 |
Home | Search | Browse | About IPO | Staff | Links |
|
Home | Search | Browse | About IPO | Staff | Links |
|
Playing games in college
The proliferation of scandals surrounding college athletics — from drug use and sexual assaults to grade-shaving and illegal recruiting — threatens to turn our sports pages over to police reporters. These well-publicized problems of "student-athletes" off the athletic field have caused paroxysms of outrage and an avalanche of commissions, task forces, studies, reports and recommendations, all aimed at reforming how college sports are run. Rarely has anyone asked the question why — why have intercollegiate athletics at all? Universities in Illinois are being asked why. Three years ago, the Illinois Board of Higher Education directed the state's public universities to phase out taxpayer support of intercollegiate athletics by July 1, 1996, the end of this fiscal year, on the grounds that there must be higher priorities for state dollars than the games people play. When it became clear that most September 1995/Illinois Issues/15 schools would not meet that deadline and that there was significant resistance to the original idea anyway, the board backed down. It has now demanded that the 11 public universities that use state funds to pay for intercollegiate sports justify that spending in reports due next summer. It could be a close call. Although athletics seems as natural an endeavor on campus as a tailgate picnic, the presence of intercollegiate sports raises compelling questions about the institutional identity of the university and the values of higher education and the society it serves. Go team go! The whole fuss started in 1992 when the Board of Higher Education, as part of its campaign to prod colleges and universities to reduce costs through reordering priorities, concluded that public universities surely had more important priorities than sports and recommended that universities quit spending tax dollars (and avoid shifting the burden to students through mandatory fees) to support intercollegiate athletics. In fiscal year 1994, Illinois' public universities spent just over $51 million on intercollegiate athletics. About $12 million of it came from direct state appropriations, tuition waivers and student athletic fees paid through the state scholarship commission; mandatory student fees for athletics raised another $13 million. The remainder came from gate receipts, concessions, television, conference revenues and such. The Board of Higher Education wondered: Is all this worth it? Universities say yes, contending that athletic competition with other colleges builds school spirit, reaps public exposure, draws financial support from alumni and other sources and entertains students. Except the fact is that, with the exception of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, athletic departments operate in the red. They need state dollars or student fees, or both, to survive. Although the amount of state money involved in athletics is scant in the billion-dollar scheme of things — less than 1 percent of state appropriations to universities goes to intercollegiate athletics — the effect of eliminating all state (and limiting student fee) support for intercollegiate sports would mean that some universities probably would have no intercollegiate sports. Eastern Illinois University, for example, depends on state and student funds for more than two-thirds of its athletic budget, as does Western Illinois. State and student sources accounted for more than half the athletic department revenue at Illinois State, Northern Illinois and the Carbondale campus of Southern Illinois University. Only the U of I at Urbana-Champaign, with significant gate receipts and TV-radio revenue, operates its intercollegiate athletic programs without state appropriations or student fees. If intercollegiate sports attract money from alumni and other sources, it's clearly not enough to keep athletic departments in the black. Still, might there be other benefits? After all, the journalism department isn't exactly a profit center either. Can a winning football team build school spirit and inspire a sense of community? Certainly people aren't buying all those Fighting Illini T-shirts out of devotion to the math department. According to Jerry M. Lewis, a professor of sociology at Kent State University, the answer is, yes and no. Lewis notes: "For a really big football school — Ohio State, Michigan — no doubt intercollegiate competition does work as an integrating mechanism, pulling the university together. A football weekend at Nebraska is an exciting event for a whole range of the community. Football pulls the community together. "But that is true for only a very few schools, a select number of high-profile sports and teams," says Lewis, who grew up a Chicago Cubs fan and graduated from the U of I. For schools below that level of recognition and prestige, schools like Kent State and Northern Illinois, Lewis says, athletic programs have a negligible effect on building a sense of identity and community. "At 2,000 colleges and universities, sports are not an integrating force." One