Essay : No Remedy Found as Yet for College Cheating

The ugly, seamy side of collegiate sports is back in the headlines.

At Tulane University recently, cocaine helped trigger another basketball gambling scandal. To cleanse itself, the university abolished the sport.

Last week, Newsweek called for more vigilance and reform by the National Collegiate Athletic Assn., headlining its story, “The Sickness of College Sports.”

Recent scandals, Newsweek reported, “are symbolic of the many ways in which the system has been failing young athletes.”

The official NCAA newspaper devoted almost five pages of its April 10 issue to a survey that its editors said reflects the concern of the chief executive officers of member institutions about the integrity of college sports.

On April 18, The Times’ top sports story was headlined “NCAA Plan Would Force Violators to Suspend Programs.”

It seems we’ve heard that song before. While it appears that university presidents and chancellors are finally moving, through a newly formed NCAA Presidential Commission and legislation that is being hailed as “revolutionary, meaningful and far-reaching,” to take control of their athletic programs, don’t count on a quick cure for the sickness.

Educators, and others, have lamented the loss of old values and lost innocence in campus games for more than 50 years. In fact, virtually all the same abuses that abound in college sports today were revealed by the Carnegie Commission in 1929. Again in 1947, our great institutions of higher learning sought to cleanse themselves of athletic sins with a “Sanity Code.”

The embarrassing record shows that the scandals, cheating and exploitation of young athletes went merrily on, largely without punishment. Finally, to catch the cheaters, the colleges organized a police force, euphemistically described as an “enforcement department.” Some cheaters have been caught, but judging by the large number of schools under investigation at any given time, the police have not been much of a deterrent. Alas, college athletes, coaches and administrators are as fallible as the rest of our society.

The sickness in college sports never goes away, mainly because of our obsession with winning. Another cause of the disease, probably, is the mildness of the penalties, even for gross violations. Schools caught breaking the rules are soon back playing in bowl games. Coaches and athletic directors who have violated the rules are still coaching and directing, and presidents and chancellors of universities charged with cheating are still administering.

The NCAA, in fact, often has been attacked by its own members for its unfairness and aggressiveness in enforcing its rules, and in 1978 its enforcement department was the target of a 10-day hearing by a congressional committee, which found its rules “vague, confusing, unenforceable and containing traps for the unwary.” Furthermore, the report said, even to an unbiased observer, the NCAA enforcement apparatus is a sanctioning body with incredible power exercised without even the minimal standards of fairness.

If the presidents really are concerned enough about the integrity of their sports programs to finally assume control of them, to even threaten to drop programs completely for as much as two years when bad violations are found, one wonders what took them so long? The sins that concern them today are not new. The traditional values of character development, educational integrity and honesty have long been bankrupted by what Harry Edwards, a self-proclaimed sports sociologist at the University of California, calls “a combination of myth and money and mania over winning.”

Edwards doesn’t think highly of most university presidents. Speaking at a symposium on “Sports and the National Character” last year at Iowa’s Grinnell College, he said, “I find that university presidents have revealed themselves to be among the most gutless and spineless individuals . . . given the character of their responsibilities.”

Dumb jocks are not born, Edwards also said, “They’re being systematically created.”

In truth, much of the responsibility for the current college sports mess lies, indeed, with the chief executive officers, many of whom give too much authority to athletic directors and coaches and do not insist on athletic integrity for fear of offending influential alumni and other wealthy boosters. All too few major institutions today place academic excellence over athletic eligibility.

Whose fault is it that the highest-paid college officials today are not Nobel Prize winners or full professors or, in many cases, even presidents and chancellors? No, the biggest salaries all too often go to football and basketball coaches.

Many coaches have television shows; some even get a cut of the gate. Tremendous monetary awards accrue to colleges and coaches who win, and under such pressure, it is no wonder that so many presidents choose athletic eligibility over academic integrity.

The reality is, there is an enormous public interest in major college sports. The playing of games is accompanied by a passion to win. College presidents, being human, are so influenced by this reality that they lose their perspective in the pursuit of victory. It is this win-at-all-costs philosophy, mistakenly identified by many coaches and others as a noble purpose establishing the foundation for character building, that begets all the sins that the presidents apparently will now try to eliminate.

Here is what they propose:

--To require that the athletic budget be controlled by the institution and subject to its normal budgeting procedures, and that it be approved by the Chief Executive Officer or the CEO’s designee.

--To require an annual audit of all expenditures for the athletic program, with the audit to be conducted by a qualified auditor from outside the institution and selected by the CEO or a designee.

--To require each institution to conduct a self-study of its athletic program at least once every five years, using a prescribed self-study format to be developed by the NCAA Council, and to maintain the self-study documentation for examination by the NCAA.

