A Call to Action: Ten Years Later

A Call to Action: Reconnecting College Sports and Higher Education

Download a PDF of A Call To Action

• A Call to Action: Letter of transmittal
• A Call to Action: Foreword
• A Call to Action: Ten Years Later
• A Call to Action: A Call to Action
• A Call to Action: Appendix A: Additional Issues for Consideration
• A Call to Action: Appendix B: Action on Knight Commission Recommendations of March 1991
• A Call to Action: Appendix C: Meeting Participants
• A Call to Action: Appendix D: Acknowledgments
• A Call to Action: Appendix E: Statement of Principles

Ten Years Later

It is tempting to turn away from bad news. To the cynic, corruption has been endemic in big-time sports as long as they have existed. To the rationalizer, reform is already under way and things are not nearly as bad as the critics make them out to be. More time is all that is needed. But to the realist, the bad news is hard to miss. The truth is manifested regularly in a cascade of scandalous acts that, against a backdrop of institutional complicity and capitulation, threaten the health of American higher education. The good name of the nation's academic enterprise is even more threatened today than it was when the Knight Commission published its first report a decade ago. Despite progress in some areas, new problems have arisen, and the condition of big-time college sports has deteriorated.

Consider as an example some simple statistics: As noted in the foreword, 57 out of 106 Division I-A institutions (54 percent) had to be censured, sanctioned or put on probation for major violations of NCAA rules in the 1980s. In the 1990s, 58 out of 114 Division I-A colleges and universities (52 percent) were similarly penalized. In other words, more than half the institutions competing at the top levels continue to break the rules. Wrongdoing as a way of life seems to represent the status quo.

The fact that such behavior has worked its way into the fiber of intercollegiate sports without provoking powerful and sustained countermeasures from the many institutions so besmirched speaks for itself. It appears that more energy goes into looking the other way than to finding a way to integrate big-time sports into the fabric of higher education.

At the heart of these problems is a profound change in the American culture of sports itself. At one time, that culture was defined by colleges, high schools, summer leagues, and countless community recreational programs. Amateurism was a cherished ideal. In such a context, it made sense to regard athletics as an educational undertaking. Young people were taught values ranging from fitness, cooperation, teamwork and perseverance to sportsmanship as moral endeavor.

All of that seems somehow archaic and quaint today. Under the influence of television and the mass media, the ethos of athletics is now professional. The apex of sporting endeavor is defined by professional sports. This fundamental shift now permeates many campuses. Big-time college basketball and football have a professional look and feel - in their arenas and stadiums, their luxury boxes and financing, their uniforms and coaching staffs, and their marketing and administrative structures. In fact, big-time programs have become minor leagues in their own right, increasingly taken into account as part of the professional athletics system.

In this new circumstance, what is the relationship between sport and the university as a place of learning?

At the time the Knight Commission was formed in 1989, the answers to that question were already sounding alarm bells. For example, the late A. Bartlett Giamatti, a former president of Yale who went on to become commissioner of major league baseball, said that "failures of nerve, principle and purpose" were threatening to "engulf higher education in ways unfair and dangerous." He argued that what had been "allowed to become a circus - college sports - threatens to become the means whereby the public believes the whole enterprise is a sideshow."

Now, in this new millennium, informed critics are equally scathing in their evaluations. James Duderstadt, president emeritus of the University of Michigan, put it this way before the Knight Commission in late 2000: Major college sports "do far more damage to the university, to its students and faculty, its leadership, its reputation and credibility than most realize - or at least are willing to admit." The ugly disciplinary incidents, outrageous academic fraud, dismal graduation rates, and uncontrolled expenditures surrounding college sports reflect what Duderstadt and others have rightly characterized as "an entertainment industry" that is not only the antithesis of academic values but is "corrosive and corruptive to the academic enterprise."

Ten years ago, the Commission's efforts focused largely on big-time football and basketball programs. The most glaring problems seemed concentrated in these two sports. While that is just as true today, the Commission notes the influence-by-emulation of big-time programs on sports other than football and basketball. William Bowen and James Shulman of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation detail the full impact of this "contagion" in their book, The Game of Life, which concludes that the skewed priorities of top programs have infected men's and women's sports at all levels, including, perhaps most remarkably, the Ivy League and elite private liberal arts colleges. It all leads, they write, to a single conclusion:

"Intercollegiate programs in these academically selective institutions are moving steadily in the direction of increased tension with core educational values, and more substantial calls on the tangible and intangible resources of their host institutions. We cannot think of a single set of data that contradicts this proposition …We are unable to identify any forces inside the system that - without considerable help - can be expected to alter these directions."

