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

Rebuild It and They Will Continue to Come

148 Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better. —Richard Hooker Higher education leaders have been trying to reform athletics for decades. Despite these efforts, Division I athletics continues to undermine the academic integrity and educational missions of our colleges and universities in very significant ways. At issue is not the value of elite athletics in our culture but whether our educational institutions should be saddled with the responsibility of developing elite athletes and sponsoring professional teams. Like trying to fit a round peg into a square hole, the professional sports model simply does not fit within the educational community. Rather than continuing to pound that peg, it is time to admit that sponsorship of elite, professional athletics should be left to the professional leagues. In short, it is time for colleges and REBUILD IT AND THEY WILL CONTINUE TO COME 149 REBUILD IT AND THEY WILL CONTINUE TO COME universities to eliminate their departments of professional athletics. The following bears mentioning again. While one of American higher education’s strengths is its tremendous diversity of services, programs, opportunities, and missions, in the case of athletics, higher education may not be able to have it all. Division I athletics, as currently structured and conducted is not meeting the purposes for which it became a part of higher education. That being the case, we have a responsibility to dramatically restructure Division I athletics to do so or, if that proves impossible, eliminate it. The history of American higher education offers many examples of programs or departments that were downsized or eliminated when it became apparent that they had become obsolete, had failed to meet their purpose, or had become a drain on institutional resources. That said, the root cause of college athletics’ ills is not commercialism nor academic fraud but rather the model— the professional sports model—that higher education has chosen to meet its business, education, and commercial goals. Professional athletics is simply not an appropriate business for higher education. In short, it is time to take a new road; a road that would require not simply strengthening eligibility standards but deconstructing the entire enterprise. Rather than trying to be all things to all people, higher education’s responsibility in the cultural area of athletics should be twofold: first, to involve the maximum number of students in sports activities that can be enjoyed for a lifetime for purposes of promoting public health and, second, to provide entertaining but educationally based intercollegiate athletics. 150 REBUILD IT AND THEY WILL CONTINUE TO COME Specifically, the professional model of intercollegiate athletics must be dismantled and rebuilt, not as a mirror of professional sports but in the image of an educational institution. To do so, the fundamental principle on which the professional sports model is built—pay for play—must be changed. Specifically, the athletic scholarship must be eliminated in favor of institutional, need-based aid. Realizing change of this magnitude will be neither quick nor easy. It is, however, necessary. The higher education community must come together in a show of courage and confidence to halt the steady and destructive march of the win-at-any-cost professional model of intercollegiate athletics . It will require the courage and will of higher education leaders to act upon the fact that college athletics is higher education’s property; not ESPN’s or CBS’s, not Nike’s or Adidas’s, not corporate America’s, not the sports talk-show hosts’, and not the crazed fan’s in the stands. Because athletics is higher education’s property, it is the higher education community alone that must establish the rules of the game, the values of the enterprise, and the principles upon which it will be presented to the public. The fact is, higher education leaders can make athletics look like and represent whatever they want. If these leaders are serious about reforming athletics, they must address the professional aspects of the enterprise. It is important to note that calls to eliminate the athletic scholarship in favor of need-based aid are not new. The 1952 Special Committee on Athletic Reform of the American Council on Education recommended that scholarships be awarded based solely on academic need and academic ability rather than athletic ability. In 1989 the NCAA 151 REBUILD IT AND THEY WILL CONTINUE TO COME Presidents Commission placed a proposal to establish a need-based aid...