Why I'm Not Watching Football Anymore

I have been, for most of my life, a football fan. Specifically, I have been a fan of the NFL, and of the Pittsburgh Steelers in particular. I grew up in Pittsburgh in the 1970s when the Chuck Noll-led dynasty was legendary. I can't not root for the Steelers - it's programmed into my autonomous responses by now, like Pavlov's dogs.

I had less interest in college football until I attended Ohio State for graduate school. Even there, I never went to a game, and I've remained diffident about big-time college football. Yes, I have rooted for the Buckeyes, but as a lifelong faculty member and administrator in higher education I have some sense of how much sports cost, how few programs actually make money, and how much other people get rich off the backs of the players and the rabid loyalty of the fans. I've blogged about this before (here, here, and here). Suffice it to say that what interest I had in BCS football has been waning for some time.

But now I find that I just can't watch the sport at any level anymore. I've come to this realization after a long accumulation of issues that just won't go away. The science on concussions, which started to get significant public attention a few years ago, is stark: a LOT of football players, especially NFL players who play for a number of years, are essentially damaged for life. Some of them go on to damage the lives of others around them. And while I appreciate that the NFL is putting a small portion of its vast wealth into studying the issue, I don't think there's a solution short of "don't play football". Maybe someone will invent the miracle helmet that can change the laws of physics, but so long as our brains can move within our skulls I think the problem is going to persist.

Then there is the issue of domestic violence, brought to light this season in a couple of very high-profile cases. An op-ed in the NYT recently - written by somebody who is still a genuine fan of the game - had a poignant take on the issue of violence and pro football. These men engage in violence - controlled and structured, true, but violence nevertheless - for a living. For many, that has an effect on the psyche just as it has an effect on the brain - and there are complex interactions than can make it worse.

Then in this past weekend's paper came this story about injuries in the NFL. Across the 32 team rosters there are roughly 1700 players (some proportion of which don't see a lot of action - kickers, third-stringers, special teams players, etc.) By this point in the season, less than 1/2 way through, some 200 of those players have been injured severely enough to be taken out for 6 weeks or more. Injuries include torn-up knees and muscles, broken legs and collarbones, strains and sprains of all kinds - and, of course, a few severe concussions. By this point, roughly 1/8 of the workforce has gotten hurt. Short of soldiers in a very active war zone, I don't know a lot of professions with that kind of casualty rate.

At some point, I just can't watch this anymore. I still appreciate the supreme skill and artistry of the game played at the highest level. Some of what these players do is remarkable to behold. But the cost which that artistry is exacting on those same players is nearing the horrific. That knowledge sits in my head, demanding attention, any time I try to watch a game. I just can't enjoy it anymore, knowing that I may well be watching the ruining of another man's future life for my entertainment.

Let me be clear - this is a personal conclusion, which so far as I'm concerned affects only me. I have lots of friends who are still fans of the game at both the college and pro levels, and I don't ask that they change their habits or demand that they think the way I do. I wouldn't dream of calling for a boycott on watching football, nor would I make the argument that football should somehow be banned. Making such arguments would be an attempt to bully or harangue my views onto others. I'm not interested in that.

So if you enjoy football, great - I hope you watch for as long as it brings you enjoyment. But as for me - I've had enough. All the damage being done - voluntary or not, consciously chosen or not - is just too much. I have plenty of other things demanding my time. Time to try a football-free fall.

The Real and Messy Costs of Widespread Gun Ownership

I have blogged before about the complex calculus surrounding gun possession as a means of self-defense (here and here, among many others). I have focused on the relationship between self-defense and firearms, because self-defense is the primary justification for gun ownership given by those who advocate for few restrictions on guns. It is the battleground (if you will) on which they have chosen to fight, and so makes for a fair starting point.

In my previous writings, I've made it clear that guns can be useful for self-defense - I am neither an advocate for trying to ban all guns (an impossible task) nor a strict nonviolence pacifist. I have tried to make it clear that guns may be a useful but not sufficient condition for self-protection - many additional skills are needed (including a number not taught in most CCW classes).

