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Chapter 6 The Governance of Intercollegiate Athletics During my term as chairman of the Big Ten Conference Council of Presidents (i.e., its board of directors), the conference celebrated its one hundredth anniversary in 1995 with a black-tie gala in the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago. Exactly a century earlier, in the same hotel, the presidents of several major midwestern universities had come together, under the leadership of an earlier Michigan president, James Angell, to form the Western Conference. Their goal was to put into place policies and rules to address the corruption that was then plaguing college football. (It was rumored at the time that most of the players on the Michigan football team were not even students.) The early years of the Western Conference, which eventually became known as the Big Ten, were difficult. The famous Michigan football coach Fielding Yost, concerned about the conference rules that forbid him to accept outside income, went over Angell’s head to lobby the Michigan regents successfully to withdraw from the conference.1 Eventually, sanity returned and Michigan rejoined, albeit with occasional lapses, such as when Michigan lobbied to prevent Michigan State from joining in the 1950s. At about the same time that the Big Ten Conference was taking shape, there was action at the national level, initiated by President Theodore Roosevelt, to form an alliance to control injuries and brutality in college football. The result was the National Collegiate Athletics Association, the organization that today has the major responsibility for protecting the integrity and the revenue stream of college sports. 104 Both the conference structure and the broader NCAA federation are important elements in the current organization and culture of intercollegiate athletics. But so too are the internal mechanisms universities use to govern and control intercollegiate athletics. Intercollegiate athletics today is a highly political enterprise , with an ever-changing balance of forces involving coaches and athletic directors, faculty, presidents and governing boards, conferences and the NCAA, the sports media and the entertainment industry, government and public opinion. This chapter will focus on the governance of intercollegiate athletics, its politics and its politicians. The Command, Control, and Communications Hierarchy At the competitive level, the responsibility for program control and integrity rests firmly with the coach. Competitive sports, by nature, demand a clear sense of discipline and direction from the head coach, and in many sports, this discipline has become almost an obsession. Many coaches seek to gain total authority over their programs and their athletes—at least until they run into trouble, when they seek help from all quarters. In the next level of institutional control, the athletic director is responsible for the administration of the athletic department, for example, hiring and firing coaches, managing budgets and athletic facilities, and interfacing with organizations such as the athletic conference and the NCAA. In the past, many athletic directors have attempted to rule the athletic department as a feudal empire, separate from the university, subject to its own laws and practices, with little need or desire to consult with others. The dictatorial, command -control-communications structure of most athletic departments stands in sharp contrast to the highly consultative, collegial, and occasionally anarchical culture of the academic units of the university. Many members of the faculty believe that the true control of intercollegiate athletics should be their responsibility, either through specific bodies such as faculty athletics boards or through more general faculty governance. After all, the principal particiThe Governance of Intercollegiate Athletics • 105 pants are students—or at least one would hope—and these are of concern to the faculty. Faculty members reason further that intercollegiate athletics are presumed to have an educational benefit. Yet, in reality, institutional control does not rest at this level. While many faculty members are concerned about athletics, few have the time to understand the intricacies of contemporary intercollegiate athletics. And rare are those among the faculty who are willing to accept the responsibility and accountability that must accompany the authority for true control. University governing boards sometimes devote unusual attention to the control, and even occasionally the management, of intercollegiate athletics. Since this is the most visible element of most universities, the more political board members are naturally as attracted to athletics as moths to a flame. Yet, here again, the level of understanding, experience, and accountability of most board members is rather limited and not well aligned with the needs of college sports. Many external forces challenge and sometimes even subvert institutional control of college athletics...

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