Social Justice and College Sports

Two weeks ago I was picking up a car at Enterprise Rental and had to talk to the manager. I thought I recognized him and asked his name. Sure enough, he had played defensive end for UW nine years ago, graduated and now managed this branch complete in white shirt and tie and spread sheet analysis. We talked awhile, and he mentioned how scared he had been arriving at UW as a highly recruited three star recruit-but with horrible SAT scores and miserable GPA. He spoke of how difficult and depressing the first two years had been learning to be a student and things like getting his first coat and tie and learning how to study and behave on the road.  “It was hard, really hard, but I graduated. Now I’m on my way up in the company.” That was his summary.

By historical accident, college sports have become an agent of social justice on college campuses. In this discussion I will narrow my discussion to issues of minority access to colleges, but could just as easily have talked about the college athletics contributions  surrounding women's access and achievement. Each year thirty to fifty young minority males who would normally not get accepted are admitted to colleges across the country as student athletes. All the algorithms predict that these minority males should fail. Yet six years later sixty to eighty percent of them graduate. Each year college athletics helps minority students who by all majors should fail in college.

Many state colleges can admit unprepared student athletes as a normal part of their mission. College athletes from disadvantaged backgrounds both from broken urban areas and poor barren rural areas come from underfunded and disorganized public schools. They have neither the social resources nor academic support to achieve the SAT/ACT scores or fluid literacy to get into good private or flagship state colleges.

90% of minority and white students from these class backgrounds will never graduate from college. Elite publics and privates have trace elements of non-Asian male minority students on campuses. The triage of American higher education requires high-standardized scores, high grade point averages and high quality essays. These schools traditionally have few minority males based upon the collapsed pipelines from high schools. The end result black male students represent 2.7% of the population at flagship state universities compared to 7% of school age population. Minority males graduate at the lowest rate of any groups in colleges.

Many of the black and other minority presences on campus derive from recruiting and stocking up high achieving minority students. These schools seldom recruit minorities from seriously disadvantaged backgrounds get to these schools. College athletics enters the scene in recruiting and trying to educate minority from ill prepared backgrounds who would be consigned to the waste heap by normal admission andoutreach approaches. 

The few students from these backgrounds arrive at college struggling to master the textbooks, unused to the workloads and behind from the first day. Without strong support they fail at astronomical rates and have the highest non-graduation rates of any groups in college.  

Paradoxically college athletics has figured out a way to recruit, train and graduate these students. On many of these campuses athletes comprise very high percentage of the minority males on that campus In addition these destined to fail students graduate at rates far beyond anything that would be predicted by their academic profiles.

The difficulty in finding minority male students prepared to succeed academically is well documented. What is often ignored is that in a number of flagship state and private schools student athletes can make up as high as twenty to thirty percent of minority males in groups such as African American, Hispanic or Pacific Islander populations. This far exceeds the population ratios for the student body.

This reflects the collapse of the social and academic pipelines to these schools of prepared minority males. This is not an ideal situation, and no one in their right minds wants minority males investing immense amounts of effort into athletes rather than academics. Many males do not have the support structure to build opportunities for sustained academic success and mentoring. They find success, identity and most importantly engaged adults in sports. They claw their way out through sports, and colleges who accept them have the opportunity and obligation to not just train them as athletes but as real students. Modern NCAA rules require prospective student athletes to take a defined list of college core classes with minimum grades to even be considered for scholarships. A desire to play college ball is linked to getting a high school education. Colleges have an ethical obligation to invest in them so that student athletes leave school not as ex-athletes without a future, but as educated young men who will contribute to their own and their society’s future.

The relatively high graduation rates of admitted minority males who would not normally get into college or succeed remain one of the unsung achievements and lessons of college athletics. The average black athlete graduates at a 17 percent higher rate than black regular students. Black student athletes still graduate at 68% rate versus 87% rates with white athletes, but the rate has gone up considerably as the reforms of 2003-4 start to take effect.  At the same time minority male student athletes especially in basketball still tend to graduate at lower rates than anticipated.

