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Scholarly Colloquium attracts research focus
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By Gary T. Brown
The NCAA News
The NCAA News
While the NCAA is a higher-education association, it has not often positioned itself to be linked with scholarly research. That will change beginning in January when the NCAA hosts the first of several Scholarly Colloquiums on College Sports to address what officials say is a dearth of quality study related to sport in the context of higher education.
The inaugural Colloquium, to be held January 10-11 in conjunction with the NCAA Convention in Nashville, serves two primary purposes: It offers scholars the opportunity to further inform the reform movement in intercollegiate athletics, and it should stimulate research over the next several years to elevate faculty involvement with college sports.
Scott Kretchmar, a philosophy of sport professor at Pennsylvania State University, chairs a 16-member advisory and editorial board that will conduct the proceedings.
The theme of the first Colloquium — “College Sports: A Legitimate Focus for Scholarly Inquiry?” — addresses whether sport, specifically as it is found in institutions of higher education, provides a unique and worthy subject matter for research.
“In other words,” Kretchmar said, “to preserve the good, eliminate the bad and improve that which needs improving in intercollegiate sports, what do we need to know? What kind of additional research is needed, and where is it likely to lead us?”
Four presenters — Robert Simon of Hamilton College; John Thelin of the University of Kentucky; Mary Jo Kane of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; and Jay Coakley of the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs — will join a series of reactors in providing multidisciplinary insight into the notion of intercollegiate athletics as a scholarly pursuit. The presentations will be provocative in nature by focusing on what needs to be known, how it might be studied, and what impact any resulting knowledge could have on both higher education and college athletics.
The four papers and the reactions will be published in a refereed journal in the spring. A subsequent edition of the journal will be published in fall 2008. At least two more Colloquiums will be conducted — at the 2009 NCAA Convention in Washington, D.C., and the 2010 Convention in Atlanta. Two journals in each of those years also will be published.
Boosting the research inventory
The advisory and editorial board includes senior scholars in fields ranging from philosophy of sport, sport management and sport physiology to sport law, sport psychology, education psychology and journalism. Board members acted as an independent entity and were not bound by the NCAA to seek only speakers who reflect positively on intercollegiate athletics.
Indeed, the presenters the board selected this year will cover topics ranging from whether athletics undermines athletics to whether athletics’ “separateness” compromises its place in the university structure.
“Each of our keynote speakers is above reproach and highly regarded,” Kretchmar said. “No one would say that the NCAA ‘owns’ these people, or that they’ve written only good things about intercollegiate athletics. We wanted four researchers with big names who are highly respected by their peers, so that nobody could claim we were just bringing in supporters of the NCAA. The board based its speaker selections on the quality of the research, not simply whether they positioned athletics favorably.”
Kretchmar, a former member of the Division I Management Council, said the Colloquium is a novel approach for the NCAA. Despite tremendous interest in college sports from any number of public and private constituencies, intercollegiate athletics is not often explored as a cultural phenomenon from a scholarly perspective. While the NCAA has addressed several student-athlete well-being issues through research on safety, behavior and academic success (even the current academic-reform movement in Division I is based on statistical research), the Association to date has not aggressively sought scholarly research about the athletics enterprise itself.
“In my mind, intercollegiate athletics is an obvious subject since it affects so many people both in higher education and outside of the academy — why wouldn’t the best scholars study it?” Kretchmar said. “Through the Colloquium, we intend to find out the good and the bad — give decision-makers in this reform environment quality data so we’re not victimized by individuals who just state opinions about the virtues or the demons of college sports. We’d rather have solid scholarship on which to say credibly, ‘Here’s what’s good about college sports and here’s what isn’t.’ ”
What may be best about the Colloquium is its timing. As Division I enters its fourth year of an aggressive data-based approach to academic reform, and on the heels of the Presidential Task Force calling upon the faculty to be more involved in integrating athletics within the educational mission, the Colloquium will benefit both goals.