Nevertheless, what the Knight Commission has concentrated on again in this review of intercollegiate athletics is the impact and control of football and basketball at the most competitive level. At the core of the problem is a prevailing money madness. These sports programs have created a universe parallel to - but outside the effective control of - the institutions that house them. They answer not to the traditional standards of higher education but to the whims and pressures of the marketplace.

There is no question about who is winning this open, ever-escalating war between the academic and athletic cultures. In too many places, the tail already wags the dog. The continuation and possible acceleration of this development is a prospect that demands the engagement of presidents, trustees, faculties, and higher education associations.

The most glaring elements of the problems outlined in this report - academic transgressions, a financial arms race, and commercialization - are all evidence of the widening chasm between higher education's ideals and big-time college sports.

Academics

When the accretions of centuries of tradition and the bells and whistles of the modern university have been stripped away, what remains is the university's essential mission as an institution for teaching, learning, and the generation of new knowledge. This is the mission that big-time college sports often mock and, in some cases, deliberately undermine.

Big-time athletics departments seem to operate with little interest in scholastic matters beyond the narrow issue of individual eligibility. They act as though the athletes' academic performance is of little moment. The historic and vital link between playing field and classroom is all but severed in many institutions. Graduation rates for athletes in football and basketball at the top level remain dismally low - and in some notable cases are falling. While the Commission recognizes that graduation rates for athletes subject to the NCAA's more stringent eligibility standards effective in the mid-1990s are not yet available, we cannot ignore these facts: The graduation rate for football players in Division I-A fell 3 percent last year and 8 percent in the last five years. The rate for men's basketball players at Division I-A institutions remained stable over the last year, but fell 5 percent over the last five years.

Graduation rates for both were already abysmal. The most recent NCAA graduation rate report reveals that 48 percent of Division I-A football players and 34 percent of men's basketball players at Division I-A institutions earned degrees. The graduation rate for white football players was 55 percent, the lowest since the Student Right to Know Act mandated that such records be made public. Only 42 percent of black football players in Division I-A graduate, according to the most recent figures.

Derrick Z. Jackson, a columnist for the Boston Globe, analyzed the graduation rates of African-American players on the 64 teams in the 2001 NCAA men's basketball tournament. He reports these shameful figures from the latest NCAA graduation rate report: Twenty-six of the 64 teams graduated fewer than 35 percent of their African-American players. Seven teams had African-American graduation rates of zero. Furthermore, he writes, "Of the 64 teams, a school was nearly twice as likely to have suffered a decline in its African-American player graduation rate since the mid-1990s than enjoy an increase. The rate in the 2000 NCAA graduation rate report was lower for 35 schools than the rate in the 1996 report. It was higher for only 19 schools."

An academic official at a Division I-A institution told Jackson in regard to the 10 percent graduation rate of its men's basketball team, "We have not in the past had the same high expectations of athletes in academics and not held them to as high a standard in the classroom."

In the face of these facts, many defend the overall graduation rates of Division I-A football and basketball players because in some instances they compare favorably to those of the student body as a whole. The Commission is unimpressed with this comparison of apples and oranges. The fact is that the rest of the student body does not have the advantage of full scholarships and the often extensive academic support services extended to athletes. Data from the U.S. Department of Education indicate that approximately 75 percent of high school graduates who enroll full-time in college immediately after graduation (and continue full-time in the same institution) will receive a bachelor's degree within five and a half years. This group of young full-time students is the appropriate comparison for Division I-A athletes.

Athletes are often admitted to institutions where they do not have a reasonable chance to graduate. They are athlete-students, brought into the collegiate mix more as performers than aspiring undergraduates. Their ambiguous academic credentials lead to chronic classroom failures or chronic cover-ups of their academic deficiencies. As soon as they arrive on campus, they are immersed in the demands of their sports. Flagrant violation of the NCAA's rule restricting the time athletes must spend on their sport to 20 hours a week is openly acknowledged. The loophole most used is that of so-called "voluntary" workouts that don't count toward the time limit. In light of these circumstances, academic failure, far from being a surprise, is almost inevitable.

