By Libby Sander

Myles Brand, the first college president to lead the National Collegiate Athletic Association and a champion of stricter academic standards for athletes, died Wednesday after a nearly yearlong battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 67.

Mr. Brand, whose face had grown gaunt in recent months as he underwent treatment, remained active in the association's work until his death. Although unsteady on his feet and significantly thinner, he attended the men's Final Four in April. Just Tuesday, members of a committee that he started several years ago to inject a scholarly focus on intercollegiate athletics speculated on whether he would attend a meeting.

"He's left a lasting influence on not only the NCAA but intercollegiate athletics generally and higher education as a whole," said Walter Harrison, president of the University of Hartford and a former chair of the NCAA's Executive Committee, who worked closely with Mr. Brand. "He will principally be remembered as someone who brought intercollegiate athletics more squarely under the umbrella of higher education, remembering that intercollegiate athletics is part of a university experience, not separate from it."

Mr. Brand had a distinguished career in academe before joining the NCAA, in 2003. A philosophy professor by training, he was a former president of the University of Oregon and Indiana University at Bloomington, and held teaching or administrative positions at four other public universities.

A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., Mr. Brand was different from many previous NCAA leaders: Tall, scholarly, and bespectacled, he had never worked in an athletics department. And though he kept fit and had an athletic build, he was no ex-jock. But what mattered was that he spoke the same language as the college presidents who composed the NCAA's top leadership committees. And he soon demonstrated that he could do the same with the people who made up the nerve center of college sports: athletics directors, coaches, and students.

In time, Mr. Brand became one of the NCAA's most recognized leaders. From his bully pulpit, he pushed for tougher academic policies for the NCAA's 400,000-plus athletes, and encouraged athletics departments to embrace healthy forms of commercial activity to finance their programs.

But more than anything else, Myles, as he insisted on being called, spoke with eloquence and passion about college athletics' role in higher education. He emphasized that college sports was at a crossroads between its educational mission and a reckless pursuit of riches and fame. He often appealed to a peer group he knew well—college presidents—to keep college athletics on track.

As illness took its toll on the usually robust Mr. Brand, chatter among athletics administrators and college presidents showed that he had successfully made the case for having a college president at the helm of college sports' national governing body. They felt certain that while Mr. Brand may have been the first college president to lead the NCAA, he would not be the last.

"He will set a precedent in that. I can't imagine not selecting a college or university president to the NCAA presidency henceforth," said John R. Thelin, a professor of higher education at the University of Kentucky who worked with Mr. Brand in developing the NCAA's first scholarly colloquium in 2008. "That will probably be a tribute to him."

On the Move

Long before he settled into his NCAA office in Indianapolis, Mr. Brand had established himself as a prominent face in academe, in a career that included stops at teaching and administrative positions at public universities in every time zone.

Mr. Brand earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1964, and a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Rochester in 1967. He began his teaching career at the University of Pittsburgh's department of philosophy, and moved on to posts at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Arizona, and Ohio State University. He assumed the presidency at Oregon in 1989, where he served until 1994. From then until he joined the NCAA in 2003, Mr. Brand was president of Indiana University. His wife, Peg, is a professor of philosophy at a sister campus.

Mr. Brand was adept at the artful politicking required at the upper echelons, and skilled at dealing with the commercial side of the NCAA's ventures. But he never lost the ability for earnest conversation with the population about which he was most passionate: college athletes.

"He had a remarkable charisma for students," said Mr. Harrison. "He listened carefully to what they had to say, and he was not the least bit paternalistic. Like the good philosophy professor he was, he encouraged them to think."

A Strong Start

Many athletic directors and coaches first heard of Mr. Brand in 2000. That was the year he fired Indiana University's legendary basketball coach, Bob Knight. The short-tempered Mr. Knight had violated a zero-tolerance policy on misbehavior that Mr. Brand had put in place shortly after an earlier scuffle with an athlete.

Fans and students were livid over the dismissal of the popular coach, who had taken the Hoosiers to three national titles. They placed Mr. Brand squarely in the cross hairs of their bitter protests. Some college presidents and faculty members, though, cheered.

The heated—and mixed—reaction was good preparation for the scrutiny Mr. Brand would later receive at the NCAA. With more than 1,200 member institutions, a 400-plus-page rule book, and an army of committees, the NCAA rarely makes a move that does not prompt a complaint from someone.

As the public face of the organization, Mr. Brand took heat on almost every pressure point, some of which he had the authority to change, some of which he did not. The NCAA should pay athletes, some critics said. Lose its tax exemption. Cap coaches' salaries. Create a football playoff. And so on. On occasion, though, he also felt the love. It came from advocates of gender equity, who were appreciative of the NCAA's outspoken support for Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination at institutions receiving federal funds. It came from college presidents and faculty members, who were heartened by the NCAA's renewed emphasis on academics.

"His name will always be associated with the most significant academic reform ever to take place within the NCAA," said William "Brit" Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, who first met Mr. Brand in the early 1990s and served on the search committee that selected him to his NCAA post.

Preaching the Gospel

Like the NCAA's ubiquitous ads, Mr. Brand often said that most college athletes would go pro in something other than sports. It was a subtle nod to the frequent criticism that universities had become merely a brief sojourn for certain athletes intent on competing professionally.

But it was also Mr. Brand's way of reminding the NCAA's critics that the sports landscape was far more complex than the sold-out arenas or scandal-tainted programs that grabbed headlines—that the NCAA was not a professional league.

"Pro sports are a cross between business and entertainment, which is fine for them but not for us," he said in a 2003 interview with the alumni magazine at Rensselaer. "I want to spotlight what's truly special in intercollegiate athletics and maintain its unique flavor."

Yet Mr. Brand often found himself dealing with questions about the proper role of commercial activity in college sports. His answer was hardly the black-and-white condemnation of commercial activity that some wanted, nor was it carte blanche for unchecked growth.

Without commercial activity, Mr. Brand often said, college sports could not survive. A faltering economy—dwindling subsidies, unreliable private donations—required athletics programs to get creative about finding new revenue streams. But "commercialism gone wild," as he put it in one of his last speeches, was dangerous and to be avoided.

"The extremes of unrealistic idealism and crass commercialism are not the right courses of action," he stated in the last remarks he delivered at the NCAA's annual meeting, in January 2009. (Mr. Brand did not attend the meeting because of illness, but a top aide, Wallace I. Renfro, delivered the speech in his absence.) "But between them—somewhere—there is an acceptable balance point."

But the NCAA's dual approach to commercialism—cherry-picking some forms of it while shunning others—often frustrated Mr. Brand's critics. They wanted the NCAA president to take a more forceful stance against some of the eye-popping coaches' salaries and escalating construction costs that had swelled the budgets of many athletics departments in recent years.

A Legacy of Reform

When Mr. Brand arrived in 2003, the NCAA had already adopted a set of new policies designed to hold athletes—and, by extension, their coaches—to stricter academic standards. But it took years of advocacy by Mr. Brand for the policies to stick.

Nathan Tublitz, a professor of biology at the University of Oregon who is active in faculty-athletics matters, said the development of the NCAA's Academic Progress Rate and its Graduation Success Rate were "noteworthy advances" in college athletics. They "forced the athletic community to think about the academic nature of their enterprise."

In an interview with The Chronicle in 2004, Mr. Brand himself agreed. "I don't think the academic stuff would have moved through" without me, he said. "It needed someone to hold its hand."

Funeral arrangements are pending.