The Athletics Incubus: How College Sports Undermine College Education: How College Sports Undermine College Education

by Andrew Hacker, Claudia Dreifus

Overview

Previously published as part of HIGHER EDUCATION?

A quarter of a million dollars. It's the going tab for four years at most top-tier colleges. But is it worth it?

In this provocative work, the renowned sociologist Andrew Hacker and New York Times writer Claudia Dreifus make an incisive case that American college athletics—which originally came into the campus as an innocent form of recreation—have overtaken academic pursuits, compromised the moral authority of educators, and gobbled up resources that should have gone to their basic missions. In other words, that the American way of higher education—now a $420 billion-per-year business—has lost sight of its primary mission: the education of our young people.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429958608
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	07/19/2011
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	32
File size:	335 KB

About the Author

ANDREW HACKER is the author of the bestselling book Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, and writes regularly for the New York Review of Books and other publications. He is a professor at Queens College.

CLAUDIA DREIFUS writes for the "Science Times" section of the New York Times and teaches at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.

They live in New York City.

ANDREW HACKER is the author of the bestselling book Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, and writes regularly for the New York Review of Books and other publications. He is a professor at Queens College.
Claudia Dreifus has been a journalist since the 1960s. Before coming to the Science Times section of The New York Times, she was known for her incisive interviews with international political figures and cultural icons. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Playboy, Ms., The Progressive, and Modern Maturity. A Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute of the New School for Social Research, she lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

THE ATHLETICS INCUBUS

Did you know that MIT has a football team?

Yes, each autumn the nation's preeminent science and engineering university garbs fifty-six players in cardinal and black jerseys to meet rivals like Massachusetts Maritime, Framingham State, and Salve Regina University. The team is supervised by eight salaried coaches, is publicized on a twenty-page website, and claims it supports itself on an annual budget of $111,203. (Women's rowing at MIT admits to $223,922.) Between 2004 and 2008, it racked up fourteen wins and thirty-two losses.

Though MIT's public relations office churns out tidbits about the "Engineers," as they are called, its 4,138 undergraduate students display little interest in their team. At a typical home game, only 683 spectators are in its stadium. The NCAA, which keeps records on this, notes that MIT placed 208th in attendance of 236 Division III teams. (The schools ranking below it have much smaller enrollments.) We once asked Susan Hockfield, MIT's president, why they even bothered with football. She hesitated and then murmured something about building school spirit, but clearly was uncomfortable with the issue. We forbore from asking if she attends.

Welcome to the world of self-delusion and magical thinking that shrouds much of intercollege athletics. We call this chapter "The Athletics Incubus" after the demons of myth, those evil spirits that descend on sleeping persons (or, in this case, institutions) and create havoc with their beings. America's colleges were founded to educate its young, to pass on the wisdom of previous generations, and to extend the range of human knowledge. College athletics originally came into the campus as an innocent form of recreation and diversion. Yet over the years the athletics incubus has overtaken academic pursuits, compromised the moral authority of educators, and gobbled up resources that should have gone to their basic missions.

We intend to argue that the virus is endemic, infecting almost all of the 1,057 colleges that sponsor varsity teams. And while it is easy to cite differences between programs, there are also striking similarities, and these are what we will be stressing. Here are vignettes of two schools, both of which in their own ways take intercollegiate competition very seriously.

The University of Texas is a major athletic power. In 2008, it reported spending $100,982,596 on its sixteen varsity teams. Revenue from football recoups most of that outlay, since it sells 98,046 tickets at a typical home game, including to undergraduates who pay through a compulsory athletics fee. In all, 525 students play on Texas teams, with 143 signed up for football or basketball, almost all of them especially recruited. But since there are 36,835 undergraduates, it means that only 1.4 percent of them participate in varsity programs. Nor has Texas shown interest in raising that ratio. Its aim is top rankings for its two high-profile sports.

Although Williams College in Massachusetts has fewer than two thousand students, it fields twenty-eight teams, ranging from ice hockey and water polo to golf and alpine skiing. It also sponsors football, with ten salaried coaches, outnumbering its physics department's eight professors. Altogether, 793 men and women, fully 40 percent of its student body, play on its varsity squads. Applicants with an aptitude for, say, water polo have an edge in the admissions process, especially if the coach puts in a good word. Williams reports spending $4,217,896 annually on intercollegiate athletics, with hardly any recouped.

We have decided not to dilate on the scandals, corruption, and arrogance infecting high-powered athletics. They include players prone to sexual assaults, coaches skirting rules to sign up stars, professors passing absent athletes, and alumni ready with backdoor bribes. Armloads of books have been written about the corrosive effects of commercialization and striving to win no matter what. So we won't try to echo Murray Sperber's Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education or William C. Dowlings's Confessions of a Spoilsport, both of which we warmly recommend. Our chief concern is with how the incubus has been spreading, in overt and subtle ways, to what are otherwise respected centers of learning.

