Colleges are compromising themselves for the sake of their sports teams, most
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Varying Views on Sports
Americans believe.
More than three-quarters of respondents to The Chronicle’s Survey of Public Opinion on Higher Education said that athletes “are not held to the same academic performance standards as other students,” and two-thirds said that “four-year colleges and universities place too much emphasis on athletics.”
Among 21 goals for colleges, including preparing students to be future leaders and presenting cultural events, “playing athletics for the entertainment of the community” was found to be the least important by far. Only 35 percent of respondents said sports were somewhat or very important for colleges.
College presidents and National Collegiate Athletic Association officials often speak in grand terms about sports as a good way to educate the public about colleges. Football and men’s basketball in particular are said to be “the front porch of the university.” But the survey results indicate that people outside the insular world of college athletics hardly agree.
That gives Kermit L. Hall, president of Utah State University, some pause.
“The results are sobering for anyone running athletic programs,” he said. “The results seem to indicate that the base of support for athletics tends to be driven more by dollar value and perceived image and development than by any underlying commitment by the public.”
However, the public’s perceptions could simply be driven by the amount of college sports available in the media, said Syracuse University’s chancellor, Kenneth A. (Buzz) Shaw. Sports are so heavily covered on television and in newspapers that it would be impossible for many people not to find them overemphasized, he said.
“I have yet to see the networks pick up on the national competition for drama” programs, said Mr. Shaw, whose men’s basketball team won the NCAA’s Division I championship last month. “It isn’t that we’re overemphasizing sports. It’s that people like it, they watch it, and the NCAA and the networks give them what they want.”
He agrees that recent scandals, including persistent news reports about athletes’ low graduation rates, lead the public to view them as getting breaks in the classroom. That’s not quite fair, Mr. Shaw argued. “If you look at high-profile sports, people confuse graduation rates with special academic privileges and make a conclusion, but that’s not correct,” he said. A variety of reasons can lead to an athlete’s not graduating; many transfer, and a few turn professional.
Critics of college sports found affirmation in the poll’s results. Murray A. Sperber, a professor of English at Indiana University at Bloomington, said in an e-mail message that Americans’ belief that colleges overemphasize sports is unsurprising, and that it “should be sobering to Myles [Brand, the NCAA"s president] and college presidents.” As it is, Mr. Sperber said, those presidents are “off chasing the Flutie factor” -- the belief that sports success increases alumni giving and admissions applications, as was the case at Boston College after Doug Flutie won the Heisman Trophy.
Mr. Sperber also suggested that the survey’s questions could have steered respondents to certain answers, particularly the idea that colleges offer sports as a form of entertainment. “Instead of ‘entertainment,’” he said, the NCAA would prefer that the question ask whether colleges should “play athletics to build community relations.”
Jon Ericson, founder of the Drake Group, an association of faculty members concerned about academic fraud in athletics, said the survey results might give presidents enough cover to begin cleaning up college sports.
“Maybe facing up to the corruption in college sports is not such a radical idea after all,” Mr. Ericson, an emeritus professor of rhetoric at Drake University, said in an e-mail message. “Faculty senates and university presidents might find it less difficult than they imagine -- and much more rewarding -- to heed the silent voices of the many rather than the clamoring of the few.”
Beyond the totals, the demographic breakdowns in The Chronicle’s survey provided some interesting results. Of respondents age 33 and younger, 21 percent said playing sports for the entertainment of a community is very important for colleges, compared with 12 to 13 percent of all other age groups. Similarly, members of Generations X and Y were less likely (59 percent) than older people to think that colleges are “placing too much emphasis on athletics.”
A quarter of African-American respondents and 31 percent of Hispanic-Americans felt that athletics are very important as a mission for colleges, while only 10 percent of white Americans and 9 percent of Asian-American respondents did.
A quarter of both black and white respondents strongly believed that athletes are not held to the same level of academic achievement as other students, while only 9 percent of Hispanics and Asians did. A fifth of black respondents and 17 percent of white ones strongly believed that colleges place too much emphasis on sports, compared with only 11 percent of Hispanics and 5 percent of Asians.
Those findings probably indicated Hispanics’ and Asians’ lack of familiarity with college sports, compared with black and white Americans, said Richard E. Lapchick, director of the sport-business-management program at the University of Central Florida.
“If you take the percentage of African-American students who are also student-athletes, it’s a pretty healthy percentage of the total,” he said. “When you take the percentage of Latinos who are athletes, it’s very, very small. That both creates less interest on the part of Latinos and Asian-Americans, and it means there’s more at stake for white people and African-Americans.”
Poorer people tend to be more suspicious of college sports. A quarter of respondents making $25,000 or less per year believed that colleges place too much emphasis on sports, while only 13 percent of those making over $100,000 did.
The findings demonstrated a general disconnect between the public and the people who are immersed in intercollegiate athletics every day, Mr. Lapchick said. “When we’re inside the world of college sports and higher education, we frequently aren’t able to see what’s right in front of us in our homes, and what’s perceived by the general public to be the reality of what we’re dealing with.”
Within that world of colleges and their sports teams, presidents may care about what the public thinks, but ultimately, they are responsible to a small subset of the public: members of their boards. Thus, the public view alone is unlikely to prod college CEO’s to institute changes or de-emphasize sports, says William E. Cooper, president of the University of Richmond.
“While we are always cognizant of what the public and prospective students think, each of us reports to a board of trustees,” Mr. Cooper says. “At every Division I institution, at least a few of those trustees will have great interest in promoting Division I intercollegiate athletics.”
Douglas Lederman and Jeffrey Selingo contributed to this report.
http://chronicle.com Section: Special Report Volume 49, Issue 34, Page A17