One of the Colloquium speakers in fact can be traced to a Task Force charge for presidents to initiate campus-based leadership in reform. Among presidents who took that to heart is Minnesota’s Robert Bruininks, who appointed a task force of his own to examine student-athlete academic performance, retention and graduation rates. His choice to chair that group was Mary Jo Kane, a professor in Minnesota’s kinesiology department and chair of the university’s Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport.
Kane will present at the Colloquium a case study of her group’s effort to obtain longitudinal data upon which to make policy decisions and implement the proper infrastructure to help student-athletes — particularly those who are academically at risk — successfully transition into the campus educational and social environment.
To her, the notion of scientific inquiry to address an athletics issue came naturally. But Kane acknowledged such methodology is not the national norm for exploring athletics issues. Historically, she said, research in sports has focused primarily on the natural sciences (exercise physiology), psychological aspects, (performance anxiety) and sport management (marketing and promotion). But serious scientific inquiry about the academic performance and support and intervention strategies that will matter hasn’t been prominent.
“It’s not that we don’t care as a group of scholars who are interested in the sporting enterprise, but it has fallen through the cracks because of the way academic disciplines have developed,” Kane said.
Kretchmar agreed with the lack of quality research related to intercollegiate athletics. He said most scholars are trained in a relatively specific or narrow subject matter — typically not athletics, which many scholars consider to be risky when it comes to serious study. Kretchmar said in fact he knows faculty members who have conducted athletics-based research but do not include it on their vitae for fear of not being taken seriously.
“Whether deserved or not, games, sport and recreation have generally been considered taboo,” he said. “There is a degree of bias in higher education that makes it difficult to pursue intercollegiate sports as a theme for research.”
Thus, Kretchmar said, the bloodlines are shallow since few researchers exit grad school who studied under people who told them it is beneficial to study athletics and here’s how to do it.
Collaborating the message
What little research does exist seems to attract polemical or utopian viewpoints as well. Colloquium speaker John Thelin, a former wrestler at Brown University who now is an award-winning research professor at the University of Kentucky, said athletics is a magnet for extremes — either exposes about scandal or uncritical celebration, neither of which is particularly helpful.
“One possible outcome for the Colloquium is to alert several constituencies to ways of finding a more reasonable ground — to not accept at face value the extreme polemics of either side,” said Thelin, who also serves on the advisory and editorial board.
Thelin cited himself as a good example of an objective observer. “I have the luxury of having a pure interest in the field. It’s not like I am an athletics director, a president or a faculty rep. People in those official roles are likely to have a certain advocacy. On the one hand, I think highly of college sports and the ideal of the student-athlete, but at the same time I’m what I call both a dissenting loyalist and a loyal dissenter,” he said.
Thelin’s research probes how intercollegiate athletics fits into higher education.
“It will be interesting,” he said, “to watch how various constituencies react at the Colloquium. Can we make sense to ADs and the faculty? Can we be the ones who both mediate and also raise good, fair issues to these different and sometimes contentious constituencies? It will be a challenge for us, since we won’t necessarily be preaching to the choir.”
Kane said the choir will at least be familiar with the message.
“Faculty members share something in common with athletics administrators and governing bodies like the NCAA, which is that at the end of the day we want to do everything we can to ensure that student-athletes have a positive academic experience that prepares them for their life beyond college,” she said. “The question is how do we get there? What are the best intervention strategies to use on those student-athletes who are academically fragile? That’s why we need scientific inquiry.”
Kretchmar said some of his peers are intrigued by the Colloquium but have questioned its “closed” format. The NCAA in fact considered a more open approach last year, but a call for papers did not generate enough submissions of sufficient quality to stage a credible first-year session. To get the Colloquium series off to a good start, the NCAA reorganized the project through a board approach that achieved the multidisciplinary representation of an open solicitation while ensuring the quality of the product.
While the 2008 Colloquium speakers were reviewed and selected by the board, the second journal to be published in the fall will include a broader array of senior and junior scholars in a submission of volunteered, refereed papers.
Kane said that formula shouldn’t surprise most people. “It’s not at all unusual in an inaugural launch to invite premier scholars to share their research,” she said. “Inviting the best of the best sets the scientific standard and the rigor for subsequent meetings.”
