Report Examines Athletics Enterprise/University Integrity Dilemma
Contact: Kay Hyatt at (207) 581-2761
ORONO, Maine — How do institutions make decisions that yield the educational, social and economic benefits of a strong athletics program without costs to academic and moral integrity? That’s the central dilemma explored in the book Who Calls the Shots? Sports and University Leadership, Culture, and Decision Making. The way university leadership pursues and manages this dilemma can either place an institution and its leaders in the forefront of reform or sabotage their credibility, cautions author Suzanne E. Estler, associate professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Maine.
Intercollegiate athletic programs — fueled by and increasingly dependent on outside forces — are growing to levels that challenge finances, facilities, reputation and ethics. As external forces such as commercialization, laws and regulations, and public obsession with sports escalate, the incentives to relax ethical and educational considerations also intensify. Too often, Estler says, this arms race to compete and win leads to uninformed decisions and unintended consequences. Even when the institution and its president are intellectually committed, they are still financially constrained, she explains.
Estler, a scholar of colleges and universities as complex organizations, served for a decade as UMaine’s director of equal opportunity and Title IX coordinator. In Who Calls the Shots, she examines a large body of literature documenting century-long efforts to reform athletics and position them as a positive element of the overall institution. Taking the unique organizational environment of colleges and universities into account, Estler addresses leadership and policy implications from a clear understanding of the dynamics between intercollegiate athletics, campus governance and external factors.
The author doesn’t exempt her own Division I-AA institution from being susceptible to the rising and fading of pride that saw the University of Maine win a national hockey championship in 1993, then through a series of unrelated but highly publicized allegations end up on NCAA probation the following year. The UMaine experience exemplified how external forces create what Estler describes as a kind of “invisible hand governing intercollegiate sports almost independently of the institutions they represent” — a struggle shared with peer institutions across the country and on a much larger scale at bigger schools.
A primer on intercollegiate athletics and the institutions that house them, the goal of Who Calls the Shots is to inform and empower stakeholders, from institution trustees to alumni. Estler approaches the challenge of reforming and “right sizing” intercollegiate athletics from four contexts.
— Structural: The origins, purposes and politics of men’s and women’s sports; contemporary governing organizations such as the National Collegiate Athletic Association, National Association for Intercollegiate Athletics, and the National Junior College Athletic Association; and the unique role of football and its culture of masculinity in shaping the foundation and regulation of college sports.
— Legal and Regulatory: The origins, impact and consequences of NCAA rules, university academic norms and policies, and state and federal laws, with special attention to Title IX prohibiting gender discrimination in education.
— Social and Cultural: The issues of gender, race, power and privilege from the emergence of men’s intercollegiate sports in the post-Civil War era to today’s selective recruitment, lack of role models for black student-athletes on campuses, and the role of the media in escalating commercialization and making sports central to American life.
— Economic: The commercialization of intercollegiate athletics, including how they brought entrepreneurial strategies to colleges and universities traditionally described as isolated ivory towers; pressure to find new revenue to pay for athletics; and the relationship of successful athletics to enrollment and financial giving.
The Title IX section explores the women’s movement and debates leading to enactment of the law in the early 1970s. While women’s participation in intercollegiate athletics blossomed and remains high, thanks to Title IX opportunities, there were unintended consequences, Estler says. Women’s sports became subordinate to the expanding enterprise of men’s athletics, and opportunities for women in coaching and athletic administration were reduced. In essence, according to Estler, accommodation to a male model transformed women’s sports from its previous educational model and has slowed the progress of gender equity in many dimensions of athletics.
“The stakes are very high when things go wrong in athletics,” says Estler. That’s why the reporting line for athletics is crucial and complex. Reporting to the president can symbolize greater institutional integration and control. However, it may also communicate status and access elevated above programs more central to the institution’s academic mission.
The size and complexity of intercollegiate athletics markets pose another leadership conundrum for campus decision makers to control. “External markets have been increasingly willing to respond to the financial needs of sports programs,” Estler writes in the report. “As a result of increased financial autonomy, institutional control weakens even more over an enterprise that critics already view as out of control relative to the college or university’s academic mission.”
Estler concludes with a series of recommendations to strengthen campus and athletics alignment with the institution’s academic mission. For example, campus leadership:
— Must be clear and consistent in expectations and responses for the quality of the student-athlete experience, ethical conduct and behavioral standards at every level of intercollegiate athletics.
— Involve athletics staff effectively in the every-day life of the institution, bringing members to see themselves as part of the institution as a whole.
— Take advantage of key opportunities, such as budgeting and hiring, to articulate the proper place of sports in the institution.
— Assure that student-athletes of color are an integral part of the institution beyond the athletics department.
— Apply learning from athletics, such as recruiting a diverse student population or raising graduation rates, to the entire institution.
Estler frames the most important organizational question for campus leaders to keep in mind as they confront issues and choices generated by external forces: As the costs keep rising, how do we maintain the positives of intercollegiate sports without compromising or selling the integrity of the institution?
Campus leaders must be realistic about the increasing commercialization of sports, Estler says. Turning back the clock to an ideal that may well have never existed is not a likely option. Today’s modern university must come to terms with the fact that forces supporting the current state of intercollegiate athletics are far more powerful than a single president, athletics director, or even a campus.
Who Calls the Shot
s? was written with Laurie J. Nelson, a UMaine graduate student in Higher Education. It was published by Jossey-Bass as part of a series of reports on critical issues in higher education sponsored by the Association for the Study of Higher Education. The book is available from the publisher at www.josseybass.com.