Green and Gold (and More Than a Little Blue)

Yet another reporter comes to ask questions, so Joey Harrington interrupts his lunch, answering patiently while sneaking bites from a sandwich. Everyone wants to know about the poster.

Even Harrington finds it hard to believe. The University of Oregon quarterback smiles as he recalls how athletic department officials approached him with the idea of draping his picture on the side of a building in New York City. It would be big, they said. Really big. He thought they were joking.

The rest of college football reacted in much the same way when the 100-foot poster was unfurled near Madison Square Garden this summer. It transformed the likable young man into a King Kong with shoulder pads, touting him for the Heisman Trophy, the award that goes each year to the best college player in the land.

Skeptics dismissed it as nothing more than an outlandish stunt to court Heisman voters on the East Coast. But they missed the point. The poster was less about Harrington and more about business--the business of winning in college sports. It was about marketing the university to New York-based sports magazines and television networks that had never paid much attention to the team from this smallish campus of 17,850 students in the Pacific Northwest.

For decades, Oregon had not warranted much notice, keeping athletics low-key, as if satisfied with second-tier teams and losing seasons. That changed in the late 1980s when administrators began emphasizing sports. They coaxed millions of dollars from boosters and built a new training complex. In short order, the football team put together a half-dozen winning seasons, went to bowl games and inched up the national rankings. Still, to become a true powerhouse, to attract top high school recruits and be mentioned with the likes of Oklahoma and Ohio State, the Ducks needed national exposure. So the athletic director, with the university president’s blessing, made Harrington a poster boy, and boosters paid the $250,000 tab.

But now Harrington is facing questions that have become a little bit tiring, “maybe a lot bit,” he says quietly. Even with Oregon the talk of college football and the team coming off its best season ever, there has been a backlash on campus, especially from faculty, who rank among the lowest paid at any state university. Given ammunition from a recent study that decries the “frantic, money-oriented” atmosphere of college football and basketball nationwide, Oregon professors and students began asking about the role of athletics at their school. How much spending is too much? they wondered. Why can’t some of this money go for academics?

The same concerns exist at other universities this fall, but there’s a special vigor at Oregon, where a tranquil scattering of brick buildings and shaded walkways seems more suited to Birkenstocks than cleats, more tie-dye than touchdowns. It’s a place where 1960s idealism still flourishes, where ideas are given free voice. As a result, the debate there now includes an extra-credit question: If Oregon stays the course of big-time athletics, is there a way to do things differently? Might the Ducks might find a new paradigm for college sports?

The 1990s saw Oregon adopt a formula for athletics that has been repeated at colleges with increasing frequency: Schools build stadiums and hire big-name coaches in hopes of attracting the best recruits. Those recruits are expected to win games, which translates into lucrative network appearances and shoe company endorsements that bring even more recruits while also paying back some of the investment. Alumni, bursting with pride, write checks for the rest.

Believing this “arms race” is now the only way to compete, major universities spend as much as $55 million a year on athletics, most of it going to football and men’s basketball. With the marching bands and crisp autumn mornings of another season upon us, the good people of Eugene are not the only ones concerned.

The respected Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics warned in its June report that college sports are veering ever farther from the ideals of higher education. The Florida-based commission cites low graduation rates among student athletes and cases where young men are kept eligible through trumped-up classes or fixed grades. Even when no fraud exists, schools mark their stadiums and uniforms with revenue-producing corporate logos. As the report said: “At the core of the problem is a prevailing money madness.”

Oregon administrators note that their football team has not been cited for a major violation in two decades. The 41% graduation rate among football players, they say, isn’t much lower than the 55% rate campuswide. (Nationally, about 51% of all students graduate in five years, according to the widely accepted ACT survey.) There is no arguing, however, that Oregon has entered a high-stakes game.

It began when administrators concluded that “there was no future in being the doormat of the conference,” says Dave Frohnmayer, the university’s president since 1994. With boosters contributing mightily to the cause, the football team hit its stride by the mid-1990s, earning consecutive berths to the prestigious Rose and Cotton bowls. The university built on this success by hiring Bill Moos as athletic director in 1995. A big man partial to golf shirts and slacks, Moos seems easy-going. But beneath the surface burns the competitiveness of a former all-conference tackle at Washington State. “You don’t get into these jobs to be mediocre,” says Moos, who spent eight years in the private sector before returning to college athletics. “Those of us in the profession, we want to compete at the highest level.”