On the other side of the coin - the one gun advocates rarely want to deal with in public - are the very real costs in innocent life of widespread gun ownership. I'm not talking here only of the high-profile Newtown or Aurora cases - discussions of which have often devolved into largely useless arguments over hypothetical tactics. These cases, while big in impact, are (thankfully) rare.

More problematic are the small encounters where the presence of a gun turns a senseless but probably harmful altercation into a deadly conflict. Emblematic of this kind of situation is this tragedy:

Alabama woman charged with killing fellow 'Bama fan after Iron Bowl loss

There are obviously a lot of factors at play here, and the evidence is admittedly incomplete. It is likely that alcohol played a role, which often lowers barriers and enhances strong emotions (in this case, intense disappointment over the outcome of a football game). It seems likely as well that the American worship on the altar of sports (football in particular) was an important factor, creating both the context in which strangers would gather and the emotional source of anger and frustration. Clearly if people drank less and were less consumed by sports, the conflict in this case would have been much less likely.

But it is one thing to talk about the sources of a fight between strangers, and another to talk about its outcome. I've argued before that the trite "guns don't kill people, people kill people" bumper sticker is beside the point. The reality is messier: gun's don't kill people by themselves, but they make it much, much easier.

The fact that one woman in this case had a gun didn't cause the conflict between them. It didn't make the shooter angrier about the football game, or make her dislike a complete stranger any more or less than she would have unarmed. But the presence of the gun changed one essential thing: the outcome. Without the gun, both women would be alive - possibly angry and with minor injuries, maybe even arrested on misdemeanor charges, but alive. With the gun, one woman is dead and the other's life is now ruined.

This is the reality that gun advocates need to confront, honestly and in public, if they want anyone outside of their tribe to take them seriously. The more guns are in public circulation, and the more ill-founded and even barbaric ideas people have about guns and violence, the more likely it is that minor scuffles that used to end in scrapes and bruised egos will instead end in funerals and murder cases. This is a very real price to pay for a particular form of freedom - and I think we have both the right and the responsibility to ask whether the price is too high.

Failure of Education

With all the talk of reforming higher education with MOOCs, online learning, and other fancy technological doodads, sometimes it's useful to remember that the real issue is frequently just plain ignorance:

LSU fraternity releases apology for offensive banner referencing Kent State shootings

Readers of this blog know that I have an interest in the Kent State shooting. To think that this banner qualified as a joke requires two things: 1) just enough knowledge to know that there was something called the "Kent State Massacre", combined with the ignorance not to know what it was or anything about it, and 2) a casual disregard for human tragedy - an inability to understand at either a personal or political level what that shooting meant. In other words, a more or less complete failure of education.

Judging by some of the other "controversial" banners referenced in the news story above, it would appear that #2 is pretty much enshrined with this group. #1 is probably pretty firmly lodged as well. 

Those looking for an argument about the deleterious impact of college sports on American university education could seize on this group, which has managed to marry willful moral and historical ignorance with love of sport to near perfection. In truth, I don't think there's a clean causal arrow here - I don't think that LSU football "causes" these young men to be ignorant & morally blind. But it does create an occasion wherein such characteristics are not only tolerated, but celebrated.

I've no doubt that the apology will be accepted, and that next week or the week after another similar banner will grace the hallowed halls of this fraternity. There will be no lasting consequence, no lesson learned. Most of these young men will probably graduate with LSU degrees, schooled perhaps in their chosen fields of study but comfortable in their ignorance. 

Regardless of whether they go on to well-paying careers that pay off their college debts, that will still be a failure of education - which no set of "metrics" or rankings system will capture. And 20 years from now, we will complain still more about the ignorance coarsening our national dialogue, and wonder anew "what happened to civic discourse?" It is dying the slow death of a thousand cuts at universities just like LSU across the country.

NCAA Rules Gone Amok

From the ongoing battle over the NCAA's role in American universities comes this story:

Wrestler Loses Scholarship for Posting His Music Online

The key bit is here:

National Collegiate Athletic Association rules prohibit athletes from using their name or image for commercial purposes

So an organization the rakes in hundreds of millions in TV revenues tells a struggling wrestler that he can't sell songs (that have nothing to do with his performance as an athlete) for a few bucks online? This is upside-down crazy, and another indication of a broken system that may not be repairable. The sooner some of the lawsuits against the NCAA (questioning, among other things, its legal standing to tell anybody to do anything) are resolved, the better.

