Should Yale abandon intercollegiate athletics?

There is a spectre haunting Yale's athletic department, and it comes in the form of a scholarly, erudite new book—The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values by James L. Shulman, BR '87, GRD '93, and President Emeritus of Princeton William G. Bowen.

REBECCA ROSENTHAL, ERIN I. LEWIS, KATIE ALDRICH, EUGENE WONG/YH

Last week in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Bowen gave the best possible brief summary of the book's complicated and subtle thesis: "Say you're an admissions officer," he said, "and you have two applications from tennis players with the same SAT score. One says, `Tennis is my life—this is it.' The other says, `I love to play tennis, it's a great sport, but this college has a great philosophy program, and I want to major in philosophy.'" Bowen suggested that the coach, and presumably the admissions officer, are going to choose the first player "But," Bowen continued, "I would argue student B is the one you want."

Bowen's claim is not radical, yet when applied concretely to a school like Yale that might value its philosophy department over its tennis team, it leads to bigger questions, such as why have a tennis team, or admit a squash player over a cellist who scored 200 points higher on the SATs? "These are questions that provoke a lot of editorializing and a lot of anger, but very few hard facts," Shulman said. "That's the gap we tried to fill."

COURTESY 'THE GAME OF LIFE' 1989 Ivy League male athlete SAT divergence from students at large.

Rather than provoke knee-jerk reactions and unfounded claims, Shulman and Bowen are trying to open a constructive debate about the role of intercollegiate athletics at selective schools. "We hope," Shulman and Bowen wrote, "that the findings will encourage more open and candid discussion of a subject that is often pushed aside, dealt with in a limited way, deferred for consideration to another day, or simply declared off limits." Let the conversation begin.

Separate, but equal?

The relationship between colleges and athletic departments started in 1852 when crews from Yale and Harvard met in the first intercollegiate athletic event. Today the Yale athletic department oversees 33 sports, 798 athletes, and operates on a budget of over $10 million. The reasons for the evolution are manifold, twisted and tangled deep into the history of the University and the country as a whole.

COURTESY 'THE GAME OF LIFE' Adjusted admissions advantage for males at a representative non-scholarship school, controlling for differences in SAT scores.

One popular current justification for such a large athletic expenditure is, as one self-proclaimed Yale sports nut put it, "Football and men's hockey are the only things that unite this campus."

But, according to Shulman and Bowen, this defense of collegiate athletics is just one of the many "myths" that need to be re-evaluated.

The two are armed with facts and figures from a restricted-access database compiled over the last 50 years by the Mellon Foundation that provide insight into every possible facet of life at 30 of the most-selective colleges and universities in the nation, including Yale, Princeton, Williams, and Georgetown. Shulman and Bowen claim that their data show that athletics actually divide, not unite, a campus. By recruiting a large number of athletes, schools such as Yale have created a new "jock culture" that defines itself in opposition to the rest of the school. Whereas the ideal of a liberal arts education is to bring together people from diverse backgrounds, athletes tend to be from homogenous backgrounds, and once in college, tend to play together, live together, and eat together.

TYLER MERTES/YH

Shulman and Bowen label this phenomenon "bunching." Both socially and academically, athletes spend a higher percentage of their time with other athletes than any other exclusive group. The average intercollegiate athlete spent 19.3 hours per week with his primary group of friends, whereas theater students, the next most exclusive group, spent a mere 8.56 hours per week inter alia. This divide is in part shaped by the fact that athletes tend to underperform academically in comparison to their peers. At the 30 schools, 72 percent of high-profile male athletes (those who play football, basketball, or hockey) are in the bottom third of the class, and 49 percent of low-profile male athletes (golfers, tennis players) are in the bottom third as well. As a result, athletes not only feel separated from the rest of the student body, but also from the faculty and larger university community. Forty-eight percent of students at Ivy League schools feel they have a faculty mentor, whereas only 26 percent of athletes feel the same way.

In other words, if athletes travel in packs from the fields to Zeta Psi to American military history class, is that the kind of unity Yale should strive for?

