Infighting: Hate the Game, Not the Player
A (competitive) discussion on the role of athletics in academia.
Monday April 3, 2006
The Progressive Case Against College Sports
By Ben Adler, Campus Progress
At the beginning of my junior year in college, I saw signs for an initial Wesleyan debate team meeting posted around campus. I went only to discover that there was no team. It was defunct and a couple of kids were trying to re-start it. They mentioned in passing that only two years earlier Wesleyan had won a national debating tournament.
 You would think a small progressive liberal arts college, which primarily exists to teach young people to think, and to express their thoughts coherently, would make sure that they always have a debate team, particularly if they are already proven to be good at it. So, rather than leave responsibility for the debate team’s existence to the free time of interested students, shouldn’t they actually invest in ensuring its continued existence through the same mechanism used for college sports? They could pay a coach and recruit talented debaters as applicants. You would think that, if necessary, they’d take the funds and admissions slots away from another extra-curricular competition that does not have the same applicability in classes or real life, squash perhaps.
You would be wrong. Wesleyan allowed their debate team to fall apart while the crucial activity of squash remained alive and well. And Wesleyan is no exception. My freshman year at Penn I went to the Penn-Princeton men’s basketball game. Since Penn considers this a serious rivalry, the arena was packed even though they had clinched the Ivy League championship in the previous game. At half-time a small group of women appeared at center court with a plaque. The announcer asked us to cheer for our national champion women’s squash team. Huh? Who knew we even had a women’s squash muttered everyone in the crowd. Apparently we did, and the school had invested serious resources into making sure they won, even if the students who footed the bill couldn’t care less.
As college students—and everyone else with five dollars and a dream of office pool victory—watches the NCAA basketball tournament, it is worth noting the corrosive effect that athletic recruiting and scholarships have on our colleges and universities. This is not the annual tut-tutting about the low graduation rate among Division I (DI) men’s basketball players. That is not the problem. It is merely a symptom. The problem is that colleges are letting in seriously under-qualified students and asking them to devote tremendous time to sports, while doing schoolwork they are, in many cases, unprepared to do in the first place. Of course they don’t graduate.
And to what end? The overwhelming majority of college athletes play sports that nobody cares about (all but basketball and football) for programs nobody follows (all but a handful of DI schools). This costs money; money that could spent on more worthwhile activities (like debate), money that could spent on hiring more professors, money that could be spent on potentially life-saving medical research or money that could be spent on holding down ever-rising tuitions.
And this is not the only way that the emphasis on college athletics wastes money. Colleges give away untold millions of dollars annually in athletic scholarships (plus rumored under the table inducements for blue chip recruits.) This is unprogressive and immoral. It is a basic tenet of progressivism that access to education should be determined on merit—and perhaps other attributes that one brings to the classroom or campus. In other words, it should not be based on ability to pay. So it stands to reason that the most progressive approach to financial aid is to grant it solely on the basis of need to anyone who has earned a place in the class. Giving away full rides to a handful of students for any reason other than need—trying to recruit academically or athletically exceptional students—is unprogressive. And if the reason is that they are good golfers it is both unprogressive and silly.
Some people argue that picking on golf is unfair because there are other sports that more people, me included, enjoy watching, like basketball and football. But if anyone proposes eliminating unpopular preppy sports then the people who play them will argue that they are victims of discrimination. And Title IX, for good reason, requires an equal number of opportunities in college sports be made available to men and women. So if you have a men’s football team, you have to balance it with a women’s sports team like field hockey. Eliminating college athletic recruiting and scholarships is an all or nothing proposition.
But wait, you say, isn’t a basketball scholarship a ticket out of the ghetto for the urban poor? Yes, but only for a select few. And those athletes who are unable to complete graduation requirements and leave college without a degree, might have been better off going to a community college they could actually get a degree from, like their less athletic cohort. Besides, basketball players are totally unrepresentative of college athletes. For every sport like basketball that allows the urban poor an avenue to college there are three like hockey, tennis and golf that are disproportionately played by rich white people who live in suburbs and can afford the equipment, league fees or lessons required to compete at a high enough level to attract the attention of college coaches. In fact, paying those costs has become a way for the affluent to perpetuate their advantage, and that is one reason why elite colleges are actually becoming less socio-economically diverse.
