Former Ivy League Executive Director Jeff Orleans, Clemson Athletics Director Terry Don Phillips, Title IX advocate Nancy Hogshead-Makar and Southern Methodist University President Gerald Turner are among speakers at the third annual NCAA Scholarly Colloquium on Intercollegiate Athletics to be conducted January 12-13 in conjunction with the NCAA Convention in Atlanta.

They will join featured presenters Rodney Fort of Michigan, Richard Lapchick of Central Florida and Smith’s Andrew Zimbalist in discussing how the recession affects all aspects of intercollegiate athletics, from funding and sustaining the enterprise to hiring the personnel who support it.

“This third edition of the Colloquium features perhaps our most provocative lineup to date, and they’ll be talking about a timely topic,” said Penn State Faculty Athletics Representative Scott Kretchmar, who chairs the Colloquium’s editorial and advisory board. “It will be a presentation that athletics administrators and scholars alike won’t want to miss.”

The late NCAA President Myles Brand initiated the Colloquium in 2008 to generate more scholarly research on college sports that would help inform decisions on NCAA policy and in turn benefit student-athletes. Last year’s session focused on health issues in athletics, but this year, the health of the enterprise itself is at question.

“The board selected the economics theme even before members knew how big the problem was going to be.” Kretchmar said. “We would think more ADs and associate and assistant ADs would find this program interesting, because it does have to do with sustainability and the future profile of athletics, given market pressures.”

Fort, a longtime researcher and professor at Michigan’s Center for Sport Management, will address sustainability in his lead-off presentation January 12. Phillips, who has been an athletics administrator for three decades (at Florida, Missouri, Liberty, Louisiana-Lafayette, Arkansas, Oklahoma State and Clemson), is one of two “reactors” to Fort’s presentation. Wake Forest law professor Tim Davis is the other.

SMU President Turner, who also co-chairs the Knight Commission, will join commission Executive Director Amy Perko in presenting results from the commission’s survey of college chancellors and presidents on financial matters. Hogshead-Makar, a professor at the Florida Coastal School of Law, joins Doug Toma from the Institute of Higher Education at Georgia as reactors.

Lapchick and Zimbalist present on January 13. Lapchick, who coordinates regular reports on diversity in college sports, will address the economy’s effect on hiring, while Zimbalist will discuss whether intercollegiate athletics can sustain its current spending behaviors in today’s economic climate.

Georgia kinesiology professor Billy Hawkins and North Carolina-Greensboro kinesiology professor Katherine Jamieson will react to Lapchick, while Orleans joins Minnesota researcher Mary Jo Kane as reactors to Zimbalist. (Click here for a complete schedule of presenters, reactors and moderators.)

Jay Coakley, professor emeritus at Colorado-Colorado Springs and one of the moderators at the Colloquium, chaired the programming committee and coordinated the selection of this year’s presenters and reactors. They are intentionally sequential, he said, to build to a closing session on the second day that gives the audience a sense of where college sports is headed in the face of budget issues.

“I wanted the presentations to lead to a constructive set of ideas about the future,” Coakley said.

As far as the Colloquium is concerned, Coakley and Kretchmar said the event has evolved as planned, from conservative beginnings to a more aggressive lineup of presenters and topics for the second and third years.

“Myles Brand’s hope of having good, honest, fact-based dialogue about research in college sports is coming to fruition,” Kretchmar said. “Our criterion has always been good scholarship. If we stray from that, we should be called out. If we invite people who are not recognized as good scholars, then we’re off target or off mission. But if we invite people who are good scholars, even if they hold views that are not mainstream, that should be OK.

“We should be able to debate it openly, and if their ideas deserve to become more mainstream, so be it; and if their ideas can be shown to be marginal, so be that as well. That’s the way we operate in academe – you test ideas and see if they hold up to scrutiny.”

Coakley believes this year’s lineup – one he considers to be the most provocative yet – will preserve that premise.

“Even though some of our presenters this year have been critical of either how institutions operate or how the NCAA operates, they are generally people who have a concern for college sports and want athletics to be more closely integrated into the campus as a whole and be more positively related to the academic side of things,” Coakley said. “And that’s not much different from the goals of the NCAA itself.”