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Colloquium shines research spotlight on academic reform

By Gary Brown
NCAA.org

There’s nothing more scholarly than a good, old-fashioned discussion about academics, and that’s what figures to take place at this year’s NCAA Scholarly Colloquium on College Sports Jan. 10-11 in Indianapolis.

The fifth annual Colloquium, designed to spur scholarly research on intercollegiate athletics and held in conjunction with the NCAA Convention, is titled, “NCAA Academic Reform: Progress, Problems and Prospects.”

Four keynote presentations, including a panel of presidents, chancellors and athletics directors, will walk participants through the NCAA’s latest iteration of academic reform, from its roots to its current successes and remaining challenges.

The NCAA’s Academic Performance Program in Division I (which includes the metric-based Academic Progress Rate and accompanying penalty structure for teams not meeting established benchmarks) has been in place for almost 10 years. The entering class of 2003-04 was the first for which APR data were gathered.

Thus, Colloquium organizers thought it prudent to see whether the data so far matched the intended outcomes and how any lingering concerns might be addressed.

Kicking off the keynotes is Oregon State professor and associate dean Michael Oriard, a 1970 Notre Dame graduate and former NFL player who is known for his published books “Brand NFL: Making and Selling America’s Favorite Sport” and “Bowled Over: Big-Time College Football from the Sixties to the BCS Era,” both from the University of North Carolina Press. Oriard has been invited to provide historical context surrounding the integral relationship between academics and athletics and discuss the various reform movements that have been necessary along the way. 

Oriard will be followed by NCAA researchers Todd Petr and Tom Paskus, who will provide results from the Academic Performance Program, which produced the well-known acronyms APR (Academic Progress Rate) and GSR (Graduation Success Rate).

University of Hartford President Walt Harrison follows with a review of next steps, including recommendations from the Division I Committee on Academic Performance (which Harrison chairs) to ratchet up initial-eligibility standards and hinge postseason participation on academic performance. 

Anchoring the agenda is the five-person panel of presidents Sidney McPhee (Middle Tennessee), Carol Cartwright (president emeritus at Kent State and Bowling Green) and Harvey Perlman (chancellor at Nebraska), and athletics directors Kevin Anderson (Maryland) and Mike Alden (Missouri), all of whom have had direct experience implementing strategies that allow their institutions to meet the regulations adopted under the academic-reform initiatives.

The Colloquium’s theme of academics is both appropriate and timely. NCAA President Mark Emmert in fact during the most recent release of APR reports in May said that it’s time for the Association to move away from thinking about academic success as something that should be “reformed” to something that is an expected outcome for student-athletes.

Emmert also invited more than 50 influential presidents and chancellors to a retreat in August at which the idea of embedding academic success was foremost on the agenda. The Division I Board of Directors the next day in fact adopted increased academic standards that teams must meet to participate in NCAA championships and bowl games. 

Previous colloquia have focused on student-athlete health and safety, social justice issues and the fiscal sustainability of the enterprise. Late NCAA President Myles Brand introduced the Colloquium in 2008 as a way to generate more research on intercollegiate athletics, a field in which he thought quality study was lacking.

Brand established an Advisory and Editorial Board composed of about a dozen high-profile scholars who oversee the Colloquium and its accompanying Journal of Intercollegiate Sport, in which papers presented at the Colloquium and others are published. The board’s current chair is David Wiggins, professor and director of the School of Recreation, Health and Tourism at George Mason University.

“Myles Brand also wanted the scholarly research he assumed the Colloquium would produce to inform decisions about NCAA policy,” Wiggins said. “We hope the 2012 Colloquium will serve us well on academic standards going forward.”

In that vein, the agenda is more linear than in previous years, with Oriard providing a historical overview, Petr and Paskus rolling out current results, Harrison teeing up next steps and the panel talking about implementation and best practices.

“The panel in particular was deliberately situated,” said Jack Evans, chair of the Colloquium’s program committee. “It’s a collection of on-the-ground practitioners who have had some involvement in the creation of the Academic Performance Program who can in effect talk about the good, the bad and the ugly of reform. What’s the experience you have lived – what was your original feeling when we started and how has that changed, if at all, as you have experienced and observed it?”

Evans, the Hettleman Professor of Business Emeritus and former dean of the Kenan-Flagler Business School at North Carolina, where he retired last year after 41 years on the faculty, will moderate the panel session. He is the only member of the Colloquium Advisory and Editorial Board who also is a member of the Committee on Academic Performance. 

As in the past, the Colloquium also features “reactors” who may offer contrarian viewpoints to the keynote presentations. Brand insisted on that kind of inclusivity as being a hallmark of the Colloquium identity.

Along those lines, Evans said some people might perceive the 2012 Colloquium lineup as being heavily stacked toward an NCAA agenda, with three of the four keynote presentations populated by NCAA staff, an NCAA committee chair, and sitting presidents and ADs.

“But there will be reactors who speak from different perspectives, which I think will produce the kind of dialogue you would hope to have at a Colloquium,” he said. “As the NCAA governance structure goes about its work, there isn’t always the automatic chance for outside perspectives to chime in. The Colloquium provides that opportunity in this case.”

Evans hopes the discussion addresses whether the NCAA’s latest reform efforts have influenced behavior.

The APP as a three-part system of increased standards (initial eligibility and progress toward degree), new metrics (APR and GSR) and penalties for not meeting them was regarded as a structure to persuade coaches to recruit differently, Evans said. 

“But there’s a hypothesis out there that says in the high-profile programs, relatively few coaches have changed their recruiting models; rather, to the extent that they’re bringing in high-risk prospects, they’re just pumping more resources in to academic-support programs,” he added. “Perhaps it could be turned to the hope that real behaviors (recruiting, academic emphasis and performance, graduation) would change, rather than creating a situation in which people simply concentrate on avoiding penalties.”

Evans said those are the types of issues he’d like the Colloquium to address.

“Although we chose the theme and started working on the program before the presidential retreat in August, I like to think that the program for the Colloquium creates the possibility of research dialog coming to bear on policy formation and expectations for the NCAA,” he said.