In 2008, the most recent figures at this writing, the 1,057 colleges sponsored a total of 17,917 teams that had 418,345 undergraduates on their rosters. Here are some salient features of intercollegiate — sometimes called varsity — athletics:

• Whether at the University of Texas or Williams College, the students who join varsity teams are designated as athletes. That's how the admissions office sees them, how their classmates generally view them, and how they tend to regard themselves. NCAA officials in far-off Indianapolis make rules about their hours of practice, when coaches can contact their parents, how much pocket money a college can give them. Even if they don't receive scholarships for playing, their sport becomes their principal activity and has first call on their time. A Harvard sophomore told us he thought he would like to try his hand at baseball. The coach was sympathetic, but told him that all the team's places had been filled with specially recruited players. Indeed, they had been early identified by the athletic staff, with their names flagged for the admissions office. In this, Harvard isn't wholly different from big-time bowl contenders.

• Student athletes are trained and recruited by salaried coaches, who oversee players on a daily basis and decide their deployment on the ice or court or field. It is an intensive relationship; indeed, one more direct and demanding than most students have with their professors.

• Teams compete against other colleges, accompanied by the expense of travel, sometimes to distant states, which can run to chartered planes and hotel accommodations, not to mention that players may miss successive classes.

• A team is expected to rack up more victories than defeats, a goal not easily attained when every match has a loser. This explains the ever-rising salaries of coaches. Mack Brown, who directs Texas's football program, gets $5 million annually in hope that he will continue a winning streak.

Nor is generosity only at the top. Ed Orgeron, Tennessee's assistant defensive football coach, receives $650,000. Of course, such paychecks no longer shock at schools where sports are unabashedly a business. Still, the pay-for-winning sentiment seeps down, even to a sport like ice hockey, which is not expected to turn a profit. An NCAA study found that half its coaches are paid at least $252,000, over twice the salary of professors at most institutions.

• The overwhelming majority of those 17,917 teams in all sports and schools end up losing money. In the top football division, which can count on strong ticket sales, 113 of its 118 teams still run a deficit. Of the five that made a profit, only two brought in enough to erase the overall deficit of their schools' athletics departments.

• College sports are akin to an arms race: once started, they create their own momentum. Anthony Marx, the president of Amherst, once suggested to some of his fellow liberal arts college presidents that they borrow a practice from international diplomacy, an athletics equivalent of mutual arms reduction. He'd downsize Amherst's money-eating football program if others followed suit. It was as if Marx, a political scientist, had asked North Korea to dismantle their SCUD missiles. He had no takers.

• Colleges create teams, not necessarily because students want them but for circuitous reasons. Ohio State has a preponderance of male athletes, largely the doing of its humongous football squad. So it installed women's rowing to get closer to a gender balance, as decreed by Title IX. A problem: few high schools sponsor this sport, and no women were signing up. Amanda Purcell, a music major, caught a coach's eye due to her sturdy 5-foot-9 frame. In return for pulling an oar, the college is paying her full tuition, plus $10,800 toward room and board. But since not enough others followed her, the team decided to recruit from abroad. In Ohio State's lead boat are five rowers from Germany, one from Russia, and another from the Netherlands. Did the original authors of Title IX envision their egalitarian measure as creating educational opportunities for female athletes from Europe?

Now to those myths and mantras, contending that varsity sports are a positive force. We'll try to show how they are thin on evidence and rely on assertion in lieu of analysis.

Myth: Intercollegiate competition builds school spirit.

Reality: On an autumn afternoon, upward of 30,000 Ohio State students are among the more than 100,000 spectators cheering their team on against the University of Michigan. We'll agree their presence is evidence of their pride in being Buckeyes, especially because they usually win. (We might add that OSU undergraduates don't get in free; those who want to cheer their team must buy a $150 five-game package.) Nor are we so naïve to suppose that these students would be equally aroused if their college reached the finals in a regional chess tournament. Still, if spirit is seen as a good thing, we want to take a closer look at what this pride is about.

On a football field, defeating Michigan shows Ohio State has displayed its superiority, at least in a stadium. But by almost all other measures, Michigan is a better school. In U.S. News & World Report's 2010 ratings of public universities, it was ranked fourth, only behind Berkeley, UCLA, and Virginia. Ohio State, on the other hand, was eighteenth, following twelve other state schools, including Florida and Georgia Tech. True, there has been criticism of the rankings; still, athletic prowess isn't in the equation. The two states are comparable in size and economic standing, and they seem equally willing to invest in football. But there the resemblance ends. Michigan has built highly regarded medical and law schools, while Ohio's are clearly lower tier. Michigan seeks to attract and keep a quality faculty, plus its students' SATs average 1375 against 1200 for Ohio State. In fact, OSU's students and alumni know their university runs a poor second to Michigan by any academic reckoning. That they look for redress on a football field strikes us as a trifle sad.

