Keeping Faith: Reform

Keeping Faith with the Student-Athlete: A New Model for Intercollegiate Athletics

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• Letter of Transmittal
• Introduction
• Reform
• A New Model
• Putting Principles into Action
• Principles for Action
• Appendix A: Acknowledgements
• Appendix B: Meeting Particpants
• Download a PDF of this publication

Reform

THE NEED FOR REFORM

As our nation approaches a new century, the demand for reform of intercollegiate athletics has escalated dramatically. Educational and athletics leaders face the challenge of controlling costs, restraining recruiting, limiting time demands, and restoring credibility and dignity to the term “student-athlete.” In the midst of these pressures, it is easy to lose sight of the achievements of intercollegiate sports and easier still to lose sight of why these games are played.

The appeal of competitive games is boundless. In ancient times, men at war laid down their weapons to compete in the Olympic games. Today, people around the globe put aside their daily cares to follow the fortunes of their teams in the World Cup. In the United States, the Super Bowl, the World Series, college football and the NCAA basketball tournament command the attention of millions. Sports have helped break down bigotry and prejudice in American life. On the international scene, they have helped integrate East and West, socialist and capitalist. The passion for sport is universal, shared across time and continents.

Games and sports are educational in the best sense of that word because they teach the participant and the observer new truths about testing oneself and others, about the enduring values of challenge and response, about teamwork, discipline and perseverance. Above all, intercollegiate contests — at any level of skill — drive home a fundamental lesson: Goals worth achieving will be attained only through effort, hard work, sacrifice, and sometimes even these will not be enough to overcome the obstacles life places in our path.

The value and success of college sports should not be overlooked. They are the foundation of our optimism for the future. At the 828 colleges and universities which comprise the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), over 254,000 young men and women participate in 21 different sports each year in about one quarter of a million contests. At the huge majority of these institutions, virtually all of these young athletes participate in these contests without any evidence of scandal or academic abuse. This record is one in which student-athletes and university administrators can take pride and from which the Knight Foundation Commission takes heart.

All of the positive contributions that sports make to higher education, however, are threatened by disturbing patterns of abuse, particularly in some big-time programs. These patterns are grounded in institutional indifference, presidential neglect, and the growing commercialization of sport combined with the urge to win at all costs. The sad truth is that on too many campuses big-time revenue sports are out of control.

The assumption of office by a new executive director of the NCAA coincides with renewed vigor for major reform on the part of athletics administrators and university presidents.

Reform efforts are well underway. One conference has voted to bar from athletics participation all students who do not meet NCAA freshman-eligibility standards. One state has decided to require all students in publicly supported institutions to maintain a “C” average in order to participate in extracurricular activities, including intercollegiate sports. Judging by the tone of recent NCAA conventions, concern for the university’s good name and the welfare of the student-athlete — irrespective of gender, race or sport — will be the centerpiece of athletics administration as we approach a new century. We do not want to interfere with that agenda. We hope to advance it.

THE PROBLEM

The problems described to the Commission — in more than a year of meetings and discussions with athletics directors, faculty representatives, coaches, athletes, conference leaders, television officials and accrediting associations - are widespread. They are not entirely confined to big schools ... or to football or basketball ... or to men’s sports. But they are most apparent within major athletics programs and are concentrated most strongly in those sports for which collegiate participation serves the talented few as an apprenticeship for professional careers.

Recruiting, the bane of the college coach’s life, is one area particularly susceptible to abuse. While most institutions and coaches recruit ethically and within the rules, some clearly do not. Recruiting abuses are the most frequent cause of punitive action by the NCAA. Even the most scrupulous coaching staffs are trapped on a recruiting treadmill, running through an interminable sequence of letters, telephone calls and visits. The cost of recruiting a handful of basketball players each year exceeds, on some campuses, the cost of recruiting the rest of the freshman class.

Athletics programs are given special, often unique, status within the university; the best coaches receive an income many times that of most full professors; some coaches succumb to the pressure to win with recruiting violations and even the abuse of players; boosters respond to athletic performance with gifts and under-the-table payments; faculty members, presidents and other administrators, unable to control the enterprise, stand by as it undermines the institution’s goals in the name of values alien to the best the university represents. These programs appear to promise a quick route to revenue, recognition and renown for the university. But along that road, big-time athletics programs often take on a life of their own. Their intrinsic educational value, easily lost in their use to promote extra-institutional goals, becomes engulfed by the revenue stream they generate and overwhelmed by the accompanying publicity. Now, instead of the institution alone having a stake in a given team or sport, the circle of involvement includes television networks and local stations that sell advertising time, the corporations and local businesses buying the time, the boosters living vicariously through the team’s success, the local economies critically dependent on the big game, and the burgeoning population of fans who live and die with the team’s fortunes.

In this crucible, the program shifts from providing an exciting avenue of expression and enjoyment for the athletes and their fans to maximizing the revenue and institutional prestige that can be generated by a handful of highly visible teams. The athletics director can become the CEO of a fair-sized corporation with a significant impact on the local economy. The “power coach,” often enjoying greater recognition throughout the state than most elected officials, becomes chief operating officer of a multi-million dollar business. Within the last decade, big-time athletics programs have taken on all of the trappings of a major entertainment enterprise. In the search for television revenues, traditional rivalries have been tossed aside in conference realignments, games have been rescheduled to satisfy broadcast preferences, the number of games has multiplied, student-athletes have been put on the field at all hours of the day and night, and university administrators have fallen to quarreling among themselves over the division of revenues from national broadcasting contracts.

