Statement for the Academic Affairs Committee of the Board of Trustees

Michael Flynn
February 6, 2004

There is no question at all that college athletics has changed a great deal over the last half century or so. One of the most significant of these changes for us are recent developments in the relationship between athletes and the institutions they attend and represent. Everyone has a sense of this I think, through mainly sporadic episodes in which the deterioration of this relationship has been thrown into highly public relief by cheating scandals or discussion of graduation rates. (Only a third of U. of Oklahoma football players graduate.) Does the anecdotal evidence reflect reality? In Division I, it appears that it does. James Shulman and William Bowen’s book The Game of Life clearly documents what, in my view at any rate is, the general failure of D1 schools to do the right thing for athletes who attend those institutions.

What about at D3, and in particular at Carleton? I’ll return to this topic in a moment, but first I want to try to clearly spell out the value of intercollegiate athletics from my point of view, a view that is not universally shared here at Carleton but at least does represent I believe, a significant portion of the faculty. I want to do that in terms of what I see as our fundamental mission.

What we do is build citizens. We take bright energetic young people just emerging from adolescence and unapologetically try to mold them into adults who are active, competent, and ethical, and who lead examined and compassionate lives. We encourage them to think broadly. We attempt to give them the skills and self-confidence to be unafraid in the face of places and people who are different. We want them to respect and appreciate the complexity of the world, and in fact to embrace and even revel in that complexity. If we have our way, they will be brave, articulate, and, in a word, they will do good.

It’s useful in this context to review why colleges like ours who want to do that to their students have athletics programs in the first place, since after all this is a very idiosyncratic aspect of American colleges. Some think at this point about sound minds in sound bodies, but that’s really an argument for PE classes, not intercollegiate sports teams that are time and money sinks. Athletics has to do more that directly relates to the institutions’ mission, and, in my opinion, it does. For example:

• Athletic teams build strong interpersonal relationships that frequently last a lifetime, and, crucially, they often do so across lines of race, socioeconomic class, and even sometimes gender.

• Athletics teaches the value, the necessity, indeed the beauty, of extended, sustained, cooperative effort.

• Athletics give young people an opportunity to perform under pressure and in public. I’ve discussed this at more length in my essay on the postseason in Division III but here I’ll just say that many important things our students will go on to do later in their lives will, to be successful, involve public performances that require skill and grace under pressure and in the spotlight. Athletics can train that in contexts where the stakes are much less high.

So, if one wants to do what we want to do, athletics is a very good thing to have, and, therefore, we have it.

However, our enthusiasm for public spectacle has a way pulling our sports teams off of their moorings, as Division I programs, especially the “high profile” sports of football and basketball, clearly demonstrate. Here is where Bowen and Levin, in Reclaiming the Game do us a tremendous service, for their book is a powerful suggestion of what to think about and how to think about it when it comes to athletics at DIII institutions such as ours. They cover a lot of ground in an interesting and careful way, but here I want to mention two important problems with our athletics programs that we may (or may not) be facing.

Academic underperformance. The problem here is that athletes systematically and reliably fail to engage the central and most important feature of Carleton, namely the guided pressure to grow intellectually. Bowen and Levin measure this in terms of deviations from predicted outcomes in terms of academic achievement.

Under-utilization of the institution. Residential colleges like Carleton are designed to be rich sources of powerfully formative experiences that are not directly related to the classroom and hence not directly measurable by means of standard methods of appraisal (for example, transcripts). This is another way in which American institutions differ from their European and Asian counterparts. To build and maintain the expensive infrastructure that makes extracurricular or co-curricular discovery likely is to say that it is important. We have a problem if athletes systematically and reliably fail to take advantage of the diverse opportunities we work so hard to provide.

To put the issue in bald terms: We devote very significant resources to provide students with opportunities to develop in the way our mission statement says they should. If a quarter of our students ordinarily fail to engage those most central aspects of who we are, then we fail to affect those students in the way we promise them we will, and we have a problem we are obliged to fix if it is possible.

So, what should we do? Well, the first thing we need to do is find out what is going on on the ground here at Carleton and also elsewhere in our “orbit of competition” if we can. I should stress here that anecdotal evidence is not very helpful. I recently heard Myles Brand, the new president of the NCAA speak on this issue, and he said, “In God we trust, everybody else brings data.” In my opinion we need to run a study along the lines of that run for the NESCAC schools here at Carleton and in the MIAC. It appears that this is actually going to happen, though I have not seen the particular form the study will take yet.

However, I believe it is not too soon to begin thinking about what we will do if it turns out that we and/or others in the MIAC have the “divide disease”. There has been widespread discussions of splitting D3, or even of some schools pulling out of the NCAA altogether. There is by no means a consensus on what we should do in any case, and the problem is very complex. But I myself think it is not too early to begin thinking about our options. There is stormy weather ahead in Division III. We should be ready for it.