Levin claims the "bunching effect" and the differentials shown in that book are less applicable to Yale. "I'm pretty certain that the gaps aren't as wide. I'm not acknowledging that there is a problem at Yale," he said. "A lot of the problematic tendencies of athletes not feeling at home in a university are not as big of a problem at Yale than at other institutions. I know that to be the case from discussions with the authors and actually also from earlier papers that compared Amherst, Columbia, Princeton, and Yale."

Selective excellence

Many athletes themselves feel that they belong at Yale because they excel in their sport. In the words of one varsity athlete, who wished to remain anonymous, "Yale should be the best at everything, athletics included."

Shulman and Bowen disagree. "In the academic world," Shulman explained, "schools know that they can't be the best at everything—Yale can't have the best chemistry department in the country and the best English department and every other program as well. It's just not possible. It's the same with the non-academic side of the house. Should the dining hall try to be Spago?" Raising the quality of dining halls to the caliber of a fancy restaurant might be nice, they maintain, but it would drain precious resources from its core responsibilities.

While athletes consume a wide range of resources, perhaps the most controversial—and valuable—are admissions spots. "Athletics have an opportunity cost," Shulman explained, "and that cost is greater when admissions is very selective." This is particularly true in light of the fact that smaller, selective schools often have more athletes than larger, traditional athletic powerhouses. For example, last year there were 362 men playing varsity athletics at the University of Michigan, but 411 at Williams, 518 at Yale, and a staggering 537 at Princeton. The gross is bigger at the smaller schools because these smaller institutions tend to have more programs, such as squash, crew, and badminton. More strikingly, the percentage differences reveal that athletes make up an increasingly large percentage of the student body at smaller schools. Because of Michigan's size, 362 men amount to no more than three percent of the total male population. But at Yale, the percentage of athletes is just over 15 percent and, at a smaller school like Williams, it's over 40 percent.

Shulman and Bowen track what they call the "admissions advantage" given to athletes, and in the most shocking statistic in the book, claim that at a representative non-scholarship school, minorities received an 18 percent advantage and legacies benefited from a 25 percent edge over regular applicants, but varsity athletes received a whopping 48 percent advantage.

"That's misleading," Shaw countered. "At Yale we've done more and more pre-screening of athletes, so it looks like a higher percentage of athletes are getting in when in fact the group of athletes applying is becoming more self-selective."

Levin conceded that there are difficulties involved with recruiting so many athletes but agreed with Shaw that the problem is not as formidable at Yale. His explanation is that Yale, unlike its smaller brethren, is big enough to purse athletic excellence. "Large numbers of students being varsity athletes and being recruited with regards to athletic ability and not academic quality are really problems to consider," he said. "At Williams or Amherst, athletes are a large fraction of the student body. At Yale, the sheer numbers aren't as problematic. The way I see it, the smaller the school, the greater the problem."

It's not about the Benjamins

According to Shulman and Bowen, the most common misconception about athletics at a school like Yale is that they bring in money. As one junior said, "Are you kidding? Yale will never reconsider its athletic priorities. Do you know how much money alumni donate because of athletics?"

The authors open the book with a picture of Michigan. In 1998-99, Michigan dominated the Big Ten; ticket sales were through the roof, and revenue from apparel sales was pouring in. Yet Mich-igan's athletic department lost $3.8 million for the year. Overhead, transportation, insurance, uniforms, and stadium upkeep costs, not to mention coaches' salaries and recruiting expenses led to an overall deficit. Thus Shulman and Bowen reasoned, "It is extremely difficult to conclude that college sports is, by any normal definition, a good business."

Even if the programs themselves lose money, supporters argue that successful athletics bring in funds that help other programs. For example, a large public school like Michigan might have to lose that $3.8 million in order to gain recognition; the Michigan State Legislature, which ultimately controls the purse strings, will be more likely to shell out funds after a winning football season.

But, in fact, the opposite is true at Ivy League schools, which depend on alumni giving. Shulman and Bowen argue that there is little or no correlation between athletic success and alumni giving. If anything, many Ivy League alumni even give less after winning football seasons, having "taken genuine pride in the fact that their school was not an athletic power and may interpret greater success on the field as an indication that values have changed." At Ivy League schools, not only do former athletes give less than other alumni, but a majority of alumni would prefer their alma maters to de-emphasize sports. Shulman and Bowen gave alumni donors in their database a list of 10 institutional priorities and asked them whether they would like to see an increase or decrease in current institutional emphasis. Of the 10 choices, the alumni said they would like to see their money going towards seven of them—such as undergraduate teaching, residential life, and diversity—and away from three—faculty research, alumni relations, and athletics.