Former Princeton University President William G. Bowen and James L. Shulman did a study of thirty selective colleges (which ran the gamut from large to small, private to public, DI to DIII) and wrote up the results in a book called the The Game of Life. One of the many myths of college sports that they statistically debunked was the claim that they add racial or socio-economic diversity to campuses (they do not). Among their other more damning findings:
- Recruited athletes in high profile sports have lower incoming GPAs and SATs,
- Even adjusted for that recruited athletes under-perform their peers in college in terms of GPA and graduation rate
- They cluster in certain majors like economics, making these departments over-crowded
- They account for a disproportionately large percentage of students caught cheating or plagiarizing
- Winning sports games does not lead to any demonstrable increase in alumni donations
When faced with this information, pro-college sports progressives tend to fall back on argument by anecdote. “But I know lots of smart college athletes. Haven’t you heard of Shane Battier, or Bill Bradley?” Yes, of course I know plenty of smart people who played college sports, and some were recruited for them. But statistically, they are merely decorative. It doesn’t prove anything more than if I offered up the anecdote of two Wesleyan football players who robbed a GAP at gunpoint my senior year. Athletes who are good students can get into college on that basis like everyone else, and they should pay as much as anyone else in their income bracket to go there.
By favoring athletes in admissions and financial aid over students who distinguish themselves in school or other extra-curriculars we are encouraging lower-income high school students to focus on sports as their means for advancement. Since the overwhelming majority of them will never play sports professionally, wouldn’t it make more sense to increase the incentives for participation in the school paper or student government, where students from lower-income backgrounds are often under-represented in college (and the real world)? Instead, we have a system where top schools like the University of Michigan give away valuable slots to backup lineman with little academic ambition, and give them a full ride, even if their parents happen to be millionaires (as a rule athletic scholarship programs are not means tested) while serious students are unable to get in or cannot afford the monstrous out of state tuition. This system is profoundly unjust and unprogressive, and it should be abolished.
The Progressive Case for College Sports
By Mark Pike and Will Feldman
"If Duke is to have a highly publicized football team, it must have a nationally recognized medical center, law clinic, forestry school, engineering college and undergraduate school famous for its high scholastic standards. Otherwise, the school will be known by the epithet ‘football college.’"
The aforementioned quote was written in a campus editorial shortly after Duke University made it to the Rose Bowl in 1941. Pearl Harbor had just been bombed and government officials banned all large gatherings on the West Coast. Instead of canceling the game in Pasadena, Duke invited Oregon State to Durham, North Carolina, to play a friendly game of pigskin. Duke lost the football game (a tradition that continues to this day), but made a huge profit on ticket sales and used much of that money to finish construction on campus.
College sports have provided academia with huge amounts of funding, scholarships for athletes, and many welcomed diversions from the stifling seriousness of the library stacks. While some believe that a tension exists between intellectual rigor and college athletics, we maintain the opposite—that a progressive university is one where athletics can thrive.
The first worry, and perhaps the most fundamental, is that athletics are only tangentially related to education and that, since universities have a limited pool of resources, valuable academic opportunities must not be sacrificed for meaningless athletic amusements. Fund debate instead of squash, Ben argues, because squash, ‘ does not have the same applicability in classes or real life.’ But what Ben forgets is that a liberal education seeks to train the whole person, and neither squash nor debate should be dismissed as insignificant pastimes. It’s important for people to play musical instruments, act, dance, paint, and play sports. None of these activities are explicitly academic, but all or some should be part of our education. The point, then, is not that sports are bad—that we shouldn’t have gyms or fields or bowling classes (we both learned to bowl over 200 in a college level P.E. class)—but that we shouldn’t over-emphasize sports. We should have debate and football, not just debate.
Surprisingly, funding the athletic opportunities which strengthen a liberal education is less expensive than Ben suggests. Take the North Carolina State basketball team. In 2005-2006, according to "The Business Journal of the Greater Triad Area," projected net earnings were just under 7 million dollars—with revenues of around 9 million and expenses of 2.2 million. The University of North Carolina basketball team similarly projected earnings of almost 12 million dollars. Of course, men’s basketball and football teams are the exceptions rather than the rule; most sports tend to net losses each year. But traditionally, proceeds from basketball and football are directed to other athletic teams and facilities, so that the cost of college athletics is less of a drain on general university resources than we might think.
