March Madness Should Make Us Think
March Madness is a great time for college basketball fans to watch some amazing games. Especially after a year of such dramatic political infighting it is good for the country to focus on some regional conflict that can be resolved on the playing field. The variety of colleges in terms of regions, size, student makeup, academic achievement, and physical prowess makes for wonderful drama and reminds me of the excitement and fun I had playing basketball for Maryland. It is also stirring up memories of my time in Congress when along with Senator Bill Bradley and Rep. Ed Towns, I cosponsored the Student Right to Know Act which called for reports on the graduation rates of student-athletes. This was an effort to raise academic performance of student-athletes and make colleges accountable for poor academic performance of their star athletes.
I also served for many years on the Knight Commission which recommended that teams graduate at least 50 percent of their players in order to be eligible for postseason play. The Knight Commission’s goal is to help develop a model of college sports that is sustainable at the top rank of American colleges and universities without compromising their core missions or exploiting the student-athletes who participate in them.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, a formidable basketball player himself, has boldly placed himself into this discussion in his article written for ESPN.com this week.
He said, “It is time to boost graduation rates for a number of NCAA tournament basketball teams with poor academic records and indefensible disparities in the grad rates of white and black players…I am proposing that the NCAA adopt an even easier standard for postseason competition — teams that graduate fewer than 40 percent of their players should be ineligible for postseason competition and honors. If a team fails to graduate two out of five players, how serious are the institution and coach about their players’ academic success and preparing their student-athletes for life? Growing up as a kid on the South Side of Chicago who loved basketball, I got to see the best that college sports had to offer. And the worst.”
When I was playing for Maryland, I had to carve out time to hit the books, and even managed to become a Rhodes Scholar after graduating. It wasn’t easy but at the time, there were many people supporting me and allowing me to follow my two passions: sports and academics. We need to foster that spirit and make sure that college players know that we want them to do well academically. There are still too many colleges where the graduation rates are unacceptably low. Some of this is tied to poverty rates and poor preparation before college, but we then need to compensate by insuring that players get extra help with their studies.
Secretary Duncan has raised some very good questions about how we can assure that our college sports are balancing athletics and academics and what we need to do to raise the bar for all of our college athletes. There are a lot of challenges to establish effective penalties for poor academic performance—the graduation rates must be as contemporaneous as possible (last couple years), coaches need to be penalized for poor academic performance as they are for recruiting infractions, and consideration must be given for students who transfer or leave the school in good standing.
Tom McMillen