But the promise of easy access to renown and revenue often represents fool’s gold. Recognition on the athletic field counts for little in the academic community. Expenses are driven by the search for revenues and the revenue stream is consumed, at most institutions, in building up the program to maintain the revenue. Renown for athletic exploits can be a twoedged sword if the university is forced to endure the public humiliation of sanctions brought on by rules violations. Above all, the fragile institution of the university often finds itself unable to stand up against the commitment, the energy and the passion underlying modern intercollegiate athletics.

In the circumstances we have described, it is small wonder that three out of four Americans believe that television dollars, not administrators, control college sports. But the underlying problems existed long before the advent of television. A 1929 report from the Carnegie Fund for the Advancement of Teaching identified many of the difficulties still with us today. In college athletics, it said, recruiting had become corrupt, professionals had replaced amateurs, education was being neglected, and commercialism reigned. That document still rings true today, reminding us that it is an oversimplification to blame today’s problems on television alone. Even so, the lure of the television dollars has unquestionably added a new dimension to the problem and must be addressed.

At the root of the problem is a great reversal of ends and means. Increasingly, the team, the game, the season and “the program” — all intended as expressions of the university’s larger purposes — gain ascendancy over the ends that created and nurtured them. Non-revenue sports receive little attention and women’s programs take a back seat. As the educational context for collegiate athletics competition is pushed aside, what remains is, too often, a selfjustifying enterprise whose connection with learning is tainted by commercialism and incipient cynicism.

In the short term, the human price for this lack of direction is exacted from the athletes whose talents give meaning to the system. But the ultimate cost is paid by the university and by society itself. If the university is not itself a model of ethical behavior, why should we expect such behavior from students or from the larger society? Pervasive though these problems are, they are not universal. This is true even if the universe is restricted to the roughly 300 institutions playing football or basketball at the highest levels. But they are sufficiently common that it is no longer possible to conclude they represent the workings of a handful of misguided individuals or a few “rotten apples.” One recent analysis indicates that fully one-half of Division I-A institutions (the 106 colleges and universities with the most competitive and expensive football programs) were the object of sanctions of varying severity from the NCAA during the 1980s. Other institutions, unsanctioned, graduate very few student-athletes in revenue-producing sports.

The problems are so deep-rooted and long-standing that they must be understood to be systemic. They can no longer be swept under the rug or kept under control by tinkering around the edges. Because these problems are so widespread, nothing short of a new structure holds much promise for restoring intercollegiate athletics to their proper place in the university. This report of the Knight Foundation Commission is designed to suggest such a structure.

We are at a critical juncture with respect to the intercollegiate athletics system. We believe college sports face three possible futures:

• higher education will put its athletics house in order from within;
• athletics order will be imposed from without and college sports will be regulated by government; or
• abuse — unchecked — will spread, destroying not only the intrinsic value of intercollegiate athletics but higher education’s claim to the high moral ground it should occupy. Concern for the health of both intercollegiate athletics and American higher education makes the choice clear.

FOCUS ON STUDENTS

Even clearer, in the Commission’s view, is the need to start with the student-athlete. The reforms we deem essential start with respect for the dignity of the young men and women who compete and the conviction that they occupy a legitimate place as students on our campuses. If we can get that right, everything else will fall into place. If we cannot, the rest of it will be all wrong.

Regulations governing the recruitment of student-athletes — including letters-of-intent, and how and under what conditions coaches may contact athletes — take up 30 pages of the NCAA Manual. But there is no requirement that the prospective student-athlete be found academically admissible before accepting a paid campus visit. A prospective player can very easily agree to attend an institution even though the admissions office does not know of the student’s existence. Similarly, student-athletes deemed eligible in the fall can compete throughout the year, generally regardless of their academic performance in the first term.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that there are few academic constraints on the studentathlete. Non-academic prohibitions, on the other hand, are remarkable. Athletics personnel are not permitted to offer rides to student-athletes. University officials are not permitted to invite a student-athlete home for dinner on the spur of the moment. Alumni are not allowed to encourage an athlete to attend their alma mater.

Each of these prohibitions — and the many others in the NCAA Manual — can be understood individually as a response to a specific abuse. But they add up to a series of checks and balances on the student-athlete as an athlete that have nothing to do with the student-athlete as a student. Some rules have been developed to manage potential abuse in particular sports, at particular schools, or in response to the particular circumstances of individual athletes. Whatever the origin of these regulations, the administration of intercollegiate athletics is now so overburdened with legalism and detail that the NCAA Manual more nearly resembles the IRS Code than it does a guide to action.

It is time to get back to first principles. Intercollegiate athletics exist first and foremost for the student-athletes who participate, whether male or female, majority or minority, whether they play football in front of 50,000 or field hockey in front of their friends. It is the university’s obligation to educate all of them, an obligation perhaps more serious because the demands we place on them are so much more severe. Real reform must begin here.