Most student athletes come into college identifying as athletes. They have excelled as athletes and received praise and success as athletes. A very high percentage of student athletes from disadvantaged backgrounds expect to become professional athletes. 70 percent of the basketball players in Division II expect to become professionals when they enroll as freshmen!

Left on their own as athletes without significant social and academic support, these minority athletes will fail at high rates. The much lower graduation rates at Division I championship schools reflects the importance of economic investment in support. Student athletes get in, but these schools do not have the resources of the will to invest in significant academic and social support to help the young athletes develop as students and change their identity focus. To be blunt, admitting disadvantaged student athletes without serious investment in academic and social support amounts to exploitation—they will predictably fail at very high rates.

For underprepared and disadvantaged student athletes to succeed two processes have to occur. First, they have to come to a new understanding of themselves as students. This requires getting the basic skills and confidence to compete in the same classroom with well-prepared peers. Second, the students need the academic and social support to get over the first two very hard years where they struggle like fish out of water.

Athletics achieves this by leveraging the student athlete’s passion to play sports just as new rules require high school athletes to take better classes and get better grades. Under NCAA rules the student must make progress towards degree by taking a set of classes in percentage increments, passing the classes and finding a degree over a three-year arc. Unless student athletes meet these rules they cannot play. These formal rules will only really work if the coaches strongly, let me emphasize strongly, push classroom attendance and education. If athletes experience lost playing time or practice time tied to academic attendances and performance, they will show up.

The first two years are critical for support. The student athletes grapple with succeeding in alien classrooms where the stakes and standards are higher than they have ever experienced. The introduction to academic classes needs to occur slowly.

We need to be honest here. Most of these athletes from disadvantaged backgrounds have failed as students. Academic classrooms are places of anguish and failure for them. They face an alien culture that many of their middle class students take for granted. So most successful programs start out student athletes in prep classes to introduce them to the demands of modern college classrooms. They take a trajectory of classes for small successes. This slow preparation takes around two years to acclimate student athletes into functioning as students in the practiced way many middle class or successful working class kids take for granted.

Good academic support programs build in strong tutoring, study tables. This takes economic investment to ensure students master basic skills and confidence as students to compete in the classroom. If the system works, then in their junior years student athletes begin to identify as students also, but also begin to realize that they will not be professionals—although this confidence can be invincible when third string corner backs still believe they will be professionals some day.

The other huge lesson and advantage lies in the community and structure that surround athletes. In even off-season they work 30-40 hours a week on athletics. This surrounds them with a community of peers and adults. The structure gives them a purpose and leverages the purpose towards keeping the student focused when they face the chaotic, strange and seemingly hostile academic world of major universities.

This structure and community can be replicated for non-athlete students. Programs that succeed in educating students from disadvantaged backgrounds do so with programs that provide purpose, strong initial academic support and a community structure—the very attributes that college athletes provides. The data on increasing not only minority but also all student graduation rates builds upon community and support structures.  

The academic and social support is not perfect and can be abused. But they help compensate for the very heavy and required work load that the athletic scholarship burdens

All the support in the world will not matter if coaches do not bring push connecting learning in the classroom to desire to play. Most college coaches are teaching at college because they believe in helping educate the student athletes as well as coaching sports and winning. In addition the coaches and universities now have strong incentives to push for academic progress because off potential lost scholarships and worse lost opportunity to play in NCAA tournaments or bowl games.

I am not naive. A high percentage of minority athletes end up in majors that look like dead ends, especially often maligned ethnic studies. These claims often do injustice do many ethnic study programs that have strong social science and humanities components. But it is important to remember that most college students end up in majors that do not prepare them for jobs. This is not the point of most social sciences and humanities; they prepare students to read with understanding, write well and think critically. They provide general adaptable cognitive frameworks for how to learn and master subjects in a wide variety of settings. All students from these backgrounds face short-term challenges in this job market.

