Schools for Scandal: The Dysfunctional Marriage of Division I Sports and Higher Education

In chapter 3 of Schools for Scandal: The Dysfunctional Marriage of Division I Sports and Higher Education, Sheldon Anderson quotes the late Jim Brown, legendary National Football League running back and Syracuse University alumnus, as saying “The NCAA is probably the most reprehensible organization God ever created” (67). Brown may have been right, except that God did not create the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA); a group of officials associated with institutions of higher education founded the NCAA in late 1905 and early 1906, in the wake of multiple noteworthy controversies regarding intercollegiate football. What may make the NCAA seem so reprehensible today is that during the past twelve decades it has become very good at fixing just one problem: ensuring that college athletes are not compensated at a fair market rate for their labor and, therefore, do not play as professionals. Meanwhile, of course, the NCAA does not limit the ability of coaches, athletic departments, and conferences—or the association itself—to profit from that labor. In this book, Anderson uses a plethora of anecdotes and quotations to illustrate how corrupt college sport has become under the NCAA's aegis, especially during recent decades. Chapter 11 outlines a way to administer collegiate athletics within a free-market system, without NCAA oversight.Throughout nearly three hundred pages of text and notes, Anderson uses examples from scores of collegiate athletic programs to expose the fact that the NCAA limits compensation received by so-called student-athletes—a term that, the author rightly points out, originated as a way to quash worker-compensation claims—while at the same time creating a climate that inhibits the ability of universities to function as educational institutions. Athletic departments skirt NCAA recruiting rules while at the same time enrolling many athletes in sham classes designed more to maintain eligibility than to provide education. Sport may have become the “front porch” of universities, but in many cases the house “has become rundown” and the porch itself “has begun to rot” (240). A brief review cannot do justice to the litany of corruption exposed in this book. Every open-minded enthusiast of college sport should read Schools for Scandal and ask themselves whether the current model is the right one. Should universities sponsor what is essentially big-time, professional sport, based on ostensibly amateur labor? And should the NCAA, along with a handful of celebrity coaches and a few prominent university athletic departments, be reaping vast profits while overseeing an anachronistic and unfair system?Anderson's extensive primary source base includes the 1995 autobiography of former NCAA head Walter Byers, as well as a vast number of newspaper articles and websites, dating mainly from the past two or three decades. The author relies particularly heavily on the Minnesota Star Tribune, The New York Times, and USA Today. This book also utilizes secondary sources including works by historians Kurt Edward Kemper, Michael Oriard, Ronald A. Smith, Murray Sperber, and John Sayle Watterson, as well as popular writings by journalists including Taylor Branch, Sally Jenkins, and Joe Nocera, among others.Although Schools for Scandal is especially good at documenting recent issues, and even touches on emerging topics such as NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness), its analysis of earlier eras is relatively thin. The book briefly discusses the NCAA's founding, the 1929 Carnegie Report, the implementation and failure of the “Sanity Code” circa 1948, the University of Wyoming's racist dismissal of fourteen Black players in 1969, and other developments, including early-1970s changes in NCAA scholarship policy. Yet some topics go unmentioned or are discussed superficially. For example, Anderson summarizes the history of stadiums this way: “Universities used to build memorial stadiums to honor the sacrifices of American soldiers in war, but rampant commercialism has put an end to that sentimental practice” (25). (The history of memorial stadiums was never so simple.) And although Anderson speaks at length about coaches’ high salaries, he includes no substantial discussion of how that change happened—a story that is unpacked in Oriard's Bowled Over (2009) yet still needs further study. To fully comprehend the turbulent present of collegiate athletics, as well as potential solutions, many topics need to be understood better. For instance, scholars should more thoroughly analyze the complicated history of conference realignment. Of course, a volume focused on the recent past cannot delve into all relevant subjects, but readers should be aware that the issues brought up in Schools for Scandal represent just the tip of the iceberg.Chapter 11, which proposes a free-market model for American intercollegiate athletics, is an important part of the book. Anderson's solution has nine steps, including turning athletic programs into “self-financing” clubs to be “run like a business” (253). These clubs would pay players, who in most cases would have the option (but not the requirement) to take classes. To facilitate travel and competition, these clubs could “form conferences with nearby institutions with similar academic standards” (264). Meanwhile, the money generated by athletics would fund academics and intramurals. This solution seems sensible. The idea of universities licensing their names, mascots, and colors to professional clubs would be one way to insulate American higher education from the rampant commercialism of big-time sports.Many scholars likely agree that the NCAA model of athletic regulation is broken, and may, as Anderson puts it, be “collapsing” (275). Yet it is not entirely clear who has the power to create a new system. Anderson writes: “Radical change to an entrenched bureaucracy like the NCAA will not come from legislators, boards of trustees, or college presidents. Reform will also not come from athletic departments or coaches” (238). Indeed. Yet the question remains: “Who will change a system that is inherently contradictory to the objectives of higher education?” (237). If and when the NCAA collapses, there is no guarantee that athletic conferences will follow. Although some conferences, most notably the Pac-12, have imploded during the last few years, others have come to resemble the all-powerful railroads that writer Frank Norris characterized in 1901 as “The Octopus.” If anything, the Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference appear to be trying to supplant the NCAA as entities to administer collegiate sports. Anderson's implication that a new breed of “regional” conferences will emerge to replace the extant juggernauts seems optimistic, at best. Some conferences, after all, predate the NCAA. In my own research, I argue that one reason early twentieth-century reforms have endured for so long is because Progressive Era reformers effectively transformed intercollegiate athletics into a permanent university department with its own experts, bureaucracy, and durable structures. The NCAA is one part of the apparatus that keeps the quasi-profitable college sports machine running, but it is not the only one.Opening American intercollegiate athletics more fully to free-market mechanisms may be one way to solve the current system's problems, but it also represents a laissez-faire mode of thinking that may not turn out to be better for universities and their students. Certainly, it is a solution to consider seriously. Anderson is to be commended for writing in a manner similar to Progressive Era muckrakers: exposing corruption in the system and proposing a solution. Something similar happened more than a century ago, during the years, months, and weeks leading up the NCAA's founding. Let us hope and pray we do a better job this time.