There are increasing pressures across the university toward commercialism and professionalism. Those pressures are most obvious in athletics, as institutions exhibit ever greater creativity in scheduling football games to earn television fees, entering into partnerships with apparel companies and other sponsors, realizing the fund-raising possibilities connected with selling choice tickets, and so on.

Similarly, as costs escalate and appropriations dwindle, universities are becoming increasingly entrepreneurial in the academic programs and student amenities they offer. The pressures to depart from traditional academic values are quite similar to the incentives to elude the amateur ideal in athletics.

Despite those commonalities, academics and athletics persistently, but needlessly, function as adversaries, rarely working jointly on shared issues or even drawing on the experience of the other to improve practice. Such an illusory divide results from faculty members and academic administrators reducing college sports to stereotypes and favoring an "us versus them" orientation. Even the activists most interested in these issues, such as the Drake Group, can take an overly romantic and thus insufficiently complex view of the realities of not only intercollegiate athletics but of the contemporary university. The same is true of those like Murray Sperber who have written about intercollegiate athletics.

Meanwhile, athletics leaders are often too insulated from academe, too commonly failing to understand the norms, values and beliefs that are so important in framing issues. They can fail to appreciate the great distinctions between institution types, to choose just one example. World-renowned research universities and regional teaching-focused institutions are portrayed solely as simply participants in the Football Bowl Subdivision, even though the average SAT scores of entering students may be 300 or 400 points different -- the difference between being in the top 10 percent, as at a top state flagship such as the University of Florida, and bottom 25 percent of those taking the test. Sports reporters, who rarely venture onto the actual campus from the stadium, exhibit the same lack of perspective.

Both sides criticize the other without really knowing or acknowledging the contexts in which the other operates -- and neither recognizes that trends and issues in both academe and athletics are often more alike than they are different.

This fundamental misunderstanding invites problems and marks a lost opportunity. The crises in athletics that can prove so burdensome to university administrations, often in an excruciatingly public manner, often are attributable to a failure in athletics to comprehend the values and mores of academic life. Meanwhile, trends and issues in athletics related to commercialism and professionalism, framed properly, can illustrate the fundamental questions that academe is asking about maintaining its own values in an environment increasingly marked by external pressures.

What is required to articulate these multiple but yet largely unrealized points of connection between academics and athletics within higher education? How can those both in athletics and academe use these shared contexts and interests as a foundation in narrowing the divide between "sides" that really should be on the same team?

We addressed some of those concerns in August 2006 when the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia convened a roundtable discussion in Atlanta, supported by the venture fund of Georgia President Michael Adams and the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. The 20 participants -- presidents, athletics directors, university and athletics administrators, leading scholars writing on intercollegiate athletics -- took on ethics in recruiting as a subject to illustrate that possible connection.

Three representatives ended up providing testimony to the Knight Commission at its January meeting. The group also produced an essay that is on the commission's Web site along with a podcast of the testimony. In response to several requests for reprints of the essay, we arranged for its broad distribution this month in hard copy and have additional copies available free of charge through the Institute.

In organizing the roundtable, it seemed to us that everyone involved in intercollegiate athletics is troubled by the state of recruiting and wants to improve it, but that it is difficult to have the conversations that might lead to such results when those who are most knowledgeable about the topic are confined to speaking only in public. So we convened an off-the-record conversation in which we can put good ideas on the table; discuss them thoroughly; and eventually air them, without attribution, in a forum that will capture the attention of those who can influence positive change.

We reacted to one another's ideas, not to some third-party analysis of the topic or to any specific case or situation. We wanted this to be a conversation among friends -- friends with experience in and concern about the state of intercollegiate support and the desire and will to consider tough and realistic steps to change it.

We had a few simple ground rules, the first being that the conversation was strictly off the record. We agreed to discuss the issues that emerged without concern for comments being reported to those outside the room, and our resulting essay would not connect comments with individual participants.

The second was that participants were not representing their institutions or conferences -- or anyone other than themselves. The third was to be clear that we were not gathering to parcel out blame to coaches, athletics administrators or university officials, nor were we going to end with yet another press release or a report that gathers dust. Instead, we defined problems in the recruiting process, explored their causes, articulated realistic approaches for resolution and targeted a broad audience to provoke action.

The roundtable focused on framing issues in recruiting student-athletes in the context of the entire university. We worked from the prospect that trends and challenges across higher education parallel and thus can inform and be informed by those in intercollegiate athletics, concluding that positive change in areas such as athletics recruiting cannot occur if it is considered in isolation from the whole of university communities. The recruitment and admission of student-athletes must be grounded in the principles of academe -- and it must involve faculty and academic administrators in meaningful ways.

We thus explored the athletics recruiting and admissions process with a view toward reconceptualizing it, advancing an approach that improves practice through spreading the risks associated with recruiting and admissions across universities as a whole by enhancing transparency in the process. By more formally and completely involving the entire university community in recruiting student-athletes, we suggested a means of counterbalancing the negative incentives and poor decisions that too often define what fundamentally must be a legitimate admissions process.

Academic administrators and faculty members must be involved directly in the recruiting process from beginning to end, we concluded. Such an approach promises to move them beyond the stereotypes and vague laments that so many believe about college sports, perhaps even toward welcoming -- and even taking credit for -- competitive successes by athletes who are also bona fide students. Meanwhile, it requires those in athletics to work transparently within the university. They must internalize academic values, embracing them even when inconvenient, if they are to retain the mantle of education that distinguishes college sports from purely professional endeavors.

So, our goal was not to produce draft NCAA legislation or issue vague calls for reform. It was to provoke thought by reframing ideas to give higher-education institutions a clearer sense of how to integrate recruiting goals with their overall purposes and contexts. The idea also was to keep the matters we considered before decision-makers and stakeholders, not allowing the big ideas to fall by the wayside in the midst of daily demands.

We wanted to generate "buzz," prompting further discussion (including criticism) toward reframing what have become rather predictable debates related to athletics in academe. Only through doing so can we move forward toward more fully integrating athletics into academe.

J. Douglas Toma is associate professor at the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia. He writes frequently about strategy and management in higher education and is the author of "Football U. Spectator Sports in the Life of the American University" (University of Michigan Press, 2003).