Influence of Athletics in the University Community, The

Academe, May/Jun 2004 by Sperber, Murray

The Influence of Athletics in the University Community

At some higher education institutions, athletics invoves nearly all aspects of community life, trom admissions to alumni support, How can we best understand this collegiate phenomenon?

Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values William G. Bowen and Sarah A. Levin Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 2003

Football U.: Spectator Sports in the Life of the American University J. Douglas Toma Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2003

The Massachusetts School of Law sponsored a televised discussion a few years ago on problems in college sports. The moderator noted that, in preparing for the program, he had read the standard literature on intercollegiate athletics and had not found a single, reputable author who defended college sports; in fact, all of the writers criticized it. he wondered why this lop-sided situation existed. One of the panelists replied, "How can you defend the indefensible?"

Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values by William Bowen and Sarah Levin continues and deepens the criticism of college sports that Bowen and William Shulman began in their 2000 volume, The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values. Indeed, in the comprehensiveness of its research and the solidity of its argument, Reclaiming the Game breaks new ground and probably will become the most influential book in the field for many years. In contrast, J. Douglas Toma attempts a rare and deathdefying feat in Football U.: Spectator Sports in the Life of the American University: he mounts a full-scale defense of college sports. That he fails is not surprising-some of Bowen and Levin's findings are torpedoes into the side of Football U.-but that he even tries is a bit amazing. Reading these two books is an excursion through two separate worlds; one is a wellordered, serious place filled with in-depth research and careful analysis; the other is a rather windy planet full of opinion and often contradictory and confusing argument.

Academic Underachievers

Bowen and Levin studied the transcripts of thousands of Students at thirty-three schools and compared current classes with sample classes from previous eras. Most important, they identified and tracked recruited athletes. They also went beyond their sample schools, mainly private and northeastern, to prove that "some of the problems faced by the schools we are studying are, without doubt, similar to those faced by the big-time Division I-A universities."

Athletes' problems begin with their admission to the university: across the board in American higher education, recruited athletes, in aggregate, have significantly lower SAT and ACT scores than other applicants to their schools. If it were not for their athletic talent, Bowen and Levin write, "they would . . . have appreciably lower admit rates than applicants in general." That is particularly true at Ivy League universities and elite liberal arts colleges, but it also applies to "public Ivies" like the University of Michigan and many other institutions. Of course, special admission for athletes is not news, nor do Bowen and Levin claim it to be; they just quantify the facts in indisputable and stark terms.

The poor academic performance of athletes in college is not news, either, but Bowen and Levin's quantification of it is. Many colleges and universities, they found, "pay a very large academic price when they recruit high-profile athletes. Recruited high-profile athletes had a cumulative grade point average that put them, as a group, in the [bottom] nineteenth percentile of their class in the Ivies and the [bottom] twenty-third percentile in the NESCAC [New England Small College Athletic Conference] colleges," schools like Wesleyan and Williams. This situation also exists at many other schools far beyond New England.

Athletes blame much of their academic underachievement on the amount of time they spend on sports. Bowen and Levin cross-checked this assertion by studying the class ranking of a cohort of nonathletes they termed "student actives," that is, students who edited the school newspaper, ran student groups, and so on. The researchers found that these "student actives did not underperform academicallyindeed, they overperformed relative to how they could have been expected to do." This finding underlined another crucial discovery about the athletes: they did "even less well in the classroom than one would expect them to do on the basis of their entering credentials." In other words, the athletes' test scores and high school grade point averages predicted that they would perform better academically in college than they actually did.

Bowen and Levin go beyond the standard explanation for the academic underachievement of athletes-time demands-and examine what they term the "athletic culture": the separate world in which the jocks live, even at small liberal arts schools. It is a subculture in which athletes continue to specialize in the sports they have pursued since childhood, and in which coaches insist on this single-minded dedication. If an eight-year-old in Pop Warner Football shows promise as a linebacker, he attends summer camps devoted to his specialty, receives extra coaching in linebacking through his high school years, and is recruited for college as a linebacker, possibly a right outside linebacker. He arrives in higher education not as an inquiring, open-minded first-year student, but as a right outside linebacker, his identity and much of his personality defined by his sports specialty.