Fed up with scandals at Pennsylvania State University and in other big-time athletic departments, college presidents have pushed for more control over NCAA decisions during the past year. But on their own campuses, many presidents lack clear authority over sports, a Chronicle analysis has found.
Of the presidents or chancellors who oversee the 25 biggest athletic departments, not a single one has contract language related to oversight of athletics. That includes Rodney A. Erickson, who was named president of Penn State following a breakdown in university leadership during the Jerry Sandusky sex-abuse scandal. Employment agreements for top officials at Ohio State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which have both faced major NCAA sanctions in the past year, do not spell out any specific powers.
More common in presidential contracts, The Chronicle found, were specific goals for fund raising and financial management. If athletics was mentioned at all, it was to spell out perks the presidents would receive, such as free lifetime tickets to games.
Campus chiefs are held accountable for sports in various ways, including through individual performance reviews or their institutions’ accreditation processes. But contract provisions are one of the measures governing boards use to assess presidential performance.
Governance experts say boards should do a better job of spelling out their leaders’ athletics responsibilities to protect institutions from conflicts with boosters and outside parties, and to guard against potential fallout from scandal.
Raymond D. Cotton, a higher-education lawyer who specializes in governance issues, believes trustees themselves should be more engaged in conversations about sports, and thinks they should revise presidential agreements to include specific language about athletics oversight: “It’s a responsibility we all have in a post-Penn State world.”
‘Afraid to Rock the Boat’
Three years ago, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics surveyed the presidents of the 120 or so institutions in the Football Bowl Subdivision. Nearly three-fourths of those interviewed believed they had limited power to effect change on their own campuses in athletics financing and the larger problems related to it.
“The real power doesn’t lie with the presidents,” one leader from a Bowl Championship Series conference said in a report on the commission’s findings. “Presidents and chancellors are afraid to rock the boat with boards, benefactors, and political supporters who want to win, so they turn their focus elsewhere.”
In August 2011, Mark Emmert, president of the NCAA, called together more than 50 college presidents and chancellors to help shore up presidential control over athletics. The crimes and alleged coverup at Penn State had not yet come to light, but scandals in marquee programs, including at the University of Southern California and the University of Miami, had led to a crisis of confidence in big-time sports.
Ed Ray, president of Oregon State University and chair of the NCAA’s Executive Committee the past two years, has been as outspoken as any leader in describing the erosion of integrity in some top programs. Over the past year, he led an NCAA working group that pushed for stricter penalties for individuals and teams that break the rules.
Last month, the NCAA’s Division I Board of Directors endorsed a change that would penalize head coaches if their assistants misbehaved. The board also backed a proposal that would give the association’s infractions committee the authority to name in its public reports presidents, chancellors, and others with oversight of athletics, even when those people are not directly involved in underlying violations.
Another NCAA working group is exploring ways to tighten the NCAA rule book and make control over sports more the responsibility of individual campuses.
Part of the idea is to hold leaders more responsible for what happens under them—changes that could lead presidents and chancellors to pay closer attention to potential problems.
But some observers say governing boards may need to go further, specifying presidents’ responsibilities in contracts or other documents.
“If you’re supposed to be paying attention to X, you’ve got a very strong incentive to pay attention to X because you want to keep your job,” Mr. Ray says. “If that language isn’t there, it’s of your own volition whether you pay attention to something or not.”
He and others have seen what happens when presidents lack power.
“Every once in awhile in talking with colleagues, one of them will say, ‘Well, my AD said we can’t do that,’” Mr. Ray says. “I say, ‘Your AD works for you, how is that possible?’
“They give you this blank stare,” he says. “If they’re not empowered, very often it’s because they don’t take up the responsibility.”
Or they’re afraid of the consequences. One president told The Chronicle he wouldn’t want detailed language about athletics in his contract because he doesn’t want to be held responsible for the behavior of students or others who are beyond his control.
Legal experts say there could be downsides to clarifying leaders’ responsibilities. If institutions start spelling out specific duties and fail to name certain ones, that can get them in trouble, says Josephine R. (Jo) Potuto, a professor of law at the University of Nebraska and former chair of the NCAA’s Division I Committee on Infractions.