--To establish an academic reporting program requiring Division I institutions to report annually to the NCAA information concerning the academic status of entering freshmen, compliance with continuing eligibility requirements, and graduation rates for recruited student-athletes and students generally.

--To revise the NCAA’s enforcement procedure by establishing distinctions between “major” and “secondary” violations of NCAA rules; by establishing specific penalties for those categories of violations; by establishing a set of minimum, automatic penalties for “major” violations, and by establishing a more stringent set of minimum, automatic penalties for repeated major violations.

--To require that restrictions imposed on a coach be applied to that coach even if he or she moves to another institution.

--A resolution to deal with its desire to assure that suitable penalties are placed on a student-athlete who was knowingly involved in NCAA rules violations.

--A resolution to specify that the presidents’ commission does not favor any further expansion of playing seasons in intercollegiate athletics and specifically to direct the NCAA Council to propose legislation that would limit the number of exception opportunities that have enabled institutions to play 35 or more basketball games in a season.

The “revolutionary” idea of separating major and secondary violations was recommended by a Congressional committee after the 1978 hearing. It was not adopted.

Maybe the presidents can clean up their act with these wordy proposals, but wouldn’t their message be clearer if they simply said that we will no longer lower our academic standards to admit high-risk athletes. “Dumb jocks” who are not students should not be allowed in college to spread the myth that our great universities are the farm systems for professional teams.

The presidents should also publicly vow to play by the rules. Sports are not worth much to a university or a society if it sacrifices integrity in the name of winning. Victories are devalued if games are not honestly won. What is a successful athletic program anyway? One that produces winners, or one that develops students’ skills and their concepts of fair play and ethics?

The presidents--and the rest of us--should accept another reality: There is an enormous amount of hypocrisy in college sports. The vast public interest in them translates into large sums of money--from boosters and television and at the gate. Inevitably, some of this money is paid to the athletes in some fashion, and when athletes are paid for performing, they are professionals.

The alternative to honest, straightforward professionalism is a book of almost 300 pages that tells the universities how to conduct their sports. When you have such regulations, Michigan State President Clifton Wharton told the Congressional hearing, “You are no longer talking about ‘sport.’ ”

The presidents are rightly concerned about costs. But why then did they long ago allow platoon football, which drastically increased the size of teams, staffs and expenses?

The evolution of recruiting rules should also interest presidents concerned about costs. At one time, a coach was not allowed to contact an athlete off campus. He couldn’t even write him a letter, in fact, unless the athlete wrote first.

Next, a coach was allowed to visit an athlete but not to enter his high school. Soon, however, coaches were permitted to pester young athletes in their schools.

Once, athletes were not allowed to visit a college campus unless brought by their parents. Then, a friend of the university was allowed to bring him. Next, coaches got permission to pay the athletes’ way as guests of the college.

When a rule could not be enforced, Forest Evashevski, former coach and athletic director, told the Grinnell symposium, “it was bent or changed.” Academic standards were lowered for athletes, costs became astronomical and injuries and cheating proliferated, he said. “Money was used to feed a habit--not for the good of a university.”

Little intellectual development is expected of jocks, according to one indictment of college sports. Few athletes get degrees or succeed as professionals and, Edwards said, “Many athletes find themselves in a technologically sophisticated society unarmed educationally.”

The disturbing part of all this is, sports mirror society and, as Grinnell panelist Roger Bannister said, “throws some light on the national character.” So what do our college sports today say about our society and national character? Certainly there is much to be horrified about.

Still, sports at the highest level can inspire a nation--as we learned last summer during the Olympic Games--and they add zest and spice to college life. The presidents should try harder to elevate them, rather than allow crooked subordinates and influential alumni and boosters to destroy them.

While sports fans will mourn the loss of their games if the presidents fail to save them, there will be some consolation for others in the fact that even without football and basketball, colleges can still turn out students who will contribute to society. It will just be less fun. And less high profile.

Television and newspapers often magnify and distort the importance of college sports. Television, with its enormous wealth and impact, is the real enemy. Important national and world news items get about 30 seconds, maybe a minute on television. A college basketball game gets two hours and a football game gets three. In fact, most college athletic budgets today depend largely on television revenue. The NCAA knows that; probably the harshest penalty it gives cheaters is to deprive them of that revenue. This, of course, puts coaches and presidents under enormous pressure to win, because the more a college wins, the more it gets on television.

That being the case, wouldn’t a simple rule barring college games on television instantly eliminate most of the presidents’ problems? Michael Novak thinks so. Novak, an author, scholar, theologian and sports fan who spoke at the Grinnell symposium, said such a rule “would diminish enthusiasm, passion and fanaticism. All the problems go along with the simple technical invention of television.”

While the games would be missed by many viewers, think of the benefits. Released from the pressure to win, universities could return to doing what they are supposed to: Educating students, not producing linebackers for the National Football League.