President Pro-Active
The office of the president of the University of Miami is on the second floor of an aging and colorless campus building best described as institutional. Decorative touches are the sole responsibility of the occupant.
Donna Shalala, the current occupant, invites you into her office. She shows you a seat, but first she shows you a football, autographed by the members of the 1994 Rose Bowl championship team from Wisconsin, a cherished symbol of the athletic program she revitalized there. She displays an autographed baseball, courtesy of Miami’s latest College World Series champions. She excuses herself for a moment, rummages through her closet and returns with a souvenir of the Sydney Olympics, an autographed picture of the U.S. women’s soccer team.
“I was trying to figure out a place to put this,” she says.
She led the American delegation to Sydney, and joyfully so, as one of her final duties during eight years as President Clinton’s secretary of health and human services. She leads the Miami delegation to the Rose Bowl out of passion, not obligation.
The Hurricanes’ first fan emphasizes that she presides over a young and ambitious research university of 14,000 students, over a law school and a medical school--much more than an athletic department. Along an office wall smothered with plaques, she points to citations from cell biologists and political scientists, not just athletic boosters.
But, whereas many university presidents and chancellors treat big-time college sports with resigned indifference or muffled hostility, Shalala considers athletics an integral part of campus culture and a vital link to the surrounding community. Sports link her to her roots, as a college tennis player and daughter of a nationally ranked tennis player.
As the president of Hunter College in New York, two decades ago, she stuffed herself into the mascot costume and performed--as the Hunter Hawk--at a basketball game. When Miami hired her last spring, she slapped a Hurricane bumper sticker on her Volkswagen beetle. On a flight with the football team, she couldn’t stop chuckling when several players declared her pant legs were too long, then rolled them up.
“She’s got to be one of the coolest ladies I’ve ever seen in my life,” Miami center Brett Romberg said.
For the typical college president, game day is another work day: Shake hands with prominent boosters, feed them, thank them for their fat checks and encourage them to write more. Shalala, 60, does that too, but she also ventures outside the VIP box to sit in the stands with students in the first quarter, then with alumni in the fourth quarter.
During the Hurricanes’ last home game, she did an ABC interview with Lynn Swann, permitted an ESPN reporter to accompany her as she sat in the student section and hung out along the Miami sideline with baseball superstar and local celebrity Alex Rodriguez.
“I don’t have a bunch of boosters moaning and groaning that we’ve got a president that doesn’t like sports,” she says.
If the boosters love you, the professors might not: The higher the profile of the athletic department, the greater the risk of resentment in the laboratories, libraries and lecture halls.
In 1987, as the newly appointed chancellor at Wisconsin, Shalala inherited a football team that was losing games and fans, and an athletic department that was losing money. She vowed to stop all that losing, and she did, but that vow did not endear her to all the professors on campus.
Would more money for sports mean less money for books? Would the university sell out its sterling academic reputation for a winning football team? So what if the Badgers had not played in the Rose Bowl since 1963?
“There were faculty members who took a perverse sort of pride in that,” said Jim Hoyt, a journalism professor at Wisconsin and the faculty representative to the NCAA during Shalala’s tenure there. “The assumption was that there was an inverse relationship between the quality of the university and the quality of the athletic program.
“She came in and, virtually from Day 1, her message was: We expect excellence from all areas of campus; we expect the medical school to be No. 1, why shouldn’t we expect the same from our athletic department?
“That defused a lot of the grumbling, because it’s a difficult message to argue against.”
To Shalala, sports could link the university to its community, to its alumni, to the citizens of its state. She fondly recalls meeting Wisconsin farmers who never set foot in Madison, never sent their children to the university and still stopped in their fields to tune in to Badger games.
“Sports means something,” she says. “It’s about recreation, but it’s also about pride. It’s about Monday morning around the water cooler.”
Even for the distinguished scholars, many of whom continued to use their season tickets--she checked--as they protested the newfound emphasis on sports.
When Wisconsin hired Stu Jackson to coach its men’s basketball team, Shalala called the chairman of the psychiatry department. Jackson’s wife was a psychiatrist; did the department have any job openings? The chairman’s response, according to Shalala: Can I upgrade my basketball seats?
Still, in an era of million-dollar contracts for top college coaches and billion-dollar contracts to televise the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, even supportive faculty members wonder whether the money and temptations of big-time sports virtually guarantee the trouble that stains the image of a university. Last June, the Knight Foundation reported that more than half of Division I schools had been cited for “major violations” of NCAA rules within the last decade.
“I wouldn’t lump every program together,” Shalala says. “There are a lot of programs that have serious fundamental problems and need to be restructured, and I think you always have to be vigilant.
