Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 20, 1991 TAG: 9103200348
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
The report by the Knight Foundation's Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics also said schools should adopt no-pass, no-play policies and said compliance with its recommendations should be verified by outside auditors.
College athletes "are brought in, used and then discarded like so much rubbish on the scrap heap of humanity," said the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, president emeritus of the University of Notre Dame and co-chairman of the commission.
The NCAA has a satisfactory-progress rule based on a "banking of hours" concept where an athlete must average 12 hours per term or 24 hours per academic year to be eligible.
The "banking" concept differs from the commission's proposal by letting athletes store up hours through summer school or during the regular term. They can thus take easier or fewer courses to concentrate on sports and make up the Hesburgh credits later.
Fourteen of the commission's 22 members are current or former college presidents. The panel said the academic administrators need to take direct control of their athletic programs, require that student athletes get an education and make sure athletic-program finances are controlled by the university, not the coaches or athletic directors.
"We would love to put the sleaziness of intercollegiate athletics to rest today," said Hesburgh.
The commission will operate for another year to advocate its proposals.
"This is not a report that will be put away and gather dust," said William C. Friday, former president of the University of North Carolina and the other co-chairman of the commission.
While the commission members and the report were blunt in describing the problems of collegiate athletics, complaining that many have come to be governed by TV contracts and private fund-raising, no institutions were named.
"At their worst, big-time college athletics appear to have lost their bearings," the commission report said.
"We sense that public concern about abuse is growing. The public appears ready to believe that many institutions achieve their athletic goals not through honest effort, but through equivocation, not by hard work and sacrifice, but by hook and crook," it said.
The commission found that academic and financial problems "are so deep-rooted and long-standing they must be understood to be systemic. . . . Because these problems are so widespread, nothing short of a new structure holds much promise for restoring intercollegiate athletics to their proper place."
A university president, it said, "cannot be a figurehead whose leadership applies elsewhere in the university but not in the athletics department."
The Knight Foundation, which put up some $2 million for the commission and the study, is one of the nation's largest foundations. It is wholly independent of Knight-Ridder Inc., but supports worthy causes and organizations in communities where Knight-Ridder has newspapers. The foundation also makes selected national grants in journalism, higher education and the field of arts and culture.
"I think we can hope for a new day when we can say that young people are not being shortchanged by being introduced into a system that they can't possibly succeed in, namely, higher education," Hesburgh said.
by CNB