As the Ducks kept winning, the athletic department budget grew from $19 million to $30 million, putting Oregon on par with such storied programs as USC, at $33 million, and UCLA, at $36 million. Moos took the spoils of victory--bowl appearance fees and television money as well as alumni donations--and reinvested them. First came a cavernous $15-million indoor practice field, all the better to woo California recruits worried about rain. There were new outdoor fields, too. Finally, with demand for tickets growing, the school announced plans to add 12,000 seats and 32 luxury boxes to cozy Autzen Stadium, at an estimated cost of $85 million--enough to fund the university’s Honors College for more than a century.

“If there is an arms race, Oregon is in it,” Moos says from a corner office in an athletics center that boasts a sports museum and a vast weight room. The Ducks entered this season with a bona fide Heisman candidate in Harrington and a top-10 ranking in virtually every poll.

As the team prepares for a critical Pacific 10 Conference matchup with USC next Saturday, Moos can look out his office windows over this new sports empire, with its landscaped athletics plaza and a merchandising shop that sells everything from sweat shirts to duck calls to jars of mustard adorned with the school logo. He can say, with no hidden satisfaction, that as the university celebrates its 125th year, Oregon is finally a contender.

Eugene is small and unhurried, a city of less than 200,000 framed by wooded buttes to the north and south and bisected by the graceful Willamette River. Here in the heart of logging country, craftsmen sell handmade candles from booths at a weekend market and upscale brew pubs share a small downtown with head shops and tattoo parlors. “The reason we have a faculty at all, given the bad salaries, is that faculty are tremendously devoted to Eugene,” says James Earl, former president of the faculty senate. “They are devoted to the ambience, both natural and cultural.”

Earl fits the mold. The bearded professor teaches an Old English class in the university’s medieval studies program and authored the 1994 book “Thinking About Beowulf.” The culture he speaks of is socially conscious, if not hippie. “A ‘60s thing,” he says. “Protesters in the streets, a lot of vegetarians.” Not the kind of people usually inclined to paint their faces green and file into a stadium on Saturday afternoons.

The clash over sports dates back a couple of years, beginning with one of the university’s most illustrious and wealthy alumni, Phil Knight, who co-founded Nike shortly after graduating from Oregon in 1959. Knight--no relation to the commission--had been the patron saint of the campus, donating a reported $9 million to help renovate the main library and $25 million for a new law center. An avid football fan who regularly helicoptered down from Nike’s headquarters outside Portland to watch practices, he was expected to donate about $30 million to the stadium renovation.

As grateful as faculty members were for the money Knight had given, some expressed dismay over his pledge to the stadium. After a decade of cuts in state funding, the university needed money in a bad way. The crunch had left the average pay for a full professor at $77,000, significantly below the salaries at comparable schools.

With the stadium plans moving forward, professors and students began pressuring Frohnmayer to have the university join a labor rights group that sought better working conditions at any overseas factories producing Ducks’ merchandise. Target No. 1? Nike.

After lengthy debate, Frohnmayer agreed to have Oregon sign up with the group. But concerned about a possible conflict of interest, he never consulted Knight. The Nike CEO said he learned of the decision in the newspaper. Furious at not getting a chance to defend the standards and wages at Nike factories, he declared “the bonds of trust” with his alma mater had been “shredded.” He stopped going to practices, much less games, and withdrew his money for the stadium.

The issue drew a line through campus. Suddenly professors were pitted against coaches, students against student athletes, and boosters were outraged. The 2000 season came and went, with the Ducks winning a school record 10 games and defeating powerful Texas in a postseason bowl. But on campus, the rift widened.

First, USC and Ohio State showed interest in hiring football coach Mike Bellotti, who was instrumental in the Ducks’ swift rise. Moos responded by offering Bellotti a multiyear, multimillion-dollar contract. Faculty saw it as another defeat at a time when they had negotiated hard for a 6.7% annual wage increase. “Our football coach, with his perks, probably makes eight or nine times what our university president makes,” says Nathan Tublitz, a biology professor who succeeded Earl as faculty senate president. “It is fair to say that many people believe athletic expenditures have gotten out of hand.