“A bad actor might say, ‘Here’s the list of things I’m supposed to do. You put this list together, and you didn’t say this. I don’t know who you wanted to do it but it wasn’t I,’” she says.
Mr. Ray’s contract does not specifically mention sports. But every year, he writes a self-assessment for his system’s chancellor and discusses athletics issues during a review with the system’s board. “It’s almost always about finances and what we’re doing or not doing there,” he says. “It’s very much front and center.”
It’s unclear how much of a priority athletics is for other leaders. The Chronicle examined 25 presidential contracts based on budget data collected by USA Today Sports. Only nine of those contracts had sections that laid out any explicit duties. Though none of those contracts specify powers over athletics, presidents were given other specific goals in fund raising and financial management. Some of their contracts also spelled out responsibilities involving state government, long-term planning, appointments and promotion, and student services.
The contracts for Eric J. Barron of Florida State University and Mary Sue Coleman of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor both mention capital campaigns as priorities. Ms. Coleman’s agreement also describes her expected role in strengthening the university health-care system, increasing university resources, and improving facilities.
The only mention of athletics in all 25 contracts comes in reference to perks, not priorities: Michael V. Martin’s contract specified that the Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge chancellor, who stepped down this year, would receive athletic-ticket packages for entertaining and fund raising. The contract of Lou Anna K. Simon, president of Michigan State University, goes further: The new chair of the NCAA’s Executive Committee will receive a number of athletic perks as lifetime benefits.
Those perks include two premium-seating tickets to home football, women’s basketball, and women’s volleyball games. She also receives free tickets to bowl games and postseason contests.
Assessing Risk
While many institutions don’t specify the president’s powers over athletics, some leagues have discussed having them spelled out. This summer leaders of the Big Ten Conference circulated a document among the league’s presidents and chancellors that proposed requiring each institution to clearly define the authority and responsibility for the administration of its athletics program and “place it firmly in the hands of the president/chancellor and the athletic director.”
The document also proposed that member institutions be required to have in place policies and procedures that would dissuade rogue boosters and trustees with inappropriate involvement in programs from trying to influence university leaders’ decisions.
That document is no longer being considered, says Sally Mason, president of the University of Iowa and chair of the league’s Council of Presidents and Chancellors. Instead, Big Ten leaders are working on a proposal that “we hope will allow all of us to not only better understand what our responsibilities are to our institutions but also to our alumni, trustees or regents, and other supporters,” she says.
To her, it’s just as important to spell out responsibilities between the president and the athletic director, and to make sure the AD is included in broader campus conversations. “The more you can integrate the athletics operations within the operations of the university, the healthier the relationship becomes,” she says.
Relationships between campus leaders and governing boards are also key in establishing proper oversight of sports. When Michael F. Adams interviewed for the presidency of the University of Georgia 16 years ago, he asked members of the Board of Regents if there was anyone he couldn’t fire if he needed to.
“I was told no—everyone at UGA worked for the president,” he says. That guidance helped him through rocky times with certain high-profile coaches and athletic directors, several of whom he dismissed amid controversy.
“I have been fortunate to have had strong support from the board on those issues, which I think negated the need to write it in any other form,” says Mr. Adams, a former chair of the NCAA’s Division I board.
Although athletics oversight is not written into his contract, Mr. Adams heads his university’s athletics board and regularly reports to the chancellor of the system and to the regents about issues in the athletic department. And to maintain its accreditation with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, the university must demonstrate presidential control over athletics.
“It’s clear in our documentation who’s in charge,” Mr. Adams says. “But you have to make sure that the organizational chart and the spirit of compliance are one and the same.”
Sometimes, all the documentation in the world may not help.
“Given the emotions of the last 18 months,” Mr. Adams says, “all of us have to ask more serious questions about risk assessment and how we protect the reputation, the ethics, and the financial standing of a particular campus, knowing that none of us will ever be 100-percent protected.”
