NCAA President Myles Brand presented former NCAA membership president and longtime athletics advocate James Frank with the NCAA President’s Gerald R. Ford Award January 12 at the opening business session of the NCAA Convention in Nashville.
Frank, former president at Lincoln University (Missouri) and commissioner of the Southwestern Athletic Conference, is the sixth recipient of the award given for significant leadership as an advocate for higher education and intercollegiate athletics over time.
As part of the award, the NCAA will donate an honorarium to the institution of Frank’s choice for the benefit of student-athletes.
“James Frank represents the best of what a commitment to the value of education can accomplish.” Brand said in presenting the award to a man he called a catalyst for important and positive change at every stop of his career.
Frank holds a special place in NCAA history, serving as both the first African-American and the first college president to hold the positions of secretary-treasurer and president, the latter from 1981-83. In fact, he presided over the 1983 NCAA Convention at which delegates adopted the controversial Prop 48, which raised graduation rates through more stringent initial-eligibility standards.
Frank was at the forefront of other issues that changed NCAA history as well. He facilitated enhanced presidential collaboration through the NCAA Long-Range Planning Committee that led to a demographic change in Association leadership. He was a key force in bringing women’s championships under the NCAA umbrella, and he pushed for the advancement of women’s intercollegiate athletics within the NCAA structure through his assertion that “separate but equal” does not lead to equality.
Frank also was integral in the NCAA’s establishment of the Minority Opportunities and Interests Committee, a group devoted to inclusiveness in Association policy decisions.

In accepting the award, Frank repeated messages he left with the Association after his term as president. “The remarks I made in 1983 still resonate today,” he told the hundreds of business session attendees. “In many ways, the overriding issues or problems in athletics aren’t educational, physical or economical, but more moral than anything else. It’s about what we do right for our student-athletes and fellow human beings. We have in our power to correct what is wrong with intercollegiate athletics.”

Frank recognized his family, friends and mentors through the years as keys to his long-term success. He also praised the NCAA’s progress over the past 25 years, noting that the issues facing today’s Association aren’t as critical as before. He quipped that the primary matter on the table today is how to determine a Division I Football Bowl Subdivision champion.

“That pales in comparison to the issues of the past,” he said.
A standout in basketball, baseball, and track and field, Frank received a bachelor’s degree in education from Lincoln and then spent two years as a first lieutenant in the Corp of Engineers before earning a master’s in education from Springfield College. In 1956, Frank returned to Lincoln as an assistant basketball coach for two years before being named head coach.
After receiving a doctorate from Springfield, he began teaching and coaching at Hunter College before serving as dean of students and vice president for academic affairs at Medgar Evers College. In 1973, Frank once again returned to Lincoln as the school’s president, the first alumnus to serve in that capacity. It was during his time at Lincoln that Frank became involved in the NCAA governance structure.
In 1983, Frank was named commissioner of the Southwestern Athletic Conference, where he served until 1998 to bring greater national recognition and publicity to the SWAC. Frank returned to the SWAC as interim commissioner from April 2001 to December 2002. Named one of the NCAA’s 100 most influential student-athletes in 2006, Frank has received numerous awards recognizing his devotion to college sports.
Previous winners of the Gerald R. Ford Award are University of Notre Dame President Emeritus Theodore Hesburgh; former Knight Commission chair William Friday; former United States Senator Birch Bayh; former University of California, Los Angeles, basketball coach John Wooden; and Christine Grant, former director of women’s athletics at the University of Iowa.