In recent years, the NCAA has pursued a variety of reform initiatives intended to ensure the "welfare" of student-athletes and encourage their persistence to graduation. I believe any such initiatives must be understood within a consideration of our institutional missions and the strength of our commitments to them.

Most university mission statements commit institutions to the personal and intellectual development of their students. In fulfilling these important obligations, a college or university must recruit and admit students who are capable of effectively using the learning resources of the institution and must offer those students challenging curricula and related learning opportunities. Under these circumstances, intercollegiate athletics can be compatible with and complementary to the fundamental mission of any institution.

However, some colleges and universities appear to have built their institutional reputations, in some significant part, on athletics success. For these institutions, athletics success has become an important path to market distinction and when this occurs, achieving and sustaining competitive status in conformity with the institution's stated mission may become very difficult.

If a divergent athletics mission is permitted, an institution of higher education can easily become trapped in an undue reliance on athletics for its stature. If it cannot succeed athletically by admitting only students who are likely to benefit from its offerings, the institution may be faced with the choice of accepting an alternate mission for some of its intercollegiate athletes or abandoning the athletics strategy on which it has staked its reputation.

When the former course is followed, it is all too easy for an institution to accept lower admissions standards for student-athletes, questionable courses or curricula for them, and graduation rates far below those of students in general. Institutional embarrassment rather than enhanced stature have resulted in too many cases. We seem increasingly willing to embrace the notion that athletics success can be a quick route to institutional stature, higher enrollments, greater gift support,

and happy alumni, but when concessions to mission become acceptable in the interest of athlete rankings, we have started down a dangerous path.

In recent years, we all have heard stories of young people recruited and admitted as student-athletes who failed to persist to graduation.

In too many cases, these young people achieved neither a college degree nor a career in professional sports.

Regrettably, there are just enough examples of success in professional sports to keep the hopes alive and the pipeline full. I believe that if an institution cannot reasonably predict academic success for a prospective student, the admission of that student for the purpose of enhancing its chances for athletics success is unethical.

The well-being of individual students, the integrity of intercollegiate athletics, and the credibility of our institutions of higher education require us to admit qualified students, support those students in their intellectual and personal growth, treat them fairly with respect to time commitments and their rights to privacy, and take reasonable measures to encourage them to persist to graduation.

Having committed fully to these important obligations, we can then turn to the honorable pursuit of athletics victories.

Bart Luedeke is the president of Rider University.