Scenario for scandal

...First of all, shrinking enrollments, sparked by a large decline in the college age population and strapped state budgets, have created a grave fiscal crisis for many universities...

...As this brief account suggests, the university's role in providing sports entertainment reflected the democratic outlook and hard-nosed practicality of many university constituents and supporters, especially in frontier and developing regions of the country...

...Nevertheless, alumni domination of sports, reinforced by the participation of local business and legislators, did not go completely unchallenged...

...The major problem in college sports today is not commercialism-it is the exploitation of athletes and the proliferation of illicit practices which dilute educational stand-ards...

...Not only have universities become desperate for new sources of revenue, but they have increasingly resorted to sophisticated "marketing" strategies to try to maintain enrollment levels and a high degree of public visibility...

...The disparity between the breadth of the abuses revealed, and the admitted insufficiency of strategies for reform, suggests the need to develop new ways of looking at the role of sports in higher education...

...Roscoe Browne, Jr., low graduation rates of athletes, particularly black athletes, have become a major public issue...

...But what they were not able to counteract, in the revenue-producing programs, was an intensification of training and competition for all athletes, a process that rendered the academic rewards of the athletic scholarship problematical indeed...

...At some institutions, especially private colleges in the East, the tendency to exploit public interest in football to the fullest was partially checked by efforts to attract academically and financially elite student bodies, and to develop internationally respected research faculties and graduate schools...

...The important thing is that the athlete be remunerated fairly and have the opportunity to gain skills from a university environment without undue competition from a physically and psychologically demanding full-time job...

...The phenomenon itself is not new...

...Athletes not graduating in the late seventies and eighties increasingly lacked the option of working in mines, factories, or construction jobs at decent, trade union wages...

...Indeed, the very features of the state institutions which made them most democratic-their responsiveness to public opinion, their commitment to making higher education available to broad sections of the populace, their insistence on a practical justification for the universities' existence-led them to assume major responsibility for the provision of sports entertainment for their states and regions...

...Football became the major instrument of publicity," Frederick Rudolph writes, "because both on and off the campus, it was the sport that inspired the most enthusiasm, elicited the most interest, and brought into the camp of college and university supporters people for whom the idea of going to college was out of the question, but for whom the idea of supporting the team was a matter of course...

...Many universities are currently deriving substantial benefits from sports programs that depend on the labor of athletes drawn from the poorest sections of America's population...

...College presidents, in the post-World War II years, found themselves having to mediate between complex arrays of interest groups, some with a stake in producing winning teams, some with a stake in attracting more skilled and sophisticated students and faculty members...

...WHAT CAN be done...

...How athletes with limited academic skills and poor high school preparation were supposed to maintain "normal academic progress," while enduring this kind of regimen is an issue no NCAA halftime show has ever satisfactorily explained...

...Many educators, coaches, and sportswriters have become convinced that the dilution of educational standards, the exploitation of student athletes, and the proliferation of illegal recruiting practices are now normal features of revenue-producing sports at American universities...

...But solving the fiscal crisis of the universities on the backs of America's poor and minorities is not, in the long run, a tenable solution...

...According to Frederick Rudolph, discussing the rise of college football in the late nineteenth century, "few movements so captured the colleges and universities...

...The recruitment of black students by major universities, the rapid expansion of university enrollment among all sections of the population, and a climate of student activism inspired by the war in Vietnam, limited the faculty's power to maintain and enforce academic standards, and temporarily loosened administrative control at many institutions...

...The contrast between the allegedly high moral ideals of American education and the dynamics of commercialized college sports was highlighted by a study undertaken by the American Council on Education in the mid 1970s...

...Such a pattern is impossible to reverse, especially when it has resulted in huge investments of fixed and liquid capital (stadiums, fieldhouses, athletic dormitories, weight rooms, scholarship funds, coaches' salaries, etc...

...That and the anticipated windfall in revenue from televised sports will accelerate tendencies toward professionalism even further in schools where it is already established, and will encourage new institutions to pursue that route...

...The current amateur system, despite its moral and educational flaws, enables universities to hire their athletic labor at minimal cost...

...In the early 1950s and '60s, some institutions de-emphasized big-time sports (particularly after a series of damaging basketball scandals), some placed them under tighter supervision, others let them evolve virtually unchecked...

...explicitly, in the case of coaches, and implicitly, in the recruitment and maintenance of athletes...

...At the Ivy League colleges, which assumed the mission of training a social elite, popular sports programs managed to survive without the recruitment of semi-literate athletes or illegal cash payments for their services...

...This may well require that scholarships be extended over five or six years, including summers...

...IN the LATE sixties and early seventies, however, dramatic cultural and demographic changes within American universities, coincident with a rapidly expanding television market for college sports, loosened existing constraints on the professionalization of college athletics...

...With the support of concerned educators, parents, and civil rights leaders, and with the help from organized labor, the college athlete, truly a sleeping giant, will someday speak out and demand what is rightly his-and hers-a fair share of the revenue created by their hard work...