New Data on Sports in Higher Education

There is a long-standing concern in higher education about the cost of athletic programs, and how much spending on sports takes away from the academic mission of universities. Scandal after scandal involving eligibility, an NCAA that is by turns draconian and toothless, and persistent reports of football coaches earning far more than campus presidents (or many CEOs) have all fed the perception that college sports isn't about "amateur scholar-athletes" - it's a big business which has largely outgrown the academic tail on the university dog.

In a way, this concern echoes the social conflict in school itself between "jocks" and "geeks" - between those who idolize, even worship, sports and those who fear sports' dark side. In the realm of money and universities, geeks fear, the jocks have won the lion's share of resources.

Into this fray steps the Delta Cost Project, the most comprehensive attempt to gather data on performance in higher education to date. They have just released a report titled "Academic Spending vs. Athletic Spending: Who Wins?" The results are not encouraging for those of us on the academic side:

Athletic departments spend far more per athletethan institutions spend to educate the averagestudent—typically three to six times as much;among Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) institutions,median athletic spending was nearly $92,000 perathlete in 2010, while median academic spendingper full-time equivalent (FTE) student was less than$14,000 in these same universities.

Athletic costs increased at least twice as fast asacademic spending, on a per-capita basis acrosseach of the three Division I subdivisions.

Very few Division I athletic departments areself-funded; instead, most programs rely on athleticsubsidies from institutions and students. However,the largest per-athlete subsidies are in thosesubdivisions with the lowest spending per athlete.Without access to other large revenue streams,these programs have increasingly turned to theirinstitutions to finance additional athletic spending.

In other words - yes, sports programs (football in particular, but sports in general) have been sucking revenue away from the academic side of the house, and at an increasing rate in recent years. Given the relatively small numbers of students who participate in and benefit from these programs (especially the few programs that take the biggest bucks), and the lack of data on the educational impact of those programs relative to university educational goals, it's hard to escape the conclusion that this is simply wasted money from an institutional mission perspective.

My preferred solution has long been to spin off the costly and potentially lucrative sports (football, basketball, maybe baseball) into what amount to professional minor leagues (yes, baseball already has this, I know. What's a few more minor league teams?) Let their profits stand or fall on their own. If they want an emotional connection to a university, let them license the name, logos and mascot for a fee. But get 'em off campus and away from the university's budget.

I'm sure that others could come up with even better and more creative solutions. I'm also realistic enough to understand that none of these solutions is likely to happen, because those who are making money on this system are making a lot of it and will be very resistant to any change. But at the least, this report should pose some uncomfortable questions for Division I (especially Div. IA) presidents, who have the power (but have lacked the vision or the courage) to take action.

More on Sports (Football) and College

Just a brief follow-up to my previous post, which talked about research indicating a negative correlation between the success of a university's football team and the grades of its students.

On the heels of that study comes the first of what are likely to be many stories this fall:

Postgame Mayhem Draws Rebukes Form West Virginia U. President

Anybody who pays any attention to higher education, or who lives near a large university, has seen this story before. The worst violence and destruction always seems to come after the victories - the bigger the victory, the more raucous and destructive the response. That this should also drag down grades is not much of a surprise - rioting and studying being mutually exclusive activities.

No one has yet come up with a good response to this problem. Some years ago Ohio State and the city of Columbus flooded the near-campus area with cops during big games, and ended up drawing angry responses and some violence directed at the "heavy-handed" police presence. Yet where there are no police, couches get burned, cars overturned, and various breakable things destroyed. Police departments and university administrations can't seem to win either way.

The root, as always, is culture. So long as we have a (sub-)culture that not only tolerates but encourages destruction in response to the "big win", that's what we'll get. Suppression efforts will always be unpopular, and will only help to some degree - by putting cops in harm's way and inviting both violent reactions against the police and over-reactions by them.