Not only do college sports pay for themselves to some extent, but they also tend, if only indirectly, to pay for other student opportunities. Development officers will be quick to admit that, because fundraising efforts depend upon loyalty, and because college sports are tremendously effective in fostering this sense of school pride, athletics can be very lucrative even if their impact is difficult to measure directly. As Duke alum and " Cameron Crazies," we realize that our top-notch professors, high-tech labs, and updated libraries depend, to some extent, upon the emotions our basketball tradition can evoke; alumni giving, and therefore the opportunities we had as students, would simply not be as strong without the program. This is why, when Coach Krzyzewski was offered a job with the L.A. Lakers, Duke President Dick Broadhead, stood outside Cameron Indoor Stadium, begging him to stay. It wasn’t only because President Broadhead loves watching basketball; losing Coach K would have been detrimental to the university’s bottom line and could represent lost opportunities for students in other parts of the school.
And while Duke is often used as the anecdotal exception in these types of discussions, school officials from many mid-major conferences are making note of the windfalls of their athletic success, according to the Wichita Business Journal.
"You’re absolutely going to see an uplift in interest in your university," says Doug Goodwin, a development office spokesman at Gonzaga. "We see it in recruitment efforts, in interest from prospective students, from donors. The amount of attention basketball brings, you can’t put a dollar (amount) on it."
Gonzaga is not alone. In the past few weeks, administrators from Bradley University have noticed a “50 percent increase in institutional giving and a three-fold hike in student inquiries.” And the on-court success of the Wichita State Shockers has left Ron Kopita, WSU vice president of campus life and university relations, well, shocked. He says they’re seeing “double to triple the number of normal inquiries, primarily through the Internet. Plus, an increase in the number of kids asking questions about academic programs." Some suggest that student interest and alumni giving will only be piqued in the short-term. Nonetheless, the gains are significant and even for those schools with losing programs, athletics still foster loyalty, which stimulates alumni donations.
The danger that progressives should be concerned with, then, is not that universities are diverting too many resources away from students, but rather, to the contrary, that the athletes are being exploited for the greater benefits of the university. Student-athletes are asked to spend hours each day on the practice fields and large chunks of time away from the classroom on road trips. Yet, rather than dismissing college athletics, we should acknowledge their value and seek out ways of tempering the sacrifices they are asked to make. It is a privilege for students to receive athletic scholarships to attend college, but, similarly, it is a privilege for colleges to receive gifted student athletes who bring money, directly and indirectly, to its students.
Claims of intellectually degrading impacts of relaxed admission standards for athletes fail to appreciate the importance of diversity. A concert violinist with below-average academic marks might be accepted to a university for the opportunities she provides for others or because she is intelligent in ways that are not measured by a GPA or an SAT. Students who are published poets or hold patents or have recorded an album might be admitted ahead of kids with higher scores. We do not hesitate in admitting these people because we all agree that college life and college learning is holistic, it goes beyond cloistered students stuck behind books and concerns the creation of a community of differing ideas, talents and interests. Certainly schools that lower academic standards only for athletes to a point that would make it impossible for them to be academically competitive with their peers is unfair to both the school, the players and the other students, but music, sports and other modes of non-academic achievement are important. We shouldn’t seek to diminutize them or get rid of them, but we should try to adhere more rigorously to basic academic standards.
Finally, Ben’s argument that merit scholarships are unprogressive and, instead, all scholarships should be need-based addresses a complex funding problem for which there is no easy solution. The progressive stance on education would seem to be to make sure as many people as possible can receive the best education they can get. But schools also have to attract the best and the brightest, to make sure award-winning research occurs, and ultimately to keep the alumni base happy. Without rewarding merit, in whatever form, what incentive is there for excellence?
