CHAPEL HILL, N.C.
In 1912, during the 12th year of Francis Preston Venable’s tenure as president of the University of North Carolina, the Tar Heels football team was defeated by the University of Virginia, 66-0.
In 1913, President Venable took a sabbatical in Europe. He did not return as president.
Lest the timing of those events seem coincidental, a university historian numbers the “violent onslaught by pro-athletic alumni and Trustees upon the University’s athletic regulations” among the factors that drove Dr. Venable from office.
Michael K. Hooker, chancellor of the university’s campus here, learned that bit of institutional history in a recent letter from an emeritus professor. “There is a tradition here of great alumni interest in and support of athletics,” Dr. Hooker says. “And there has been a tradition here of chancellors worrying about the integrity of the institution and wondering how to balance the two.”
By most accounts, few universities have succeeded so well in this regard as North Carolina. Chapel Hill is regularly ranked among the very top public universities in the nation for its academic programs, while its football and men’s basketball teams are currently rated among the top 10.
And Carolina’s excellence is not restricted to the so-called revenue-producing sports. Its women’s soccer team is among the most dominant teams in the recent history of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, having won 14 of the last 17 championships. The women’s field-hockey team last month won its third straight N.C.A.A. title, and the women’s basketball team is also rated among the top 10.
The university has achieved its renown while graduating athletes at a rate -- 72 per cent, in the past four years -- that is frequently among the best in the country for public institutions. Perhaps most important to Dr. Hooker and the trustees who hired him, the athletics department has been without serious scandal for almost 40 years.
Among the Division I institutions with stronger academic reputations, only Stanford University sponsors a sports program that has been as broadly successful, and as clean. And Stanford, a private institution, can afford to be more selective in its admissions than can Chapel Hill, the flagship of a large state-university system.
Yet when faculty members and administrators at North Carolina speak about the university’s dual success, they make it clear that it has been achieved by riding a tiger.
“I’m probably one of the few presidents who doesn’t go to sleep at night and wake up worrying about the university’s being embarrassed by its athletics program,” says Dr. Hooker. “But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen.”
Despite its reputation, North Carolina struggles like other institutions with the compromises inherent in Division I athletics. It labors to educate athletes who are not as well-prepared for college as are their classmates; to maintain a major football program without damaging the academic integrity of the university, to balance its athletics budget, and to comply with federal laws on gender equity.
According to admissions data for the past four academic years, football players on athletics scholarships have entered North Carolina with an average SAT score of 953 or an average ACT score of 20. During that same period, men’s basketball players at North Carolina had an average SAT score of 905. (None reported taking the ACT.)
Those scores are close to the average for Division I-A institutions during that period (football 925/19, basketball 917/19). But they are below the national average for all students who took the tests during the past academic year (1013/20.9), and well below the average score of this year’s freshman class at North Carolina (1220/28).
Further, as North Carolina’s football team has improved, the number of players receiving what are known as “academic exceptions,” because they do not meet the university’s regular admissions standards, has increased. From 1986-87 to 1988-89, the university admitted an average of eight students per year this way in either football or basketball; in each of the next five academic years, it averaged 12 academic exceptions. The university makes only combined figures available, but officials confirm that the great majority of the exceptions were granted in football.
Dick Baddour, the university’s director of athletics, says that in recruiting students who do not meet the university’s regular admissions standards, it is essential to “trust and hold accountable the people who are recruiting these people.” Namely, the coaches and their staffs.
Several of North Carolina’s coaches, including Mack Brown, the football coach; Frank Comfort, the men’s and women’s swimming coach; Anson Dorrance, the women’s soccer coach; Sylvia Hatchtell, the women’s basketball coach; and Karen Shelton the women’s field-hockey coach, are among the most respected figures in their sports. But none is as renowned as the man who recently retired after 36 years as men’s basketball coach, Dean Smith.
Mr. Smith not only won 879 games, more than any college basketball coach in history, he also helped to integrate the city’s restaurants, and he withstood public ridicule to recruit the university’s first black basketball players. All but eight of his 232 letter winners have graduated. Ninety-four have attended graduate school, and 53 have played in the National Basketball Association.
