Athletic Victories, Educational Defeats

Big-time sports distort educational values. Faculty members need to restore a better balance.

By John R. Gerdy

Attempts to initiate substantive reform have been almost as much a part of the higher education landscape as the classroom lecture. But despite the well-intentioned efforts of many intelligent and dedicated people, these attempts, beginning with a 1929 report from the Carnegie Foundation, have yielded few results. Ironically, the reform efforts have correctly identified the major issues—overcommercialization, the compromising of academic integrity, misplaced fiscal priori-ties, overzealous boosters and alumni, and exploitation of student-athletes. Moreover, although people may disagree about specific measures needed to mitigate the problems, the general recipe for reform has also been agreed upon by many higher education leaders. It recommends increased presidential control, fiscal restraint, minimization of commercial intrusion, and the establishment for student-athletes of academic standards, expectations, and outcomes comparable to those for students generally.

Why, then, have we been unable to implement meaningful change? The sad reality of athletics reform is that without the active engagement of a critical mass of people in the higher education community, meaningful change will never occur. The forces against it are simply too entrenched for any commission, no matter how prestigious, to craft a report that will result in substantive change.

Despite these seemingly overwhelming odds, three recent developments offer a glimmer of hope. First is the release last year of the latest report from the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. Second is an embryonic effort by faculty members to be heard on athletics issues. Third is the publication of several books on college athletics, particularly The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values by William G. Bowen and James L. Shulman. These books have shattered many time-honored assumptions about college sports and redefined the parameters of the debate regarding the role of athletics in higher education. The challenge now for the higher education community is to build the critical mass necessary to turn these trickles of opportunity into a steady stream of reform.

Faculty Role

Yet even though presidents and boards must lead the way, they cannot do it alone. As the 2001 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." In short, it is time for everyone with a stake in the future of American higher education to step up to the plate of athletics reform.

The faculty’s responsibility for defining and defending academic values requires them to become directly engaged in the issue. Simply put, without significant faculty attention and involvement, the critical mass necessary to force substantive change cannot be achieved. If for no other reason than their sheer size as a higher education constituency, faculty are well situated to provide the momentum necessary to transform reform concepts into actual change.

Traditionally, faculty have been seen as too concerned with their disciplines to sustain meaningful involvement with athletics reform. To expect faculty to initiate and execute change is unfair. The fact is, professors have little direct access to the mechanisms for change. As I have noted, it is presidents and boards who have the influence, authority, and responsibility to initiate reform.

But their lack of authority does not mean that faculty members bear no responsibility for becoming actively engaged in the process. As the primary guardians of academic integrity, faculty must advance the dialogue about the appropriate role of athletics on campus and ensure that such discussions and sub-sequent decisions are based on facts. For over a hundred years, campus leaders have based athletics policy largely on myths, anecdotes, and propaganda from coaches, athletics administrators, sports-crazed alumni, and star-struck media. So faculty can play a vital role by beginning to study in earnest the institutional impact of highly competitive athletics. In short, they must assume a central leadership position as we search for the truth about the influence of sports on higher education.

History informs us that achieving change will not be easy, nor will it occur quickly. College athletics is an enormous and powerful enterprise. But athletics has altered the landscape of American higher education, as well as that of the wider society, too dramatically in the past two decades for faculty to remain disengaged. By all indications, the influence of athletics is not only increasing but also becoming far more direct than previously imagined. Small, elite schools struggle to determine the number of precious admissions slots to allocate to competitive athletics teams, while larger institutions wonder whether to spend tens of millions of dollars to add sky boxes to the football stadium to allow corporate donors to watch six games a year when academic budgets are skeletal, classrooms inadequate, and faculty underpaid. We can no longer deny that college sports, particularly big-time college sports, are in direct conflict with virtually every value an academic institution should stand for. The good news, however, is that opportunities are emerging to help faculty meet their responsibility to create the critical mass needed to drive substantive change.

Kick-Start for Reform

Its most recent report is a brutally honest assessment of the current state of intercollegiate athletics. It makes the case that the conflict between athletics imperatives and academic values has become so intense that it threatens higher education’s ability to serve the public. This is not the first time such a claim has been made; what is most striking about the report is its conclusion 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."