We should promote sports alongside other important non-academic activities; we should promote all sports rather than just basketball and football; we should have higher standards for admissions, not letting in comparatively unintelligent athletes (this means affirming diverse criteria for admission, not just SAT scores and grades); we should have better rules about practice; we should embrace the fact that our basketball players might bring money to the university just as our scientists might, while making sure that we don’t exploit them and that we don’t sacrifice other parts of the university to basketball; perhaps we should reconsider the way in which we give merit scholarships. All of these changes would make for more successful student athletes and better universities.
Universities should be vibrant places where students expand in many ways, not just in class. We should reconsider the place of college sports; we should be sensitive to some of the bad effects it has on athletes and others students. But we should remember that sports can be a very important part of personal growth, not only for the varsity athletes themselves, but also for the fans—just as music rewards the player and the listener. And just as the 1941 Rose Bowl gave many Duke students new opportunities (including our grandfather and great uncle who were roommates at Duke then), college sports might bring in money which elevate the quality of education at American institutions.
Ben Responds
Let me just start by pointing out that I like watching college basketball but I hate Duke. Mark and Will’s anecdote about how desperately Duke President Richard Brodhead beseeched Coach K not to go to the NBA, while intended to prove the value of college sports, actually illustrates what is deeply wrong with them. As Jason Zengerle argued in The New Republic at the time:
[T]here was something particularly unsettling about the spectacle of Brodhead prostrating himself before Krzyzewski …. Confronted with the prospect of Krzyzewski’s departure, Brodhead essentially begged him to stay….
In addition to paying Coach K homage, Duke has paid him deference…. In 1990, angered by a mid-season report card issued by Duke’s student newspaper that gave his team a B-plus, Krzyzewski summoned the student journalists to a meeting and, in front of his players, cursed out the students for not giving the team straight As…. Krzyzewski has even abused his position for partisan politics, hosting a fundraiser for North Carolina Republican Senate candidate Elizabeth Dole that – because the event was called "Blue Devils for Dole" and was held at a university-owned facility – gave the impression that Duke was endorsing Dole. In all of these cases of misbehavior, Duke has simply looked the other way.
In one person Coach K embodies much of what is wrong with major college athletics programs: they place themselves above the school’s top administrators and are exempted from the rules that govern everyone else on campus. And this is at Duke, mind you, which is a relative saint in the world of DI college basketball (at least their players usually graduate and stay out of legal trouble.)
Alas, the same cannot be said for Duke’s lacrosse team. Duke’s athletic department recently suspended their entire season after a number of them allegedly gang-raped strippers at a team party. Though the whole ugly incident raises a tangle of other issues, many would argue that this sort of behavior is unconsciously influenced by the privilege that many athletes occupy at schools like Duke (for more on this see Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values by former Princeton University President William G. Bowen and Sarah A. Levin, daughter of Yale’s current president, in which they argue colleges have allowed a "jockocracy" to take hold, by which athletes are separated academically and socially from everyone else.)
Now, for a few of the canards Mark and Will presented: notwithstanding their example of high-grossing high profile very successful college basketball program, college sports are a net revenue loser at programs big and small across the country. UNC and NC State are the exceptions that prove the rule. I went to a small liberal arts college where, like at almost every school across the country, the sports were not televised and games were free to attend. In other words, they produced no revenue. So they were not merely net revenue losers, they were revenue losers, period, as are the lower-profile sports at even the best overall athletic programs like Stanford’s. How much would you pay to watch a squash game?
Mark and Will seem to misunderstand my argument. Many people complain about NCAA basketball because it makes a lot of money rather than expressing the amateur ideal of college athletics. I say the opposite. If schools want to throw aside the admissions process to recruit the best players and run expensive programs, let them charge as much as they want and pay the athletes as the minor league professionals they are, instead of pretending they are students and giving them a scholarship.
In this system, the programs that are economically self-sufficient would stay around, but, other than a handful of men’s basketball teams, I think you’d find there would be remarkably few of them. According to the NCAA, “for 2001 the average Division I-A women’s basketball team, with only 15 scholarship athletes, was $711,000 in the red.” For football, the amazingly high costs of recruiting and maintaining a seventy man roster and traveling with all the equipment and the band to games, makes all but a few elite DI teams net revenue losers as well. And then there are all the sports that generate no revenue at all.