As with most mass behavior problems, this will only change when we - and in this case, "we" means both students and the adults around them - decide to put an end to it. The students, of course, have the greatest control. But adults - especially alumni - get tainted by these incidents too, and need to find their voice and their levers. Some alums, of course, probably did similar things when they were students and so are reluctant to call out current students. But that can be a cop-out, an excuse for doing nothing.

What should responsible alums do? I don't honestly know - I came from a school that, for all of its own alcohol issues, never rioted after football games (won or lost). But making this a continual battle between rowdy students and university presidents (and their police forces) reduces the problem to "Animal House". More voices who care about their universities and the cultures they propagate need to get involved.

Data on Sports That's Hard to Look At

The American love affair with sports is well-documented. Nowhere is this love greater than football, which has long since supplanted baseball as "America's pastime". In its intersection with higher education, football has had a greater impact on universities (fiscally and otherwise) than any other sport, with top-ranked college leagues commanding as much media attention (and TV revenue) as professional leagues in other sports.

As important as college football has become, therefore, the release of a new study provides a sudden shock of cold water:

How Does Football Success Affect Student Performance?

The punch line of the research, done at the University of Oregon over a series of football seasons where the team when from just OK to national champions, is blunt and direct: the better your football team does, the worse student grades get. Not the athletes' grades - the rest of the student body.

Much of the Chronicle article summarizing this research focuses on the gender difference, which is both interesting and predictable (the effects are much greater on men than women). But there's a much more fundamental issue at stake.

Here is cold, hard evidence that a successful sports program provides a distraction which damages the university's supposed primary mission: educating students. If grades are an indication (and despite all of their flaws, they are, especially in the aggregate over time), the more successful the football team is the less learning takes place across the student body.

This is going to be a very bitter pill to swallow for anybody with an interest in collegiate sports - especially for university administrators with a financial stake in the success of those teams. I expect there will be much denial, and many will point out that "this is only one study". It's certainly true that, by the rules of science, one study does not establish truth - it must be replicated and expanded as far as possible. Hopefully that work will take place.

But I suspect that most of my colleagues inside higher education will hardly be surprised when this same result turns up again and again. And if/when that happens, we will see a very real test of courage. Every university claims that educating students and creating knowledge are its primary missions. When faced with unmistakable evidence that some collegiate sports (in particular, successful football teams) detract from that mission, how many will have the courage to do something about it? And how many will simply hide behind platitudes, evasions and falsehoods so the money can keep flowing?

I expect I'll be disappointed by the answers. But maybe a few courageous institutions will surprise us.

The Dangerous Relationship Between Sports & Universities: Another Case

I've written before about the relationship between sports and higher education. In my previous blog post on the subject, I suggested that while sports have a number of excellent qualities, they tend to breed a tribalist loyalty that causes people to do bad things in the name of upholding the identity of the tribe. The Penn State debacle was Exhibit A in that problem.

Now comes another case, this one at the University of North Carolina's flagship campus at Chapel Hill. In this case, there is evidence that athletes were given all sorts of breaks to maintain their academic eligibility, including the creation of "no-show" courses and administrative grade changes. That this sort of behavior violates the most basic tenets of education is obvious. This is clearly a major problem (and NOT just a PR problem) for UNC, and I hope they can get it cleaned up (hope - not expect).

What dismays me about this is not just that this happened - I find that I can't bring myself to be surprised, we sort of all expected that this kind of thing was going on. What is dismaying is how little coverage it seems to be getting. Sporting News is doing a great job, if you read it. But neither CNN nor Reuters - two mainstream news sources that claim to cover everything - have even a whisper of the scandal, which broke over a week ago. The NYT has a discussion - on a sports blog, and in a sports-section piece about how the team is trying to move beyond the scandal and "put it behind them". Basically, if you don't read sports news, you have probably not caught this story.

A part of this may be because most people just aren't that surprised - this really isn't news. Jerry Sandusky was (hopefully) an aberration - but fudging grades for athletes? That's not news, it's background noise.

