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Journal of Intercollegiate Sport, 2012, 5, 4-18
© 2012 Human Kinetics, Inc.
ConferenCe Presentations and resPonses
NCAA Academic Reform:
History, Context and Challenges
Michael Oriard
Oregon State University
The purpose of this article is to offer a sociohistorical overview of academic
reform in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). To do so, the
author draws heavily from football history and its association with academic
reform in the broader intercollegiate athletics context. Intercollegiate athletics
has undergone signicant changes in professionalism and academic integrity
over time—something that suggests the current dysfunctional structure can be
systemically changed, too.
I have been charged with laying out the broad context for the general topic of the
colloquium, and for the keynote addresses and responses that follow. As a cultural
historian, my focus has been on football, and I will focus my remarks on what
I know best. I am fully aware of the irritation among advocates for nonrevenue
and women’s sports when speakers focus only on football and men’s basketball.
But football drove the development of college sports in this country, and along
with men’s basketball, it has driven the academic reform agenda since the 1980s.
Moreover, the two so-called revenue sports—at the most elite level—created the
full-time, year-round model for all sports in not just Division I but also Division II.
From my view, despite the higher graduation rates, particularly in women’s sports,
this model has not worked to the benet of these athletes, whose losses are merely
the collateral damage from policies dictated by football and men’s basketball. All
of this suggests thinking about academic reform means thinking primarily about
football and men’s basketball, but that does not exclude thinking about how a single
set of standards or requirements serves or does not serve the interests and needs
of all athletes in all sports.
Part One
I’ll begin, then, by setting up the historical context.
1
The era of academic reform
did not truly begin until the 1980s, but the criticism of priorities and practices in
intercollegiate sports, and thus an implicit call for reform, is nearly as old as col-
lege sports themselves. As Ron Smith has pointed out, controversy began with the
second intercollegiate competition, a boat race between Harvard and Yale three
years after their initial race in 1852, over Harvard’s use of a coxswain from the
Oriard is Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR.
NCAA Academic Reform 5
1852 boat who had subsequently graduated. Yale protested but Harvard refused to
remove him from the boat and proceeded to win (Smith, 2011).
Questions of eligibility were bitterly argued over for the next half-century,
because college sports had no traditions, no governing body, and minimal insti-
tutional control. Our more recent wrangling over “initial eligibility” has been
entirely an academic issue, but this was not so in this earlier period, when disputes
more fundamentally concerned whether the athlete was an actual student at the
college for which he was competing. That coxswain in 1855 was a Harvard man,
but a graduate rather than a current student. Clearly that could not be allowed, but
whether current students in the graduate and professional schools—law, medicine,
and theology—should be allowed to play continued to be an issue well into the
twentieth century.
Graduate students, at least, were actual students. The eligibility of what might
euphemistically be called “part-time” or “irregular” students became an issue due
to the win-at-all-costs ethic that Americans even at the most elite institutions of
higher education brought to athletic competition. What became more bluntly known
as “tramp athletes,” who enrolled for fall term only and never visited a classroom,
or who moved from school to school for a better deal, were part of the college
football world in the 1880s and 1890s, as were bitter feuds between schools over
their eligibility.
The grounds for objecting to tramp athletes seem obvious. But eligibility was
also tied to a British denition of “amateurism” that was class-based and incompat-
ible with American democratic principles. Not just tramp athletes, but also regular
students who earned expense money by playing summer baseball were deemed to
violate the amateur code. The NCAA still adamantly insists on amateurism, but
what constitutes “amateurism” today would have appalled its champions at the turn
of the twentieth century. Playing summer baseball for expense money could get
you banned from college football. In January 2012, Oklahoma State won the Rose
Bowl behind a twenty-eight-year-old quarterback who played ve years of minor
league baseball before enrolling in college. In the early years of college sports,
any payment of tuition or fees or living expenses was a mark of “professionalism.”
Today, tuition, room, and board constitute an athletic scholarship, which is funda-
mental to collegiate amateurism. Today, instead, we are wrestling with the living
expenses part of the standard scholarship, in relation to a proposal to provide an
extra $2,000, which is roughly half of what nancial aid policies typically judge
the Full Cost of Attendance. While high- and low-revenue programs wrestle with
the economic impact, the ofcial NCAA position is that compensation up to the full
cost of attendance would still be within the bounds of amateurism, while anything
beyond would be professionalism. However one feels about stipends for athletes,
everyone should recognize that “amateurism” has been a shifting and exible
principle for a very long time.
