Big-Time Sports Become the Big Risk : More Universities Need to Realize the Costs to Education

Athletics have become addictive for many American universities, diverting their focus from learning to sports, yet the institutions fear that they cannot thrive without them.

Few doubt that team sports have a place in the education and development of young people. But the spectator sports underwritten by many universities have little relationship to the traditional rationale for athletics in the higher learning process. At Southern Methodist University, where I have taught for 25 years, there have been new allegations of National Collegiate Athletic Assn. rule violations while the school already is serving an NCAA probation for recruiting and other infractions.

The post-season football games that will soon follow one another on TV, like planes departing from a busy airport, will showcase pre-professionals hoping for post-graduation jobs in the high-paying sports-entertainment industry. University officials have become entrepreneurs caught up in a high-risk, high-stakes business.

Universities hardly are to blame for the forces that have diverted them from teaching and research. The alumni who carried with them the nostalgia of Saturday afternoon games wanted to hold on to the memories. They and the public then tended to idealize autumn’s football contests as the epitome of college life. Television added a marketing dimension, and now college sports have ballooned into a multimillion-dollar industry.

The seamy side of university athletics has been fostered by the pressures for teams to win. Winning football teams generate big audiences, TV coverage, post-season bowl bids and profits. Losing teams can cause substantial losses. The pressures to win are translated into commercial activities to protect profits that, despite NCAA regulations, result in special inducements for athletes. The relatively benign ones include special admission conditions for players, special living and dining arrangements, special academic tutoring and sometimes special curricula to ensure that players maintain their eligibility to play.

At worst, the inducements include payments to players to “sign� to attend a given university, payments for attending and bonuses for outstanding performances. Payments sometimes are made in the form of apartments, job promises and cars. They may be made to players’ families, and there also are reports of negative payments in the form of threats to families’ livelihoods if players do not come through.

University officials all too often are involved in these activities because coaches and recruiters, although they are paid salaries that dwarf the usual academic compensations, have short tenures and are under great pressure to produce winning teams. Even when university officials are not directly involved in player payoffs, “boosters� often provide them.

The business of athletics has benefits for the sponsoring universities. Foremost are profits that will support faculties, laboratories and libraries. But publicity is equally important. The media provide instant headlines and keep the name and symbols of a participating university constantly in the public eye. University trustees believe that such publicity helps in the general recruitment of students and faculty members and in attracting philanthropic and government support.

But there are costs. It is not unusual for university presidents to spend as much time solving the problems of their athletic departments as on the real work of higher education. Faculty members may spend as much time with a few academically unqualified student athletes as with those on whom they place their greatest hopes.

Athletic department losses, of course, impinge on the general revenues of the university. But, perhaps most important, excessive promotion of athletics breeds a sense of values that is antithetical to the true goals of higher education. Excessive promotion of athletics exalts achievements of the body rather than the critical examination of ideas. And when university complicity in illegal inducement of athletes is made public, lessons in ethics that should be an integral part of learning become moot.

Many of the best private universities--such as the University of Chicago, Columbia and Yale--decided to de-emphasize athletics at some point in their histories. Other schools have eschewed the big-money game, football. More seem likely to follow. With smaller numbers of alumni than public institutions have, the private universities that stay with the game seem under even more pressure to win. They are under pressure to sell seats in their stadiums and to capture TV attention; their wealthy boosters also seem especially difficult to control.

While there is risk to such institutions in abandoning commercialized athletic programs, increasingly there is greater risk in not doing so. Universities drive away supporters who want to contribute to learning institutions by holding onto supporters who want to hang onto their adolescent identities. It is said that no university ever became great through football. New scandals in sports programs suggest that it is time for more universities to make the tough choice to put education ahead of sports.