Because men’s basketball players traditionally have the lowest graduation rates among athletes, Mr. Smith’s example was all the more powerful, his former colleagues say.
“He did it the hard way,” Mr. Dorrance says. “If this man can do it in his arena, which is so much harder than mine, then it is reasonable to expect that I can do it, too.”
When the university looks beyond “objective criteria” such as high-school grade-point average and standardized tests, and trusts a coach’s intuition, it is taking on a special responsibility, Mr. Baddour says. “The department of athletics and the university strongly believe that if you are going to recruit people to come here, you are taking on the job of giving them the tools to succeed.”
That job falls to the coaches and to the university’s Academic Support Program for Student Athletes, which offers tutoring, drug-and-alcohol counseling, a peer-mentor program, and instruction in note taking and study skills. In addition, some coaches conduct team study halls, and a few consider academic and disciplinary issues in determining playing time and granting other privileges, such as the right to live away from the campus.
Critics of major-college athletics have argued that the necessity of such support services suggests that many athletes, especially those in football and men’s basketball, would not succeed without an inordinate amount of help.
John G. Blanchard, director of the university’s support program for student athletes, disagrees. “College students in general need these programs, and the programs that the athletics department runs are available for other students,” he says. “They are more concentrated in athletics, and the big reason is that student athletes’ time is so limited.”
North Carolina monitors athletes’ academic progress on a sport-by-sport basis. A committee of faculty members meets annually to review the data and discuss concerns with coaches. The panel also conducts interviews with graduating seniors to get their opinions of their academic experiences.
Despite those efforts, the university’s graduation rates have not been uniformly high. According to the most recent data, 72 per cent of the students who entered North Carolina on athletics scholarships from the fall of 1987 through the fall of 1990 had graduated with six years, a rate 14 percentage points above the average for a Division I institution. However, the graduation rate for athletes who entered the university during the 1990 academic year was only 63 per cent, just five points above the Division I average. And only 51 per cent of the male athletes who entered the university in 1990 had graduated within six years, including 43 per cent of those in baseball and 48 per cent of those in football.
These numbers pale in comparison with those of the University of Virginia (83 per cent) and Pennsylvania State University (81 per cent), the public institutions with Division I-A football teams that fared best in the most recent study.
John P. Evans, North Carolina’s faculty athletics representative, acknowledges that the university’s graduation rates in a few sports “are not where we want them to be.” He points out, though, that of the scholarship athletes who entered North Carolina between the fall of 1983 and the fall of 1991, 92 per cent of those who remained in school long enough to exhaust their athletics eligibility had received their degrees within six years.
“Is it people who are choosing to leave, or is it people who are not managing academically?” he asks about the most recent rates. “If we thought it was a problem with the selection of these individuals in the first place, we would address it that way.”
Some faculty members believe that a decline in academic standards among athletes is inevitable. “That’s a sign of the price we pay to advance, particularly in football,” says Leon Fink, a professor of American history. “To contend with the top programs, you almost necessarily cut some corners.”
One problem that is difficult for educators to overcome is the rigor of an athlete’s schedule.
Richelle Fox, the university’s best female swimmer, gets up at 5:30 a.m. every day, swims from 6 a.m. until 7:30 a.m., lifts weights until 8:30 a.m., and then has breakfast.
“I take a nap, usually until about 10, then I have classes from 11 to 2,” says Ms. Fox, a junior who is considering a career in cardiac rehabilitation. After a quick lunch, she spends half an hour doing physical therapy on tired muscles, then practices with her team from 3:15 until 6 p.m. After dinner, she studies.
“There’s not much time, because you are devoting it all to your sport,” she says. “I couldn’t imagine having a whole day to myself.”
Ms. Fox, who is ranked fourth in the world in the women’s 100-meter butterfly, belongs to a long tradition of prominent female athletes in Chapel Hill. Each year the university presents the Patterson Medal to its outstanding senior athlete; five of the past seven winners have been women’s soccer players. One of those women, Mia Hamm, may be the best-known female soccer player in the world.
