Of Grades and Glory: RethinkingIntercollegiate Athletics

The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values. By James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen (in collaboration with Lauren A. Meserve and Roger C. Schonfeld). Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. 447 pages. $27.95 (cloth).

I had read almost half of The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values when the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics released its latest report, its first since 1993. ¹ The study, which received a great deal of media attention, outlines some of the many problems plaguing college sports--widespread academic abuses, a financial arms race, rampant commercialization, and an overemphasis on winning--and includes recommendations to address them, such as barring teams that do not graduate at least 50 percent of its players from conference championships or postseason play, prohibiting athletes from wearing uniforms with corporate logos, and reducing the length of practices, playing seasons, and post-seasons. To most sports fans and commentators, the Knight Commission's findings were unsurprising, and its suggestions were unrealistic. Sports columnist Dave Kindred put it well: "The Knight Commission is on the side of the angels," he noted. "Its recommendations are good ones; they're just impractical. The genie is out of the bottle. Big-time college athletics is professional entertainment, has been for decades, and could be downsized only at the risk of litigation by all those corporations who've made high-dollar deals to buy college athletics' soul." ² As if trying to prove Kindred's point, the athletic directors of the most powerful conferences met a few days later and said that, while the Knight Commission raised important issues, its report was "flawed" (since the commission did not include a sitting athletic director) and that they "probably would not follow" its recommendations. ³ That same month, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) announced a new eleven-year, $200 million contract with the ESPN cable network to broadcast NCAA championships, including the Division I women's basketball tournament. ⁴ So much for the Knight report, I thought, turning back to The Game of Life, which methodically examines "how intercollegiate athletics, in its various forms, affects the ways in which colleges and universities discharge their missions" (xxvii) and is among the best, most systematically researched, and thoughtful books on the subject.

Written by James L. Shulman, an officer at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation who collaborated on The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (1998), and William G. Bowen, the president of the Mellon Foundation, a former president of Princeton University, and co-author of The Shape of the River, The Game of Life is an impressive book. Besides being well organized and meticulous, its stated aims are more modest than what it actually delivers. The book's goal, Shulman and Bowen explain, is to see how some of the assumptions and myths commonly associated with intercollegiate athletics hold up under the scrutiny of empirical analysis--The Game of Life features more than eighty charts and graphs and more than sixty pages of statistical tables in its appendices--and then to draw "conclusions about how schools might best take advantage of the positive emotions that sports evoke without endangering the core of their educational missions" (xxvii). Although the book relies heavily on an expanding secondary literature on intercollegiate athletics, its chief source is the "College and Beyond" (C&B) database compiled by the Mellon Foundation and used in The Shape of the River. In this study, which cultural critic Louis Menand correctly notes might be thought of as "a kind of companion to the earlier book," Shulman and Bowen focus on thirty "academically selective" (xxvii) institutions from across the athletic spectrum: Division IA public universities (e.g., the Universities of Michigan and North Carolina), Division IA private universities (Duke and Stanford), Division IAA Ivy League universities (Columbia and Princeton), Division III universities (Emory and Tufts), Division III coed liberal [End...