The graduation rate of minority male student athletes has improved for the last several years reflecting consistently tighter and more aggressive academic reforms ranging from higher high school requirements to mandate progress to degree to new penalties for lower graduation rates that kept schools like Connecticut. The one spot that continues to resist reform efforts remains men’s basketball especially at mid major schools who use it to get tournament access. College basketball has by far the most corrupt feeder system, and the one and done mentality encourages less high school preparation, less investment in athletes once they arrive and leads to a culture of rampant transfers to gain playing time. Unfortunately transferring leads to lower GPA and a much lower probability of graduation.  The roots of basketball sport are now so compromised and so many schools have so little money for academic support that I remain deeply pessimistic that the universities will be able to achieve the social justice possibilities in basketball that present themselves elsewhere.

This combination of purpose, support and structure can provide the context for academically and economically disadvantaged students to integrate in and succeed in quality academic settings. This stands as a success, paradox and challenge of college sports.

Athlete Politicians: Basketball Democrats & Football Republican

I am watching the start of the NCAA tournament  but also watching the Republican nomination process. I just watched the Fan in Chief do his own NCAA brackets. It dawned on me that in so many ways politics and sports naturally converge, certainly the media uses the same language and approach to them. So I thought about athletes who enter politics.

Name recognition alchemizes electoral politics and name recognition with high positive generates electoral gold. This link makes athletics and electoral politics natural fits, and more than a few successful athletes have parlayed their positive fame into electoral victories. Using a totally nonscientific sample of largely ex-professional players, I think that the two sports—football and basketball—launch very different political types.

Let’s start with the similarities of electoral politics and sports. All elite athletes are fierce competitors dedicated to winning. Elite athletes stay in shape and are incredibly driven and persistent; they don’t give up and learn to handle failure and adapt. In modern sports, they learn to handle negative press and personal attacks as well as revel in success. They know how fickle the public can be but hold their professional focus. These character traits prepare them well for electoral politics.

Finally most athletes earn their fame in a local area, and electoral politics remains resolutely local despite the best efforts of national PACS. Most of the politicians I cite either returned home like Largent, Watts or Johnson or built their political base where they played long term like Kemp, Bradley or Bing. They enter at strong local positions such as mayor or US House seats.


So let's think about the hypothetical relations between politics and football and basketball.

Off hand a couple football names come to mind. Steve Largent, the great receiver for the Seattle Seahawks, returned home to Oklahoma and entered politics as a conservative Republican. He served 4 terms in the US House of Representatives but lost in his bid to become Republican governor. J.C. Watts returned home to Oklahoma and ran successfully for the US House of Representative as a black conservative Republican. Eagles' guard John Runyan presently serves in the US House from New Jersey as a conservative Republican. Jack Kemp, one of the most dynamic and interesting politicians of the late twentieth century, was elected from his base as the Buffalo Bills quarterback. He  served 18 years in the House and later as the Secretary of HUD under George H. Bush as well as a Vice Presidential candidate. Non pro but very very football, Tom Osborne, the long time football coach player at Nebraska, served 4 terms in the US House and lost his bid to win the governorship. 

Why would football players make good conservative Republicans? Good question and I will right way eliminate all the head injuries as some wags have suggested.  First, elite athletes believe in individual self-discipline and personal responsibility. The vast majority of players come from working class or deeply disadvantaged backgrounds. All of them achieved success as self-made men and will not believe in an entitled or “hand-out” based world. Second, football depends upon strong authority. Players thrive under strong authoritative leadership. The authority combines with ordered co-operations and teamwork. Third, teams are voluntary associations where people earn their spots in a brutal and relentless meritocracy. Successful teams align voluntary self-disciplined effort and skills with an absolute commitment to common authority—one   mind, one team, one effort, one leader. Finally, violence and aggressiveness dominate the world of football. Teams win with brains but ultimately with the consistent, skillful and borderline legal applications of force and coercion. Football is not just about competition and zero sum win or lose situations but about a world saturated with aggression and violence.

