EDMUND BURKEDear Alma Mater:
As an undergraduate in bygone days, I cheered when Floyd Little, the third great running back to wear Syracuse number 44, returned punts the length of the field. (About you, Syracuse, Floyd Little said: ""I liked it because they made you be a student first, an athlete second.”) As an alumnus, I was thrilled every time the basketball team reached the Final Four and delighted when Syracuse won a national championship.
Now I beseech you – and other universities of integrity: Stop playing Division I men’s football and basketball.
Yes, I understand the value of those programs for the university. That’s just the problem; they have become too valuable.
Like alumni of other universities, I wanted to believe that my school’s teams were composed of genuine student-athletes who were just like other Syracuse students, except, of course, that they were athletically gifted and disciplined enough to succeed in sports and academics simultaneously. Periodically scandals erupted at other colleges; but I wanted to believe my school was different.
Then Syracuse had its scandal. I learned from the NCAA report that there was an entire infrastructure within Syracuse’s basketball program to ensure that players succeeded academically. There were mentors to provide skills training for athletes, tutors for particular subjects, and a director of basketball operations who – notwithstanding that job title – spent 90 percent of his time on players’ academics.
According to that report, in January 2013, a star basketball player’s grades made him ineligible to play. Much was at stake: Syracuse’s team was undefeated and a potential contender for another national championship. The athletic director convened a meeting to discuss how to restore the player’s eligibility. Eight people attended, including the associate provost – a high-ranking official from the academic side of the university. They decided that the player should ask an instructor in a completed course to consider raising a grade if the player did extra work, an option purportedly open to all Syracuse students.
The following afternoon, an instructor for a course the player completed the previous year agreed to consider a grade change if the player submitted a four or five-page paper. The very next morning the paper was submitted, and the instructor raised the player’s grade in the course from a C- to B-. If, as a general matter, students can raise a course grade that much with a four-page paper, the university has other problems; but in this case anyway, that’s what happened. The player’s eligibility was restored, and the team went on to reach the Final Four.
Later an investigation revealed that the paper was written – or, at a minimum, substantially revised – not by the student but by the director of basketball operations and one of his staff members.
You ask, alma mater, that we believe that the problem was caused by a few apostates who violated not only the university’s formal policies but its genuine wishes and expectations. The director of basketball operations and his staff member are no longer at Syracuse, and the athletics director has been reassigned.
Head Coach Jim Boeheim says he knew nothing about the fake paper. I believe him. But what signal did he send to his staff when he recruited that player in the first place? The player was from Brazil, and he himself says that he didn’t speak English well enough to do college work. Did the coach reasonably expect the player to learn English well enough and quickly enough to succeed in a rigorous college program – while devoting 40 hours a week to basketball?
Jim Boeheim is a good man. That I do not doubt. Among other worthy things, he and his wife have raised millions of dollars to fight cancer. Moreover, Boeheim gives his time not only to fundraising but to personally talking with cancer victims, including children. The problem is not that the system is filled with bad people. The problem is that the system forces good people to close their eyes to its fundamental flaw -- a flaw they can't change and, to succeed, must ignore.
There is nothing unique about Syracuse. Other prestigious universities with academic-integrity sports violations include Stanford, Berkeley, Notre Dame, Michigan, Minnesota, and UCLA.
The mother of all scandals is unfolding at University of North Carolina, where over a period of thirteen years 3,100 students took sham courses. Most of these students were athletes, who had been directed to those particular courses by the athletic department’s academic support staff. Some of the courses never existed in any form; there were no instructors, no classes, and no assignments. For other courses, students wrote fake papers. The convention was that students could cut and paste material from the web and submit it as their own work, provided they cited the source. The citations provided a pretense that the paper was not plagiarized, or at least were so accepted by the instructors. (Was it a coincidence that the Syracuse instructor initially rejected that four-page paper because it lacked citations?)
Regardless of whether universities use the same techniques, they may have no alternative but to engage in self-delusion and fraud – for the hard truth may be that it is otherwise impossible to compete at the highest levels in men’s basketball and football. Here’s why: When they look at high school prospects, college programs find both athletically-gifted players who are – and who are not – prepared for college. Programs that limit themselves only to athletes who are prepared for college work place themselves at a competitive disadvantage. That's the fundamental flaw in the system.
Coaches, admissions officers, and college presidents may tell themselves that their academic support programs will help athletes who are unprepared for college work to succeed academically. But tutors are not miracle workers. They can do a great deal; but extra help takes extra time. Even the best tutors cannot turn students who are not prepared for college into successful students with the time that Division I athletes have available for study.
Because of the enormous sums that can made through television broadcast rights, ticket sales, and apparel licensing – or, conversely, the red ink that will flow should those revenues fail to exceed coaches’ and trainers’ salaries, athletic scholarships, team travel, and all of other costs of these expensive programs – the drive to do whatever is necessary to compete successfully in men’s basketball and football has become irresistible.
The NCAA can’t help. When colleges without elite sports programs make noises about real reform, schools with profitable programs threaten to bolt. Moreover, the NCAA has itself become addicted to the money. Its men’s basketball tournament generates $750 million annually for itself and its member institutions. Consequently, the NCAA’s greatest interest is in preserving the appearance – rather than the substance – of academic integrity. It can make itself look good by landing heavily on a school such as Syracuse, where academic integrity issues involved three students; but so far it has recoiled at the too-big-to-acknowledge UNC scandal. Investigative journalists and internal whistleblowers – not the NCAA – exposed the fake courses. Although its investigation has not concluded, the NCAA is suggesting that situation may be beyond its jurisdiction because it involves the academic integrity of an entire university rather than whether athletes received benefits unavailable to other students.
Desperate people cling to fantasies. For too long, coaches – who, if successful, are showered with fortunes and glory; and if unsuccessful, are fired – and university presidents – who are painfully aware of the tens of millions of dollars to be made or lost in men’s basketball and football – have been deluding themselves. So have alumni like me. It is time to face reality.