How Sports Ate Academic Freedom
Big-money athletics undermine universities’ core commitments: truth, discovery and free inquiry.
By Jay M. Smith
April 30, 2018
Citing “levels of corruption” grave enough to threaten the survival of the sport, Condoleezza Rice and her NCAA-appointed Commission on College Basketball have proposed reforms that aim to “put the ‘college’ back in college basketball.” They hope to do this by cracking down on corruption, reducing the flow of illicit money into players’ hands and fortifying the National College Athletic Association’s punitive powers.
But like previous reform attempts, the commission’s approach is intended to shore up the current model of college athletics rather than solve the fundamental problem. Corruption in college sports is merely one consequence of their outsize role, which has grown to the point of undermining universities’ core commitments to truth, discovery and free inquiry.
The experience of one basketball-crazed school, the University of North Carolina, shows how prioritizing sports can negatively affect athletes’ academic lives—along with the administrative culture that helps to shape those lives. Between 1993 and 2011, athletes made up about half the students enrolled in hundreds of nonexistent classes, earning high grades for minimal work submitted to a departmental secretary. A 2014 landmark report detailed the scheme. Yet the university has resisted owning up to its failure.
While under investigation by the NCAA in 2017, UNC leaders simply denied that the university had engaged in conduct that met the NCAA’s definition of fraud, twisting the organization’s bylaws. The chancellor had apologized in 2015 for the university’s fraudulent behavior while seeking to retain UNC’s academic accreditation, but she explained to the NCAA two years later that the written confession had been a “typo.” By denying reality and daring the NCAA to call its bluff, the university escaped punishment for offering sham classes.
As these events unfolded, I co-authored a book that chronicled UNC’s handling of its scandal and placed the story in the context of the relationship between academics and athletics. Later, I developed a history course on big-time college sports. In that course, students learned about the conflicts of interest that had defined intercollegiate athletics from their beginning in the 19th century. They read about how the prime beneficiaries of college sports—coaches, university presidents, alumni and governing boards, the NCAA—had created a system that kept money rolling in but kept athletes always disadvantaged. They learned about the long-term origins of the systematic educational fraud that the UNC case exemplified.
UNC administrators, and the boosters to whom they answer, were not pleased about the new course. (When the athletic director heard about it, he insisted that he teach it in my place.) The course had flown under the radar of academic administrators in 2016, but when they discovered that I planned to teach it again in 2017, they intervened to suppress it.
The dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, a longtime friend to athletics, pressured the chairman of the history department to yank my course from the schedule. He made ominous noises about the history department being “over-resourced.” He asked the chairman to consider whether it was “strategic” for the course to be offered. He ended by saying, “This is not a threat”—but it would be a bad idea for the department to schedule the course in 2017. The department chairman told me to find something else to teach.
After a nine-month battle, administrators relented and allowed the course to be taught this spring. That news came days after I had submitted a formal grievance to the faculty committee charged with enforcing the rules of faculty governance. The faculty committee decided unambiguously in my favor, scolding the dean for interfering in the scheduling of a course that happened to cover controversial issues. They called on administrators to reaffirm their support for academic freedom.
The findings of the faculty committee had no effect. Exercising their prerogative to override any faculty decision, the administrators simply rejected the recommendations. In the face of a report that highlighted administrative bullying (“this is not a threat, but”), the chancellor wrote, “I do not believe that the Dean . . . violated existing tenets for providing proper administration” of curricular programs. Since the grievance process is advisory only—a sign of the powerlessness of faculty in the modern university—administrators were free to assert that intimidation is a legitimate academic practice. Controversial courses will remain vulnerable to suppression.
It would be hard to imagine a more demoralizing example of the tail wagging the dog. UNC is a “public ivy.” Its faculty win Nobel, Pulitzer and Guggenheim awards. Since 1987, UNC ranks first among public universities in competitions for Rhodes scholarships. Chapel Hill is not the typical football factory. Yet UNC’s leaders were willing to carry water for the athletic department—even in the wake of an enormous athletic scandal. They were also willing to limit what their students could learn, threaten the academic freedom of a tenured professor, use intimidation tactics against a distinguished department, and risk the reputation of the university.
At UNC, the power of big-money sports led administrators to defend the legitimacy of fake classes that had no professor. It then led them to wage an all-out war against a real class that asked common-sense questions about sports in institutions of higher learning. The pressures that produce such warped priorities are hardly specific to UNC. Michigan, Minnesota, Washington and Syracuse, to name several recent examples, have run their own bold experiments in curricular flimflam. Nor is a tradition of success in sports a precondition for athletics-inspired corruption (Binghamton, we’re looking at you).
Before we “put the ‘college’ back in college basketball,” we need to get academic values back into college. Parents with college-bound children should ask: “Have we prepared our kids for university, and taken on huge financial burdens, so that people who worship at the altar of athletics can set their educational agenda?” If the answer is no, the time to speak up is now.
Mr. Smith is a professor of history at UNC-Chapel Hill and a co-author of “Cheated: The UNC Scandal, the Education of Athletes, and the Future of Big-Time College Sports.”