Kretchmar said his ideal outcome for the colloquium would be to further legitimize collegiate sport as a research theme so that people don’t look at it as second-caliber or trivial.
“A more specific outcome would be to generate higher volume and greater quality of research,” he said. “The idea of the Colloquium and related journal is to stimulate more activity. We don’t have all the answers and we need a bigger work force. In our business, you count on the good research to eventually win the day. When you get good information, you make better decisions. That will help intercollegiate athletics, and it will help higher education.
“Any reform agenda begs for good research to assess where you are. If you’re going to say it’s broken or partly broken, you ought to have good data to support it. The reform effort has generated the need for good scholarship so that we go about reform with a rifle with a scope on it rather than a shotgun.”
Jay Coakley, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs
Topic: “Ignore, Idealize or Condemn: ‘Scholarly’ Approaches to Intercollegiate Sports”
Preview: Research faculty seldom study sports on their campuses. Is it too challenging to investigate the immediate contexts of their lives, or is the paucity of empirically based knowledge about intercollegiate sports due to other factors? But before collecting new data, we must know what we already know and don’t know, and how we might use existing data to add to our knowledge.
Biography: Coakley earned his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Notre Dame in 1972 before teaching at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and devoting nearly four decades of research on play, games and sports. Much of his work focuses on the ways youth make sense of their physical activities and integrate them into their lives. His findings have enabled him to work effectively with parents, coaches and sport administrators, showing how they might use the perspectives of young people to organize sports in ways that are exciting at the same time that they contribute to positive development.
Robert Simon, Hamilton College
Topic: “Does Athletics Undermine Academics?”
Preview: Critics frequently maintain that intercollegiate athletics undermine the academic mission of colleges and universities, if not in principle then generally in practice. I examine certain major arguments for such a view and also consider the claim that intercollegiate athletics and academics not only can be compatible but also can be mutually supportive.
Biography: Simon is the Marjorie and Robert W. McEwen Professor of Philosophy at Hamilton. He has published many articles in ethics, political philosophy and philosophy of sport. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He combines his interest in philosophy and sport by having served as president of the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport and as golf coach at Hamilton.
John Thelin, University of Kentucky
Topic: “Academics and Athletics: A Part and Apart in the American Campus”
Preview: Both academics and athletics are part of the American campus, yet, they often operate in distinctive orbits and by different codes. Given these contrasts, I want to look at research that has provided useful insights on how intercollegiate sports fit into higher education. Good, serious writing about college sports requires careful sifting and sorting that avoids two polarities in the popular media: exaggerated praise and celebration versus sensational exposes and allegations of excess and abuse.
Biography: Thelin is a member of the educational policy studies department at Kentucky. An alumnus of Brown University, he was a history major, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and was a varsity letter-winner in wrestling. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining Kentucky in 1996, he was Chancellor Professor at the College of William and Mary and professor at Indiana University, Bloomington. In 1990, he provided expert testimony to the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics for its groundbreaking report on reform. In 2006, he received the university provost’s award for outstanding teaching. A competitive long-distance runner for more than 35 years, he has won state senior championships in Virginia and Kentucky and placed second in the national 8K championship.
Mary Jo Kane, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Topic: “Issues Related to Academic Support and Performance of Division I Student-Athletes: A Case Study at the University of Minnesota”
Preview: In 2005, Minnesota President Robert Bruininks initiated a task force I chaired to examine key issues surrounding student-athlete academic outcomes. My paper discusses significant findings that emerged from an innovative statistical regression model, as well as key recommendations such as creating comprehensive programs to help student-athletes — especially those who are academically fragile — successfully transition into their academic and social life on a college campus.
Biography: Kane is professor and chair in the School of Kinesiology and the director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at Minnesota. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Champaign, in 1985 with an emphasis in sport sociology. She is an internationally recognized scholar who has published extensively on media representations of female athletes. She is also considered one of the nation’s leading experts on the social and political implications of Title IX. In 1996, Kane was awarded the first endowed chair related to women in sport: the Dorothy McNeill and Elbridge Ashcraft Tucker Chair for Women in Sport and Exercise Science. She was recently elected by her peers as a Fellow in the American Academy of Kinesiology and Physical Education, the highest academic honor in her field.
