If some professors get their way, the Academic Achievement Award could become the greatest honor a university can win in the arena of college sports.
Faculty and trustees at major universities — including Big Ten schools — are investigating whether athletics distract from the academic focus of their universities.
Northwestern administrators say NU athletics don’t need reform. Average graduation rates for student athletes are about 90 percent with graduation rates as a whole at 92 percent for the university, said Marilyn McCoy, vice president for administration and planning.
Changes at other schools, however, could benefit NU in the future.
“If a national reform movement happens, it would reinforce values already in place (at NU) and try to support what we try to do,” said Robert Gundlach, NU’s faculty athletics representative to the Big Ten and NCAA.
Gundlach said reforms are taking place at the national level to create more rigorous guidelines for athlete eligibility, develop methods to measure the academic success of athletics programs and provide incentives to universities for making academics a priority for student athletes.
“This movement could have a good effect if there’s pressure on the other schools to up their academics,” McCoy said.
In mid-January members of the Association of Governing Boards, the national organization for boards of trustees, including NU, voted in favor of supporting a coalition to investigate athletics issues among the nation’s universities — a growing concern in recent years.
To help achieve these goals, the Association of Governing Boards will participate in talks among leaders of universities and their boards of trustees, outside interest groups and even the NCAA.
John Ingram, the association’s executive director, said the first task is determining the issues that need to be tackled. The basic problem, Ingram said, is that while college sports can bring name recognition to a university, they also distract from academic endeavor.
At NU, the faculty senate is taking its own measures to create dialogue about the role of athletics on campus. In December, the senate adopted a resolution, drafted by the Coalition of Independent Colleges, stating three main objectives: the most important role for a college athlete is that of a student; commercialization of sports teams should be reduced; and the “arms race” of intercollegiate athletics must be scaled back so the university doesn’t lose its academic mission in terms of both focus and finance.
“We’re doing very well (managing athletics), but I think we can do even better,” said Bruce Wessels, who will co-chair a new athletics committee formed by members of the General Faculty Committee. “I’m concerned, for example, about how important are the revenue sports and how does that shape academic programs.”
Wessels’ faculty committee will meet in the upcoming months to discuss, among other issues, the academic and financial costs of maintaining athletics programs. Wessel said he hasn’t presented anything to the athletics department yet, and Director of Athletics Rick Taylor declined to comment on the committee because he said he wasn’t “privy to the discussions.”
Some professors worry that being part of a major athletics conference can put pressure on the university to build bigger and better facilities and put more resources into athletics departments. If other schools put more energy into academics and spent less money on facilities, Gundlach said, it would take pressure off NU to keep up with its peers in what some have described as an “arms race” of building newer, fancier facilities.
Maintaining an academic focus while staying competitive is not just a priority for administrators — athletes have to work to balance school and sports on a daily basis.
“It’s very difficult being in the Big Ten,” said Jason Wright, who juggles premedical studies while starting at running back on NU’s football team. “(There’s) a lot of pressure to perform, and we’re also at a very challenging school.