“But some of the rules of the NCAA go against common sense. It kills me sometimes that, when there are a bunch of student-athletes sitting there waiting for the bus, and I could give them a ride, I can’t. It’s raining, and I can’t give them a ride. I can’t even reach out and hand them an umbrella, probably, because that would be a gift.”
The violations have been much more severe at Wisconsin in the eight years since Shalala left to join Clinton’s cabinet, and at Miami. The men she selected to reverse the Badgers’ fortunes, Athletic Director Pat Richter and football Coach Barry Alvarez, were reprimanded last year in the wake of school and NCAA investigations that revealed the football and basketball programs had provided improper housing assistance for recruits and that hundreds of athletes on a variety of Wisconsin teams had received thousands of dollars’ worth of impermissible discounts from a shoe store. The NCAA put Wisconsin on five years’ probation.
And there was truth in advertising when the old Notre Dame-Miami football games were billed as “Catholics vs. Convicts.” In 1995, the NCAA stripped the Hurricanes of 24 football scholarships over two years as partial punishment for a catalog of misdeeds that included financial-aid fraud, hushed-up positive drug tests and payments to players as rewards for big hits in big games. In 1994, the final season under Coach Dennis Erickson, the Hurricanes had more players arrested, 12, than victories, 10.
In the cases of both schools, the NCAA sanctions cited a lack of institutional control, perhaps the most damning phrase in college sports. In plain English, it means no one on campus is properly supervising the athletic department.
The violations at Wisconsin occurred after Shalala had departed, and the violations at Miami occurred before she arrived, so she cannot address what happened in either case, or why. But she warns that any president or chancellor who ignores the athletic department does so at his or her peril.
The person running the university need not be a sports fan, she says, but big-time sports carry supervisory responsibility too important to be delegated.
“I’m not saying Miami won’t have a problem in the future,” she says. “I’ve run a very good institution that had problems in the future. But I do believe the president herself has to pay attention.”
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Reform at Miami predates Shalala, with the credit shared among Athletic Director Paul Dee, former coach Butch Davis (who replaced Erickson) and current Coach Larry Coker, promoted from offensive coordinator when Davis left for the NFL’s Cleveland Browns. The arrest rate is down; the graduation rate is up.
“When I first heard about going to college as a football player, on scholarship, I was totally thinking about getting money, getting cars, pretty much the way this school used to operate,” Romberg said.
“I come here, and you have to have this, you have to be attentive, you have to do everything they say. I was expecting guys to just show up for class whenever they wanted, but you’re penalized for everything wrong. It’s not a prison--actually, it really is, but it’s a healthy prison system. It’s only going to benefit you.”
Rare is the Miami football recruit who does not consider himself a lock to play in the NFL. Over the last 15 years, no school has had more players selected in the first round of the NFL draft.
But miss two classes without an excuse, and Coker will see you at 6 a.m., for a meeting and an extra workout.
“I’m old enough and smart enough to know that all these guys aren’t going to make $47 million in the National Football League, like Edgerrin James,” Coker said. “I see too many of them that come back and say, ‘Well, Coach, if only I had gone to class.... ‘
“I hope all of them make it [in the NFL], but most of our players don’t. Some that do, they make it for two or three years, and then they have to go out and get a job. We’re going to do everything we can to make sure they don’t leave here without at least a great opportunity to get an education.”
Shalala delivers that message herself, and often. She encourages coaches hosting recruits on a campus visit to drop by her office, so she can talk with the prospective Hurricanes.
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In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, Shalala spoke to numerous campus and community gatherings. One of the first audiences she addressed: The football team, at practice.
She pulled aside one Muslim member of the team for a private chat in Farsi, a language she’d spoken as a Peace Corps volunteer in Iran during the Kennedy administration. Then she gathered all the players.
“I told them that I thought the terrorists wanted to stop them from doing everything,” she says. “They wanted to stop us from going to school. They wanted to stop us from playing football. They wanted to destroy our culture and entertainment. And that was the reason why we were going to continue to do what we were doing. We weren’t going to let them stop us.”
And then she talked to them about one of her favorite subjects, the Rose Bowl. This was September, two games into the Hurricanes’ season. Coker, the typical coach, repeatedly warns his players not to look beyond the next game. Yet here came Shalala, the big boss, telling stories about the promised land of Pasadena. “She talks about the Rose Bowl a lot,” cornerback Phillip Buchanon said. “She says she hasn’t lost a game in the Rose Bowl.”
Wisconsin won three Rose Bowls within seven years, all under Richter and Alvarez. Shalala had left for Washington by then, but in spirit she had never left Madison. Her office in Miami is crowded with all kinds of memorabilia, sporting and otherwise. But rest assured she can find room, somewhere, for another Rose Bowl championship football.