North Carolina sponsors 13 sports for men and 15 for women, including every sport in which the N.C.A.A. sponsors a women’s championship. It spent more than $2.4-million on women’s athletics in 1995-96, not counting coaching salaries.
In proportional terms, though, North Carolina’s gender-equity record is mixed. Sixty per cent of its undergraduates are women, but 59 per cent of its athletes are men. Men’s sports receive 81 per cent of the operating budget, 82 per cent of the recruiting budget, and 63 per cent of the scholarship money.
“They do have a lot of women involved in sports,” says Rachel D. Zuk, of the Women’s Sports Foundation, which publishes a gender-equity “report card” on college athletics programs. North Carolina received a C. “Where they are really lacking is in allocating their budget.” The university received a D for providing too little money for recruiting female athletes.
Mr. Baddour, the athletics director, says North Carolina would like to do better by its female athletes. “We need to do more,” he says. “We’re not done with that part of the story.”
Chancellor Hooker says the biggest challenge he faces in athletics is increasing the size of the women’s program while maintaining a robust program for men.
The university has a $27-million athletics budget, and Dr. Hooker says the program is one of the five or six in the country that are truly self-supporting. “I know that more schools claim to be,” he says. “But I also know something about hiding money.”
Nike, the world’s largest sports-footwear company, is a major contributor to North Carolina’s athletics budget. This past summer the company signed an exclusive contract to provide the university with footwear and uniforms for its athletics teams, in exchange for the right to display the corporate logo, the Swoosh, on the Tar Heels’ shoes and uniforms, and at the university’s athletics events.
The five-year deal is worth $7.1-million.
The contract is Nike’s second such arrangement with the university, but the renewed deal has engendered controversy on the campus in a way that the first one did not.
“There has been a lack of attention to the labor questions,” says Dr. Fink, the history professor. Faculty members are concerned, he adds, about reports that the foreign workers who make Nike’s products were paid less than the minimum wage, subjected to corporal punishment, exposed to unsafe working conditions, and forced to work overtime.
Nike has denied such charges. The company paid for an investigation of its subcontractors’ plants by GoodWorks International, headed by Andrew Young, a former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Mr. Young’s report cited only scattered problems in the plants, but it has been criticized as superficial by labor organizations.
Dr. Hooker scoffs at much of the faculty criticism of the deal. “People wearing clothes from Southeast Asia send e-mail complaining about Nike on computers made in Southeast Asia,” he says. “There is a level of hypocrisy here that is just appalling.
“I’ve toured these factories. I’ve seen these people lining up for the jobs. You have to understand developmental economics to understand what is going on.”
Last month, Dr. Hooker spoke at a forum called by students who wanted the university to investigate Nike’s labor practices. He agreed to establish a committee of students and faculty members to review the university’s contracts with corporations. Six days later, he announced to the Faculty Council that at his request, Nike had agreed to allow a delegation from the university to visit its plants in Southeast Asia.
In addition, two faculty members have announced plans to conduct a course on Nike and the global marketplace, and Dr. Hooker has suggested that three students -- including a reporter from the student newspaper and a member of the class on Nike -- be included in the delegation.
Not all of the critics are satisfied. “The chancellor makes a vigorous argument that is not without some plausibility,” Dr. Fink says. “But I think it is Panglossian to assume that the progress emerges just out of the marketplace itself.”
He sees the dispute over the contract as part of a broader problem with the university community’s attitude toward intercollegiate athletics.
“There is a widespread feeling that on the one hand, we are part of big-time college athletics, but at the same time, we have the illusion -- stoked perhaps by the long presence of Dean Smith -- that we are better than the rest, that we are unsullied by scandal, that we have a high-class program. That may be an illusion, but that is the prevailing mood.
“I don’t think the other shoe has dropped yet, and some of us are worried about the day that it will.”
Dr. Hooker shares some of those concerns about major-college athletics.
“It really is all out of proportion to any reason or reality. It seems to grow more out of control every year,” he says.
“It’s bizarre. But it is part of the American culture, and there is nothing I can do to change that. What I can do is maintain a program of integrity. It would be quixotic for me to think that I could say anything to affect the national psyche.”
