October
3 , 2003
Front-Page
News
This opinion piece ran in the Hartford
Courant on Tuesday, September
23.
The Trouble with Escalating Athletics Programs
By Joanne V. Creighton, MHC president
We at Mount Holyoke love our student athletes. To be honest,
they are not all that different from the rest of our student
body. They may run a little faster, jump a little higher, and
spend a little more of their free time in the weight room, but
in the dorm or the classroom, they fit right in. As a women's
college, we are lucky—for now.
Throughout higher education, research abounds on the discrepancies between
recruited athletes and other students on campus. Educational researchers William
G. Bowen and Sarah A. Levin's new book, Reclaiming
the Game: College Sports and Educational Values, describes differences in admissions standards,
classroom performance, and career choices. The athletes are not at fault; our
competitive culture pushes children to specialize at an early age, and our
colleges snatch them up to vanquish foes on the field. Division I is more extreme
than Division III, and women are about a generation behind the men, although
heading in the same direction.
The escalation of the athletics arms race is disturbing to educational leaders.
The distorting power of athletics has become enough of a concern for liberal
arts colleges that we, with help from the Mellon Foundation, are trying to
put the brakes on a process that is sapping more and more of our institutional
resources and energy. Wesleyan, Amherst, Williams, and we at Mount Holyoke,
just to name a few, all worry that, unchecked, Division III athletics may pose
a threat to our educational programs.
We will always give our student athletes the support and encouragement they
deserve, knowing they are students first and that is why they chose our colleges.
But when success on the fields means bringing in recruits who, were it not
for sports, would hardly give our schools a second glance, and when regular
students can no longer walk onto a team, then we have gone too far. A substantial
number of college presidents in Division III agree on this point, and we are
working together to make sure academics and athletics maintain their proper
balance.
Every college wants to be competitive in sports, but it doesn't take
a professor of statistics to point out that most sporting contests produce
one winner and one loser. If every college wants to be that winner all the
time, and all of us will do whatever we can to ensure it, then we are on a
road to disaster that leaves our educational missions by the wayside. The latest
example of the proliferation of this arms race is a recent news report that
MIT is escalating--not de-escalating, mind you, like so many of its Division
III peers are looking to do--its athletics program.
Could this help MIT as an educational institution? Arguably, MIT could steal
a few top student athletes who otherwise might have preferred Stanford or Princeton.
But what happens to higher education? There are a finite number of top student
athletes, and if more go to MIT, fewer will go to its rivals, who will in turn
be forced to spend more time and money on stealing somebody else's recruits.
This is time and money we could be spending in the classroom, on community
service, or even on the student athletes who already want to come to our schools.
And, for parents eyeing annual tuition increases in disbelief, guess who ends
up footing the bill for this new and shiny athletic infrastructure?
We at women's colleges are as close as it comes to preserving the collegiate
ideal: Our athletes stand out for their camaraderie, determination, and discipline,
rather than double standards in admission or academic underperformance. But
it is evident that even for us the trend is in the wrong direction, that the
competitive forces in the education marketplace and the NCAA will push us to
subvert our educational values in order to win on the field. That is, unless
we slow it down—unless educational leaders commit themselves to maintaining
a level playing field instead of competing in a self-perpetuating and self-defeating
game of one-upmanship.
As colleges, we can invest even more to try to inch ahead of the next school,
or we can be true to our roots and remember how it is that we best serve American
families and American society. In the athletics arms race, to the victor go
the spoils, but to the parents and students goes the bill.
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