Poor sports

Christian Century, Oct 18, 2003 by Mark G. Toulouse

I LOVE THE DISCIPLINE, the focus, the grace associated with nearly all sports. I'm probably one of the few professors in a theological school or religion department who can list "sports photographer" on his resume. My wife and I have had season tickets for every sport played at Texas Christian University during the past 18 years. I must also admit that I have benefited financially from college athletics. My daughter is on a Division I athletic scholarship, playing soccer. And, yes, we try to make all her games, even, when she's on the road.

This love of sports made my heart heavy as I watched recent developments at Baylor University. As the investigation into the murder of a basketball player, allegedly by one of his teammates, unfolded, NCAA violations surfaced. Though coach Dave Bliss denied allegations, a university committee discovered that he had personally arranged for the tuition payments of two players. Bliss and the athletic director resigned. A week later tapes surfaced proving Bliss had attempted to cover up his abuses by shifting blame to the deceased player. Using players and coaches, he tried to create the impression that the player had covered his own tuition by dealing drugs. The racial implications of the white basketball coach trying to blame the dead black youth by portraying him as a high-rolling drug dealer has not been lost on local media.

The Baylor case reveals just how ugly abuses in Division I athletics can be. The scandal at this conservative Baptist university has caused people to wonder how bad the abuses at other schools might be. While violations in college athletics have increasingly come to light, most people assume we've only seen the tip of the iceberg.

A recent study makes clear that problems associated with college athletics are not limited to big-time programs. Intercollegiate athletics have had an adverse effect on educational values even where no athletic scholarships are in play. William G. Bowen, former president of Princeton University (1972-1988), and Sarah A. Levin, president (since 1988) of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and an AllAmerican athlete while a Harvard undergraduate, enjoy sports mad believe college athletics should be able to enhance the educational experience of all students. Their book, to which Martin A. Kurzweil contributed, argues that the traditional values associated with college sports, even at the best schools in the country, are "threatened by the emergence of a growing "divide'" between athletics and the academic missions of these schools.

Reclaiming the Game analyzes athletics at the eight Ivy League universities, the 11 schools associated with the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC), four of the universities connected to the University Athletic Association (UAA--schools like the University of Chicago and Emory University), three women's colleges (Bryn Mawr, Smith and Wellesley) and seven coed liberal arts schools (such as Oberlin and Swarthmore). On average, sonic 43 percent of men and 32 percent of women participate in athletics at the NESCAC colleges. At the Ivies, 20 to 30 percent of first-year students are athletes. These figures compare with under 5 percent at big schools like the University of Michigan. In other words, the athletic culture can affect the campus ethos at these smaller, "academically rigorous liberal arts colleges" more powerfully than it does at the bigger schools, especially where educational values are concerned.

This book is data-driven. Each of the 33 schools provided detailed records far the cohort of students entering college in the fall of 1995. The book tracks 27,811 students throughout their college careers and distinguishes between recruited athletes, walk-ons and students at large. Bowen and Levin analyzed demographic and pre-collegiate information (gender, race and SAT scores), followed activities in all intercollegiate athletics (both "high profile" and "lower profile" sports) and tracked college grades, fields of studies, graduation status and graduation dates.

The good news is that graduation rates for athletes at these schools are high (generally over 90 percent in the Ivies and over 80 percent in NESCAC schools). In contrast, Division I schools graduated only 43 percent of men's basketball players in this cohort. But that comparison hardly seems fair, since men's basketball programs have so few entering students in any given year. Bowen and Levin would have been on safer ground if they had compared their figures to a section of the NCAA report they do not mention: Division I schools graduated 60 percent of the athletes who entered school in '95 across all sports, the highest percentage since the NCAA started tracking rates in 1984. This is 2 percent higher than the percentage of graduates among all students in Division I schools.

There is plenty of bad news for the schools in this study. Bowen and Levin show that SAT scores for "recruited" high profile athletes (football, basketball and hockey) are between 119 and 165 points below the average of students at large. In addition to the SAT gap, a recruited athlete, particularly at the Ivies, is four times more likely to be admitted than a nonathlete with similar credentials. This "affirmative action for athletes" causes many otherwise talented applicants to receive rejection notices. Contrary to the conclusions one might draw from the spate of recent court cases challenging affirmative action, athletic affirmative action is much more a factor in the admissions process than race-based admissions has ever been.