Modern Republicanism, at least, fits naturally with a world view of being surrounded by violent enemies and depending upon a radical self-made effort where people owe little to each other, unless they do so in a voluntary association. It also coexists uneasily with a world of strong authoritarian leadership to mobilize people in a threatening and aggressive world.

Basketball has a long tradition of Democrats. Mo Udall long time Arizona congressman and presidential candidate played basketball for the Denver Nuggets.  Bill Bradley played for years with the New York Knicks and ended up serving 3 terms  in the US Senate representing New Jersey as well as being strongly considered for the Presidency. Tom McMillen played basketball at Maryland and professional at Washington. He later served 3 terms as a member of the US House in Maryland before losing his seat in a redistricting battle. 


One of the issues that lead me to thinking about this was watching Kevin Johnson, the Mayor of Sacramento, lead negotiations to keep the Sacramento Kings at his birth city. He entered started economic development companies in his hometown after going back for his degree at California and then getting a Divinity Degree at Harvard. Dave Bing was elected as a strong reform minded mayor in Detroit after playing for the Pistons for 16 years and then founding a successful local business. 

Now why might basketball turn out Democrats? Well race might seem obvious since 82 percent of NBA players are black compared to 65 % in football, except football culture trumps race in the case of folks like J. C. Watts or Lynn Swann. Elite basketball athletes would share the same mind-set of self-made individuals as well as the disciplined and focus competitive world-view. But basketball presents a very different view of authority and how the world works. Basketball unfolds as a continuous sport, not a reset sport. No one gets to stop after each event and call plays and start over. Authority is not authoritarian in such conditions. It must be adaptable, fluid and open to a wider range of permutations in real time. In basketball you don't just do what you are told, you see and adapt while the coach watches from the side. While physical, basketball does not possess nearly the level of sheer violence or injury. It requires aggressiveness but of a much more blended type. Basketball never stops moving. It is chaotic and fast and requires incessant and fluid awareness to master the sport. Players relate to authority differently. 

Authority remains more fluid since coaches cannot stop play each play an impose order. The power of the floor general or point guard grows and takes far more time. The teamwork is much less rigid. More room exists for egos  and individuality because the teams are smaller and more exposed rather than the faceless weaponized modern football players.  Basketball presents a world with much more individualized play, more styles, more chaos and much less overt and direct aggressive violence. It also requires a comfort with endless vaguely ordered chaos.

If you watch the modern democratic politics, it remains a more chaotic, pluralistic and diffuse coalition. The politics requires adaptability and movement and comfort with chaos and innovation; authority is simply far less certain and diversity of style far wider. The world view opens to more than just zero sum solutions or aggressive and violent enemies. 

I may think more about this and wonder what to do with Arnold Schwarzenegger and body-building or or Jesse Ventura and professional wrestling, but that is another story, as is baseball.

As I think more about football and Republicans I remember that Richard Nixon played football at Whittier College, Dwight Eisenhower played football at West Point until he was injured. Gerald Ford played football at Michigan and Ronald Reagan played football at Notre Dame. No wait! He played George Gipper in the movie Knute Rockne, but in modern America there is no difference.

Love and Basketball: John Wooden as Coach

I don't have any more accolades to add to those being heaped upon John Wooden at his death at the age of 99. I did have the pleasure of growing up watching his teams play and having his style of play and coaching imprinted upon me as an ideal to be sought and admired. But more important for me and some students, I teach his books, especially his biography/coaching manuel They Call Me Coach.

The book always startles my students who aspire to become coaches. At first they get impatient because he really tells a love story between him and his wife Nellie from Indiana. His growth as a hard working midwestern country boy weaves through the love story and ties in his discovery and love of basketball. His earliest high school coaches taught him how to grow but also deal with failure and success.

The students wonder why they are reading about this story that seems so far away. Young basketball players have no clue about him, and very few students have heard his name. But slowly its power holds sway as he discusses various coaching and playing styles he assimilated as well as how he strove to create a balance with family, Nellie and basketball. He was lucky because his passion for Nellie matched, nourished and renewed his passion for basketball. His first lesson for my students is that love matters in life and you need to work hard to find, nurture and respect it.

