During the winter of his junior year at tiny Albion College in Michigan, Dolph Grundman saw his basketball coach make an unusual decision: One of the team's seldom-used forwards asked if he could skip a game at nearby Olivet College to study for an exam. Few middle-school coaches, let alone college coaches, would have said yes--but low-key, diplomatic Cedric Dempsey did.
Forty years later, Dempsey is the outgoing president of the NationalCollegiate Athletic Association and is widely known just as Grundman remembershim--as a diplomat. The organization he will leave behind when his contractexpires in December is, by its own measures of success, better off than he foundit eight years ago. With lucrative television contracts for basketball, newoffices in Indianapolis, and a revamped governing structure, the NCAA will not beslipping into irrelevancy any time soon.
But by many other measures of success, the world of college sports today isthe same disaster that Dempsey inherited in 1994--riddled with hypocrisy, at oddswith educational values, and, some argue, an increasing detriment to highereducation as a whole. The NCAA may be merely a "voluntary association" ofschools, but it is also the group charged with the oversight and administrationof intercollegiate athletics--a realm that many regard as chronically troubled.
Fairly or not, the NCAA is often held responsible for these shortcomings.Professors note with disappointment the widening gulf between athletics andacademics; economists and a small but growing number of student-athletes call theNCAA a cartel; college athletic departments continue to lose money. The list goeson, but most observers agree on one thing: Although diplomatic Cedric Dempseywas well intentioned and from time to time spoke to the big issues, he was notthe fire-breathing dynamo needed to waken the world of college sports from itsself-satisfied slumber.
Who is? A surprising number of observers believe that the answer to thatquestion no longer really matters. "I don't think this is a system that ischangeable very effectively from within," says Princeton professor of publicaffairs Michael Danielson, who has written on sports and politics. His pessimismis rooted in the NCAA's central contradiction: Though the organization issupposed to protect the integrity of college sports, it is dominated by theinfluence of the big-time athletic schools. These are the actors with thestrongest incentive to plow ahead with the very trend--commercialization--thatmost threatens the integrity of the entire enterprise. Why would they select forthemselves a president who blows the whistle any louder than Dempsey did?
In The Game of Life, a levelheaded but damning critique of college sports published last year, James Shulman and William Bowen demonstrated that commercialization, among other factors, feeds a destructive athletic "arms race" among colleges. Chasing after sports revenue and athletic prestige, schools admit more and more athletes, in the process sapping resources from their central academic missions and sending the unfortunate message to young people that sports is the best way to get into college. Shulman and Bowen were raising themes that had been trumpeted in the early 1990s by the Knight Commission, a blue-ribbon group that recommended measures to restore the primacy of academics in college athletics. The commission reconvened in 2001 and the following year reported that the situation had only gotten worse.
Shulman doubts that the NCAA can break the cycle he and Bowen identified."They aren't able to solve problems the schools themselves aren't able to solve,"he says. Therein lies the difficulty: The NCAA is nothing more than a collectionof schools, but by bringing more and more money into the arena through itspostseason tournaments, the association feeds colleges' worst impulses ratherthan appealing to their better ones. And there's no reason to suspect that whenit comes time for the NCAA to pick a new president the association will seize theopportunity to reverse that course. Ellen Staurowsky, an associate professor ofsport sciences at Ithaca College in New York, says that if the organization'smember schools aren't interested in cleaning up college sports, "no figurehead isgoing to be successful" at doing the same thing.
Not everyone is ready to consign the NCAA presidency to irrelevancy. For thoseinclined to think that it matters, there is near-unanimity on one point: Theassociation's next head should be, and probably will be, a college president.(Dempsey and his predecessor were former athletics directors.) "If the directorwere a former university president who had a great deal of credibility on thenational scene, it might send a different kind of message," notes Randall Webb,president of Northwestern State University and a member of the NCAA's executivecommittee, which will select the new president.
Some, however, are unconvinced. "It doesn't really matter," maintains AllenSack, a professor of sports management at the University of New Haven inConnecticut. "The symbolism will not necessarily move the NCAA away from thecommercial model." Sack actually worries that the selection of a college president will give the NCAA political cover it doesn't deserve--a built-in lipservice conferred by an academic's mere presence at the organization's helm.
A somewhat different objection is lodged by many sports economists, whodetest the NCAA, which they view as a cartel that limits the compensation ofathletes to below-market rates. In 1990, Robert Brown, an economist at CaliforniaState University-San Marcos, estimated that a top-rated NCAA men's basketballplayer brought in between $700,000 and $1,000,000 in revenue per year. Bycontrast, the actual value of his compensation--in the form of a scholarship--wasat most $30,000. It's the kind of gross violation of the market's free hand thatshows up in economists' nightmares.
But it's not just economists whom the next NCAA president will have tocontend with; it's also a new group of students called the Collegiate AthletesCoalition. The group, which was recently featured on 60 Minutes, is not a labor union--but through an informal alliance with the United Steelworkers, its members seek better benefits for student-athletes, and they hope to dismantle restrictions on how much money they can earn.
The schools that control the NCAA have a strong incentive to resist suchchanges. If they had to compensate student-athletes at even a fraction of theirmarket value, men's basketball and football might no longer provide the revenueto fund every other collegiate sport, as they currently do at many schools. "I'mnot sure if anyone knows how these guys are going to voluntarily give up some ofthese revenues," says Arthur Fleisher, an economist at Metropolitan State Collegeof Denver. The implication? Nothing short of a student-athlete strike or a courtdecision could compel such changes. And neither of these possibilities seemslikely to disrupt the status quo in the near future.
Those who see the NCAA as a potential engine for reform hope that its nextleader will be an aggressive "truth teller," in Shulman's words. While the newpresident may not be able to push through ambitious reform single-handedly, atleast he or she can badger those who hold real power in the world of collegeathletics--university presidents and conference commissioners--into backing downfrom their intensifying arms race.
But would the NCAA ever select that kind of leader--a truth teller who wouldpublicly seek to shame America's colleges out of their corrosive love affair withcommercialized sports? Murray Sperber, a professor of English and Americanstudies at Indiana University and longtime critic of the NCAA, thinks that he hasthe situation all figured out. He normally ranks among the understandably gloomy;but speaking from Bloomington recently on a sunny day, he was, for once, feelingoptimistic. "My hope is that they could get someone who is a kind of Earl Warrenfigure," he said. "Someone who could surprise people."
So this is what it has come down to for advocates of college-athletics reform:a hope that the NCAA is about as good at selecting presidents as Eisenhower wasat selecting Supreme Court justices. And if that sounds a little desperate--itis.
