March 23, 2008
Inside Higher Ed's NCAA bracket, a think-outside-the-arena take on The Big Dance, isn't looking so bad right now. All that IHE co-founder Doug Lederman needs for his national championship pick to be realized on April 7 is for Davidson College to win five more games.
Which is not likely, Lederman readily admits. His predicted winners of all 64 tournament games are based strictly on the Academic Progress Rate, an NCAA tool tracking classroom progress of each team's players.
Last year Lederman employed the APR to anoint Holy Cross, which promptly lost in the first round. Two years ago, Bucknell. Gone after the first weekend.
Still, this Easter egghead hunt, and a similar annual exercise by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (using a slightly different NCAA compilation called Graduation Success Rate), are reminders that there is "another side" to this fabulous amusement known as March Madness: College.
TIDES' numbers conclude that Western Kentucky - also through to the second round - would win the title game (with Davidson in the Final Four). More evidence, given those teams' on-court limitations, that assuming these quasi-professional entertainers to be true "student-athletes" is attempting to square the circle.
"It is what it is," Lederman said. "College sports is a hugely important element of our society, a significant part of higher education, and there are plenty of good things that happen in the name of college sports. But, at the highest level, it is an entertainment business. It's a dicey bargain, a little bit of a deal with the devil. Bottom line, I don't think this is an enterprise that can be meaningfully turned around."
In "Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports is Crippling Undergraduate Education," one of several books he wrote on the subject, Indiana University professor emeritus Murray Sperber compared the student-performer dichotomy to George Orwell's "doublethink" in "1984" - "The power to hold two completely contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accept both of them."
It's not that athletes aren't capable of being good students, Sperber said in a telephone interview. Whenever he taught athletes who had completed their team eligibility - without the demands of travel, meetings and practice - he found them to be "much better students than my frat-rat, party-on students."
But the reality was that when in the midst of their athletic duties, "they were underachievers in class," Sperber said, "mainly because they were mentally and physically exhausted."
Davidson president Thomas Ross, with a player graduation rate of 91 percent, according to the GSR statistics, said the Higher Ed bracket honor indicated that his school "has figured out how to do both things [sports and academics] well. It's a matter of emphasis."
He argued there "are lots of athletes in America in lots of sports in lots of universities - some that are big names in football and basketball - who also excel academically." But he acknowledged the forces working mightily against that sort of balance, most prominently society's skewed attention given to sports and the financial pull, both on schools and athletes with an eye toward the pros.
Lederman, who has been examining college sports' place in the academic setting for more than 20 years, credited the NCAA with "some reforms that all well-intentioned," including the loss of scholarships for schools not reaching Academic Progress Rate-mandated standards.
"But if you make it that schools can be punished for academic inadequacy," he said, "one outcome is they do a better job recruiting athletes with academic potential. The other is they bring in the same kids and do more things to make sure those athletes get through."
The root problem, he said, is that "we long ago set up our system in which our colleges were primary providers of high-quality athletics that became a source of entertainment. And there are very few advocates for undoing that."
Sperber knows a college president who insisted that none of his peers, presented with the idea of starting a sports team, would accept it. "But they inherit this," he said, "and there's other stuff for them to do.
"Maybe schools giving themselves over to entertainment is part of this large culture shift from industrial America to service and consumption-driven America. One of the things we like to consume certainly is March Madness.
"I guess, when you get right down to it, I like the European system better than ours. They don't burden their universities with big-time sports. I mean, the Sorbonne doesn't field a team in anything."
Source: http://www.newsday.com