A month later, Moos received the administration’s permission to postpone the annual “Civil War” game with rival Oregon State by two weeks so it would fit into ABC’s programming schedule. The payoff would be $600,000 for each school. All well and good, if only the Dec. 1 date didn’t fall during “dead week,” a span when the campus falls quiet as students prepare for final exams. To some on campus, this is precisely what the Knight Commission meant when it wrote “schools and conferences prostrate themselves to win and get on television . . . so much for classroom commitments.”

What’s more, the faculty weren’t told about the switch. “Not only did we read about it in the newspapers, the provost read about it in the newspapers,” Earl says. “It was a fiasco.”

The last straw, as far as some professors and students saw it, came last spring when the state Board of Higher Education effectively banned the university from joining any labor watchdog group. The decision meant that the university could retreat with dignity from its clash with Knight and Frohnmayer could start repairing the damage. Knight has declined to comment, but his helicopter was seen in the parking lot near football practices this summer, and a university fund-raiser says he is expected to contribute to the stadium expansion.

Earl scoffed at the state board’s decision. “The whole process got knee-capped,” he says. He acknowledges he has never been much of a sports fan, not as a graduate student at Cornell, certainly not as a professor. “Why should higher education be saddled with a semiprofessional football league?” he asks. “I mean, the Ivy League doesn’t do this.” To him, the money for sports represents a profound imbalance. He sees the corporatization of America seeping into academia, the image of his beloved school repackaged and sold by way of televised games and nightly news highlights. “The public now thinks of higher education as athletics,” he says. “The town’s people think they are entitled to this entertainment. Students will tell you they choose a school by the athletic team. “I don’t want to think I work for a sports franchise.”

The football stadium, with its cluster of fields and buildings, lies across the Willamette from the university, linked by a paved footpath and pedestrian bridge. Bellotti would like to imagine the distance as not so great. “Every department at a university wants to be the best,” he says. “Science, business, mathematics, whatever.”

But he knows academics and athletics are separated by a schism as real as the water that runs between them. Since he became head coach in 1995, his teams have finished each season with a winning record. Along the way, he has earned a reputation for being straightforward. Yes, he has read the newspapers. Yes, he knows about the complaints of faculty members. “There are some valid points,” he says. “What bothers me is, they make comments about me or my program, but none of those faculty members have ever set foot in my office.”

Down on the practice field, fans arrive around noon, men in ties sneaking out of the office, fathers with sons in tow, townsfolk coming to watch the Ducks run through weekday drills. Cheers erupt when the team’s star receiver, Keenan Howry, catches a Harrington pass. “I went to college here in the late ‘70s and saw a lot of bad football,” says Jeff Redd, an editor at a local publishing house. “They used to beg folks to come to games.” Now there is a waiting list for season tickets.

It’s the same among students. While many sympathize with faculty or simply do not care for sports, the student section is always packed and noisy at games. When Earl spoke out last spring, he found himself the target of a letter-writing campaign and dubbed “Ayatollah Earl.” Even among faculty, for each colleague who supported him, another disagreed. At the law center that Knight’s money built, associate dean James O’Fallon keeps a snapshot of himself with the Nike billionaire in his office. In addition to teaching law, O’Fallon serves as a liaison to the National Collegiate Athletic Assn., monitoring paperwork that keeps Oregon athletes eligible to compete. Though concerned about the arms race, he rejects the argument that big-time sports are antithetical to the university’s mission and cites as evidence the success of Stanford’s teams: “I don’t see their educational program going to hell and I don’t see our educational program going to hell.”

Nor does he buy a comparison Earl makes to universities in other countries. Earl likes to point out that foreign schools do not operate massive athletic departments. Gifted young soccer players, for example, are diverted to the professional minor leagues. O’Fallon prefers the American way: “It beats the heck out of the European approach, where they make the kids choose one or the other.”

