Criticizing the NCAA has gotten plenty of people in hot water with the association over the years. Add to that list a group of faculty members whom the association brings together for its annual Scholarly Colloquium.
In the coming days, NCAA officials are expected to meet about the future of that event, with some leaders apparently feeling that the forum has turned into too much of an NCAA-bashing, according to e-mails obtained by The Chronicle.
Skeptics have long wondered how much tolerance the NCAA would have for views unfavorable to its positions. In recent weeks, organizers of the colloquium got what some consider to be a brushback pitch: At least one top NCAA executive has not been happy with the tone of recent conferences and raised questions about whether the association would continue to back the forum.
On November 7, David K. Wiggins, a professor at George Mason University and chair of the colloquium’s Executive Board, sent an e-mail to fellow board members alerting them to his worries about the event’s future.
In the e-mail, Mr. Wiggins said that several top NCAA administrators apparently were concerned that the last couple of colloquia had “primarily included ideologues intent on criticizing the NCAA.” As a result, one top NCAA leader told him, the colloquium “runs the risk of no longer being funded,” Mr. Wiggins wrote.
Mr. Wiggins based his concerns on two “rather extensive conversations” with Wallace I. Renfro, the NCAA’s top policy adviser, he said in the e-mail.
In an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Renfro said that in those conversations he was speaking for himself, not the association, and that he hoped the colloquium would continue as a platform where multiple views were presented.
Mr. Wiggins stands by his e-mail, saying that Mr. Renfro repeatedly told him that several top NCAA leaders were not happy with the direction of the colloquium over what they believed was its ideological approach.
Subsequent e-mails Mr. Wiggins exchanged with James L. Isch, the NCAA’s chief operating officer, indicate that the NCAA has had several internal conversations about the colloquium and its future, and planned to meet sometime after December 10 to consider its fate. In a message dated November 26, Mr. Isch wrote that “we are looking to reinvest the colloquium dollars into more directed research.”
Two scholars who have worked closely with the colloquium since its inception found the message in Mr. Wiggins’s e-mail to the board disturbing.
“The idea that the association would threaten to withdraw funding because of the ideas that might be presented in an academic forum is deeply troubling in its anti-intellectual position as well as its potentially punitive nature,” said Ellen Staurowsky, a professor of sport management at Drexel University and the program director for next month’s colloquium. “It’s such a contradiction to all of their false assertions about being a higher-education association.”
Richard M. Southall, director of the College Sport Research Council at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was on the colloquium’s first abstract-review committee and has had two papers accepted for the forthcoming conference, said there had been tensions around the forum from the start.
“These things get messy when you have people thinking and discussing and digging into stuff,” said Mr. Southall, whose research council has its own academic conference. That may not be comfortable for some people at the association, he said.
But he was taken aback by the e-mail’s suggestion that the NCAA might pull its financial support over dissenting views.
“With a broad brush,” he said, “they seem to be dismissing any research that does not draw conclusions that are beneficial to them.”
As an association of colleges and universities, the NCAA should be expected to have the same kind of ethos as a college or university when it comes to the creation of knowledge, said Robert C. Post, dean of the Yale Law School and an expert on academic freedom.
But the e-mail suggests something different about Mr. Renfro at the least, said Mr. Post, a co-author of For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom (Yale University Press, 2009).
“It’s clear,” he said, “that this person, if what this e-mail says is true, is imagining himself like any other corporate executive, supporting the corporate interest he’s trying to serve.”
Data, Not Ideology
The colloquium was the brainchild of Myles Brand, a former NCAA president and philosopher who saw a need for more serious research on college sports. He and others believed that such an event could foster more open dialogue between the scholars who study sport issues and the people who work in the game.
Mr. Brand emphasized that the colloquium should be data-based and should avoid ideology. “Myles always used to joke: ‘In God we trust; everyone else should bring data,’” said Mr. Renfro, a former top adviser to Mr. Brand.
But as Mr. Renfro watched presentations at last year’s colloquium, which focused on changes the NCAA has made in its academic policies in recent years, he did not see a variety of perspectives.
“I was hearing virtually one voice being sung by a number of people ... and it was relatively critical of the NCAA’s academic-reform effort,” he said. “I don’t care whether it was critical or not, but I care about whether there are different perspectives presented.”
He became even more concerned when he learned of the theme for next month’s colloquium, which is to be held in conjunction with the association’s annual convention: “Economic Inequality Within the NCAA.”
