The Influence of Athletics in the University Community

At some higher education institutions, athletics involves nearly all aspects of community life, from admissions to alumni support. How can we best understand this collegiate phenomenon?

By Murray Sperber

Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values

Football U.: Spectator Sports in the Life of the American University

The Massachusetts School of Law sponsored a televised discussion a few years ago on problems in college sports. The moderator noted that, in preparing for the program, he had read the standard literature on intercollegiate athletics and had not found a single, reputable author who defended college sports; in fact, all of the writers criticized it. He wondered why this lop-sided situation existed. One of the panelists replied, "How can you defend the indefensible?"

Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values by William Bowen and Sarah Levin continues and deepens the criticism of college sports that Bowen and William Shulman began in their 2000 volume, The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values. Indeed, in the comprehensiveness of its research and the solidity of its argument, Reclaiming the Game breaks new ground and probably will become the most influential book in the field for many years. In contrast, J. Douglas Toma attempts a rare and death-defying feat in Football U.: Spectator Sports in the Life of the American University: he mounts a full-scale defense of college sports. That he fails is not surprising—some of Bowen and Levin's findings are torpedoes into the side of Football U.—but that he even tries is a bit amazing. Reading these two books is an excursion through two separate worlds; one is a well-ordered, serious place filled with in-depth research and careful analysis; the other is a rather windy planet full of opinion and often contradictory and confusing argument.

Academic Underachievers

Bowen and Levin studied the transcripts of thousands of students at thirty-three schools and compared current classes with sample classes from previous eras. Most important, they identified and tracked recruited athletes. They also went beyond their sample schools, mainly private and northeastern, to prove that "some of the problems faced by the schools we are studying are, without doubt, similar to those faced by the big-time Division I-A universities."

Athletes' problems begin with their admission to the university: across the board in American higher education, recruited athletes, in aggregate, have significantly lower SAT and ACT scores than other applicants to their schools. If it were not for their athletic talent, Bowen and Levin write, "they would . . . have appreciably lower admit rates than applicants in general." That is particularly true at Ivy League universities and elite liberal arts colleges, but it also applies to "public Ivies" like the University of Michigan and many other institutions. Of course, special admission for athletes is not news, nor do Bowen and Levin claim it to be; they just quantify the facts in indisputable and stark terms.

The poor academic performance of athletes in college is not news, either, but Bowen and Levin's quantification of it is. Many colleges and universities, they found, "pay a very large academic price when they recruit high-profile athletes. Recruited high-profile athletes had a cumulative grade point average that put them, as a group, in the [bottom] nineteenth percentile of their class in the Ivies and the [bottom] twenty-third percentile in the NESCAC [New England Small College Athletic Conference] colleges," schools like Wesleyan and Williams. This situation also exists at many other schools far beyond New England.

Athletes blame much of their academic underachievement on the amount of time they spend on sports. Bowen and Levin cross-checked this assertion by studying the class ranking of a cohort of nonathletes they termed "student actives," that is, students who edited the school newspaper, ran student groups, and so on. The researchers found that these "student actives did not underperform academically—indeed, they overperformed relative to how they could have been expected to do." This finding underlined another crucial discovery about the athletes: they did "even less well in the classroom than one would expect them to do on the basis of their entering credentials." In other words, the athletes' test scores and high school grade point averages predicted that they would perform better academically in college than they actually did.

Bowen and Levin go beyond the standard explanation for the academic underachievement of athletes—time demands—and examine what they term the "athletic culture": the separate world in which the jocks live, even at small liberal arts schools. It is a subculture in which athletes continue to specialize in the sports they have pursued since childhood, and in which coaches insist on this single-minded dedication. If an eight-year-old in Pop Warner Football shows promise as a linebacker, he attends summer camps devoted to his specialty, receives extra coaching in linebacking through his high school years, and is recruited for college as a linebacker, possibly a right outside linebacker. He arrives in higher education not as an inquiring, open-minded first-year student, but as a right outside linebacker, his identity and much of his personality defined by his sports specialty.

He associates with his peers at big-time college sports schools in the current equivalent of "jock dorms." But even at small colleges, he or she (increasingly, women exist within this athletic subculture) is segregated with other athletes and set apart from regular student life. Bowen and Levin quote a Williams College report that found clear "evidence of anti-intellectualism" among many of the campus jocks and "of clear disengagement and even outright disdain" for academic subjects. Bowen and Levin conclude that when athletes "habitually underperform [academically], and especially when they are blunt about their own (different) priorities, the combination of their attitudes and their performance can affect the campus ethos" negatively.

Athletics Reform

Having presented their findings on the state of intercollegiate athletics—and my summary does not do justice to the depth, complexity, and subtlety of their arguments—Bowen and Levin offer a program for reform. In the conclusion to The Game of Life, Bowen and Shulman presented some ideas on reform, but their narrow, scattershot suggestions fell flat. In Reclaiming the Game, however, Bowen and Levin acknowledge "that reform needs to be undertaken 'holistically,' not piecemeal."

With this premise, they present a thorough plan for overhauling college sports, one that would indeed "reclaim the game," and one that is at odds with the reforms recommended by Myles Brand, president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), and other higher education authorities. (Bowen and Levin do not comment directly on others' proposals, but, according to their premise and arguments, Brand's ideas as well as those of various national faculty groups are piecemeal at best and inevitably doomed to fail.)