...At institutions where faculty power and self-confidence were limited, the alumni take-over of sports was particularly pronounced, at once superseding and shaping the professionalization of coaching and athletic management...

...Boxing has always been typecast as...

...At last, the American college and university had discovered something that all sorts of people cared about passionately...

...Insensitive to many of the black athletes they re-cruited, who came from more impoverished backgrounds than most of their white players, coaches and administrators sometimes insulated black athletes from the mainstream of the campus experience, creating elaborate subterfuges to maintain their eligibility...

...the red light district of sports,'" wrote Dave Anderson, a sports col-umnist for the New York Times...

...So many athletes have come forward with tales of transcript forging, bribes, and under-the-table payments that even sports journalists, a notoriously hard-bitten and cynical crew, have been shaken...

...but most are at the mercy of far wealthier and sophisticated adults who know that good players are a dime a dozen in the rubble-strewn lots and schoolyards of "The Other America...

...But those connected with sports, television, and academia do not doubt that a huge windfall is on the horizon.'' Resistance to professionalization, largely centered in the faculty, is likely to weaken when sports-generated revenues are presented as an alternative to layoffs, increased course-loads, and assaults on tenure...

...The provision of sports entertainment for the general public has been an important function of the American university system for over one hundred years...

...But the seriousness of the problem has intensified in recent years because of the gradual evolution of the American economy away from a dependence on heavy industry into high technology enterprises and an advanced service sector requiring a professionally trained, literate labor force...

...But at land grant colleges in the midwestern and southern states, founded to provide practical training to fanners or specialized technical education conducive to the expansion of local industries, university administrators "often discovered that athletic victories were more important than anything else in convincing reluctant legislators to open the public purse...

...By 1900, the relationship between football and public relations had been firmly established and almost everywhere acknowledged as one of the sport's major justifications...

...No one can predict with any confidence how much money will be raised now that cable and pay-for-view television have begun to compete with the networks to show football and basketball games," a New York Times reporter observed...

...It is the responsibility of educators, civil rights leaders, and concerned citizens to see that these young people get a fair return for their labor both in terms of direct remuneration, and in terms of career preparation for a life outside sports...

...When I first began reviewing the history of college sports, what immediately attracted my attention was how quickly American universities became involved in providing sports entertainment for their students and the general public...

...Indeed, several developments in the economy, the media, and in higher education itself suggest that profes-sionalization in college sports will accelerate in coming years, placing pressures on college athletes fundamentally incompatible with educational achievement...

...The first thing is to dispense with all illusions about "amateurism'' in big-time college sports...

...But not a single coach, faculty member, or administrator who participated in the Council's study expressed confidence that such procedures would significantly reduce abuses at schools where commercialized sports programs were well established...

...The result is a huge pool of highly skilled athletes, without the education, training, and sophistication to survive in most college environments, and who are thus totally dependent on coaches and athletic administrators for income and psychological support...

...By the early 1970s, bowl games, post-season tournaments and "holiday classics" had multiplied to the point where almost every player in a revenue-producing sport had to miss more than ten days of classes and their entire Christmas read-ing period (in addition to practicing three hours a day all year round...

...Although a national coaches committee survey, completed in 1976, claimed that only twelve percent of the schools cheat (a figure which may be plausible if one includes schools that do not give athletic scholarships), many players and coaches have insisted that the figure should be raised to ninety percent if one concentrates on Division I institutions which field nationally competitive football and basketball programs...

...So quickly did the general public seize upon college football as a subject of enthusiasm and identification (aided by the proliferation of mass circulation newspapers) that university presidents, operating in a climate not always conducive to intellectual concerns, began consciously to use the sport as a vehicle for attracting financial and political support, whether from alumni, state legislators, or prospective students and contributors...

...Athletic departments took advantage of the "liberalized" climate to pursue the best athletes available, irrespective of racial background or level of academic preparation, and to reap the financial rewards to be won from expanded televison coverage...

...Black athletes, after an initial period of accommodation, ehgaged in protests that effectively eliminated double standards of treatment at most schools...

...Then there is the fiscal crisis of the universities...

...Let me try to present a framework that will explain why college sports scandals have been endemic since the late nineteenth century and why they are becoming particularly blatant and visible now, followed by proposals for some solutions to the problems faced by athletes in revenue-producing sports...

...Call college athletics the 'green light district of sports' now...

...Finally, deteriorating conditions of life among the poorer strata of the American population, from which a disproportionate share of successful athletes derives, renders the college athletic work force even more vulnerable to exploitation...

...Such a proposal, I suspect, will not be easy to implement...

...But thanks to the efforts of people like Dr...

...In states where populist suspicions of "higher learning" were deeply rooted, fielding a football team sometimes came to be regarded as the university's most important single cultural activity...

...But boxing is almost a boys choir now in contrast to the garbage dump that so much of college athletics has become...