Q Why is a Scholarly Colloquium appropriate for the NCAA? And why now?
A One, Myles Brand is the first NCAA president who comes from academia and has experience not only as a university president, but also as president of a major research university, so he is intimately familiar with the importance of research and has dealt with scholars over the years. He is a card-carrying philosopher, as I like to call him, and is still writing and publishing even as he leads the NCAA. So I don’t think this would have happened without him in his current position and his support.
Second, one of his primary initiatives has been integration of athletics into the educational mission. He has always been curious why so many academics stay at arm’s length of athletics, when it is clearly such a large, interesting and significant social phenomenon. The goal is to integrate and pull scholars closer to the NCAA and invite them to study and research — find out the good and the bad, give us some data so we’re not so much victimized by public and media opinion.
Q Who is the target audience?
A The broad audience is anyone who wants to make sure that higher education becomes more solid and that the public trusts it. The big issue is not athletics, but the integrity of higher education. If the public loses trust in higher education as a means for educating our young folks for good citizenship and productive work, then we’ve lost the whole shooting match. If athletics contributes to eroding that trust, that’s the worst outcome that athletics could have.
The narrower audience is FARs, because they are the faculty who have self-identified as being interested in athletics and how well it goes on campus. Another audience would be sport researchers. I’m hoping to get converts. I want this effort to be one more straw that says it’s really OK to do research in this area. I want people who have never written anything sports-related to now do so.
Q Why appoint a board to participate in the launch of this initiative?
A It’s a multi- and cross-disciplinary venture. In other words, papers can come from any discipline — physiology, biomechanics, motor learning, philosophy of sport, history of sport, sociology of sport, journalism. We’re staying open to the area of scholarship that generates the research. That’s multi-disciplinary. Cross-disciplinary means that the given research piece draws from different areas. A lot of research these days does this.
The reason for the large board is to have representation from a reasonable spectrum of research fields. The board has people from literature, history, sociology, physiology. It’s important to have visible people with reputations so scholars who are thinking about signing up can identify with peers. Also, more heads are better than one, so when you’re making important decisions, it’s good to have a lot of input.
Q Why is this initiative particularly relevant to faculty members?
A As academics who are associated with intercollegiate athletics, we should all have a stake in answers to these questions — whether we come from Division I, II or III institutions. I hope that many of us will add to this research in the years ahead. Toward that end, the Colloquium board will be issuing a call for papers next year and indicating procedures for submitting articles to the journal when it is officially announced later this fall. In short, the Colloquium and journal should provide new avenues by which we can combine our academic training with our oversight and leadership roles in intercollegiate athletics.
Q Some people might interpret the Colloquium as a carefully orchestrated and overly controlled event. What do you say to them?
A I’ve had people ask why they can’t submit papers. I’ve said wait until next year — we want to get off the ground this year in a solid fashion. The theme for us is high quality. We want the best researchers and the best research. The criteria for our journal and the criteria for getting into the program are related to the care the researchers took in coming to their conclusions. If it’s a good piece of research that is critical of the Association, so be it — we need to hear it and it will help us in the long run. We can’t run away from research that doesn’t paint a rosy picture. And I guarantee that this year our presenters will be saying things that are indeed negative — there will be negative comments. We do not tell people to do research but only if it’s favorable to the NCAA. We say do good research and let the chips fall where they may.
The inaugural Colloquium, to be held January 10-11 in conjunction with the NCAA Convention in Nashville, serves two primary purposes: It offers scholars the opportunity to further inform the reform movement in intercollegiate athletics, and it should stimulate research over the next several years to elevate faculty involvement with college sports.
Scott Kretchmar, a philosophy of sport professor at Pennsylvania State University, chairs a 16-member advisory and editorial board that will conduct the proceedings.The theme of the first Colloquium — “College Sports: A Legitimate Focus for Scholarly Inquiry?” — addresses whether sport, specifically as it is found in institutions of higher education, provides a unique and worthy subject matter for research.
