Academics vs. Athletics: Is Reform Possible

The history of collegiate sports reform and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and its influence on academics and athletic reform can be traced to five major sports reform movements during the 20th century. These include early football reforms involving President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905, the PresidentÆs Report on sports reform produced by the American Council on Education (ACE) in 1952, the PresidentÆs Hanford Report of 1974, and a series of reform proposals known as the Knight Commission Report of the early 1990s and in 2001. Despite these attempts at reform of athletics on colleges and universities across America and others like them such as the Carnegie Report of 1929, none of these reforms or reports has established reconciliation between academics and college athletics.

At the beginning of the century, muckraking journalism was responsible for drawing attention to the widespread nature of brutality, abuse, and scandal in collegiate athletic programs. The Big Three sports institutions, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, met with Roosevelt at a White House summit to discuss reforms and rules that would make the games safer and more ethical. An alleged threat by Roosevelt to abolish football if reform attempts failed led to a reform group now known as the NCAA. Harvard football coach Bill Reid promised Roosevelt reform was forthcoming. In order to elicit the adoption of 19 rules aimed a

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ntinued to erupt among collegiate sports programs in the 1990s, the Knight Commission reconvened with most of its original members in 2001. Despite such efforts at reform, few believe that much progress has occurred in reconciling academics and collegiate athletics. There is widespread agreement in the literature on collegiate athletics and academic integrity and ethics that current commercial models of sport and a tendency to favor professionalism over amateurism are responsible for such reforms, along with presidential unwillingness to lead reform movements. Powerful coaches and athletic directors continue to control sports programs in colleges across the country, while scandals, poor academic performance, and a lack of ethics are pervasive. As Thelin (1994) maintains, presidents of major sport institutions have ôpurposefully separated athletics by making them special and preferential and at the same time withdrawing them from the educational mission of the institution,ö (190). Such lack of progress with respect to reconciling educational mission and athletics is evident even in the early 1900s, when reforms developed after the White House summit failed to impact collegiate sport programs in the way intended by reformers.
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Approximate Word count = 1282
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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