Sadly though, it comes as a rude surprise to many athletes yearning for a professional sports career to learn that the odds against success are astronomically high. Approximately 1 percent of NCAA men's basketball players and 2 percent of NCAA football players are drafted by NBA or NFL teams - and just being drafted is no assurance of a successful professional career. "Student-athletes" whose sole and now failed objective was to make the pros suddenly find themselves in a world that demands skills their universities did not require them to learn.

The academic support and tutoring athletes receive is too often designed solely to keep them eligible, rather than guide them toward a degree. The instances of tutors or other counselors bending and breaking rules on athletes' behalf is a well-publicized scandal. NCAA case books clearly reveal multiple infractions stemming from "tutoring" involving completing athletes' assignments, writing their papers, and pressuring professors for higher grades. Beyond the breaking of the rules is the breaking of the universities' implicit covenant with all students, athletes included, to educate them. Despite new NCAA satisfactory progress requirements effective in the mid-1990s, press and NCAA reports repeatedly document instances of athletes being diverted into courses that provide no basis for meaningful degrees. A faculty member at a Division I-A institution who has recently spoken out against the transgressions she has witnessed on her campus said, "There are students on our football team this year [2000] who will graduate when both faculty and students know they cannot read or write."

The Arms Race

NCAA President Cedric Dempsey, along with many others, has been outspoken about what he calls an ever growing "arms race" of spending and building to reach impractical financial goals. There is evidence to support these concerns. The NCAA's latest study of revenues and expenses at Divisions I and II institutions shows that just about 15 percent operate their athletics programs in the black. And deficits are growing every year.

"Clearly, the rising revenues on most campuses have been overwhelmed by even higher costs," Dempsey told the NCAA convention this year. "At the more than 970 NCAA member schools, we are bringing in just over $3 billion a year, but we're spending $4.1 billion in that same period."

A frantic, money-oriented modus operandi that defies responsibility dominates the structure of big-time football and basketball. The vast majority of these schools don't profit from their athletics programs: At over half the schools competing at the NCAA's Division I-A level in 1999, expenses exceeded revenues by an average of $3.3 million, an increase of 18 percent over the previous two years. On the other hand, for the 48 Division I-A institutions where revenues exceeded expenses, the average "profit" more than doubled, increasing 124 percent from $1.7 million to $3.8 million from 1997 to 1999. In considering all these data, moreover, it must be understood that they do not take into consideration the full costs of athletics programs, in that the reported expenses do not include capital expenditures, debt service, and many indirect program costs. Nevertheless, competitive balance is crumbling as the gap between the haves and the have-nots widens. While a relative few programs flourish, many others have chosen to discontinue sports other than football or basketball to make ends meet. Even some of the "haves" react to intense financial pressure to control costs by dropping so-called minor sports.

Too much in major college sports is geared to accommodating excess. Too many athletic directors and conference commissioners serve principally as money managers, ever alert to maximizing revenues. And too many have looked to their stadiums and arenas to generate more money. In the last seven years, capital expenditures at Division I-A institutions (e.g., construction or remodeling of athletics facilities, capital equipment, etc.) increased 250 percent. From east to west, north to south, the test becomes who can build the biggest stadiums, the most luxurious skyboxes. Every one of the 12 schools in one major conference has built a new football stadium or refurbished its old one in recent years. All seem to have assumed they could not afford to do otherwise. The building boom in college sports facilities now under way across the nation will cost well over $4 billion, with the resulting debt stretching far into the future.

The arms race isn't entered into by NCAA fiat. Institutions, not the NCAA, decide what's best for themselves, and for many that means joining the arms race. Presidents and trustees accept their athletics department's argument that they have to keep up with the competition. When one school has a $50 million athletic budget and another gets along on $9 million, how can there be any pretense of competitive parity? And what about on-campus parity? A five-part series, "The Price of Winning," published by The Philadelphia Inquirer in fall 2000 revealed average annual costs as high as nearly $90,000 per athlete at one Division I-A institution. At some Division I-A schools, annual costs per football player are well over $100,000. How can such expenses be justified when the average salary of fully tenured professors at U.S. public research universities barely exceeds $84,000?

