Reform Debate: Expedience or Reality?

The athletic director at Georgetown University says the NCAA Presidents Commission ignored its own research data last week when it kept the 700 cutoff score on the SAT standardized test component of the continually controversial Proposition 48. He said the reason was “political expediency.”

Frank Rienzo, the athletic director, said he received a letter from the chairman of the NCAA Academic Requirements Committee saying “the research does not support limitations” of cutoff scores within the index that the presidents proposed.

Lorna P. Straus, a University of Chicago anatomy professor and the person who replied to two Rienzo letters to the NCAA, said her committee recommended a no-cut score to the commission, and offered as “a political reality” an index with the cutoff score of 650. The Presidents Commission chose instead to keep the cutoff at 700.

“There is a legitimate opportunity to disagree on where those lines should be drawn,” she said in a telephone interview yesterday. “And what the data showed was that there was no strong indication of where those lines should be drawn. So what the presidents said was ‘Let’s stay with the status quo for the floor.’ ”

According to the data, a 700 (out of 1,600) SAT score or an 18 (out of 36) ACT score is comparable to a 2.5 (out of 4.0) grade-point average on 13 core courses. The data showed that the test score was twice as difficult to achieve as the 2.0 GPA, and that the comparable number for the SAT would be 490 -- only 90 points more than is awarded for signing the test.

“We’re talking about kids’ lives here,” Rienzo said. “Are the Presidents Commission and the NCAA interested in education, politics or discrimination? And if the political situation is such that it’s encouraging the presidents to discriminate against those individuals who need help the most and have the least available ability to represent themselves, then we don’t have a problem with athletics. We have a problem with civil rights.

“I favor whatever the research data indicates that predicts the highest probability of success in college. I don’t know the right answer, but I would want the commission using what the data supports. All I want them to do is look at the data and make the decision based on the data.”

NCAA Executive Director Dick Schultz and University of Texas President William H. Cunningham, the Division I chairman who presided over the two-day commission meeting last week, could not be reached for comment the past two days.

But Ohio Wesleyan President David Warren, who chairs the commission’s Division III subcommittee, said, “I think the cutline (should be) 700.

Last week the Presidents Commission, comprising 44 presidents and chancellors of NCAA member institutions, announced it would sponsor changes in the other components of Prop 48, raising the required core courses to 13 and the minimum grade-point average to 2.5.

When Prop 48, which sets standards for initial eligibility, was passed at the 1983 NCAA convention, incoming students needed a 2.0 GPA on 11 core courses to be eligible for athletic participation.

This proposal, plus others that would strengthen requirements for continued eligibility, comes at a time when college and university presidents are gaining control over big-time athletic programs and trying to reform them -- in an atmosphere of negative public opinion caused by athletic abuses and of threatened intervention by Congress.

“The public is concerned about the exploitation of athletes, about bringing them in as hessians and using them as fodder,” Warren said. “I think both the public and the Presidents Commission are determined to alter both the perception and the reality of this.”

William Simons, former president of the Washington Teachers’ Union, said, “I think it’s a worthwhile adjustment. The emphasis should be on the academic achievement of the youngsters to make sure they get an education.”

As its current priority in setting an agenda for the NCAA annual convention in Anaheim, Calif., in January 1992, the Presidents Commission has focused on academic changes, always a sticky wicket because of its impact on socio-economically disadvantaged groups.

Also in question are the conditions of the inner-city elementary and secondary schools that prepare many of these athletes with the academic fundamentals, as Temple basketball coach John Chaney pointed out the other day in saying he was opposed to any strengthening of Prop 48 until those schools are improved.

But to understand the current situation, look at the situation a decade ago, when the only standard for initial athletic eligibility was a 2.0 in all high school courses.

Coaches told star athletes not to worry about SAT scores; they would get them in. Remember Chris Washburn? (SAT 460, accepted at N.C. State) Functional illiterates such as Kevin Ross of Creighton basketball and Dexter Manley of Oklahoma State football also made their way to prominence.

So in the summer of 1982, an ad hoc committee of presidents, led by Harvard’s Derek Bok and under the umbrella of the American Council on Education, met and formulated what became Proposition 48 at the 1983 convention.

A bitter floor battle developed at that gathering. Representatives of historically black institutions argued they were not consulted, that the test score provision was “racist” in that it was designed to eliminate many blacks athletes from competing in the NCAA (which data shows didn’t happen), and that the NCAA had no data base on which to determine the appropriateness of 700 and 2.0 as standards.

But with a public relations disaster facing them if Proposition 48 were not passed, the presidents agreed to a key compromise: the partial qualifier, which allowed anyone to receive an athletic scholarship if he or she had a 2.0 overall GPA.

But that individual would be ineligible to compete or practice during the freshman year and would have only three years of competition. The NCAA also proposed a five-year study of scholarship athletes entering college from 1984 to 1988, and promised to adjust Proposition 48 using that data.

And that is why Rienzo is so concerned now. Already, the NCAA convention has not lived up to its word. At the 1989 convention, in a proposal sponsored by the Southeastern Conference, it passed Proposition 42, which eliminated athletic scholarships and all institutionally administered financial aid for athletes who did not qualify under Prop 48.

Rienzo’s basketball coach, John Thompson, boycotted coaching in two games as a protest and led an effort, along with Rienzo, to overturn the rule at the following convention, saying it denied certain athletes access to a college education. They were half successful: The athletic scholarship is still forbidden, but institutionally administered aid, such as Stafford Loans and Pell Grants, is available.