For those that want to argue that there needs to be a fundamental rethink between sports and higher education, however, there's plenty of fodder here. Does anybody want to bet that UNC is the only school in the nation to do this? How many NCAA Div I schools are engaging in this kind of cheating right now, today? We have no way of knowing, of course, in part because sports departments will do their best to keep it quiet and in part because digging too deep into a sports program's shadows makes you a lot of enemies - as many people discovered in trying to investigate Penn State for years before the Sandusky scandal finally broke.

UNC's football program, I'm sure, wants to simply say "Hey, we've stopped, let's let the kids play football." Even assuming they have stopped - what's to keep them from starting again, in two years when no one is looking, if there's no consequence for getting caught this time? How many incredibly egregious violations can these programs get away with before somebody - a college president, a state governor, somebody with some leadership - says, enough is enough? It appears, from this latest case, that we haven't yet found the bottom of that barrel.

A Few Thoughts on Joe Paterno, Graham Spanier, and Penn State

By now, a tremendous amount has been written in the wake of the Louis Freeh report about Penn State's handing (or mishandling) of Jerry Sandusky. You can read the whole thing, and see Freeh's announcement at the release of the report, here. If you have any interest in higher education, you should probably read at least the summary - though it's not a pleasant story.

Follow-on stories about Paterno negotiating a sweeter retirement package - even while the Grand Jury investigations as going on - have only added more questions. One wag at Reuters even pointed out still more questions - like, does Penn State really have its own private jet?

All of this is interesting, and fun in a sort of watching-a-train-wreck kind of way. For people inclined to root against Penn State, there's a certain amount of schadenfreude going around. And by now, it's pretty clear that the cover-up by Paterno, Spanier, and two VPs at Penn State was pretty despicable.

Cover-up stories are hardly new. The Catholic Church is going through a large, slow-moving wave of similar issues (covering up crimes similar to Sandusky's, no less). Police departments (notably in New York and Los Angelis) have gone through periods of "blue wall" cover-ups in which wrongdoing by individuals within the organization was shielded from outside investigations. So the narrative here is pretty easy to construct.

A number of folks - including my friend & colleague, Steve Saideman - have pointed out that this particular cover-up represents the pinnacle of perversion of the university: the sports "tail" wagging the university "dog". This is certainly true - big-time college sports have become a serious problem at larger universities, imposing both economic and institutional (and, sometimes, moral and ethical) costs. Frankly, I'd like to seen them tossed off campus to survive on their own.

One question that occurred to me, interested as I am particularly in the higher education angle: why sports? What is it about sports as an activity that seems to attract this kind of questionable behavior? Scandals involving sex, money, and cover-ups at universities, to a substantial degree if not almost entirely, seem to emanate from this one area.

Universities engage in all sorts of activities, of course, that have greater or lesser degrees of attachment to their central mission of creating (research) and distributing (teaching) knowledge. The value of sports as an educational enterprise has always been suspect - but so are a lot of things that universities do. Extracurricular clubs and activities and campus-sponsored organizations and resources abound, many of which have only the most tenuous connection to educating students.

But scandals don't come from the Asian Student Association or the campus radio station or even ("Animal House" stereotypes aside) from Greek organizations most of the time. Hazing is certainly an issue (see Florida A&M - where the line between "marching band" and sports was thin if not altogether missing), and that sometimes leads to cover-up behavior. But usually not for long, especially when somebody dies or is seriously injured. I haven't done systematic research, but I'm willing to guess that sports are responsible for the vast majority of serious scandals, and cover-ups of same, involving universities.

It's tempting to blame the money, and many do. There is a LOT of money in NCAA Division I football and basketball - with much of the actual profit going to small numbers of individuals (coaches, league heads, bowl promoters). But (as usual) I think that the better explanation is cultural.

Sports, like most human activities, develops its own sub-culture. In order to build an effective team out of disparate individuals, all sorts of techniques are used to bind the loyalty of the players to the group - in some cases, techniques not that different from those militaries use. Fans, too, are encouraged to tie themselves to the larger whole - witness the use of the term "nation" in sports ("Red Sox Nation", "Buckeye Nation" and so on).

One of the psychological side-effects of in-group loyalty is a tendency to overlook flaws in the group, or in its members. Fifty years ago Fritz Heider was writing his Psychology of Interpersonal Relations and discovering how, if you really like somebody, you see their good points and don't see their bad ones. The stronger the emotion, the more you rearrange your perceptions to fit. Love (or hate) something passionately enough, and you will become delusional - you will see things that aren't there and fail to see things that are.

