How Sports Ate Academic Freedom

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How Sports Ate Academic Freedom 
Big-money athletics undermine universities’ core commitments: truth,
discovery and free inquiry.

By Jay M. Smith
April 30, 2018 5:57 p.m. ET 

Citing “levels of corruption” grave enough to threaten the survival of
the sport, Condoleezza Rice and her NCAA-appointed Commission on
College Basketball have proposed reforms that aim to “put the
‘college’ back in college basketball.” They hope to do this by
cracking down on corruption, reducing the flow of illicit money into
players’ hands and fortifying the National College Athletic
Association’s punitive powers.

But like previous reform attempts, the commission’s approach is
intended to shore up the current model of college athletics rather
than solve the fundamental problem. Corruption in college sports is
merely one consequence of their outsize role, which has grown to the
point of undermining universities’ core commitments to truth,
discovery and free inquiry.

The experience of one basketball-crazed school, the University of
North Carolina, shows how prioritizing sports can negatively affect
athletes’ academic lives—along with the administrative culture that
helps to shape those lives. Between 1993 and 2011, athletes made up
about half the students enrolled in hundreds of nonexistent classes,
earning high grades for minimal work submitted to a departmental
secretary. A 2014 landmark report detailed the scheme. Yet the
university has resisted owning up to its failure.

While under investigation by the NCAA in 2017, UNC leaders simply
denied that the university had engaged in conduct that met the NCAA’s
definition of fraud, twisting the organization’s bylaws. The
chancellor had apologized in 2015 for the university’s fraudulent
behavior while seeking to retain UNC’s academic accreditation, but she
explained to the NCAA two years later that the written confession had
been a “typo.” By denying reality and daring the NCAA to call its
bluff, the university escaped punishment for offering sham classes.

As these events unfolded, I co-authored a book that chronicled UNC’s
handling of its scandal and placed the story in the context of the
relationship between academics and athletics. Later, I developed a
history course on big-time college sports. In that course, students
learned about the conflicts of interest that had defined
intercollegiate athletics from their beginning in the 19th
century. They read about how the prime beneficiaries of college
sports—coaches, university presidents, alumni and governing boards,
the NCAA—had created a system that kept money rolling in but kept
athletes always disadvantaged. They learned about the long-term
origins of the systematic educational fraud that the UNC case
exemplified.

UNC administrators, and the boosters to whom they answer, were not
pleased about the new course. (When the athletic director heard about
it, he insisted that he teach it in my place.) The course had flown
under the radar of academic administrators in 2016, but when they
discovered that I planned to teach it again in 2017, they intervened
to suppress it.

The dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, a longtime friend to
athletics, pressured the chairman of the history department to yank my
course from the schedule. He made ominous noises about the history
department being “over-resourced.” He asked the chairman to consider
whether it was “strategic” for the course to be offered. He ended by
saying, “This is not a threat”—but it would be a bad idea for the
department to schedule the course in 2017. The department chairman
told me to find something else to teach.

After a nine-month battle, administrators relented and allowed the
course to be taught this spring. That news came days after I had
submitted a formal grievance to the faculty committee charged with
enforcing the rules of faculty governance. The faculty committee
decided unambiguously in my favor, scolding the dean for interfering
in the scheduling of a course that happened to cover controversial
issues. They called on administrators to reaffirm their support for
academic freedom.

The findings of the faculty committee had no effect. Exercising their
prerogative to override any faculty decision, the administrators
simply rejected the recommendations. In the face of a report that
highlighted administrative bullying (“this is not a threat, but”), the
chancellor wrote, “I do not believe that the Dean . . . violated
existing tenets for providing proper administration” of curricular
programs. Since the grievance process is advisory only—a sign of the
powerlessness of faculty in the modern university—administrators were
free to assert that intimidation is a legitimate academic
practice. Controversial courses will remain vulnerable to suppression.

It would be hard to imagine a more demoralizing example of the tail
wagging the dog. UNC is a “public ivy.” Its faculty win Nobel,
Pulitzer and Guggenheim awards. Since 1987, UNC ranks first among
public universities in competitions for Rhodes scholarships. Chapel
Hill is not the typical football factory. Yet UNC’s leaders were
willing to carry water for the athletic department—even in the wake of
an enormous athletic scandal. They were also willing to limit what
their students could learn, threaten the academic freedom of a tenured
professor, use intimidation tactics against a distinguished
department, and risk the reputation of the university.

At UNC, the power of big-money sports led administrators to defend the
legitimacy of fake classes that had no professor. It then led them to
wage an all-out war against a real class that asked common-sense
questions about sports in institutions of higher learning. The
pressures that produce such warped priorities are hardly specific to
UNC. Michigan, Minnesota, Washington and Syracuse, to name several
recent examples, have run their own bold experiments in curricular
flimflam. Nor is a tradition of success in sports a precondition for
athletics-inspired corruption (Binghamton, we’re looking at you).

Before we “put the ‘college’ back in college basketball,” we need to
get academic values back into college. Parents with college-bound
children should ask: “Have we prepared our kids for university, and
taken on huge financial burdens, so that people who worship at the
altar of athletics can set their educational agenda?” If the answer is
no, the time to speak up is now.

Mr. Smith is a professor of history at UNC-Chapel Hill and a co-author
of “Cheated: The UNC Scandal, the Education of Athletes, and the
Future of Big-Time College Sports.”