The NCAA News - News and Features

The NCAA News -- November 22, 1999

Passing the grade

Faculty involvement in college athletics diminished as business focus increased

BY GARY T. BROWN
STAFF WRITER

Through most of the NCAA's formative years, college and university faculty members occupied the leadership positions within the Association.

NCAA icons such as Robert Ray, Marcus Plant, Alan Chapman, Harry Cross, Earl Ramer and Neils Thompson were among faculty athletics representatives who led the Association at various times in the 1960s and '70s.

But around 1980, the relationship between faculty and athletics began to shift.

"It was an unwritten rule (until then) that the president should be a faculty representative at that time," said Chapman, a faculty athletics representative who served as president in 1973-74 and who still teaches at Rice University. "It goes back to the history of the NCAA, even before the 1960s, most of the activity was carried on by faculty representatives -- that's the way the NCAA was formed."

In 1978, the NCAA elected William J. Flynn, director of athletics at Boston College, as president -- the first AD to hold the position since Everett Barnes of Colgate University (1965-66). The term after Flynn's belonged to James Frank of Lincoln University (Missouri), the first institutional chief executive officer to serve as NCAA president. The last faculty athletics representative to lead the NCAA was Al Witte of the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville (1989-90).

Under the current NCAA structure, all volunteer leadership positions (Executive Committee chair and chairs of the three presidential boards) must be held by institutional CEOs.

More professional

Chapman has no trouble identifying what was behind the transition.

"The whole business of college athletics started becoming more professional," Chapman said. "That is, conferences started hiring executive directors and other professionals to run things, and athletics directors were becoming more involved because athletics were becom-
ing more of a business than a student activity."

Chapman said it also was a time during which college presidents were aware that they needed to be more visible. As athletics began to have more business ramifications, rules violations increased. As violations increased, so did the attention devoted to the miscues. And that attention more often than not was directed at the top.

"Up until that time, presidents more or less had the attitude of 'keep things running smoothly and don't bother me,' " Chapman said. "But then it became more and more apparent that CEOs had to be more involved because in the end it was they who were on the firing line, particularly when infractions started attracting so much prominence from media.

"When their school was the one put on probation, all their alumni and media would want to know what the president thought."

Percy Bates, the current faculty athletics representative at the University of Michigan, agreed that faculty reps clearly had an influential role until about 1980. But as the tug between "student" and "athlete" increased, the role of the faculty rep was -- if not diminished -- at least divided.

"The faculty had been involved across the board," Bates said of the Association's early days. "But somewhere in the 1980s we started to see at least a desire to begin to divide up the roles so that financial matters became the purview of athletics directors, and academic matters and student-athlete welfare issues remained with the faculty reps."

Across-the-board decisions

Bates said while that shift in the leadership paradigm wasn't necessarily bad, it may not have been the best approach. He said the division of responsibilities became a problem for fundamental decisions on issues that were neither financial nor academic.

"For example, let's take an issue that cuts across the whole campus, like raising ticket prices because the athletics director thinks more money is needed," Bates said. "Is that independent of student-athlete welfare? It appears as though it's strictly a financial matter, but you have to look at how it will affect students across the campus, too. In that sense, the division is not such a good idea."

But Bates acknowledged that as money became more of a factor in the business of running intercollegiate athletics, the people making the decisions tended to be those with greater control of the purse strings.

He also said that the transition was a quiet one.

"I'm not sure anyone wanted to step in and say, 'You know, athletics directors really ought to run this show,' because that would have been a way of saying that we're really going to emphasize professionalism and financial aspects and reduce the academic part. No one wanted to touch that," Bates said.

"But the way we got to it was that people began to look at the issue of escalating cost and who's to pay for what. I think in effect we said, 'Look, we don't want to reduce the academic involvement and impact, but we do feel that there's a managerial aspect in all of this that we need to shift to the other side of the ledger.' And I think most people thought that was reasonable."

Passing the baton

Both Chapman and Bates acknowledged that as CEOs became more involved, the baton of academic interests in a sense was passed to a relevant caretaker. But while presidents do have a broad view, Bates said they can't ignore the bottom line.

"Some people like to think that presidential control is akin to faculty rep control, but I don't think so," he said. "I think presidential control is different because they are the bottom line. By the time something gets to them, it's difficult in many instances for them to really understand what all of the issues are. In fact, I've heard that some presidents are saying now that they're in control we don't need the role of the faculty -- but the roles are not one and the same.

"I see the faculty as one of the front-line watchdogs," Bates said. "I see the presidents at the end of the line to make sure there's some reasonable balance in this process, but they're not the ones to talk about maintaining academic integrity, particularly on local campuses."

Chapman said that presidential control in fact has decreased the need for a faculty rep.

"It's kind of regrettable because it's brought on a different attitude," he said. "It's nice to have a perspective from someone there whose job doesn't depend on the athletics success of the team. That's one of the things the faculty reps were insulated by -- their jobs depended on their academic endeavors and they could provide the viewpoint that the professionals couldn't, as well as CEOs, who were more concerned with public image and so forth."

Bates said that the role of the faculty athletics representative shouldn't be diminished any more than it already has. He believes that the Association's leadership should maintain a partnership among presidents, athletics administrators, commissioners -- and certainly, faculty athletics representatives.

"The main issue is that we're major academic institutions where there are other activities that go on in conjunction with our primary role," he said. "And when couched that way, it's clear then that you've got to maintain a heavy faculty involvement. Otherwise, you begin to lose what you started with."