Posted on: Sunday, July 01, 2001
Editorial
Sports and universities still an uncertain mix
"We're not in the entertainment business, nor are we a minor league for professional sports," intoned the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame University.
But Hesburgh is also co-chairman of a commission whose just-released findings indicate, for most high-level college athletic programs, quite the opposite:
• The largest college athletic programs graduated just 34 percent of their basketball players and 48 percent of their football players (42 percent for black football players).
• Athletic departments at the NCAA's 970 schools are bringing in just over $3 billion a year but spending $4.1 billion.
Those numbers make it hard to suppose that education is the top priority here.
One widespread perception is that talented athletes use universities to catapult themselves into lucrative professional careers. The reality is that only a tiny percentage of college players make the pros.
Another perception is that the major athletic schools recruit athletes to boost their institutional fame and fortune and then cut most loose with nothing to build their futures but some gray T-shirts.
Zeroing in on such questions, the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics has recommended sweeping changes to narrow what it calls "the widening chasm between higher education's ideals and big-time college sports."
Perhaps its most controversial recommendation is to ban teams from lucrative postseason games if half their players or more fail to graduate. That proposal has many sports observers cynically predicting it will never leave the starting gate because big-time college sports are simply too popular and, with their TV contracts, too powerful.
While that may be true, it's also a proposal we'd bet would work if it were firmly and uniformly applied. What college team would fail to tutor its athletes if too high a failure rate meant missing a bowl game?
According to a recent book, "The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values," by James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen, statistics show that university communities are making greater sacrifices than they may realize in order to feed their sports beasts:
• Universities must ration the limited number of places in each entering class. The more athletes recruited, the fewer non-athlete scholars.
• The athletic "class" increasingly is setting itself apart from the rest of the student body, as shown by athletic dorms, training tables, declining interest in classwork — and steadily declining attendance by students at athletic events.
• The pressures of commercialization, "some of which are less a threat to the budget than to the institution's mission," have led the commission to recommend an end to Nike and Reebok logos on uniforms.
None of this is to suggest that student athletes are somehow "bad," or that college sports can't contribute to a well-rounded education and character. But the Knight report makes clear that the contribution of intercollegiate athletics to the achievement of educational goals is steadily diminishing.
The sports beast is flourishing in many ways at the expense of its host, competing with the core teaching-research function of the university — a function that must promote educational values such as learning for its own sake, and a strong sense of obligation to provide educational opportunity to those who will make the most of it.
When the good of society is increasingly dependent on the effective development and deployment of intellectual capital, the proper place of athletics on the university campus increasingly becomes a burning issue.