After establishing that loving centers living, he discusses coaching and the cumulative impact of his championship teams. He speaks of the roots of his conditioning and defensive philosophies. He speaks at length about the need to adapt to the talent you have and how his teams evolved in light of his various teams and players especially Lew Alicinder/Kareem Abdul-Jabaar and Bill Walton.

In modern America we don't normally associate coaching with love. Too many of us have memories of psycho-dads screaming and demanding as coaches or spectators. The indelible image of Vince Lombardi and win at any price and Woody Hayes attacking players at the end of his career tend to erase the deeper more lasting reality that many great coaches and Wooden excelled them all, coach from and through love.

The biography reveals the second love, love of the game. He revels in exlpaining how much he learned from others. The book is not about X's and O's, but he reveals a deep curiosity and sheer joy in discovering a complex zone defense, adapting it to his players and other teams and integrating conditioning and quickness into a philosophy of play. His stories reveal how the losses linger and at the end of each season and beginning of each he sets goals that infuse what he does. The game and its intricacies always remain with him with his fine mind mulling, thinking, inventing. The point of the game is love of the game.

But the most important love for a coach is love of his players. I don't mean love in a sort of dry agape way that thins out because it encompasses everyone; I certainly don't mean love in an erotic or homoerotic channeling towards players. No I mean an abiding care, a rock bottom emotional commitment to the player and team as individuals. This care, this emotional focus upon the person seeks the best for that person. It has a family resemblance to parenting, but without the sometimes twisted variations or self-identifying that can infuse parental love. Abdul-Jabaar said "he was preparing us for life." His players often mentioned they knew he cared for them even if they fought him, and his lessons only really sank in later. The truest test of a coach and teacher is if students return to meet with him, and his players constantly returned.

Wooden was not a nice coach. He makes that clear. He rode referees and players (something he truly regreted later). His coaching style demanded an immense commitment from student athletes. Essentially it demanded that individuals meld or subordinate their talent to a team concept. His most interesting stories and the ones he clearly values and relishes are discussing how players like Sidney Wicks and Bill Walton fought with him and worked with him to grow into superb players. Over some issues, it was simply "my way or the highway." Wooden also makes clear he learns from them. He demanded that players earn respect but gave them love. He may not like them but gave them love, and they knew it as a rock bottom reality to their lives.

This mutual learning never sacrifices his authority, but it grows from his love of the players. He knew them, watched them, demanded of them. His intimate knowledge of them coupled with his vision of whom they could become enabled him to match their talents to the evolving system.  Even when one would quit, he always gave them second chances because once long ago, and he never forgot, he had quit a team out of anger at perceived injustice. His own high school coach let him back and Coach Wooden believed that loving a player required room for players to redeem themselves.

I sometimes think his idea of love can only flourish at high school and college. Something about the nature of professional sports, of the contractual nature, the money, the self-protective brutality of the sport to both its players and its coaches--in most sports it is cheaper to fire a coach than a star player, makes the type of patient, demanding, forgiving love that Wooden exemplified, impossible.

Wooden's testament, as he insisted, has never been the trophies or the unexcelled record of 10 NCAA championships. It remains the quality of people his players became. Wooden did not walk in the sands of time with footsteps that blow away. He helped boys grow into men, and those men helped their own children grow into adults. Even today his books help me help others grow into coaches. Certainly that is love at its best.

Things Fall Apart--the SUNY Binghamton Basketball Mess & Failed College Leadership

I have been following the sad and compelling story of the implosion of the SUNY Binghamton athletic program. The fate of the athletic program at this academically excellent public institution deserves careful scrutiny. The SUNY Board of Trustees recently released a four month long,  $900,000 investigative report of what happened at the University. Its long time President Lois LaFleur, after throwing everyone else off the boat, finally jumped off herself with a retirement for "personal reasons."