To return to the historical context for academic reform: over the 1880s, 1890s,
and early 1900s, as college athletics became increasingly organized, and shifted
from student-run to institutional control, a four-point consensus on eligibility
emerged that touched on academic principles: (a) competition should be limited
to four years, (b) for only full-time undergraduate students, (c) in good academic
standing, and (d) pursuing a degree.
2
The basic principles remain the same today,
though it now takes pages and pages of regulations to dene each term. In these
6 Oriard
early years, in the absence of any governing body, institutions were to monitor the
eligibility of their own athletes. Notice that whether freshmen should be eligible
for the varsity team was not part of the consensus. Where freshmen were allowed
to compete, it was typically at small schools concerned about having enough
skilled players for the team. Where freshmen were ineligible, it was more often
out of concern about tramp athletes than the academic well-being of freshmen. The
desire was simply to limit participation to bona de students of the institution, as
dened by that institution.
As football passed baseball and crew to become the chief college sport, no
season passed without its controversies over eligibility or professionalism, but only
the brutality of the game could arouse broad public outrage. Here is the earliest
case of the power of the media in driving or hindering reform in college sports. The
modern newspaper, as created by Joseph Pulitzer in New York in the 1880s, along
with William Randolph Hearst when he entered the New York market to challenge
Pulitzer in 1895, exploited the violence of football in the same way it exploited
sensational crimes to drive up circulations, and in so doing it created, or at least
magnied, the sense of crisis in college football. In what has become the NCAA’s
familiar creation story, college football reached a crisis in the 1905 season, requir-
ing the intervention of President Roosevelt himself, out of which came the rst
nation-wide organization to oversee the conduct of the game, which eventually took
the name National Collegiate Athletic Association. Roosevelt was more concerned
about the demoralizing consequences of professionalism in college athletics, but
he recognized it was brutality putting the game at risk with the public, and his
taming of the “football slugger” added to his stature as the president with the Big
Stick. Parenthetically, the issue of brutality has again become a matter of urgent
concern in just the past few years, as evidence of the long-term consequences of
head trauma accumulates.
Out of the 1905 crisis came a revision of the rules to make football safer, most
signicantly legalization of the forward pass. The rst convention, in 1906, also
adopted a policy on academic eligibility: “No student shall represent a College
or University in any intercollegiate contest, who is not taking a full schedule of
work as prescribed in the catalogue of the institution” (“Proceedings,” 1906; Falla,
1981, p. 25). To my knowledge, this is the rst ofcial statement of an academic
standard for college sports.
Part Two
Out of the 1905 crisis, of course, also came the NCAA itself, to recommend policy
but without regulatory powers to enforce it until the 1940s. Beginning in 1895, with
the forerunner of the Big Ten, conferences assumed whatever regulatory powers
were attempted before the 1950s. In the 1920s, college football fully emerged as the
country’s greatest sporting spectacle (as opposed to baseball, the national pastime),
with massive concrete and steel stadiums sprouting up throughout the country. A
10-point code adopted by the NCAA convention in December 1922 reveals what
issues concerned member institutions at this time. Half of the principles addressed
matters related to eligibility: freshmen not eligible for varsity competition; gradu-
ate students not eligible; eligibility limited to three years (not four); restrictions
NCAA Academic Reform 7
on transfers from other colleges (to be adopted through conferences); and athletes
banned from playing on any team other than those representing their own insti-
tutions. These are the basic principles adopted in 1906, slightly revised. Three
additional principles addressed issues of control and oversight: schools encouraged
to organize into sectional conferences, which would establish rules and enforce
them; faculty should have absolute control of athletics on campus; and district
representatives of the NCAA should visit colleges in the region to advocate for the
principles of the Association. And two nal principles addressed ethical issues: the
principles of amateurism, as dened by the Association, should be adhered to; and
gambling should be suppressed (Falla, 1981, pp. 128–29, 137). Underlying all of
these was a basic principle of home rule: the members of the NCAA were to agree
on recommendations, but institutions were to govern their own athletic programs
as they saw t, unless they ceded authority to a conference.