I have no objection to having sports continue to exist at DIII schools, or lower-profile sports existing at DI schools. I simply think they should be subject to the same standards as all other extra-curriculars. That means two things: reducing all teams to what are currently called club teams and eliminating athletic recruiting. The overwhelming majority of performing arts groups on campus are student-run organizations that require volunteer efforts to be organized and funded rather than having professional paid coaches. Sports should be run this way—while some of the activities that are currently run as clubs should arguably be elevated to the level of varsity team (i.e. debate).
At Wesleyan all classes cease between 4pm and 6pm for varsity athletic practice. But play rehearsals must be scheduled in the evening because no one would dream of cancelling classes for them (nor should they, nor would they for sports if the sports were all club level instead of varsity.) Many sports already operate under the same rules as other extra-curriculars, including club athletic teams composed of people who didn’t make varsity in sports like baseball, to top student athletes who happen to play sports that are not favored by the university (like ultimate Frisbee and rugby.) If a cappella singers, actors, debaters and rugby players can run their own clubs without the assistance of professional coaches or trainers, and schedule practice around class, why can’t tennis players at Duke and football players at Wesleyan?
Furthermore, Mark and Will’s example of the talented violinist who gets into college just like the talented place-kicker is misleading. Yes, college admissions committees take extra curricular talents into account, as well they should. If they hadn’t looked at my acting, writing etc, I might not have gotten into Penn (I certainly got in over some kids who worked harder on their homework instead.) That’s fine, because they are holistically judging an applicant on all his or her merits, and there’s no reason sports can’t be one of those.
But athletic recruiting perverts that process. Rather than taking someone’s ability to kick a ball into account, they take a certain number of coaches’ selections as an automatic instruction to accept the student, outside the regular applicant pool. These “coaches tips” as they are called, currently account for 66 annual slots at Williams College. That’s thirteen percent of the coveted spots in Williams’ freshman class every year. A violinist may be chosen from within the regular pool for her musical talent as well, but there aren’t 66 dedicated spots for musicians or poets that the music and poetry teachers get to single-handedly select the way that coaches do.
Some people propose allowing arts teachers to get their own recruits to balance this out, but that would absurdly twist the admissions process even further. Admissions committees are tasked with judging the totality of each and every applicant to formulate the totality of the freshman class. Rather than shattering this process into little fiefdoms, it should be centralized and no particular skill area, (and certainly not one as inconsequential as wrestling) should be placed separate and above all the others. Ending athletic recruiting and downgrading teams from varsity to club level won’t ruin the fun of college sports, it will make them stronger by better-integrating them into college as a whole.
Mark & Will Respond
Possession arrow points to us? Alright then! Let’s try to settle this great sports debate, once and for all.
Ben is right that we should not have used the isolated examples of UNC and NC State basketball. However, other Division I programs seem to confirm our intuitions. To quote from the very same article Ben references:
A few sports do make money…Some [people] claim that football programs spend more than they should, and that their expenditures are rising. But so are the average profits at the Division 1A level, up to $ 4.7 million in fiscal 2001 from $ 3.8 million in 1999.
Similarly, men’s Division 1A basketball averaged a profit of $1.7 million in 2001, which was up from the $1.6 million average in 1999. The author of the article Ben references points out that ‘a big plus for the men’s programs is that the lucrative NCAA tournament returns money to conferences, a windfall that can bring some teams almost $1 million.’ It’s not the case, as Ben argues that ‘for football the amazingly high costs of recruiting and maintaining a seventy man roster and traveling with all the equipment and the band to games, makes all but a few elite teams in a few elite divisions net revenue losers as well.’ Nor is it the case that ‘college sports are a net revenue loser at programs big and small across the country.’