And what does higher education sacrifice when a school names its football stadium after a pizza chain or its new stadium club after any other commercial product or corporation? To what purpose, indeed, are luxury skyboxes built? Not to satisfy any legitimate institutional need; certainly not to accommodate more students, in whose name and for whose benefit collegiate sports were originally introduced. The central goal is to garner greater fiscal windfalls from wealthy boosters and alumni willing to spend thousands of dollars to acquire not only luxury boxes but choice seating throughout the stadium, while students are often relegated to the end zone if they can get tickets at all. Interestingly, repeated studies indicate that most contributions to colleges and universities come from those to whom athletic records have little import. Big athletic boosters, conversely, are far less likely to support other aspects of the universities' life and mission, again according to these studies.

There is a tangible downside to this arms race for most schools, that is, for the majority whose big-time programs are less successful and cannot pay for themselves. They must siphon funds from general revenue to try to keep up with the Joneses. Pursuit of success in this context jeopardizes not only the universities' moral heritage but also their financial security.

A glaring symptom of the arms race run amok is the salaries of so-called "star" coaches. At last count, some 30 college football and men's basketball coaches are paid a million dollars or more a year. A few are nearing twice that, or are already there. The irony is not lost on the critics. A college provost points out that his school spent more money hiring the head football coach than it did hiring five department heads - combined. A trustee laments that his university signed the basketball coach to a salary three times greater than its president's. Many players join the complaining chorus when they compare their scholarships to their coaches' salaries, and when their coaches break contracts and jump from team to team - just as their professional counterparts do. Some dissatisfied players have begun to organize in an attempt to increase their clout and have aligned with the United Steelworkers of America for help in doing so.

But coaches have quite a different perspective. They consider the pressures put on their teams' performance when football and basketball revenues are expected to produce the lion's share of the athletic department's budget. They weigh the dismissal rate of those in their ranks who do not win - or do not win soon enough, or big enough - in a win-at-any-cost environment. And they conclude that their salaries are justified.

The logical question for academia emerges: Is there any other department at a university where so much money is spent and justified primarily by reference to the nonacademic performance of its students, staff or instructors? That is the crux of the matter. Coaches' salaries, like numerous athletics department expenditures, are considered as though they have nothing to do with the traditions and principles of the universities in which they are housed. This lack of academic connection is the fundamental corruption of the original rationale for both sports and coaches on campus: that they are integral components of a well-rounded student life and a useful complement to the universities' other central pursuits. What we have now is a separate culture of performers and trainers, there to provide bread and circuses but otherwise unconnected to the institution that supports them.

Commercialization

Over the last decade, the commercialization of college sports has burgeoned. Vastly larger television deals and shoe contracts have been signed, and more and more space in stadiums and arenas has been sold to advertisers. In too many respects, big-time college sports today more closely resemble the commercialized model appropriate to professional sports than they do the academic model. The NCAA's Dempsey warned the NCAA membership recently that "the level of cynicism over the commercialization of our most visible athletics programs has reached epidemic proportions."

Beginning in 2002, CBS will pay the NCAA$6.2 billion over an 11-year period for broadcast rights primarily for its Division I men's basketball tournament. Television accounts for nearly 80 percent of the NCAA's revenue. When all sources of revenues are accounted for, the Division I men's basketball tournament alone generates well over 90 percent of the NCAA's operating budget. And much of the television money is distributed based on winning basketball games. The NCAA's revenue distribution formula for its new CBS contract values each win in the Division I men's basketball tournament at $780,000. Thus, the stakes for a foul shot to win a game in the tournament will exceed three-quarters of a million dollars. The players are fully aware of these economics, and they feel the pressure.

With the money comes manipulation. Schools and conferences prostrate themselves to win and get on television. There is a rush now to approve cable and television requests for football and basketball games on weekday evenings, on Sundays, in the morning, and late at night. So much for classroom commitments. On the field, the essential rhythms of the games are sacrificed as play is routinely interrupted for television commercials, including those pushing the alcoholic beverages that contribute to the binge drinking that mars campus life.