It doesn’t matter to him if students apply to Oregon because of the football team, as long as they become good students once they arrive. The same goes for student athletes. “If we’re going to think about the role of athletics in higher education,” he says, “we need to think about it in a more complicated fashion than the Knight Commission has.” A tinge of impatience marks his voice. He suggests that some of his colleagues are stuck in the 19th century, imagining Oregon as a classic German Universitat. “That culture has, for better or worse, been left behind,” he says. “This is the culture we live in . . . there is a Sports Illustrated magazine that lots of people read. There is no Education Illustrated.”

As the ducks enter their Pac-10 season this week, the university they represent has reached a fork in the road. Should the athletic department continue down its heady path? Should critics continue their grass-roots battle? Or will this campus’ odd confluence of hippie meets jock produce an unexpected result?

There are glimmers of answers.

Frohnmayer sides with athletics on key issues but--in keeping with his background as a former state attorney genera--he has been careful to listen to both sides and to foster an atmosphere of free expression. As Tublitz explains, “It comes close to an edge but it never goes over the edge. There are heated thoughts but calm words.”

Therein lies Oregon’s hope: While the athletic culture at some schools is cemented, this university is new enough to the game to alter its course, and--just maybe--find some new way for big-time sports and academics to coexist at a university. As Tublitz says: “We’re trying to raise the conversation level. Our goal at Oregon is to develop a new model.” Aware of the opportunity, Frohnmayer has gathered professors and athletic department officials, sometimes formally, other times in his living room. Discussions have been frank. Moos wanted credit for raising funds and building facilities for all his teams while keeping the athletic department at or near budget. He said alumni who grow excited about football are more likely to give to academics. It’s a fund-raising axiom: People like to join a winner. Indeed, while athletic coffers have swelled, the university has raised a record $255 million for construction and endowed chairs and scholarships. Earl, however, argued that it could have been more. A benefactor who gives $1 million to athletics might otherwise have given at least some of that to academics, he said. He cited published research that finds no positive correlation between winning and private gifts to academic endeavors.

As the talking continued, Frohnmayer brokered a deal. First, all parties agreed that faculty will be consulted the next time the team wants to change its schedule. Second, Moos made a tough concession. With his fund-raising going well, he offered to phase out the annual subsidy that his department draws from general funds. It was decided that much of the $2 million would go toward boosting faculty salaries. “Bill Moos did the right thing and he didn’t have to,” Tublitz says. Even Earl acknowledges that “it made a lot of faculty feel as if academics could get its voice heard.”

Emboldened, Earl drafted a resolution that was embraced by the rest of the faculty senate and distributed to rival schools in the conference. In plain language, it urges Pac-10 presidents to consider a limit on athletic spending. As such, it was a smaller, grass-roots precursor to the Knight Commission’s call for a national coalition of university presidents to address athletic expenditures. Eight of 10 faculty senates have endorsed the resolution to date.

To be sure, Oregon’s efforts fall short of the Knight Commission’s recommendations to cap sports budgets, bring coaching salaries into line with faculty pay and ban corporate logos from uniforms. And the university has put up billboards featuring other players in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland. But the commission cited Earl’s resolution among “several positive developments” nationwide. And Oregon faculty have continued their fight, negotiating for the athletic department to give a portion of its revenue to the general fund.

Across campus, in the football lunchroom, Harrington winces at the mention of money. He would like to nap before practice, but more interviews are scheduled for the afternoon and he wants to do his part for the team. Square-jawed, his black hair clipped short, he is a Duck through and through. His father, John, played quarterback for Oregon in darker times, and the day Joey was born, the university, in jest, offered him a football scholarship. “In no way am I saying that other areas of the university don’t need improvement,” the young star says. “There are low-paid professors, there are buildings that need improvement.” But he is adamant that the team has earned its notoriety through victories. Fans should be allowed to enjoy the fruits of that success. And he wants to clarify that the money that paid for his poster was donated specifically for that reason. “Someone comes to the university and says they want to give $250,000,” he says. “The university is supposed to say no?”

In the midst of a national debate on athletic expenditures, the Ducks probably could not have found a better poster boy. In addition to his considerable football skills, Harrington is a jazz pianist in his free time, and he entered this season with a 3.21 grade-point average, only three credits shy of his degree. He is the type of student even Earl might want on campus.

His major? Business administration, with an emphasis on sports marketing.