Conference Addresses Athletics and Academics
Myles Brand, president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), opened the AAUP's fourth annual governance conference with the declaration that college sports are at a crossroads. In some ways, he said, intercollegiate athletics have never been more popular or in better shape. College football will probably set new attendance records again this fall, he noted, and athletics participation among women has grown by 400 percent over the past thirty years. In addition, graduation rates among athletes have been rising and hit an all-time high in 2002.
At the same time, Brand reported, U.S. intercollegiate athletics spends about $1 billion a year more than it brings in, graduation rates among football and men's basketball players in NCAA Division I schools are below those of the general student body, and the concept of amateur athletics is being undercut by million-dollar coaches, multi-million-dollar budgets, and facility expansions that could finance an entire academic department.
"In one direction," Brand said, "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 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."
Brand delivered his address at NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis. The NCAA cosponsored the governance conference, held October 9-11, with the AAUP and the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics (COIA).
Saying that faculty should be leaders in athletics reform, Brand challenged conference participants to "engage in the effort to move college sports toward its full potential as a contributing unit in the higher education mission."
Peter Orszag, senior director at Sebago Associates, reported preliminary findings from a study the NCAA commissioned his firm to carry out on the economics of college sports. Orszag noted that several of his findings contradict popular assumptions about intercollegiate athletics programs. For example, according to U.S. Department of Education data, operating expenditures on such programs at NCAA Division I schools in 1997 (the most recent year for which data are available) represented a relatively small share of overall academic spending: roughly 3 percent. In addition, Orszag's firm found that increased spending on football and basketball did not correlate with increased winning percentages, nor did increased winning bring more revenue to institutions.
James Earl of the University of Oregon recounted the founding in 2002 of the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics by a network of faculty senate leaders interested in serious reform of campus athletics through institutional governance mechanisms. He described COIA as a grassroots movement among faculty that now involves professors from all Division I institutions. "If faculty don't continue to set standards, someone else will," he said. Earl and others from COIA presented two best practices documents at the Indianapolis conference and listened to suggested revisions from conference participants. Their goal was to achieve a consensus document outlining principles and practices that can be adapted to fit circumstances on campuses nationwide.
Other presentations on intercollegiate athletics explored the faculty role in reform of college sports, athletics reform from the board's perspective, best practices for faculty athletics representatives, women's participation in college athletics, and the academic experience of college athletes.
In addition, the conference offered sessions on other aspects of institutional governance, including effective faculty handbooks, the faculty role in institutional budgeting, use of AAUP chapters to address handbook and governance issues, political and legal issues surrounding collegial governance, and shared governance in the context of collective bargaining.
A portion of the conference was devoted to contingent faculty appointments. Faculty members with all types of appointments at all types of institutions commented on the Association's new draft policy statement, Contingent Appointments and the Academic Profession in a lively session devoted to that topic. In another session, participants discussed the extent to which contingent faculty members are involved with governance bodies on their campuses. In a plenary address, Linda Collins, chair of the AAUP's Committee on Community Colleges and a faculty member at Los Medanos College in California, talked about the link between the dramatic increase in contingent faculty appointments and dwindling public funding for higher education generally. She described specific legislative gains won in California that address pay and job security protections for contingent faculty.
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