Two different visions of how to deal with college athletics were on display at a recent Pope Center round-table conference. Most of the 12 participants agreed that the world of college sports is troubled, but disagreed on the direction reform should take.
The Pope Center’s Jane Shaw dubbed one approach the “fight” model, which suggests wholesale de-emphasis of big-time athletics. The other she called the “reclaim” model, which favors reaching out to coaches and administrators to gradually restore sportsmanship and ethical behavior.
The basic arguments were presented by Bill Thierfelder, president of Belmont Abbey College and a former national champion in the high jump, and Murray Sperber, a professor of English and American studies at the University of Indiana for many years and the author of several popular books on college sports, including Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Has Crippled Undergraduate Education.
Each of the two men has seen the world of athletics from many different angles. Despite their different perspectives, they both agreed that something is seriously amiss in the world of college athletics.
Sports and virtue
Thierfelder, representing the “reclaim” model, focused on his belief of what college athletics should be — a means to train the whole person and a way to lead an athlete to virtue.
He rejected a common assessment that college athletics are so tainted by money that they should be eliminated or given professional status. To Thierfelder, sports have great value in forming the character of students. He said that he could understand the expense of college sports if it served a greater purpose than making money. However, few athletic departments are profitable.
He described sports as an “artificial environment” in which good or bad behavior can be taught deliberately. He said coaches, administrators, and athletic departments must be held accountable for students under their charge, in terms of their character as well as their performance.
“If the end is world-class performance and the development of virtue and the formation of a whole person, body, mind and spirit, fantastic!” Thierfelder said. He suggested that, too often, the goal is to simply win championships, with no higher purpose in mind. Still, he sees no divide between world-class athletic performance and virtue—“world-class performance is a virtue, but it’s only one of them.” The problem with collegiate athletics is that only athletic performance is rewarded, and not the other aspects of virtue, he said.
”Athletic arms race”
Sperber, representing the “fight” model, had a darker focus. As the author of several books strongly criticizing big-time college sports, he continues to emphasize exposing the problems of corruption, and he indicated little hope for any shift in the focus of athletic departments away from winning and money.
He amusingly described how college athletics were born in corruption and commercialization. The first intercollegiate athletic event was a rowing contest between Harvard and Yale in the 1830s. It was intended to advertise real estate for a railroad company, and both teams had numerous “ringers” with no known connections to the schools. “Before an oar hit the water, it’s highly commercial and they’re cheating,” he said.
Athletic departments and administrations at big Division I universities have given themselves over to an “athletic arms race,” where money drives everything, he said. Even Division III schools are “increasingly imitating the big-time universities.”
The public has long thought that big-time sports are profitable, he said, “which is the way athletic departments want it portrayed… It’s now generally accepted that they lose money.”
Sperber quoted an economics professor from Cornell University, who said “the pattern is very troubling. We’re spending a lot of money on things that in the end aren’t going to make any difference in how well we do as a society.”
“I love college sports, but I love education more,” Sperber said. “And that’s what universities should be about.”
”Marketing value” of sports
Many of the problems stem from the fact that “athletic teams have marketing value,” said Harry Lewis, a computer science professor at Harvard University. Administrators are “worried that 16-year-olds won’t recognize their schools without a football team,” he said, adding that the pressure to attract students through big-time sports is “destructive to the integrity of college athletics.”
Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, suggested that school officials partly justify athletics’ prominence on campus because it is an easy way to build a “community” out of strangers thrown together for a short time.
Yet changes in academia’s economics and demographics might alter the athletic landscape, Wood said. Women are starting to dominate academia, and their sports programs have suffered less corruption. As more students seek alternatives to traditional college educations, such as online programs, athletics could diminish. “The University of Phoenix has no football team,” he said.
Jay Schalin is a senior writer of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.