“In other words,” Kretchmar said, “to preserve the good, eliminate the bad and improve that which needs improving in intercollegiate sports, what do we need to know? What kind of additional research is needed, and where is it likely to lead us?”
Four presenters — Robert Simon of Hamilton College; John Thelin of the University of Kentucky; Mary Jo Kane of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; and Jay Coakley of the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs — will join a series of reactors in providing multidisciplinary insight into the notion of intercollegiate athletics as a scholarly pursuit. The presentations will be provocative in nature by focusing on what needs to be known, how it might be studied, and what impact any resulting knowledge could have on both higher education and college athletics.
The four papers and the reactions will be published in a refereed journal in the spring. A subsequent edition of the journal will be published in fall 2008. At least two more Colloquiums will be conducted — at the 2009 NCAA Convention in Washington, D.C., and the 2010 Convention in Atlanta. Two journals in each of those years also will be published.
Boosting the research inventory
The advisory and editorial board includes senior scholars in fields ranging from philosophy of sport, sport management and sport physiology to sport law, sport psychology, education psychology and journalism. Board members acted as an independent entity and were not bound by the NCAA to seek only speakers who reflect positively on intercollegiate athletics.
Indeed, the presenters the board selected this year will cover topics ranging from whether athletics undermines athletics to whether athletics’ “separateness” compromises its place in the university structure.
“Each of our keynote speakers is above reproach and highly regarded,” Kretchmar said. “No one would say that the NCAA ‘owns’ these people, or that they’ve written only good things about intercollegiate athletics. We wanted four researchers with big names who are highly respected by their peers, so that nobody could claim we were just bringing in supporters of the NCAA. The board based its speaker selections on the quality of the research, not simply whether they positioned athletics favorably.”
Kretchmar, a former member of the Division I Management Council, said the Colloquium is a novel approach for the NCAA. Despite tremendous interest in college sports from any number of public and private constituencies, intercollegiate athletics is not often explored as a cultural phenomenon from a scholarly perspective. While the NCAA has addressed several student-athlete well-being issues through research on safety, behavior and academic success (even the current academic-reform movement in Division I is based on statistical research), the Association to date has not aggressively sought scholarly research about the athletics enterprise itself.
“In my mind, intercollegiate athletics is an obvious subject since it affects so many people both in higher education and outside of the academy — why wouldn’t the best scholars study it?” Kretchmar said. “Through the Colloquium, we intend to find out the good and the bad — give decision-makers in this reform environment quality data so we’re not victimized by individuals who just state opinions about the virtues or the demons of college sports. We’d rather have solid scholarship on which to say credibly, ‘Here’s what’s good about college sports and here’s what isn’t.’ ”
What may be best about the Colloquium is its timing. As Division I enters its fourth year of an aggressive data-based approach to academic reform, and on the heels of the Presidential Task Force calling upon the faculty to be more involved in integrating athletics within the educational mission, the Colloquium will benefit both goals.
One of the Colloquium speakers in fact can be traced to a Task Force charge for presidents to initiate campus-based leadership in reform. Among presidents who took that to heart is Minnesota’s Robert Bruininks, who appointed a task force of his own to examine student-athlete academic performance, retention and graduation rates. His choice to chair that group was Mary Jo Kane, a professor in Minnesota’s kinesiology department and chair of the university’s Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport.
Kane will present at the Colloquium a case study of her group’s effort to obtain longitudinal data upon which to make policy decisions and implement the proper infrastructure to help student-athletes — particularly those who are academically at risk — successfully transition into the campus educational and social environment.
To her, the notion of scientific inquiry to address an athletics issue came naturally. But Kane acknowledged such methodology is not the national norm for exploring athletics issues. Historically, she said, research in sports has focused primarily on the natural sciences (exercise physiology), psychological aspects, (performance anxiety) and sport management (marketing and promotion). But serious scientific inquiry about the academic performance and support and intervention strategies that will matter hasn’t been prominent.
“It’s not that we don’t care as a group of scholars who are interested in the sporting enterprise, but it has fallen through the cracks because of the way academic disciplines have developed,” Kane said.