The report team was chaired by Judith Kaye, a senior partner at the law firm and former Chief Justice of the New York supreme court. It distills the story of an athletic program and basketball team torn apart by undermining university admissions standards, arbitrary intervention by the President and Provost and a team decimated by arrests, drug dealing, violent assaults and academic failure and fraud. The sordid story appeared on the pages of the NewYork Times and serves as a poster child for all that can and does go wrong in NCAA athletics.

The point of the game is how quickly an entire program can be destroyed. It emphasizes how vital the admissions process is and how the academics of an athlete program can be subverted with lightening speed if the President and athletic director fail to monitor and, instead, collude to win over all other considerations. 

The Report spells out fundamental lessons for all program. Every college athletic program needs   needs strong structural supports to maintain the academic integrity against the cross pressures of Division I athletics. The undertows of Division IA sports pull against keeping the academic welfare of the student athletes front and center. The need to win to gain the recognition and pay off or justify the facilities is amplified by college’s ruthless willingness to fire coaches who succeed in graduating students but do not win championships or make it into NCAA tournaments.  Close to the majority of football coaches fired in the last two years had winning records.

It is an article of faith for the NCAA that an athletic program needs strong presidential support to maintain its integrity against outside forces. This Presidential support should be buttressed by significant structural design.
1)     The admissions process needs to be insulated from outside pressures so that students admitted have some change of succeeding at the university.
2)      The students admitted, especially the at risk students, need deep academic support that gives them the mentoring and tutoring to get the tools to succeed academically and in life when they graduate.
3)      This support system of tutors and academic monitoring must be tightly controlled to avoid cheating or special treatment. The academic support matters profoundly because the revenue sports recruit a significant percentage of minority students with awful academic backgrounds and without social support networks to reinforce academic pursuits. To bring underprepared students into selective universities without clearly assessing the students’ willingness to work and the university’s academic support system is simple exploitation.

The SUNY Binghamton debacle goes wrong from the top down. The NCAA creed insists that Presidents must control the integrity of the athletic Department. Presidents have a number of tools to accomplish this: appointing the Athletic Director (AD); overseeing the budget process; overseeing the Provost and relevant Deans and Vice Provosts who administer academics and admissions; the Faculty Athletic Representative who is a faculty member who reports to the President and has the task to watch over the academic and compliance integrity. The FAR can bring issues directly to the President.

The NCAA model requires an engaged President, not one who outsources oversight of athletics to a Vice President or Vice Provost.  The irony of SUNY Binghamton is that President Lois LeFleur was too involved in the program She invested time, reputation and capital in moving the program to Division I and building a new facility. She desired a championship team to enhance public recognition. She viewed athletic success and visibility as a capstone to her stewardship of the academic portion of the university. To build a winner, she micro-managed issues; stayed on top of recruiting of top players—the AD would email her progress reports on recruits and teams; replaced the FAR with a faculty member nominated by her AD as more friendly to athletics. In critical actions she intervened in the admissions process on to help get student athletes into the university whom admissions had rejected.

The President’s involvement subverted the creation of an athletic program that had structural integrity. The keystone for any program at an academically select university is high and carefully monitored admissions standards and process.  This intersection determines whether a university is serious about bringing in young student athletes who can not only compete in athletics but stand a chance to thrive in the classroom and gain a degree.

A successful admissions process for selective institutions requires several things. First, the admissions process needs to be autonomous from athletic influence. The admissions process must be insulated and protected from outside pressure from coaches, athletic directors and boosters. Second, the admissions process needs strong faculty support. This can be in the form of strong standards and limits upon the number of very high at risk students who are allowed in. Third, it needs either a faculty committee to review the at-risk students or a faculty appeal process to review students.

Binghamton with ample help from its President destroyed  the integrity of admissions. It rejected a faculty admissions committee because it might hinder coaches’ ability to build winning teams. Written policies stated that all contact with admissions should only be through the Director of Compliance. Instead coaches and athletic directors would contact and harass admissions personnel. Worst still, the FAR, who should be the last line of defense to support admissions standards, actively worked outside of admissions to overturn their academic and character based decisions.