Arguments that higher education should be above this commercial fray largely go unheeded, but concern is growing over the economic realities. The television money, when parceled around, never seems to be enough, and the benefits are never evenly distributed. The rich - that is, the schools more in demand by network schedule-makers - get richer, the poor go deeper into debt. Disparities have widened to the point where many underfunded programs trying to compete at the top level are perpetual losers, both on and off the field.

The winners are primarily those institutions that belong to the founding conferences in the Bowl Championship Series (BCS), namely, the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), the Big East, the Big Ten, the Big 12, the Pacific-10, and the Southeastern Conference (SEC). The BCS is a consortium originally designed and instituted in the early 1990s by conference commissioners to control Division I-A postseason football. The NCAA has no role in the BCS, and even presidents of BCS member institutions are marginalized: for negotiation of BCS television contracts, for example, only conference commissioners and representatives of the television network are at the table, with bowl representatives brought in for the revenue distribution discussions that follow. A small group of conference commissioners controls distribution of all Division I-A postseason football revenues. Conference commissioners are rewarded for successfully generating postseason revenues and so have little incentive to consider other priorities. In allowing commercial interests to prevail over academic concerns and traditions, presidents have abdicated their responsibilities.

Meanwhile, equipment manufacturers inundate prominent coaches and universities with goods and money in exchange for exposure - advertisements of all kinds on campuses, stadiums, and field houses, and logos on uniforms, shoes, and every other conceivable piece of equipment.

There is a clear and sharp message in such deals: This is business; show us the money. Over the last decade, the amounts of money involved have grown tremendously. The University of Michigan's latest contract with Nike, for example, doubled its cash payments from the shoe and apparel company to $1.2 million a year. With royalties, uniforms, and equipment added to that, the seven-year deal is expected to be worth $25 million to $28 million.

The sellout has made at least one longtime manufacturer's representative openly disdainful. He told the presidents on the Commission that they and their counterparts had "sold their souls" to him in the 1970s when he came bearing gifts, and it was their lack of courage to make changes in the interim that put them so deeply into the morass.

The influence of sneaker companies is now pervasive in high school sports as well, both in schools and in summer basketball leagues. These companies have become part of the college recruiting process in many instances, and contribute to the special treatment of athletes from a young age. This special treatment raises players' expectations, shields them from the consequences of their own actions, and teaches them that the rules applied to everyone else don't necessarily apply to them. It exploits athletes as they are eased through high school and college, finishing their years in school with no semblance of the education needed to negotiate life when their playing days are over.

High school sports today can reflect the worst of their collegiate counterparts. In addition to commercial influences, recruitment and transfer of high school players is far too common, leading to disjointed academic experiences and absurdly dominant teams in some communities. Academic compromises are made for high school athletes as well, leaving them with a diploma but ill-prepared for college-level work. And throughout high school sports, as throughout colleges and universities, the young athletes' ultimate goal has increasingly become a successful career at the professional level, with all the single-minded focus that requires.

College sports as an enterprise with vested commercial interests contradicts the NCAA's stated purpose: to maintain intercollegiate athletics "as an integral part of the educational program, and the athlete as an integral part of the student body, [and to] retain a clear line of demarcation between intercollegiate athletics and professional sports." The more that line is crossed, the more likely government intervention in the form of IRS challenges to the institutions' tax-exempt status becomes. Current proposed IRS regulations would tax as "business related income" revenues derived from such arrangements as "naming rights" for games or from contracts with such vendors as soft drink companies for exclusive rights in stadiums or arenas.

The NCAA Manual also says that postseason play is meant to be controlled to "prevent unjustified intrusions on the time student-athletes devote to their academic programs, and to protect [them] from exploitation by professional and commercial enterprises." Yet the number of postseason bowl games has grown from 18 to 25 over the past 10 years, and the men's Division I basketball tournament is three weeks long. Seasons now extend from August until January for football, and from October to April - nearly six months - for basketball.

Sports as big business is suitable for the marketplace and has proved to be a profitable way to tap into the national psyche. Sports as big business for colleges and universities, however, is in direct conflict with nearly every value that should matter for higher education. In the year 2001, the big business of big-time sports all but swamps those values, making a mockery of those professing to uphold them.