…Prompting Calls for Reform on Campus
As the final four basketball teams in the NCAA tournament assemble in San Antonio, Texas, this weekend, few will mention that the cost of most universities’ admittance to “the big dance” is a big piece of their academic soul.
Only 21 of the 65 teams starting the tournament two weeks ago had graduation rates better than 50%, with four teams graduating nobody in the six-year period these numbers reflect. Three tournament teams were still on probation for major violations; one, Utah, according to the NCAA, for academic fraud. All, however, were permitted to compete.
St. Bonaventure University, in Olean, N.Y., was not so lucky. Bona’s, as it is known, was slapped by the NCAA in February with three years’ probation and a one-year tournament ban for enrolling a junior-college player with good basketball skills but poor academics in 2002. The offense seems minor compared to recent college sports headline-grabbers that include rape and murder. The fallout, however, hit like an earthquake.
Everything happened within a week in March 2003. Atlantic 10 sanctions barred Bona’s from the conference tournament. The team then boycotted its last two games, and the national press jumped all over the story. The university fired the coach, an assistant and the athletic director, and forced the president to resign. The coverage intensified.
“It shook the campus,” says Nancy Casey, head of the elementary education department at the Franciscan university of 2,200 students. “People were very sad, not because we were getting trashed, but because this is not who we are as a university.”
Many people focused their disappointment on Bill Swan, chairman of the board of trustees. An alumnus and fervent team supporter, he took the criticism hard. One night last August, he hanged himself; his note said that he felt he had let the university down. “That was the biggest shock,” says Jim Miller, news editor of the Bona Venture, the student newspaper. “He was the guy who gave a voice to the school during the week of the scandal, who helped bring us together.”
The scandal put St. Bonaventure in bad company. Among the worst, Baylor’s basketball coach obscured problems with his program by claiming a murdered player was dealing drugs, and Colorado’s football coach diverted charges of rape of a female kicker by demeaning her kicking skills. All the negative attention has helped fuel a reform effort in which the NCAA has joined with the national governing board of trustees and several faculty groups to bring order to what economist Andrew Zimbalist calls a $3 billion industry.
Escalating sports budgets are a major issue. But it is the academic compromises that universities make—primarily recruiting good athletes who are poor students and then helping them cheat to remain eligible to play—that are sparking reform.
And while sports tempt universities with fame and money, payoffs are elusive. Recent NCAA studies show that, even with millions awarded annually through TV broadcasts, the high cost of competing means that “fewer than a dozen universities” make a profit from sports, according to NCAA President Myles Brand. Even the popular notion that alumni donate more for winning is flawed. Independent studies and those by the Mellon Foundation in 2001 and the NCAA in 2003 testified that winning sports teams rarely inspire more alumni giving, and, when they do, it is short-lived.
Reformers attack the lengths some universities go for sports: Offenses include falsifying grades, creating bogus courses for athletes, and intimidating teachers to pass failing players. Most egregious, many insist, is the abuse of students.
“To bring young persons to your campus, involve them in a sport...then have them leave with no degree and qualifications for a better future is wrong,” says William Friday, chairman of the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. Begun in 1989, the commission issued reports in 1991, 1992, 1993 and 2001 that spurred reform. It reconvened last year because problems with academic fraud, graduation rates and salary inflation are growing, extending from major sports programs to smaller universities and even high schools.
Linking the Knight Commission and the reform movement is a belief that high-profile sports are overvalued in the university community, that trouble results when uniforms and sneakers take precedent over caps and gowns. That was certainly the case at St. Bonaventure, a school with a 146-year tradition of academics and spirituality.
Former president Robert J. Wickenheiser, who had steered the school through rough economic waters, was an effusive basketball fan. He was proud of its history in the NIT and NCAA—it was the smallest school ever to reach the final four in 1970—and yearned to elevate the program. When coach Jim Baron left in 2001, Mr. Wickenheiser signed Jan van Breda Kolff, former NBA player and coach at Cornell, Vanderbilt and Pepperdine.
Mr. Van Breda Kolff took the Bonnies to the NIT in his first season, but then things began to unravel. He recruited and signed junior-college transfer Jamil Terrell, a prized big man for a small school. Unfortunately, Mr. Terrell had only a certificate in welding to pass for academic credentials. The NCAA report placing St. Bonaventure on probation blamed Mr. Wickenheiser, calling him guilty of “hubris” in overriding evidence of Mr. Terrell’s status. “Hubris is apt,” says alumnus Jack McGinley, who headed the school’s own report. “Bob’s visions were bigger than the institutional reality. Passion is a good thing, but here passion gave way to hubris.”
Passion for St. Bonaventure basketball is normal in Olean, a town of 15,000 south of Buffalo. Winter entertainment choices are few, and the Reilly Center rocks on game nights. After wins and losses, friendly fans congregate at Angee’s for drinks or dinner, then move up the block to the Village Green Lounge. A sense of good feeling permeates the campus, where friars in robes mix with students in baggy jeans. Civility is paramount. This added pain to the scandal, especially to the suicide of Bill Swan, a banker who held the school together when it most needed him. He seemed so strong, but months later a few individuals continued to hold him accountable.
“There was a small group that was so hurt that this school was caught in something like this that they would not let go,” says Father Dominic Monti, acting president. “If Bill were a politician he would have taken the 80% support and called it a win, but Bona’s was so special to him that he couldn’t get over those 20%. He was a very moral man.” And while the school and the community struggle to move on, what seems to linger is that all this happened because of basketball.
“We’re not naive,” says Rachel George, sports editor of the Bona Venture. “We know a sports department has to raise money, and winning is important, but business should never dictate the purpose of a university. We want to win, but there are other things that are more important.”