Air Ball: American Education's Failed Experiment with Elite Athletics

A Changed Context for Reform

86 I beg your pardon, I didn’t recognize you—I’ve changed a lot. —Oscar Wilde History provides many examples of monumental societal and cultural change. Empires have risen and fallen. Dynasties have collapsed or been conquered. Governments have been overthrown . Ideologies have waxed and waned. Why is it, then, that we find it so hard to envision systemic change in the way elite athletics is conducted in America? Granted, the forces against fundamental structural and cultural change in America’s system of athletics are very strong. College athletics, for example, is an enterprise that has grown virtually unchecked for over one hundred years. Universities were competing athletically for more than sixty years before the first attempt to regulate anything other than the specific playing rules of the game. As public interest in, media coverage of, and the financial stakes surrounding college athletics have escalated, they have come to A CHANGED CONTEXT FOR REFORM 87 A CHANGED CONTEXT FOR REFORM assume an enormous presence and influence in our culture. The enterprise has grown in every sense—bigger crowds, more money, greater visibility, and more television and media coverage. As a result, there is more pressure to win. Like a freight train careening down the tracks, accelerating and gathering more power, college athletics has generated a massive amount of energy and inertia. With more lucrative television contracts, never-ending media coverage, biggerthan -life coaches, and a sports-crazed populace that seems to be unable to get enough of that speeding train, no wonder many believe it is impossible to reform college athletics. Periodic attempts at athletics reform are almost as much a part of the higher education landscape as the classroom lecture. Like clockwork, every fifteen or twenty years, a series of scandals leads to public outrage and a subsequent national reform initiative. In 1906, the NCAA was formed as a result of calls from President Theodore Roosevelt to reform the violent nature of football. In 1929, the Carnegie Commission for the Advancement of Teaching released a comprehensive study of athletics that revealed rampant professionalism and commercialization. In 1946, the NCAA adopted the Principles for the Conduct of Intercollegiate Athletics. This measure, referred to as the “Sanity Code,” not only placed limits on the amount and types of financial aid an athlete could receive but, for the first time, also established a mechanism to enforce those rules. In 1952, the NCAA Convention voted to establish an NCAA Membership Committee to consider complaints of failure to comply with the rules or its constitution and adopted regulatory legislation governing the administration of financial aid to athletes. Also in that year, an American 88 A CHANGED CONTEXT FOR REFORM Council on Education (ACE) report called for more stringent eligibility rules, basing financial awards to athletes on academic achievement and economic need and prohibiting freshman eligibility. More recently, there have been what many consider a series of short periods of reform, starting with the establishment of the NCAA Presidents Commission in 1984 and the release of two reports from the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics in 1991 and a decade later in 2001. My purpose is not to dismiss these reform efforts. In some cases, they have resulted in real change. For example, the formation of the NCAA in 1906 was an enormous step in making the game of football safer. And the adoption of the Sanity Code began to place much needed restrictions on the recruiting process. Typically, however, the reform scenario plays out as follows. A series of scandals ignites widespread public indignation over the excesses of big-time athletics. Calls for sweeping reform are heard from many quarters. A commission full of high-profile educational leaders is formed to examine the problems and recommend reform measures. A series of changes are proposed, some of which, if implemented, have little long-lasting impact. Amid much self-congratulatory praise, the public is once again appeased. And life within our college athletics departments returns to business as usual until the next series of scandals reignites the process. Despite the fact that attempts to implement meaningful, long-lasting reform have recurred periodically, the growth and negative impact of professionalized college athletics on not only institutional integrity and academic values but also our society continues. The three-hundred-pound 89 A CHANGED CONTEXT FOR REFORM gorilla lurking in the corner of the higher education classroom continues to grow, gobbling up resources...