To me, this is why money and greed are less-good explanations for the kind of scandalous behavior we see in the world of sports. There are lots of ways to get money; a greedy person may love money passionately, but at some point rationality will kick in and they'll seek a better way to acquire it. But sports loyalties, built and developed over time, are deeper, more emotional, less rational. They appeal to our underlying tribal instincts.

The thing about tribal loyalties is that they are very much a two-edged sword. Loyalty to the group can inspire heroic behavior, and produce tremendous results from a group of otherwise-disparate individuals. We watch sports in part because of those inspiring moments when people transcend what we thought humans were capable of.

But tribal loyalty can also bring out the worst in us. Individually and on our own, few of us can be truly horrible for sustained periods - and those that are, are usually caught and stopped or punished. But in groups, where the terrible behavior of the few becomes protected by the blindness of the many, it can flourish. Worse still, as Stanley Milgram, Henri Tajfel, and others have pointed out, groups can make us far worse than the sum of our parts - can inspire us, through the pressure of loyalty, to do terrible things.

There is no escaping the dark side of sports. Certainly, there should be regulations, better accountability, and systems put in place to mitigate these effects. There is absolutely no excuse either for what Sandusky did, or for the failure of Penn State officials to do anything about it for over a decade. But in our zeal to reform, we should not expect to ever conquer this problem completely. With its emphasis on loyalty and identity, sports will always generate bad behaviors or the willingness to tolerate them. The sooner universities realize this, the sooner we can have a serious conversation about the costs as well as the benefits of sports programs, and what to do with them in the future.

Let's Call a Spade a Spade

In the wake of the Penn State scandal, a proposal has surfaced in the Big Ten Conference to give the league itself the power to fire coaches. There's a legal argument to be made here that this is nonsense - that no university can allow an outside, private entity power to fire its employees. I can only imagine how many contracts and labor laws, union or otherwise, this would violate. From the standpoint of university governance, it's a terrible idea.

But it does point to an underlying truth - one that universities might be better off if they would just recognize. The major collegiate sports leagues - the Big 10, SEC, Pac-10, ACC, and the rest - function essentially like professional sports leagues. They set rules, they arrange schedules, they determine membership, and they're run largely by a collection of their owners university presidents. Structurally and functionally, there's not a lot of difference between the Big 10 and, say, Major League Baseball - the only significant exception being that MLB has a license to act as a monopoly.

People inside higher education have known for years that top-tier NCAA Division I sports programs in football and basketball (and, to a lesser extent, baseball) are essentially professional minor leagues that don't pay their players. They trade on the built-in loyalty of fan bases (alumni), they sign big TV contracts and pay coaches big bucks, they even have some degree of player mobility (though without the structure of free-agency rules). They feed directly into the professional major leagues of their respective sports, which which they have close relationships.

If the Big 10 wants the ability to fire coaches, fine. Take the football and basketball programs out of the universities and set up a professional league. The league would be free to hire students as employees, paying them their tuition, fees, books, and even a salary. It could set rules and structures, and hire and fire coaches at will. 

Get all of this mess off the university's books, and call it what it is - professional sports. Instantly, all of the NCAA recruiting "scandals" disappear - because universities get out of the business of recruiting professional athletes. When we stop pretending that the players are amateurs, we can treat them like adults - let them have agents, let them shop their services around to the highest bidder. In the process, universities can stop subsidizing this nonsense - let the revenues raised by the sport pay for the activities of it. 

None of this is going to happen, of course. University presidents and would-be presidents have too much pride and prestige at stake in "their" teams. There's too much fear of alumni abandoning the institution and taking their donor dollars elsewhere - though I suspect that alumni would adjust, and a for-profit sports enterprise doesn't need donations, does it? In short, there are too many people in positions of power who are profiting hugely from the status quo. 

Which is a shame, because big-time "college" sports has far more downside than upside for universities. Maybe if a few more university presidents get fired (and, we can only hope, indicted and convicted), we'll see some real change.

