Call for a Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics

Intercollegiate athletics can provide an important enhancement to the life and spirit of an academic community.  The positive contributions of intercollegiate athletics to American higher education are important to protect.  However, since its inception, the practice of college sports has involved serious problems that have conflicted with and at times outweighed its constructive potential. Over the past decade, attention to such problems has grown, and their negative impact on institutions of higher education nationally has been increasingly acknowledged.  Detailed statements concerning problems associated with intercollegiate athletics, the need for reform, and the general nature of necessary reforms exist in adequate numbers.  The problems are not simple, and powerful social forces create obstacles to their solution.  What is needed is a sustained and focused effort by the higher education community to clarify a long-term vision of the appropriate shape of college sports, and to devise effective solutions to difficult problems and a staged process of reform that will realize that vision within a specific and realistic time frame.

Faculty governance leaders of Big Ten Conference schools agree to work cooperatively to assemble a coalition that will address national problems in intercollegiate athletics.  The purpose of the coalition will be to study problems in intercollegiate athletics related to academics, student welfare, costs, and commercialization; develop effective strategies and specific proposals to accomplish significant long-term reform; and work nationally with university faculties, administrations, trustee boards, and national associations concerned with higher education to implement these strategies and proposals.  To create a broad basis for this coalition, we will initially propose to work together with two national associations, the Association of Governing Boards and the American Association of University Professors, both of which have indicated a commitment to serious effort on these issues. Recognizing the recent and ongoing cooperative efforts of presidents of Bowl Championship Conference universities to devise significant reforms, we ask faculty governance colleagues at schools in those conferences to join us as founding partners of this coalition.

Working with these groups, we hope to appoint by the end of January a representative steering committee to coordinate planning for the 2003 calendar year.  The steering committee would undertake the following tasks: develop an initial working outline for staged reform; identify key questions of fact and seek funding for their study; organize and set the agenda for an initial conference to be held during spring 2003, to include representatives of the coalition’s founding groups; plan a more broadly based conference for the fall 2003, designed to broaden the coalition and engage the NCAA and the national higher education community in its program.

-- Endorsed by Faculty Governance Leaders of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Indiana University, the University of Iowa, Michigan State University, the University of Michigan,  the University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison

22 November 2002