The absence of explicitly academic matters is striking, presumably meaning
that none seemed urgent at the time. Amateurism, whether expressed explicitly
in the aforementioned ethical provisions or implicitly in the rules on eligibility,
remained the key issue, or rather the “professionalism” that violated the amateur
code. “Professionalism’s” twin curse was “commercialism,” which exploded in
the 1920s along with all of those stadiums arising. These two primary concerns
culminated in the well-known 1929 report by the Carnegie Foundation, the rst
real landmark in efforts to reform college athletics. The primary focus of the report,
and all of the media attention it received at the time, dealt with the recruiting and
subsidizing of college football players for the sake of a commercial enterprise now
staged in enormous stadiums that dwarfed any academic building on campus. But
Chapter VI, titled “Athletic Participation and Its Results,” included information
about the academic standing of athletes relative to nonathletes that provides an
interesting touchstone for the issues facing us today. In a section on “Scholastic
Requirements and Their Administration” the report was mildly positive, noting that
academic standards had risen over the past twenty years, though how rigorously they
were applied was more difcult to assess. The principle author, Howard Savage,
cited several incidents of what he termed “conicts between athletic ambitions
and academic standards”: a president, trustee, or alumnus pressuring the registrar
or overriding the faculty to admit an academically unqualied athlete; an athlete
staying eligible “through the passing of an examination under circumstances that
were, to say the least, unusual”; and a general questioning of academic standards
at “certain Catholic institutions” (read Notre Dame here).
Except for the quaintness of the language, the Knight Commission or the Drake
Group could have issued the concluding statement last week:
Faculties, trustees, and even college or university presidents are not as yet
united as respects the maintenance of strict requirements in the face of the
supposed benets that can be wrung from winning teams. The fact that all of
these supposed advantages are tinged at one point or another with the color of
money casts over every relaxation of standards a mercenary shadow (Savage
et al., 1929, p. 119).
But Savage et al. also reported the results from examining the academic records
of 2,787 athletes and 11,480 nonathletes at 52 colleges and universities. In general,
8 Oriard
the differences between athletes and nonathletes were negligible and not statisti-
cally meaningful (Savage et al., 1929):
• Athletesactuallyhadhigheraveragecourseloadsandgraduationrates,but
slightly lower grades and “very slightly” higher rates of academic probation;
• Athletestookasemesterlongertograduate;
• Athletes took more “easy” courses than nonathletes, butalso more “hard”
ones;
• Regardingathletes’marginallylowergrades,footballplayerswereatthebottom
(interesting, along with polo players!), but 95% of athletes overall progressed
to the following semester (compared with 90% of nonathletes);
• Andonintelligencetests,nonathletesscoredonlyslightlyhigher;ononeof
the major ones, the Pennsylvania Achievement Test, athletes scored marginally
higher than nonathletes (636.37–615.55), though football players (at 609.42)
fell slightly below the nonathletes.
Big-time college athletics were controversial in 1929, but not for academic
failures. And public response to the report’s charges about the recruiting and sub-
sidizing of athletes is instructive for thinking about the climate in which reform
efforts continue to take place today. The Carnegie Foundation’s indictment of the
schools that subsidized athletes received front-page attention wherever big-time
football was played, but it appeared on a Thursday (October 24), followed by the
local university’s denial or a shrug of indifference, after which the newspapers
refocused their attention on what really mattered—how the home team would fare
in Saturday’s game. The timing may have been bad—the report was published the
very week that Wall Street crashed—but the dismissal by the press and the indif-
ference of the football public would have guaranteed a lack of impact in any case.
By the time of the Carnegie Foundation report, big-time college football had
simply become too important (too big to fail, one might say)—to local communi-
ties and to the institutions depending on them—to be governed only by ethical
and academic concerns. This was the era of intersectional football, when college
football became a national sport with regional variants, whose champions com-
peted against each other for local and regional pride. This was also the era when
what John Thelin (1994) (following Daniel Boorstin) calls the Booster College, or
what Douglas Toma (2003) terms Football U., came into being: universities built
themselves on the renown of their football teams.
And this was the era when coverage of sports exploded in a new era of mass
media. The daily newspaper with its separate sports section and massive Sunday
issue emerged in the 1920s. Newspapers had contributed hugely to the sense of
crisis over the brutality of football in the 1890s and early 1900s. Not in 1929.
Newspapers now depended on sports news for circulations, and sportswriters had
cozy relationships with the coaches of the teams they covered. Commercial radio
began in 1921 and by the end of the 1920s was carrying football games throughout
the day on Fall Saturdays on both local stations and national networks. College
football feature lms proliferated after 1925, and about 20% of the newsreel before
the feature was devoted to sports, which meant college football in the Fall. By the
end of the twenties, the media and college football were mutually dependent in
ways now taken for granted, and sustained criticism of college sports, as opposed