Athletics, Academics, and Student Success: Which Comes First?

I have long been uneasy with college sports, especially NCAA Division I "big money" sports (primarily football and basketball). I taught at a Div I school for a bit years ago, and it seemed to me then that the "student-athletes" weren't getting an education so much as playing in a minor league that happened to be located on a college campus. Those that make it big often leave before they finish their degree - to take one example, Ben Roethlisberger never finished at Miami of Ohio, a school that prides itself on academic excellence. And those that don't make the pro draft - which is a lot of college players - have long had degree-completion rates well below the national average.

Plenty of ink has been spilled about how the system of college sports is broken, and there are lots of ideas floating around about how to fix it - spin the sports off into "real" professional minor leagues, allow the players to be paid for their time, there is no shortage of possible fixes. I'm not qualified to express judgement on most of these solutions, except to agree with the general consensus that the system is pretty well busted.

That said, many universities do deserve credit in one area: putting serious resources into the academic success of their athletes. The "Forrest Gump" image - the "student" who is radically academically unqualified but who gets passed through on underwater basket weaving and "gut" courses because they're good for the team - stings in higher ed. When there are accusations of going academically soft on athletes, they are taken very seriously, if for no other reason than good PR.

So universities have started getting serious about helping their student-athletes actually succeed in real classes. Today's Chronicle has an article on the subject, which now leads some to ask: if the athletes are getting all this support from "learning specialists", why not the rest of our students? Do student-athletes deserve more support and a better chance at success than your average non-scholarship, non-athletic student?

It's a fair question, especially in an era of tight university budgets and pressure on public universities to increase their graduation rates. My own university, now launching a major student success initiative, is looking at this closely. While we are a Division I school, we don't have a football team, our basketball team makes the NCAA tournament about once in a generation, and our sports programs are generally not seen as revenue-generators to a significant degree. Nevertheless, our athletics department has achieved a remarkable success: it was announced yesterday that for nearly eight years running, the average GPA of student-athletes on our campus has been over 3.0, well above the campus average.

So the folks leading the charge on broader student success are naturally asking, what are we doing with athletes that we could or should be doing with everybody? As I listened to the announcement, I couldn't help wondering if maybe we are (at least in part) putting the cart before the horse. Maybe it's not the case that student-athletes at our school succeed academically because we work hard to give them extra help (though there certainly is some of that). Maybe their academic success comes from the fact that they're student-athletes.

This is a novel concept - we're used to that image of the "dumb jock" who couldn't get into college any other way except that he's good at a sport. But at universities like mine, with no football and largely non-revenue sports, we don't need to recruit those students. Yes, we will go out and get students who are good soccer players, good softball players, good baseball or volleyball players. Few of them will come to us because they envision a pro career, just as many of our students who are good at playing in a marching band won't go on to become professional musicians. So some of our correlation between athletics and academic success is just a lack of the selection bias problem that may plague some of the "big time" schools.

But I think there's another cause to the correlation, one that runs from athletics to success. These students have had to take the time to become genuinely good at their sports - good enough to play on a Division I team, even to get recruited to it. That takes discipline. Moreover, they've gotten to that level not because they think they're going to make a career out of it, but simply for the love of the game. That takes inner motivation - the desire to do something for its own sake.

As any college professor will tell you, discipline and motivation will go a long way towards success in the classroom. Without discipline, even intellectually gifted students become bored and do sub-par work. Without motivation, students at all levels won't put in the effort.

Student-athletes have already proved, in one arena, that they possess these traits in greater measure than the rest of the population. Sports is not the only way to do this, of course - this is why colleges love to recruit students who have become really good at something, almost anything really - music, poetry, art, dance, public speaking, organizing service projects, you name it. These students have what it takes to succeed.

So while it's good to focus resources on academically underprepared athletes, they already have a leg up on many of their non-athletic peers - the students who didn't really pursue anything in high school, who went to college because it was expected or because it seemed like the thing to do, or because they like the idea of a four (or five, or six) year party. Given their predilections, getting athletes to succeed is relatively easy. It's reaching some of the rest of our students that's going to be the real challenge.