In an op-ed piece published last Tuesday in the San Jose Mercury News, President Nan Keohane called for university educators to push for aggressive steps to improve the academic standards of college sports programs.
Writing with President John Hennessy of Stanford University, Keohane declared that "those of us charged with leading our nation's major universities have a responsibility to restore the primacy of academics in the lives of student athletes."
Highlighting the low graduation rates of many college sports teams and the increasing time demand of voluntary practices on athletes, the two presidents made several specific proposals for measures that would combat the problems.
Those controversial steps, however, could draw resistance from officials in the college athletic community, said Christopher Kennedy, associate director of athletics at Duke, who helped Keohane draft the article.
"Whenever there is a proposal for change at the NCAA, you're going to get some surprising responses and some unpredictable opposition because of the diverse range of the [NCAA's] constituency," Kennedy said.
The first proposal made in the article is to toughen the scholastic requirements of college-bound athletes when they are still in high school. Under NCAA rules, students must complete 13 core courses in high school to be eligible to play college sports. There currently is an NCAA initiative to raise the number of required classes to 14, and Keohane wrote that number should be increased to 16.
"Many of the NCAA's efforts have brought the standards closer to what Duke's already are," Kennedy said.
Perhaps most controversial proposal in the article is to punish schools with low graduation rates. "We must develop sanctions with real teeth for programs that fail to achieve reasonable graduation rates," the presidents wrote. Punishments could include disqualification from bowl games or post-season tournaments and a reduction in athletic scholarships.
Lew Perkins, athletics director at the University of Connecticut, which only recently upgraded its football program to Division I, said such an approach would be misplaced. "I don't think we should penalize bad schools. I think we should reward good schools," he said. In addition, Perkins questioned the way graduation rates are calculated since schools are punished for students who transfer to other schools or leave early to play professional sports.
The last major step that the two presidents proposed is to limit the voluntary workouts of student-athletes in order to combat increasing practice requirements.
"We need to look at redefining voluntary workouts, [because] the word 'voluntary' is a joke," said Kathleen Smith, professor of biology and chair of Duke's Athletic Council, a group of professors, administrators and other community members that advises on University athletics policies.
Current NCAA rules limit "required athletically related activities" to 20 hours a week. "When the NCAA created the 20-hour rule, there was a huge outcry from students," Kennedy said. "So I would expect a lot of resistance to cutting back voluntary workouts."
In addition, Duke officials said measures described in the article are unlikely to have much effect on schools like Duke and Stanford, which already have high academic standards for their athletes relative to other schools. "Duke's [athlete] graduation rates are usually pretty close to those of non-athletes and are traditionally among the top five in the country," Smith said.
For this reason, educators at schools with less rigorous academic requirements may oppose these measures, which would raise the NCAA's standards closer to those of Duke and Stanford. "I think more emphasis should fall on institutions to regulate themselves," Perkins said.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.