Kretchmar agreed with the lack of quality research related to intercollegiate athletics. He said most scholars are trained in a relatively specific or narrow subject matter — typically not athletics, which many scholars consider to be risky when it comes to serious study. Kretchmar said in fact he knows faculty members who have conducted athletics-based research but do not include it on their vitae for fear of not being taken seriously.
“Whether deserved or not, games, sport and recreation have generally been considered taboo,” he said. “There is a degree of bias in higher education that makes it difficult to pursue intercollegiate sports as a theme for research.”
Thus, Kretchmar said, the bloodlines are shallow since few researchers exit grad school who studied under people who told them it is beneficial to study athletics and here’s how to do it.
Collaborating the message
What little research does exist seems to attract polemical or utopian viewpoints as well. Colloquium speaker John Thelin, a former wrestler at Brown University who now is an award-winning research professor at the University of Kentucky, said athletics is a magnet for extremes — either exposes about scandal or uncritical celebration, neither of which is particularly helpful.
“One possible outcome for the Colloquium is to alert several constituencies to ways of finding a more reasonable ground — to not accept at face value the extreme polemics of either side,” said Thelin, who also serves on the advisory and editorial board.
Thelin cited himself as a good example of an objective observer. “I have the luxury of having a pure interest in the field. It’s not like I am an athletics director, a president or a faculty rep. People in those official roles are likely to have a certain advocacy. On the one hand, I think highly of college sports and the ideal of the student-athlete, but at the same time I’m what I call both a dissenting loyalist and a loyal dissenter,” he said.
Thelin’s research probes how intercollegiate athletics fits into higher education.
“It will be interesting,” he said, “to watch how various constituencies react at the Colloquium. Can we make sense to ADs and the faculty? Can we be the ones who both mediate and also raise good, fair issues to these different and sometimes contentious constituencies? It will be a challenge for us, since we won’t necessarily be preaching to the choir.”
Kane said the choir will at least be familiar with the message.
“Faculty members share something in common with athletics administrators and governing bodies like the NCAA, which is that at the end of the day we want to do everything we can to ensure that student-athletes have a positive academic experience that prepares them for their life beyond college,” she said. “The question is how do we get there? What are the best intervention strategies to use on those student-athletes who are academically fragile? That’s why we need scientific inquiry.”
Kretchmar said some of his peers are intrigued by the Colloquium but have questioned its “closed” format. The NCAA in fact considered a more open approach last year, but a call for papers did not generate enough submissions of sufficient quality to stage a credible first-year session. To get the Colloquium series off to a good start, the NCAA reorganized the project through a board approach that achieved the multidisciplinary representation of an open solicitation while ensuring the quality of the product.
While the 2008 Colloquium speakers were reviewed and selected by the board, the second journal to be published in the fall will include a broader array of senior and junior scholars in a submission of volunteered, refereed papers.
Kane said that formula shouldn’t surprise most people. “It’s not at all unusual in an inaugural launch to invite premier scholars to share their research,” she said. “Inviting the best of the best sets the scientific standard and the rigor for subsequent meetings.”
Kretchmar said his ideal outcome for the colloquium would be to further legitimize collegiate sport as a research theme so that people don’t look at it as second-caliber or trivial.
“A more specific outcome would be to generate higher volume and greater quality of research,” he said. “The idea of the Colloquium and related journal is to stimulate more activity. We don’t have all the answers and we need a bigger work force. In our business, you count on the good research to eventually win the day. When you get good information, you make better decisions. That will help intercollegiate athletics, and it will help higher education.
“Any reform agenda begs for good research to assess where you are. If you’re going to say it’s broken or partly broken, you ought to have good data to support it. The reform effort has generated the need for good scholarship so that we go about reform with a rifle with a scope on it rather than a shotgun.”