The University permitted the athletic director and coaches to do end runs and meet with Deans, especially the Dean of the School of Community and Public Affairs That Dean enabled at risk student athletes to congregate in a “friendly” major. The admissions process became nullified by ex parte contacts; end runs to Deans and Provosts; and finally the President’s willingness to get involved in admissions decisions to benefit teams.

The lack of structural integrity at admissions infected academic support. Once the university essentially abandoned its own admissions decisions and let in anyone the coach wanted who met the NCAA minimum qualifications, the rest followed. Student athletes congregated in one major and college. Two faculty members, with the encouragement of the FAR and the Dean of the College, took on special teaching obligations, offered independent studies; helped students with their assignments in other classes and even pressured other professors to give extensions to student athletes they were “mentoring.” The College of Community and Public Affairs with that Dean’s acquiescence and faculty enablers became a dumping ground for the students let in under pressure. The University even considered creating a special sports management degree using on line classes to benefit student athletes.

Finally, the University Faculty oversight committees were not able to get any information that tracked the performance of student athletes nor that identified the range of students now being admitted at risk to the campus. Even as restive faculty members challenged the issues and the New York Times exposed the University to embarrassment, the faculty could not get consistent data to review the effectiveness and progress of the program. Without the data the faculty could not oversee or recommend revisions in admissions or support standards.

The Report reveals how an overzealous President permitted and abetted the undermining of a system of checks and balances and oversight of the academic credibility of the program. She and her athletic director gave permission to coaches to violate the integrity of admissions and subvert academically responsible support to the admitted student athletes.

The SUNY Report spells out how a college athletic program  needs strong structural supports to maintain the academic integrity against the cross pressures of Division I athletics. The undertows of Division IA sports pull against keeping the academic welfare of the student athletes front and center. The need to win to gain the recognition and pay off or justify the facilities is amplified by  a college’s ruthless willingness to fire coaches who succeed in graduating students but do not win championships or make it into NCAA tournaments.  Close to the majority of football coaches fired in the last two years had winning records.

The Report makes incredibly clear that the quality of leadership matters profoundly. Here the President, the Provost, the FAR, and the Dean of the School of Community and Public Affairs all failed. 

They collaborated in ensuring that academically at risk and character challenged students would be admitted to SUNY-Binghamton. In intercollegiate athletes in the big revenue sports, at risk student athletes get admitted all the time. But I have never seen a program where the top academic officers pushed the admissions department to compromise their work. The top academic administrators  then worked to find safe harbors for the at risk students. Finally the academic officers injected a pro-athletes FAR to remove real academic oversight and  actively encouraged  two academic faculty enablers to give special courses and grades to the student athletes. The point of the game here is that the collapse occurred at the top first. The senior Academic officers sacrificed their values to cover-up the academic disaster unfolding before them.

It is not uncommon to find the perverse combination of safe majors, enabling faculty members, spotty admissions and compromised academic support. What sets Binghamton apart is that all the senior academic administrators and a major Dean collaborated to make this happen. This was a new program that did not have to go in this direction. The disaster occurred not because of lack of leadership but because the leaders wanted this to happen.

The Athletic Director clearly made all this happen by hiring a borderline coach whose penchant for "rescuing" at risk kids was well known. The AD continued the depredations by violating his own rules, hounding admissions  and directly contacting academic officers and Deans about not just admissions but setting up academic blinds for his students.

To make the complex equation work where universities bring in at risk and underprepared students as athletes, the university has to expend alot of effort to assess the "character" of the young athletes. If the young underprepared athletes are competitors in all areas of life; if they are willing to try and work hard at academics; if they are willing to live by the rules--they may not become great students, but they can grow into college students who can acquire an education. Good academic support units regularly prove that academic support, strong coaches and committed athletes can lead underprepared kids to grow into college students.

