Get Out of Show Business

It has been said that when responsible people fail to speak or act, bad things happen. Bad things have happened in intercollegiate sports; now responsible officials have the duty to speak and act.

Big-time college sports today bears only slight resemblance to the goals and objectives for which intercollegiate athletics were begun in America. This is especially the case at major public universities, and some private ones, which make up the membership of the top football and basketball conferences. On these campuses it is the intramural sports and clubs that personify for the players, and to some extent for the fans, the original ideals of amateur college sports.

The varsity sports, especially football and basketball, are in another world for the most part. They are great entertainment conducted under the name of the universities, financed in part by student fees and gate receipts, but driven primarily by the hundreds of millions of dollars pumped in each year by the TV networks and media enterprises, shoe and apparel companies, and institutional boosters.

For many years, efforts have been made to bring reforms to major college sports to validate the connection between the coexisting entertainment enterprise and the educational institutions. The efforts of university leaders, of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and of the independent Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics—created to promote such reform—have led to some positive changes. These reforms have focused upon affirming the primacy of the academic nature of the sponsoring institutions and the place of the performers in the entertainment enterprise as students.

Yet each year brings more scandals and more incidents calling into question the compatibility of universities and a gargantuan entertainment industry. The results have clearly shown that the arrangement can lead to entertainment imperatives taking precedence over those of education. My own university was the locus of one set of these scandals. There is no need here to call the roll of other scandals. The scale and frequencies of these episodes, with their pervasive consequences for individuals and for the institutions themselves, bring into focus and reinforce the evidence that the entertainment enterprise is more and more in control.

The broad effect of this condition reminds me of what my dear late friend Creed C. Black wrote almost 20 years ago in a Knight Commission report by paraphrasing A. Bartlett Giamatti, the former Yale president who ultimately became the commissioner of baseball: “Public faith in higher education cannot be sustained if college sports are permitted to become a circus, with the institution itself little more than a supporting sideshow.”

There is much that must be changed, but a place to begin now would be to make the operations of this entertainment colossus more transparent. A good start would be to require each institution to issue annually a comprehensive report on its intercollegiate sports programs. This report would go far beyond the won-lost column. Specifically, it should state all sources of revenue and specified, detailed expenditures; current and anticipated indebtedness for capital improvements; exceptions to admission policies; graduation rates; all compensation paid to coaches, including institutional base salary, bonuses and all supplements paid from other sources; and cost of remedial instruction. The report should also compare rates of change over time between athletics and academic spending.

There is a sound and important place for intercollegiate sports in academic institutions. It is time for those directly responsible to exert strong leadership and bring an immediate end to the shameful exploitation and abuse now so destructive of these worthy and essential institutions. Thoughtful Americans expect no less from trustees and university leaders.

William C. Friday is president emeritus of the University of North Carolina system and one of the founders of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics.