and electives, course GPA and instructor.
No individual student grades would be disclosed. Much of the academic fraud that has come to be associated with college athletics could be eliminated if information on how we educate students were publicly disclosed. Disclosure is not about student behavior-- it is about institutional behavior. Academic evidence of the quality of education being given athletes will enable faculty and administrators to monitor grade inflation and the educational practices that affect the quality of the institution's degree. A first step would be to disclose, on a yearly basis, the majors taken by college athletes and the average aggregate grades of students enrolled in those and other majors. For the purposes of clarification, the Drake Group is not advocating that any individual records of athletes be revealed nor is there an intention to "blame" athletes for this situation. Rather, our purpose is to expose areas within the academy where the so-called preferential treatment of athletes (i.e., advisement into bogus or easy courses, manipulation of grades) actually constitutes a denial of equitable access to educational opportunity.
* * * *
Drake Group on the term "student-athlete"
Whatever the origin of the term “student-athlete” may be, it is the right term since these young men and women are and should be both students and athletes.
Myles Brand, April 6, 2003 in The Sunday New York Times
And what is that origin?
In his book Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes, former NCAA Executive Director Walter Byers stated: “We crafted the term” in reply to “the dreaded notion that NCAA athletes could be identified as employees by state industrial commissions and the courts” [
In other words:
The term student-athlete itself tells you they are not normal students. This anomalous term was coined by Walter Byers in 1953 to assist NCAA member schools in their fight against workmen’s compensation insurance claims for injured football players. If student-athletes were normal university students, then either the term would not be necessary or it would be joined by other terms like student-musician, student-artist, or student-engineer [ Zimbalist, Unpaid Professionals, 37].
Byers’ public confession to this “sleight of language” is an example of what Murray Sperber [Onward to Victory, 446] calls “NCAA newspeak”—language that faculty are quick to condemn or caricaturize when used by the government or the military.
An academician’s task is to confront history, not dismiss it. Unlike Mr. Brand, The Drake Group joins The Chronicle of Higher Education [“Student-athlete: This euphemism should not be used except in quotations.”] and this list of distinguished authors, columnists, and reporters in calling for the term to be retired:
Jim Duderstadt, President emeritus, University of Michigan, in Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University 2000 “Even the name used throughout this book to describe the participants in college sports, student-athlete, is contrived” [191].
John Feinstein, noted author of books on college sports, in The Last Amateurs [ “No term is misused more often in athletics today” [403].
Andrew Bagnato who covers national college sports for the Chicago Tribune [“2 sides of the story on stipends: cut coaches’ salaries to make it work,” Feb. 18, 2001, 12]: “Let’s not call them ‘student-athletes,’ a phony and deceptive term invented by the NCAA.”
James L. Shulman & William G. Bowen, Financial and Administrative Officer, & President at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, authors of The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values: “A brief word about language. We have chosen to resist some of the standard terminology associated with college sports. So, for example, whereas the NCAA is adamant about referring to students who play college sports as ‘student-athletes,’ we do not use this term, since everyone who is enrolled at a college or university is a student” [xxxi].
Marc Hansen, columnist for The Des Moines Register, [“A vote for holding schools and athletes accountable,” April 21, 2000, 1 C]:
I have been trying hard lately to avoid using the term “student-athlete.”
At the NCAA basketball tournament, it's student-athlete this, student-athlete that. Please direct your questions to the student-athletes. The student-athletes will now be tested for performance-enhancing drugs.
All right, already. The phrase needs a serious haircut. The student part should be eliminated.
We don’t refer to members of the pep band as student-musicians. We don’t call the budding artists on campus student-sculptors
So, Mr. Brand, because we do not call members of the marching band “student-musicians,” are they not students? Because members of the college debate team are not called “student-debaters,” are they not students? Because we do not call members of the cast in a play, “student- actors” or “student-thespians,” are they not students? Would we not laugh at—in fact, ridicule—any such pretension if a band director, debate coach, or theatre director made the statement you have made?
Given the severity of the problems in college athletics, some might feel that addressing language is insignificant. Reporting on the first meeting of The Drake Group, Frederick Klein of The Wall Street Journal [“A Collegiate Effort,” Nov. 12, 1999, W7] disagrees:
A symbolic but potentially potent proposal that student-athletes henceforth be referred to by their institutions as, merely, “students,” met the same fate [killed]. When I asked one conferee why he opposed it, he said he thought it would have made the group look silly. I didn’t think so at all.
The Drake Group agrees with Frederick Klein: Abolishing the term is a symbolic and potent step toward reform of college athletics. It is true of course, that if the only action taken by a group to restore academic integrity to college sports were to adopt this proposal, the group would indeed look silly. Abolishing the term is just the beginning.
Contrived. . . no term is misused more. . . a phony and deceptive term.... The Drake Group does not believe in the use of language as camouflage and joins The Chronicle of Higher Education and these distinguished reporters, columnists, and authors in proposing that students who participate in sports be referred to as athletes—just as students who participate in debate are called debaters—and that the term “student-athlete” be retired.
Jon Ericson, member of The Drake Group