measure of the integrating potential of athletics, Lewis says, is student interest. Noting that the typical Kent State undergraduate attends only one of five home football games, Lewis says, "One way to convince me is: Do you sell out every game? Michigan does." Universities in Illinois don't, not even the U of I. So, do sports matter to students? At least some students believe intercollegiate competition is an important facet of campus life — so long as they don't have to pay for it. The higher ed board's Student Advisory Committee approved a resolution last spring declaring that "intercollegiate athletics benefit the entire university community and . .. expand the dimensions of student life as a whole." The same resolution made clear, however, that sports should be offered without "burdening students with increased fees" (proving some students, at least, are ready for the real world). Indeed, on a cost-benefit basis, students may care more about costs than benefits. Rey Brune, a member of the higher ed board, noted SlU-Carbondale had twice offered students a chance to vote on increasing fees for athletics and both times students said no. Even more intriguing, said Brune, was "the fact that there are 442 students on athletic scholarships and only 140 students voted in favor of increasing fees. I would think that any student on athletic scholarship would have voted in favor of the proposal." You would also think that if athletics are such an important dimension of student life, then students would attend athletic events. But they don't in substantial numbers. In 1993, just 362 students, a mere 1.5 percent on average, attended basketball games at Northern Illinois, which has an enrollment of nearly 23,000 students; student attendance at football games averaged 17 percent of the student body. Other schools report similar patterns — 9.5 percent of students attend ISU basketball games; 12 percent go to see the football team play. Six percent of SIU-C students cheer the Saluki basketball team; 12 percent attend football games. This despite the fact that mandatory student fees give students free admission or reduced ticket prices for all sporting events. Parents fretting over whether they are getting their money's worth at state schools may begin asking not whether their children are cutting classes but whether they went to the football game. 16/September 1995/Illinois Issues
Big-time college sports are so deeply woven into the fabric of campus life today, it is difficult to fathom now that the reputation of universities did not always depend on the preseason rankings of The Associated Press. "We're the only nation in the world where higher education is in the sports entertainment business," says Jerry M. Lewis, a sociology professor at Kent State University. He predicts that won't be the case in the future because it "doesn't pay off." As Rey Brune told fellow board members: "We say athletics are an important part of the whole experience; I wonder if it's as important to the students as it is to some adults." Soul searching "Fifty years from now, colleges won't be in the sports entertainment business," predicts Kent State's Lewis, "because it is increasingly costly and it doesn't pay off." If true, that would bring universities full circle. Big-time college sports are so deeply woven into the fabric of campus life today, it is difficult to fathom now that the reputation of universities did not always depend on the preseason rankings of The Associated Press. "We're the only nation in the world where higher education is in the sports entertainment business," says Lewis. Like most aspects of American culture, the university has its September 1995/Illinois Issues/17 roots in England. In its colonial and early American incarnation, the university was fashioned a "cultural school" after Oxford and Cambridge, institutions that existed to foster intellectual development and pass on an established body of knowledge, an exclusively Western canon of ideas, to the children of the upper classes. The notion that a university should have so practical a mission as preparing students for a job — or should sponsor so ignoble an endeavor as athletic competition — was foreign to the early conception of what higher learning was all about. Where student recreational activities existed, they were initiated, organized and run by students, who formed clubs in much the way intramural sports operate on campuses today. A turning point in the development of intercollegiate sports occurred in 1852 when a racing crew from Yale competed against one from Harvard; to their surprise, publicity of the contest alerted college officials that such competitions helped advertise their institutions and build enrollments. In 1869, Rutgers played Princeton in the first intercollegiate football game, a pivotal encounter that changed the face of collegiate sports and, ultimately, the character of the university. Sports in general and football in particular quickly came to be seen as a means to gain publicity, prominence and even prestige in a culture whose population, for the most part, had little other connection to higher education.