...Secondly, the growth of cable television promises to bring about a vast increase in revenue to schools fielding successful sports programs, offering powerful temptations to institutions battered by inflation, budget cuts, and declining enrollments...

...To put the matter bluntly, coaches and athletic administrators, with virtually no opposition from the NCAA, launched a "speed-up'' in college athletics which made it increasingly difficult to participate in revenue-producing programs and graduate in four years...

...For many institutions, especially those without strong academic reputations, developing a nationally competitive sports program, especially in basketball, represents a quick way to get public exposure and free advertising, along with the associated benefits of improved campus morale and increased alumni interest...

...Dave Meg-gysey, attending Syracuse University in the early 1960s, was one of only three varsity football players in his entering class who graduated in four years...

...After finding that the governance of athletic departments at many institutions had become separated from the control of faculties and college presidents, the Council tried to develop guidelines and procedures that would help universities subject athletic departments to greater fiscal and academic accountability...

...Even the land-grant colleges were partially affected by this trend...

...It took some time for deteriorating educational prospects for athletes to capture the attention of educators and civil rights leaders...

...But in the large state universities, where the faculty often lacked the authority to challenge professionalization or insist on high standards of admission, the business and entertainment dimension of college football grew virtually unchecked, inspiring the construction of huge football stadiums on many campuses in the boom years of the 1920s and producing a chain of scandals that provoked the Carnegie Commission to issue a report in 1929 recommending the de-emphasis of college sports...

...The result seems to have been a system in which the majority of institutions kept commercialism in check, while the big powers ran semi-professional programs with as much discretion as competitive conditions would allow...

...But despite the egalitarian ethos that pervaded college sports, athletic departments proved far more vulnerable to the domination of'' special interests'' and powerful local elites than the academic divisions of the universities...

...Indeed, all predicted that the ethical and educational problems connected with college sports would become more, rather than less troublesome in subsequent years...

...Many state institutions, responding to the technical and cultural needs of their regions, undertook impressive upgrading of the faculties and research bodies, creating constituencies within the faculties, and within the community at large, who pressed for the raising of academic standards...

...Under-the-table payments, illegal recruiting, and fictional class attendance by athletes had become visible in many institutions by the 1890s...

...By the 1890s, college athletics had come largely under the domination of the alumni, who alone possessed the funds and the business expertise to promote a spectacle possessing consistent mass appeal...

...low-paying service jobs, and public assistance to make ends meet...

...As faculty members launched a generally successful struggle to upgrade their status and reduce the involvement of non-academicians (particularly businessmen and politicians) in the day-to-day life of the university, their efforts helped create a climate, at least at some institutions, conducive to a reduced emphasis on big-time sports...

...Not only has the percentage of Americans living in poverty gone up in the late 1970s and 1980s, but urban school systems have sharply deteriorated resulting in astronomical levels of unemployment among minority teenagers...

...The combined effects of the movement toward eaualitv in sports for women," George Hanford, President of the College Board wrote, "declining student enrollments, and tax reduction legislation are bound to keep the economic squeeze on all facets of higher education, which will in turn put even greater premium on television dollars for sports and so exacerbate the ethical problems in the recruitment and subsidy of television revenue-producing athletes...

...and the acquisition of lucrative television contracts...

...But though strong voices for reform were raised by many college presidents and one president of the United States (Theodore Roosevelt), efforts to assure that athletes functioned as parts of the normal student population succeeded primarily at institutions which did not need sports as a primary fund-raising mechanism...

...Harry Edwards and Dr...

...Minimally, scholarships in revenue-producing sports should be designed to extend until graduation, rather than covering only four years of athletic eligibility, and should include guarantees of tutoring, counseling, and proper medical care...

...The very few of them who are superstars can work out a good bargain...

...Educators must therefore shift the focus of their reform efforts...

...Stories in the media documenting the tragic fate of athletes who have completed their eligibility without receiving their degree have proliferated...

...By the mid 1920s, athletic departments with large football programs, with few exceptions, had evolved almost entirely autonomously of the academic divisions of the university, and commanded impressive political power and financial backing...

...At some state institutions (many of which are the leading powers in the College Football Association) this function has historically been perceived by legislators and the general public as equaling, if not superseding, academic training...

...If they failed to graduate, or acquire quantitative and communicative skills, they were often forced to resort to a combination of "hustling" (selling drugs, running numbers, etc...

...The cross pressures had highly varied results...

...At institutions where the profits are particularly large (such as Texas A & M, which can afford to pay its football coach $280,000 a year) scholarships should also provide salaries that extend beyond room, board, and tuition...

...One consequence of the university's entry into the sphere of sports entertainment was professionalization...

...Sports, perhaps now more than ever, are perceived by youngsters in poor communities as their best chance of getting into the mainstream of the economy and are approached with a desperate, single-minded intensity...

...Despite this fact, neither the American Council on Education, nor the NCAA, nor any other important body in higher education has offered a realistic plan to protect athletes from exploitation or to reduce corruption in college sports...