Panelists Discuss Challenges Facing College Athletics
Street & Smith’s Conference Group’s 6th Annual Intercollegiate Athletics Forum kicked-off this morning at The Intercontinental, The Barclay, in N.Y. with a session titled, “The State of Intercollegiate Athletics: A Culture in Flux." Panelists included NCAA President Myles Brand, Univ. of Central Florida Institute for Diversity & Ethics in Sport Dir Richard Lapchick, Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics co-Chair and Univ. of Oregon professor Nathan Tublitz, Clemson Univ. President James Barker and Univ. of Notre Dame AD Kevin White. Following are highlights from the discussion.
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NCAA President
Myles Brand |
The Issue: What are the biggest challenges facing intercollegiate athletics today?
The Skinny: Brand: “Only six of our institutions are self-sustaining in terms of making money on athletics. The rest are subsidized to some degree. The tension between academic needs and athletic needs is a great source of tension, and it’s a quiet crisis on campuses.”
Barker: “There’s no question graduation rates have to improve. As your standards get higher and higher, if your standards to admit athletes don’t go up as well, that creates tension.”
Tublitz: “The problem is that academics and athletics are divergent, but we still have to think of the two together because they’re part of the same enterprise.”
Lapchick: “We still need to work harder to hire African-American coaches and leaders. The idea is to open the process, not necessarily to hire African-American coaches. Today we have five D-1 [football] coaches who are African-American, less than the eight we had a decade ago. The process simply isn’t working today. We’re an overwhelmingly white male group.”
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Univ. Of Central Florida's
Richard Lapchick |
The Issue: Do pressures to win affect spending decisions?
The Skinny: White: “Intercollegiate athletics represent four to five percent of spending across the enterprise at universities, and I suspect there are excesses all across these institutions. Intercollegiate athletics have been used as a marketing medium, and upward mobility has caused a lot of the tensions we’ve talked about.”
Brand: “Four or five percent sounds like money on the margins, but putting it into a stadium instead of science labs makes a difference. When we’re talking four or five percent of billions of dollars, that money makes a huge difference wherever it goes.”
Tublitz: “The temptation to cut corners isn’t unique to sports. I can cut corners too -- I could plagiarize, and people do that. But we still need standards and integrity, because we need to balance the needs of the entire university.”
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Clemson President
James Barker |
The Issue: What issues do you face with sponsorship?
The Skinny: Brand: “Our corporate sponsors want to associate with our institutions and our student-athletes. Our challenge is to find ways to do this, but not allow our athletes to be exploited.”
Barker: “Commercialization has gone on for a long time. We need to keep thinking about what this means, because it’s a moving landscape that even goes to the naming of non-athletic buildings on campus. Do you name a building after a great biologist or after the donor who gave you $16.5 million?"
Tublitz: “The spending decisions at universities are the same kinds of decisions families make. Do you buy a new BMW or do you fix the roof? There are push back and balance issues, and what you do at one end of the university affects the whole."
Greatest Hit: "Twelve million people watched our Labor Day game against Florida State, and that was an opportunity to tell 12 million people about our school. Do you have any idea how long it would take to tell 12 million people about our math department?” -- Barker.
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