We've found that at colleges where the students are pleased with the educations they're getting, they feel little need for varsity competition to pump up school spirit. Indeed, it bemuses us why so many colleges continue with costly football squads when so few of their students seem to care. We've already noted of MIT's 4,138 undergraduates, only 683 are at an average game. At Grinnell, a well-regarded liberal arts college, 411 of its 1,623 students typically turn out. And of the 6,467 enrolled at St. Louis's Washington University, 5,250 are somewhere other than the stadium on a Saturday afternoon. These small turnouts lead us to suspect that at these schools and elsewhere, students have found other ways to express pride in their schools.

Myth: Enrolling athletes creates a more diverse campus.

Reality: An earlier myth, now mercifully retired, was that recruiting black students for varsity teams allowed them to continue their education and leave with degrees. We hardly hear this argument anymore, since it's understood that the only reason most of them are on the campus is to play. Football and basketball in particular demand so much time and energy that it's almost impossible to carry a serious academic program — all the more if you come with marginal preparation. At some schools, graduation rates have been in the single digits. Black athletes, more than others, are fodder for coaches, to use when they're needed and discarded when they're not. It's not inherently racial; some young African Americans simply have the skills coaches seek. If colleges found that mathematics championships could make money, we'd see students of Asian and Russian origin being avidly recruited.

We'll grant that having a basketball team composed almost entirely of black players will help integrate a mostly white campus. But the numbers are usually modest. Of the twelve members of the Rutgers 2009 women's squad, eleven were of African-American origin and had been recruited from as far as California and Mississippi. But since Rutgers has 26,479 students, it's unlikely those eleven faces add much to their diversity. Most of the 628 colleges fielding football, and the 1,954 with basketball, don't have the budgets or reputations needed for scouting inner-city talent. Even with high-powered Duke's basketball, the roster is two-thirds white. Up at Williams, its eighteen-member squad has only two black players, and we counted seven black faces amid the seventy-five in its football photograph.

But football and basketball are only two of many college sports. The rosters of the remaining teams, with the occasional exception of track, are overwhelmingly white. As new programs have been added — as with rowing at Ohio State — white students now top the recruiting lists. One need only look at sports like lacrosse, golf, and hockey to see that the players got their start at private and suburban schools. So when Colby introduced women's ice hockey, it was clear it wouldn't be filling its positions from the inner cities. In fact, almost everyone on its current team comes from exclusive — and expensive — schools like Tabor, Taft, and St. Paul's.

The upsurge in "white" sports is a partial explanation for why students from private schools have an admissions advantage at selective colleges. After all, few public high schools nurture their students in sports like ice hockey, golf, and crew. So though nationally private schools, including those with religious ties, account for only 10 percent of all high school graduates, they provide 40 percent of Stanford's admissions, along with 46 percent of Colby's and 45 percent of Yale's.

And there's another kind of diversity. With tennis, coaches have a penchant for overseas recruits. As we write, of Berkeley's nine women players, six are from abroad, including Germany, Hungary, and Australia. In a recent NCAA tennis tournament, forty-eight of the sixty-four male finalists were foreign nationals. As we saw, this was how Ohio State keeps women's rowing going. In a further twist, the imported players tend to be several years older, and come with more stamina and experience. Brooklyn's St. Francis College has a water polo team, but only three of its fifteen members started as regular students. The other twelve were invited, sight unseen, from Israel, Hungary, and Serbia, given student visas, and automatic admission. We'll grant that this adds to the diversity of the college. Still, overseas recruiting is yet another consequence of intercollegiate competition; colleges and coaches want to come in first, even if they have to go to Munich and Melbourne to assemble winning teams. As a result, American students sit by and watch while foreign recruits carry the name of their college.

Myth: Expanding women's sports imperils men's programs.

Reality: Here the poster victim is men's wrestling. Between 1982 and 2008, the number of schools sponsoring this very male sport dropped from 363 to 227. The reason most commonly given is that Title IX demands parity of men's and women's participation in athletic programs, or at the least strong efforts toward that goal. Since historically most teams were for men, to even up the numbers colleges had to show a substantial increase in women's programs.

And they have. In 1982, only 80 colleges sponsored women's soccer teams; now 956 do. Colby not only installed ice hockey for women, it also added women's teams for golf, lacrosse, crew, squash, plus two kinds of skiing. Even so, at most schools, budgets are limited, so decisions were made that some men's sports would have to go. Wrestling was on a lot of hit lists. "The number of collegiate wrestling teams lost to Title IX compliance is staggering," the novelist John Irving exclaimed in the New York Times. He was right; or at least partly so. As we've seen, there are now 136 fewer wrestling programs, a drop of over a third. Since fully 149 swimming teams for women have been started, it's tempting to assume that their arrival had some causal connection to the demise of those 136 wrestling teams.

(Continues…)

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Copyright © 2010 Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus.
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