One alumnus tells of a dinner he was invited to two years ago at the Yale Club for "healthy donors." "Levin prattled on about Yale's winning athletic teams," he said. "He made it sound as if we should give money to Yale so the hockey team can go undefeated. He didn't understand that that made me want to give less."

The economics are debatable, but more fundamentally Shulman and Bowen question whether economics should even factor into the decision. As they concluded, "The appropriate `bottom line' question is how well intercollegiate athletic programs serve an institution's core mission."

Extra, extra, read all about it

The facts Shulman and Bowen present in the book have generated discussion all over the country. Positive reviews have appeared, or will shortly, in the New Yorker, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Atlantic Monthly. ESPN ran a segment on the book, and Frank Deford, the country's most eminent sportswriter, recently appeared on National Public Radio hailing the book as "the most important sports book written in years." "Their book is no anti-athletic screed," he continued. "It's written dispassionately, but its conclusions are truly depressing and significant."

Helped by such massive publicity, the book has sold briskly, prompting its publisher, Princeton University Press, to consider a second print run, perhaps starting as early as next week.

"It's going to be very, very interesting to see what happens in the wake of this book," Professor Murray Sperber of Indiana University, the cou-ntry's leading crusader to deinsti-utionalize college athletic, said. Sperber is the chairman of National Alliance for Collegiate Athletic Reform (NAFCAR), and author of, most recently, Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education. Sperber feels that The Game of Life, unlike his own, targets the constituency that has the power to effect change. "Look at who's reading their book," he noted. "It's been reviewed on NPR and by literary intellectuals at the New Yorker. These people don't care about sports at Indiana University, but they sure do about Princeton and Yale." Indeed, the wake may already have been felt. After meeting with experts—including Shulman—Swarthmore College announced on Sat., Dec. 2 that it was getting rid of its football team, a decision Shulman explained as follows: "It's a Quaker school. They would like to produce a certain type of alum that has a certain effect on society, and they decided that they had to realign their admissions and athletics priorities to fit their larger educational goals."

In the end, Shulman and Bowen are not as optimistic as Sperber about the possibility of change. Factors such as a vocal minority of alumni (some of whom happen to be on the Board of Trustees), apathy, and a desire not to upset a precarious balance will probably keep the state of athletics exactly where it is. Shulman and Bowen do, however, recommend certain steps universities should take to curb the most glaring drawbacks of intercollegiate athletics and make athletic priorities fit schools' larger educational goals. Their suggestions include a wider adoption of a club sports model, less emphasis placed on postseason competition, and less extensive recruitment. The most novel suggestion is that coaches should coach two sports, thereby giving the coach less of an ultimatum to win at all costs.

At the end of the day, however, Shulman and Bowen want to raise questions more than provide answers. They hope rational and frank discussion will refocus the debate and precpitiate a re-alignment of priorities.

At Yale, the debate seems to be brewing. While numerous officials at the athletic department, including Director of Athletics Tom Beckett, refused to comment, others in the community seemed anxious to express their views. One student supporter of athletics said "getting rid of athletics would make this a school I wouldn't want to attend." On the other hand, one professor, who asked to remain anonymous, commented, "Should Yale get rid of athletics? In a heartbeat. Where's the petition? Sign me up." And one Yale alumnus read about the book in the New Yorker and was "deeply disturbed. I saw some of their statistics in the article, and I was shocked by the emphasis Yale is putting on sports."

For the time being at least, no plans exist for re-evaluating Yale's commitment to athletics. Shaw, Levin, and Brodhead all called the book "interesting," and Levin felt that "the book is definitely worthy of consideration." As Associate Dean of Yale College, Penelope Laurans summed up, "I have no idea what this study will do or even if it will have any effect at all. To the degree that it raises interesting questions, whether or not we agree with it, it should be valued. Only timid people are fearful of introspection and questioning."

Photo by Tyler Mertes.

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