Certainly, as we said in our first article, ‘ men’s basketball and football teams are the exceptions rather than the rule; most sports tend to net losses each year.’ But profits from men’s basketball and football teams in Division I do offset their own costs and help offset the costs of other teams— like women’s basketball teams which lose $711,000 each year or men’s baseball teams which lose $367,000. In a recent USA Today article, authors Erik Brady and Jodi Upton bemoan the ‘$3.8 billion dollars that [were] spent on athletics in 2004-05, a number that could nearly double in the next ten years,’ but go on to point out that ‘the 119 most prominent football schools had revenues of more than $4 billion in 2004-05’ and that ‘those revenue increases help offset much but not all of the spending.’ In fact, if we take Division I (including all three subdivisions) and Division II athletic programs on the whole, there is parity between average revenue and average spending. Division 1A athletic programs make $29.4 million, on average, and spend $27.2 million; division I-AA programs make $7.2 million and spend $7.5; and division 1-AAA make $6.2 million and spend $6.5. In Division II, for schools who have football teams, the numbers are $2.6 million made and $2.7 spent; for those without, they are $1.7 million made and $1.9 spent. In fact, the article suggests that moving from Division II into Division I is financially inadvisable—in other words, that Division II athletics do quite well. We suspect that, in Division III, the disparity between revenues and expenditures is larger. Nevertheless, as we said before, ‘the cost of college athletics is smaller than we might think.’ Or perhaps we should have said, ‘It’s smaller than Ben thinks.’
Yet, more important than the direct monetary benefits of college athletics are the indirect ones—which Ben does not acknowledge. College sports help facilitate alumni donations, because they foster a sense of school pride. This is true not only of basketball and football but of squash, tennis, and lacrosse, and it applies not only to schools like Duke and NC State but also to smaller schools like Yale, Sewanee, and College of Charleston. Whether athletic teams win or lose, they bring everybody under one roof (then they raise the aforementioned roof), and they promote bonds to the university which bring in money.
That said, we agree entirely that changes to the current system must be made. If it really is true that Wesleyan can’t have a debate team because so much money is spent on athletics, then less should be spent. Practices should not be all-consuming, and athletes should not get special treatment. These two changes alone would begin to address the current cycle of academic underachievement, in which athletes are given insufficient support and the administration then turns a blind eye to the problems it has, in part, created (the worst situation for student athletes). And clearly, taking a person’s ability to kick a football ‘as a total instruction to accept the student’ is a perversion. The current system, which grossly relaxes the standards for college athletes, is unjust. This is why we initially said, ‘music, sports, and other modes of non-academic achievement should be important to a point.’
Yet, while college sports today do not reflect the kind of model we envision, smaller modifications instead of wholesale changes could reflect the progressive goals of a liberal education. Neither of the two major changes that Ben suggests – “reducing varsity teams to what are currently called club teams and eliminating athletic recruiting” – are particularly progressive. Recruiting, in and of itself, isn’t bad if it means scouting in unusual places for exceptional talent – as long as we are recruiting for talents of all kinds – athletic, academic or artistic. Why should a university not seek out the best physics students, the best debaters, the best dancers, and the best three-point shooters?
And the notion that teams should have to be fully self-funded, as Ben suggests, seems silly. We agree that, if these teams are drawing too much, they should be given less. But they shouldn’t have to be self-funded entirely. Universities have drama professors who direct plays and music teachers who conduct orchestras, not to mention that universities provide theaters and concert halls just as they provide sports fields. Other student organizations ranging from literary magazines to community service activities draw money from student activities fees. Money and support from universities are directed at non-academic interests other than just sports as well they should be, but the key here is proportionality, which, to be fair, needs to be more closely monitored at many schools.
The flamboyant conclusion Ben offers to his first article ‘This system is profoundly unjust and unprogressive, and it should be abolished’ is tempered by a sentence he writes in the second: ‘I have no objection to having sports continue to exist at DIII schools, or lower-profile sports existing at DI schools.’ After reading Ben’s first article, it seemed that he was advocating an end to college sports beyond what we, or any sports fan, might have felt was appropriate. Perhaps this is because he used the word ‘abolished’ rather than ‘amended’ and he spoke of only the ills of athletics. Based on some of the statements Ben makes in his second article, it truly does appear that our positions are close. Perhaps the biggest difference is that we see more inherent value in sports than he does. And we acknowledge the role athletics can play in raising money and building an endowment to fund educational opportunities, which in the end is the real progressive goal.
All that being said, we’re just excited to have our four years of eligibility left for college sports since we would obviously be cut from Ben’s debate team.
Illustration: Matt Bors
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