Just as Bowen and Levin's analysis of the problems in college sports begins with the admission of athletes into higher education, they launch their reform proposals by adamantly opposing special admissions, special financial aid, and special academic treatment for athletes. Their basic tenet is simple: "Players shall be truly representative of the student body." Bowen and Levin offer steps for ending the athletic subculture and integrating athletes into the student body, and also for allowing regular students to participate in college sports. If doing so results in less-intense and less-well-played intercollegiate contests, so be it, they write. Their "first principle" is that the "program in intercollegiate athletics is to be kept in harmony with the essential educational purposes of the institution." Every college and university in America trumpets a version of this principle; Bowen and Levin say that the time has arrived to stop paying lip service to this credo and to start implementing it. Education must come first.

At this point, the eyes of most readers, even critics of college sports, glaze over. Libraries are full of high-minded, rhetorically lofty proposals to reform intercollegiate athletics. But Bowen and Levin have prepared their ground well. They cite one conference, the University Athletic Association (UAA), that has no special admissions, no special financial aid, and no special academic treatment for athletes. As a result, the conference's athletes are totally integrated into the life of their schools and, most important, "there is no significant [academic] underperformance by any group of athletes at these schools," which are Brandeis, Carnegie-Mellon, Case Western Reserve, Emory, and New York Universities, Washington University in St. Louis, and the Universities of Chicago and Rochester.

This sane and successful approach to college sports did not happen through magic: "Of first importance is the clear determination of the UAA presidents to maintain a right sense of balance between academics and athletics and to put in place policies and practices that would sustain this balance." Again, almost every college and university president in America claims to have found the right balance between academics and athletics. But only those who implement policies similar to the UAA's can support their claims with transcripts on the academic success of the majority of their athletes and other proofs that could pass Bowen and Levin's tests. Unlike other proposals for the reform of college sports, Bowen and Levin's do not exist in a vacuum but have been tested in the real world. They actually work.

Defense of Big-Time Sports

It is difficult to go from the well-ordered, carefully constructed world of Reclaiming the Game to the messy and idiosyncratic one of Football U. J. Douglas Toma discusses many important topics—chapter titles like "Home Games: Local Involvement in the Life of the American University" and "Loyal Fans: Institutional Identification at State U." indicate his interests—but, unlike Bowen and Levin, he proceeds in an ad hoc, anecdotal manner, with frequent repetition and overwriting. At his best, when he uses standard sources, Toma offers insight into the mass popularity of college football. Too often, however, he startles the reader with sloppy or incorrect evidence.

For example, he writes, "Try to purchase a souvenir of a visit to Omaha or Birmingham or Indianapolis at the airport there that does not have something to do with the state university teams. Football thus humanizes seemingly impersonal large universities for external audiences."

I cannot speak for the Omaha or Birmingham airports, having never been in them. But I have used the Indianapolis airport about once a month for the last twenty-five years, and I can state unequivocally that I have never seen an Indiana University football souvenir there. In fact, the airport's large newsstand and souvenir shop sells mainly racing-car items—Indianapolis 500, Brickyard 500, and the like—and some National Football League and National Basketball Association paraphernalia. As in this example, too often Toma employs a breezy style and questionable evidence to try to prove his points.

Toma's main argument—that big-time college football has done and continues to do wonderful things for its host universities—also leads him to some absurd conclusions. For example, he writes, "The few prominent universities outside of the Ivy League that do not compete in high-profile football, like Case Western Reserve, Chicago, Emory, Rochester, and Washington University, are an aberration in American higher education. They are also relatively unknown outside of academe. The University of Chicago, which disbanded its football team and high-profile athletics program in the 1930s, simply does not register for most people—even those in Chicago." So much for the university's seventy-five Nobel Prize winners, the site of the first nuclear reaction (it occurred beneath Chicago's abandoned football stadium), and all of the other illustrious, nonathletic events in the history of this great university. All of them are supposedly unknown because the school dropped out of big-time college sports!

Of course, Toma is denigrating the schools that make up the University Athletic Association, the very institutions that Bowen and Levin admire. Instead of seeing them as a possible model for the future of intercollegiate athletics, he dismisses them and their academic accomplishments as "an aberration." However, oddly and surprisingly, when he arrives at his concluding chapter—"Amateur Ideals and Commercial Realities: Understanding the American University and the Future of College Sports"—he becomes pessimistic and mocks the premise of amateur athletics upon which college sports is based. He writes, "Institutions continue to need the amateur ideal both to justify their involvement in high-profile football and to heighten its appeal to the public. Accordingly, they developed a series of needed myths—myths that portrayed an essentially commercial activity as something else."

Robert Hutchins, the University of Chicago president who took the Maroons out of big-time college sports, could have written those lines. In fact, he penned similar ones in a famous essay in the Saturday Evening Post. But Hutchins was always consistent in his opposition to big-time college football; unfortunately, Toma lacks consistency and fails to persuade the reader of his argument. Indeed, in his thirty-two-page conclusion, he seems to stop defending the indefensible and suits up on the critics' side. This is all very confusing, especially after reading Bowen and Levin's clear and consistent argument, based on equally clear and consistent evidence.

Yet one small, niggling problem bothered me about Reclaiming the Game: the authors never clearly explain their title. They sometimes use the phrase in passing and imply that they mean reclaiming college sports for all students, thus ending the athletic subculture on campuses and abolishing that famous NCAA concept of "student-athlete" in favor of "student." When that occurs, all students will be able to participate in the joys of college sports, and they and their schools will reclaim the game.

Usually when authors fail to clearly define their title, they undercut the message of their book; for Reclaiming the Game, Bowen and Levin make their readers work a bit harder and extrapolate the meaning of the title. No reader of this truly important book will hold the small problem of the title against them.

Murray Sperber is professor of English and American studies at Indiana University Bloomington. He has published four books on college sports and college life, most recently Beer & Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education (2000).

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