The whole academic risk of intercollegiate athletics depends upon upon young athletes of character that translates across athletics to academics. This responsiblity rests with the coach in recruting and the department in support. The AD at Binghamton failed to demand that his coaches honestly evaluate character, failed to build a strong unit of support and failed to respect the boundaries of academic achievement and sport achievement. The end result of academic and criminal and civil malfeasance rests with him as well as the academic officers who endorsed his behavior.

One of the more disturbing and bizarre aspects reported in the SUNY investigation was the President's attempt to manipulate the issue of race and athletics to attack the admissions office. This is a complex and touchy subject that pervades all the work colleges and NCAA do around admissions. At many schools the traditional admissions standards of GPA plus test scores adversely impacts  young minorities and low social economic students.

These young minority athletes are the backbone of most successful college football and basketball programs. Most universities struggle with a collision between their admission standards and the lack of preparedness of at risk minority student athletes who sustain the revenue generating TV worshipped sports. As I mentioned the only way to make this a reasonable and morally defensible risk involves strong character evaluation and strong academic support units.

The report takes acute umbrage at a troubling set of justifications for letting in unprepared and unsupported students into SUNY-BU. In a move worthy of George Orwell and 1984 newspeak, the President and athletic department charged admissions with being “racist” by balking at letting in several student athletes.

The whole world of college revenue sports is riven with issues involving race because so many of the highly successful athletes are minority students from underprepared academic background. Every selective academic institution has developed special admission programs to permit these young men and women into the university despite the fact a significant "gap" exists between their level of academic preparation and the rest of the student body.

In essence the athletic programs become a form of entry for academically ‘at risk” students into universities they would normally not be able to attend. This risk is undertaken because of their special skills in athletics. The key to any reasonable risk decision making is to have clear parameters around how high the risk is, what the institution’s tolerance for the risk is,  and what the university needs to do to mitigate the risk. In this case, the problem is that under  normal academic conditions these underprepared students would fail as students and not graduate.

These are hard topics to discuss and good admissions program make exceptional efforts to ensure that the underprepared students have the motivation to do the academic work and the support for them in the first two years to make the perilous transition from athlete to student athlete.

SUNY-Binghamton failed in this obligation and had no clear parameters to assess the academic success of students they admitted. The admissions office balked at letting in students it knew were not prepared to succeed, but the admissions office also knew that the student athletes would have no real academic support services and several had serious character issues.

Twice the head of the office of Affirmative Action questioned the admissions officers as possibly racist for not letting in or taking a chance on at risk minority students. The President herself charged her own admissions office with possible racism because they would not admit certain transfers who had under 2.0 averages and had evinced serious and dangerous behavior at other schools.

The report found the charges of racism extremely dangerous and irresponsible. It might be argued that letting in underprepared minority students into a university where they cannot succeed and where the university does not provide real academic support is racist exploitation. Many faculty believe this. On the other hand, minority coaches associations and the President at SUNY-BU have invented another form of racism which requires letting in unqualified and at-risk students even if you do not have resources to support them and have not track record of success with them.

It is one thing to bring in student in strongly supported academic program where you have experience at promoting academic success; it is another to pretend that admissions personnel trying to protect the university’s integrity and to protect the student’s ability to succeed as racist. It’s one of the most vexing and ugly discussions that weaves through NCAA and academic discussions and battles over admissions and support.

The irony of all this is that the University probably did not violate fundamental NCAA rules, which largely apply to recruiting and cheating. But it did violate its own standards, sabotaged its own ideals, and created a culture that ended with assaults, dope dealing, thefts, academic malfeasance, but no real violations. The University ended humiliated and embarrassed and morally compromised, but no major NCAA sanctions will occur. It’s an object lesson for existing and wannabe Presidents and ADs about how you cannot let go for a minute and once Presidents set precedents that weaken standards, things fall apart very fast.

The President and senior academic officers willingness to resort to the race card in addition to their disregard of admissions and provision of support demonstrate the difficult and complex skeins that hold together academics and athletics. They reveal how quickly the whole thing can be unwound by reckless leaders.