Advisory and Editorial Board
- Ketra Armstrong, sport management, California State University, Long Beach
- Jan Boxill, philosophy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
- Dana Brooks, physical education, West Virginia University
- Jay Coakley, sociology, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs
- Packianathan Chelladurai, sports management, Ohio State University
- Jane Clark, kinesiology, University of Maryland, College Park
- Jack Evans, business, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
- Scott Kretchmar (chair), exercise and sport science, Pennsylvania State University
- Matt Mitten, sports law, Marquette University
- Malcolm Moran, sports journalism, Pennsylvania State University
- William Morgan, philosophy, Ohio State University
- Russell Pate, exercise science, University of South Carolina, Columbia
- Robert Simon, philosophy, Hamilton College
- John Thelin, education policy studies, University of Kentucky
- Daniel Wann, psychology, Murray State University
- Maureen Weiss, educational psychology, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Colloquium registration
To register for the 2008 NCAA Scholarly Colloquium on College Sports, visit www.ncaaconvention.com. Click the registration link under the Colloquium heading. There are no registration fees to attend; registration also includes access to Association-wide sessions on Friday, January 11, and a keynote lunch (if space is available). Hotel rooms are reserved through the online registration process. A credit card will be required to reserve a hotel room.Colloquium presenters
Jay Coakley, University of Colorado, Colorado SpringsTopic: “Ignore, Idealize or Condemn: ‘Scholarly’ Approaches to Intercollegiate Sports”
Preview: Research faculty seldom study sports on their campuses. Is it too challenging to investigate the immediate contexts of their lives, or is the paucity of empirically based knowledge about intercollegiate sports due to other factors? But before collecting new data, we must know what we already know and don’t know, and how we might use existing data to add to our knowledge.
Biography: Coakley earned his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Notre Dame in 1972 before teaching at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and devoting nearly four decades of research on play, games and sports. Much of his work focuses on the ways youth make sense of their physical activities and integrate them into their lives. His findings have enabled him to work effectively with parents, coaches and sport administrators, showing how they might use the perspectives of young people to organize sports in ways that are exciting at the same time that they contribute to positive development.
Robert Simon, Hamilton College Topic: “Does Athletics Undermine Academics?”
Preview: Critics frequently maintain that intercollegiate athletics undermine the academic mission of colleges and universities, if not in principle then generally in practice. I examine certain major arguments for such a view and also consider the claim that intercollegiate athletics and academics not only can be compatible but also can be mutually supportive.
Biography: Simon is the Marjorie and Robert W. McEwen Professor of Philosophy at Hamilton. He has published many articles in ethics, political philosophy and philosophy of sport. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He combines his interest in philosophy and sport by having served as president of the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport and as golf coach at Hamilton.
John Thelin, University of KentuckyTopic: “Academics and Athletics: A Part and Apart in the American Campus”
Preview: Both academics and athletics are part of the American campus, yet, they often operate in distinctive orbits and by different codes. Given these contrasts, I want to look at research that has provided useful insights on how intercollegiate sports fit into higher education. Good, serious writing about college sports requires careful sifting and sorting that avoids two polarities in the popular media: exaggerated praise and celebration versus sensational exposes and allegations of excess and abuse.
Biography: Thelin is a member of the educational policy studies department at Kentucky. An alumnus of Brown University, he was a history major, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and was a varsity letter-winner in wrestling. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining Kentucky in 1996, he was Chancellor Professor at the College of William and Mary and professor at Indiana University, Bloomington. In 1990, he provided expert testimony to the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics for its groundbreaking report on reform. In 2006, he received the university provost’s award for outstanding teaching. A competitive long-distance runner for more than 35 years, he has won state senior championships in Virginia and Kentucky and placed second in the national 8K championship.
Mary Jo Kane, University of Minnesota, Twin CitiesTopic: “Issues Related to Academic Support and Performance of Division I Student-Athletes: A Case Study at the University of Minnesota”
Preview: In 2005, Minnesota President Robert Bruininks initiated a task force I chaired to examine key issues surrounding student-athlete academic outcomes. My paper discusses significant findings that emerged from an innovative statistical regression model, as well as key recommendations such as creating comprehensive programs to help student-athletes — especially those who are academically fragile — successfully transition into their academic and social life on a college campus.