Still, even as football gained in popularity and colleges attempted to exploit its potential for attracting students, enhancing status (for those schools with successful teams) and building financial support from alumni or state legislatures, the sport itself continued to be regarded as extraneous to the mission of higher education and thus beyond the official sanction or control of university administrators. It was not until widespread and notorious abuses (student-athletes who were more athlete than student, to cite one example that endures today) triggered indignation that the sport was corrupting the university that the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives — the Big Ten — was formed in 1895 to give supervision of sports to faculty, as opposed to athletic departments, and establish standards for participation in athletic programs. Nonetheless, problems and abuses persisted, even accelerated, and by 1929 a Carnegie Report, American College Athletics, fretted that the university's social, commercial and athletic "activities have in recent years appreciably overshadowed the intellectual life for which the university is assumed to exist." And it said that "the responsibility to bring athletics into a sincere relation to the intellectual life of the college rests squarely on the shoulders of the president and faculty" — not the first and hardly the last appeal to the academic forces of higher education to rein in intercollegiate athletics. As universities were wrestling with the proper place of sports on campus, they were also grappling through the second half of the 19th century with something of an identity crisis. A new model of the nature of the university, this imported from Germany, began to clash with the English idea: the university as a focus of acquired scholarship — that is, knowledge not passed on as a birthright but gained through scientific research, and available not just to the upper crust of society but to the whole loaf. These notions of educational attainment and egalitarianism set well with American educators even as a uniquely American idea of the proper function of a university began to emerge: that the university, like all public institutions, should serve to improve society, to better the condition of humanity. It was this belief that prompted passage of the Morrill Act — known more commonly as the land grant act — in 1862, giving states vast stretches of territory for development of land grant schools designed to serve the agricultural, mechanical and ________ business needs of their citizens. Prominent among educators who embraced the "societal service station" concept of higher education was William Rainey Harper, president of the University of Chicago from 1892 to 1906, who believed the university should deal with social problems and student concerns. Harper tripled enrollment, hired Alonzo Stagg to run the athletic department and imposed a physical education requirement for students. These actions were consistent with the trend toward turning the university into a program center and diluting its narrow intellectual purpose in an attempt to broaden its marketability. Though Harper's view gained momentum in the early 20th century, and still holds sway today, not all agreed that a university should strive for mass market appeal. Robert Hutchins, who became president of the University of Chicago in 1929, ridiculed the idea that a university "must make itself felt in the community; it must be constantly, currently felt. A state university must help the farmers look after the cows. An endowed university must help adults get better jobs by giving them courses in the afternoons and evening." Hutchins rejected the "service station" function of a university and repealed the physical education requirement (though he strengthened intramural sports), and, in 1939, ended intercollegiate football at the University of Chicago. "Just as much courage, and courage of a higher sort, is required to tackle a 200-pound idea as to tackle a 200-pound fullback," Hutchins said. But Hutchins' was a lonely voice. Burly fullbacks are generally more numerous, and certainly more cherished, on 18/September 1995/Illinois Issues
college campuses than mighty ideas.
So, what was a university for? Center of intellectual development, setting for applied research, service agency to the community — the variety of models competing for the soul of the university left American institutions with, if not a schizophrenic character, at least a confusion of identity. Donald Chu, a Skidmore College professor, has observed: "There was no one definition of what American higher education should or, for that matter, should not do." Lacking a clear-cut understanding of what Chu calls the "socially defined charter" — the values, attitudes, goals and dreams that link the public to higher education — American universities have operated with a license that "anything goes." Including intercollegiate sports. Clash of values Still, it seems odd: sports taking root in what would appear to be an inhospitable environment, much like compassion springing up in modem politics. But then, compassion has little political currency these days whereas football abounds in commercial riches. The Carnegie Report on college athletics was the first, though not the last, to complain that football "is not a students' game, as it once was. It is a highly organized commercial enterprise." That was in 1929. Success at the box office, of course, follows only those teams that are successful on. the field, bringing to the university a peculiar definition of success: Professor Lewis points out that Gerry Faust was fired as the football coach at Notre Dame after winning more games than he lost. Surely, academic deans must be grateful that such standards are not applied to the English department. The values of athletics — winning is everything — are foreign, indeed inimical, to the values of the academy. The values that produce a winning team (rightfully) stress subservience to a hierarchy of leadership and subordination to organizational goals and are ill-suited to a university that values individuality, independence, free expression and personal responsibility. And the values of the university — intellectual growth and academic standards — compromise the sport with a perverse form of affirmative action that dictates that the basketball team can't field the best team of amateur athletes but rather the best team of amateur athletes that can make a minimum (and minimal) score on a college aptitude exam. Universities enroll inferior students because they are superior athletes while forcing athletic recruiters to forgo superior athletes because they are inferior students. It is more, though, than an unnatural alliance. As Robert Hutchins noted 30 years ago: "It is sad but true that when an institution determines to do something in order to get money it must lose its soul and frequently does not get the money." Donald Sevener is projects editor/or Illinois Issues magazine. In his spare time, he works on writing projects/or the Illinois Board of Higher Education.
September 1995/Illinois Issues/19 |
|
|