“It’s certainly provocative. And it may be pejorative,” Mr. Renfro said. “But it clearly does not represent a notion that you’re going to examine financial differences. It says you’re going to talk about financial inequalities.”
After looking at some of the titles of the research to be presented in January, he became concerned that the conference was beginning to look ideological.
“If you lose the capacity for this platform to be a dialogue in which there is an opportunity to present a position and respond to that, it isn’t a colloquium any longer,” he said. “Some might call it a rant.”
“And if in fact there is a drift toward the ideological,” he added, “the NCAA might very well make up its mind to stop funding.”
There’s no question that certain scholars who have spoken at recent colloquia have criticized the NCAA. Some, including Ms. Staurowsky, have been part of watchdog organizations that have come down hard on the association.
But several scholars took issue with Mr. Renfro’s characterization of recent forums as one-sided.
The last colloquium was organized by Jack Evans, a distinguished professor of operations in the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a longtime member of the NCAA’s Committee on Academic Performance. As chair of the program committee, he helped put together the panels and decide on speakers.
Those speakers included Todd Petr, the NCAA’s managing director of research, and Tom Paskus, the association’s principal research scientist. Another was Walter Harrison, president of the University of Hartford. A longtime chair of the NCAA’s academic-performance committee, Mr. Harrison helped push through many of the association’s academic changes.
Scholars who have presented papers at past colloquia say they have never felt a bias in the selection process because all research is blind-reviewed by an external committee.
“Give credit to the colloquium’s board,” Mr. Southall said. “A number of them don’t agree with mine or others’ assessments, but they don’t squelch those views. If it’s solid research, then it’s solid research.”
A Well-Rounded Picture?
This year’s agenda starts with a keynote presentation by Andrew Zimbalist, a professor of economics at Smith College who has written and commented extensively on the economics of sports and financial challenges faced by NCAA institutions. His speech is designed to provide an overview of NCAA programs’ major revenue streams and how they came about, how the escalation in spending has increased over time, and the gaps that exist between programs.
Heather Lawrence-Benedict, an associate professor in the department of sports administration at Ohio University, who was invited to respond to Mr. Zimbalist, is working on a new way of looking at budget transparency. She plans to discuss the limitations of existing data and the need for more transparency in college sports.
Another presenter, Jeffrey H. Orleans, a former director of the Ivy League, is scheduled to speak about the effects of the economic model of college sport on athletes’ educational experiences.
Those and other presentations, as well as a mix of research on the financial challenges that elite and not-so-elite programs face, give a well-rounded picture of intercollegiate athletics, said Ms. Staurowsky, the program chair.
“Not only is this program not addressing anything that hasn’t been out in the culture for a very long time,” she said, “but we really do have people doing some interesting new work and trying to move the ball forward.”
She is puzzled that no one from the NCAA shared concerns with the colloquium’s board before the program was put in place. According to the minutes of a January 10 colloquium board meeting, Mr. Renfro and several other NCAA employees, including Mr. Isch, were present when the board decided to focus on economic inequality within the NCAA. (Mr. Renfro said he was not in attendance.)
The day before, Mr. Renfro and Mr. Isch made a presentation to colloquium board members in which Mr. Isch thanked them for their work and raised several questions for them to consider in the next year.
According to the minutes of that meeting, Mr. Isch asked the board if the colloquium was meeting its intended purpose, including whether it was advancing “relevant” work from an informed perspective, and considering topics that can advise NCAA policy.
Although some scholars in attendance did not think much about it at the time, the minutes also show that Mr. Isch asked whether the colloquium was meeting another purpose, as articulated in its constitution: Is it considering topics on all sides?
In his e-mail to board members last month, Mr. Wiggins, the board chair, said he had asked Mr. Renfro if and when a decision was going to be made regarding the future of the colloquium.
Mr. Renfro gave no indication, Mr. Wiggins wrote, but indicated that Mr. Isch would make specific recommendations to Mark Emmert, the association’s president, regarding the forum’s status.
On Sunday, Mr. Wiggins said he didn’t have a good feeling about where things are headed. “I do not doubt for a minute that we will find out very shortly that we will no longer exist after [next] year,” he said. “And I think that would be a shame because we serve a valuable purpose.”
But if the colloquium goes on, he fears that the NCAA will never be happy. “There will always be criticism of the organization, and some tension,” he said. “We just have different purposes.”