With A Call to Action, the Knight Commission laid down the gauntlet. Never before has such a high-profile group of respected educational leaders stated so unequivocally that athletics has no place in our educational institutions if it cannot be structured and conducted in a way that complements the broader purposes of higher education. Simply providing entertainment on a Saturday afternoon is not enough. Although the commission hopes the day will never arrive when athletics has no place on campus, its report challenges the higher education community to find the will to ensure that it does not.

The report also offers something that previous documents have not. It recommends the establishment of an independent institute for intercollegiate athletics. The purpose of the institute would be to maintain pressure for change by catalyzing public interest in reform, providing moral leadership, monitoring progress, and reporting that progress to the public. Such an entity, existing outside the athletics establishment, is essential if current efforts are to do more than previous reform measures, which have quietly faded into a distant memory. The Knight Foundation recognizes that it will take time to build the critical mass necessary to achieve reform and, apparently, it is pre-pared to commit to the issue for the long haul.

Building support requires appropriate vehicles through which different constituencies can become engaged. Previous faculty involvement has been limited to the random faculty member speaking out on campus or fighting against meaningless courses or degrees designed to keep athletes eligible. Most of these professors have been isolated, ostracized, or harassed, their voices shouted down by the athletics establishment, their fate sealed by faculty indifference. Against such odds, it is no wonder that most faculty members have lost interest in bucking the system.

Now, however, several safer and more productive ways exist for faculty to become engaged in athletics reform. For example, since 2000, the Drake Group has offered faculty the opportunity to get involved on a national level. The group is an alliance of over a hundred faculty members who hope to rally colleagues from around the nation to promote academic integrity in college athletics.

More recently, and perhaps most significant, faculty senates at eight institutions in the Pacific-10 Conference passed a resolution calling for their presidents to begin discussing ways to curb the financial "arms race" and commercialization in college sports. A similar resolution will also be considered by the faculty senates in the Big Ten Conference. Working through their senates may be the most promising and powerful reform tool for faculty. Even though a large percentage of professors may not become actively engaged in athletics reform, faculty senate members, by virtue of their involvement in the senate, have accepted the responsibility of faculty leadership. Defining academic and institutional values, including those affected by athletics, is central to that responsibility. As demonstrated by the response of the Pac-10 presidents to the faculty senate resolution—the presidents committed to engage in a national dialogue regarding the concerns raised in the resolution—faculty can have an impact on institutional priorities regarding the role and influence of athletics on their campuses.

Other opportunities for faculty involvement arise within the committee and governance structures of individual campuses, athletics conferences, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). One such opportunity is to serve as an institutional faculty athletics representative. A college or university president designates the faculty athletics representative to represent the institution and its faculty in the institution’s relationships with its athletics conference and with the NCAA. Some people, however, question the effectiveness of the faculty representative within the NCAA structure. Often, the representative is shut out from the decision-making processes of athletics departments by administrators and coaches intent upon keeping departmental policy making "within the family." Further, many question the legitimacy of one individual’s representing the views of the entire faculty. It is for this reason in particular that the Pac-10 faculty senate initiative is so promising: the size and legitimacy of a senate offers a much stronger voice for faculty.

The vehicles for faculty engagement I have just outlined illustrate an important requirement for building critical mass: they provide opportunities for individuals and groups to build coalitions around specific issues. For example, the Drake Group organizes faculty around promotion of academic integrity, while the Pac-10 faculty senate movement centers on fiscal and commercial matters and their impact on academic values and policy. Involvement in athletics conference or NCAA structures permits faculty to address important governance issues. In short, there are many issues in athletics reform, with various groups coalescing around those issues. As a result, faculty members now have more opportunities than ever to do their part to change college athletics.

Your Life and Livelihood

That brings us to Bowen and Shulman’s The Game of Life. Drawing on an extensive database, this important book shatters many of the long-held myths regarding the institutional benefits of sports. For example, many people believe that athletics generates enormous revenue for colleges and universities. Most programs, however, actually lose money. Similarly, one of the strongest myths about intercollegiate athletics is that winning teams have a positive impact on philanthropic giving. Recent data contradict this assumption. Research also shows that neither the quality nor the divisional affiliation of a school’s sports program matters to most prospective students. Furthermore, contrary to popular belief, most alumni actually favor decreasing their alma mater’s emphasis on intercollegiate sports.

The findings outlined in The Game of Life apply not only to NCAA Division I programs, but to virtually every institution sponsoring intercollegiate athletics. Among the authors’ conclusions is that student-athletes underperform academically compared with their nonathlete peers and with what their high school grades and test scores would predict. In addition, the authors found that a distinct "athletics culture" tends to separate athletes from other students in all sports at all levels of play. The authors further note that the negative effects of overemphasis of athletics are increasing. Most disturbing is the documentation that the chasm between athletics and education is widening not only at NCAA Division I institutions, but also at virtually every institution sponsoring intercollegiate athletics, including Ivy League universities and selective liberal arts colleges. In other words, athletics reform is no longer an issue only at schools with "big time" programs, but at all schools—public and private, large and small.

The fact is, intercollegiate athletics influences which students receive financial aid and thus enroll, the backgrounds and attitudes of an institution’s students, its fiscal and academic priorities, its campus culture, and, at Division I schools, even faculty members’ salaries. Yes, as a faculty member at any school, you are directly influenced by what transpires in the athletic department.

On the other hand, to simply dismiss athletics would waste a tremendous potential resource. Reversing the decline in public trust is probably the most important challenge facing higher education today. To do so, colleges and universities must become far more effective in communicating their story to the public. Athletics, with its widespread visibility and influence in our society, can help them accomplish this task. For example, institutions have, up to now, viewed televised games simply as entertainment designed to promote corporate and athletics interests, not as an opportunity to communicate to the public the value and mission of higher education. If institutions would spend only half as much time and money developing creative ways to promote education as they now do to advertise the weekly "game of the century," they could pro-duce exciting and captivating presentations illustrating how higher education improves the lives of individual citizens. The challenge is therefore not to eliminate athletics programs, but to structure them in a way that harnesses their tremendous potential to contribute to institutional goals.

Societal Responsibility

A strong case can be made that our country has lost perspective regarding the role of organized sports in our culture. Although much of what transpires in college athletics is positive, we have come to glorify athletic accomplishment far more than academic achievement. And we in higher education have largely been responsible for allowing this culture to evolve.

It is clear that athletics reform is no longer about the traditional concerns of student-athlete welfare, academic integrity, and presidential control. Today, reform is about the cultural values we will pass on to our children and grandchildren. It is about ensuring that we prize and reinforce honesty, intelligence, and civility over athletic prowess. In short, the influence of highly competitive sports on our culture has become a critical societal issue.

If we are ever going to restore a more balanced perspective regarding the proper relationship between sports and education, the higher education community will have to initiate the process. Perhaps this is an unfair burden. After all, the professional sports community also bears some responsibility. Maybe so, but not nearly to the degree that we do.

Our obligation is greater because, in the realm of athletics, American higher education has failed in its public mission. We have not provided leadership in establishing a healthy societal attitude toward athletics. Regarding our leader-ship in the area of public health, for example, how can we justify universities’ spending exorbitant amounts of money and resources on intercollegiate athletics for the elite few, while the lifelong health and fitness needs of most college students go largely unmet as a result of the low priority placed on programs in physical education, intramural sports, and wellness?

We need to make it clear to the college athletics community, as well as to the public, that the simple fact that a hundred thousand fans attend a football game does not mean that athletics is indispensable. People need to understand that American higher education existed for more than two hundred years before the first intercollegiate athletic contest and will continue to provide quality education, produce important research, and contribute to the betterment of society with or without athletics.

The issue is balance. Somewhere along the line, our cultural consensus regarding the importance of athletic performance versus intellectual achievement became grotesquely distorted. And the societal consequences of our loss of perspective are becoming too great. In the end, if we accept the notion that the most important purpose of higher education is to provide leadership in addressing the critical issues of the day, our responsibility as faculty members to become involved in achieving substantive athletics reform is clear.

John Gerdy, visiting professor of sports administration at Ohio University, is author of The Successful College Athletic Program: The New Standard; Sports in School: The Future of an Institution; and Sports: The All-American Addiction> (forthcoming). His e-mail address is johngerdy@aol.com.

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