Biography: Kane is professor and chair in the School of Kinesiology and the director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at Minnesota. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Champaign, in 1985 with an emphasis in sport sociology. She is an internationally recognized scholar who has published extensively on media representations of female athletes. She is also considered one of the nation’s leading experts on the social and political implications of Title IX. In 1996, Kane was awarded the first endowed chair related to women in sport: the Dorothy McNeill and Elbridge Ashcraft Tucker Chair for Women in Sport and Exercise Science. She was recently elected by her peers as a Fellow in the American Academy of Kinesiology and Physical Education, the highest academic honor in her field.
Colloquium Q&A
Scott Kretchmar, a philosophy of sport professor at Pennsylvania State University and chair of the advisory and editorial board that is overseeing the Scholarly Colloquium, answered the following questions about the significance of the event:Q Why is a Scholarly Colloquium appropriate for the NCAA? And why now?
A One, Myles Brand is the first NCAA president who comes from academia and has experience not only as a university president, but also as president of a major research university, so he is intimately familiar with the importance of research and has dealt with scholars over the years. He is a card-carrying philosopher, as I like to call him, and is still writing and publishing even as he leads the NCAA. So I don’t think this would have happened without him in his current position and his support.
Second, one of his primary initiatives has been integration of athletics into the educational mission. He has always been curious why so many academics stay at arm’s length of athletics, when it is clearly such a large, interesting and significant social phenomenon. The goal is to integrate and pull scholars closer to the NCAA and invite them to study and research — find out the good and the bad, give us some data so we’re not so much victimized by public and media opinion.
Q Who is the target audience?
A The broad audience is anyone who wants to make sure that higher education becomes more solid and that the public trusts it. The big issue is not athletics, but the integrity of higher education. If the public loses trust in higher education as a means for educating our young folks for good citizenship and productive work, then we’ve lost the whole shooting match. If athletics contributes to eroding that trust, that’s the worst outcome that athletics could have.
The narrower audience is FARs, because they are the faculty who have self-identified as being interested in athletics and how well it goes on campus. Another audience would be sport researchers. I’m hoping to get converts. I want this effort to be one more straw that says it’s really OK to do research in this area. I want people who have never written anything sports-related to now do so.
Q Why appoint a board to participate in the launch of this initiative?
A It’s a multi- and cross-disciplinary venture. In other words, papers can come from any discipline — physiology, biomechanics, motor learning, philosophy of sport, history of sport, sociology of sport, journalism. We’re staying open to the area of scholarship that generates the research. That’s multi-disciplinary. Cross-disciplinary means that the given research piece draws from different areas. A lot of research these days does this.
The reason for the large board is to have representation from a reasonable spectrum of research fields. The board has people from literature, history, sociology, physiology. It’s important to have visible people with reputations so scholars who are thinking about signing up can identify with peers. Also, more heads are better than one, so when you’re making important decisions, it’s good to have a lot of input.
Q Why is this initiative particularly relevant to faculty members?
A As academics who are associated with intercollegiate athletics, we should all have a stake in answers to these questions — whether we come from Division I, II or III institutions. I hope that many of us will add to this research in the years ahead. Toward that end, the Colloquium board will be issuing a call for papers next year and indicating procedures for submitting articles to the journal when it is officially announced later this fall. In short, the Colloquium and journal should provide new avenues by which we can combine our academic training with our oversight and leadership roles in intercollegiate athletics.
Q Some people might interpret the Colloquium as a carefully orchestrated and overly controlled event. What do you say to them?
A I’ve had people ask why they can’t submit papers. I’ve said wait until next year — we want to get off the ground this year in a solid fashion. The theme for us is high quality. We want the best researchers and the best research. The criteria for our journal and the criteria for getting into the program are related to the care the researchers took in coming to their conclusions. If it’s a good piece of research that is critical of the Association, so be it — we need to hear it and it will help us in the long run. We can’t run away from research that doesn’t paint a rosy picture. And I guarantee that this year our presenters will be saying things that are indeed negative — there will be negative comments. We do not tell people to do research but only if it’s favorable to the NCAA. We say do good research and let the chips fall where they may.
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