February 21, 2001: Features

Paying the price for Sports
Bowen's new book questions the value of college athletics

In their 1998 book The Shape of the River, former Princeton president William G. Bowen *58 and former Harvard president Derek Bok examined a set of 90,000 alumni, from classes entering 30 selective colleges and universities throughout the country in 1951, 1976, and 1989, to assess the impact of race-sensitive admission policies. Last month, Bowen and collaborator James Shulman released a new book, The Game of Life, for which they studied this same vast database to determine the impact of college athletics on institutional health and educational values. The Game of Life looks at college sports from many angles: their history and their impact on college admissions; athletes' careers after college and their record of financial contributions to their universities; and the overall financial balance sheet of revenues and expenditures tied to athletics.

Although some of the authors' observations are unsurprising - for example, that big-time sports programs at high-profile universities often lose money - a few of their findings are start-ling. One of their major conclusions is that athletics at smaller schools, such as Division III schools or the Ivies, can have a greater impact, both positive and negative, than at higher profile universities. That's primarily because, although these schools don't offer athletic scholarships, a greater percentage of the overall student body is involved in sports: In 1997, for example, 22 percent of all male students at Princeton were varsity athletes, compared to 3 percent at the University of Michigan. In addition, since the 1950s, the difference between athletes and nonathletes on campus in terms of academic performance, social life, and postcollege careers has widened considerably, and this has been true for female athletes as well as for male, although over a shorter time period.

Bowen and Shulman also found that athletes enjoy a greater advantage in admissions than do other special groups such as minorities or legacies, and that the recruitment of athletes does not significantly increase the socioeconomic or racial diversity of a given student body. In addition, they learned that while male athletes generally earn more money than their classmates and give more money back to their schools than other alumni (on a par with those heavily involved in other extracurriculars), winning teams, even in high-profile sports, do not inspire greater giving by the alumni body at large.

While The Shape of the River concluded that affirmative action admission policies had done more good than harm for universities, The Game of Life ends up questioning whether the advantages of college athletics outweigh their costs. Although the authors decline to set out what they call a "blueprint" for change, they do offer a summary of the obstacles as well as suggestions for possible action and analysis. An interview with Bowen, Shulman, and Princeton athletic director Gary Walters '67 will be forthcoming on PAW Online.

The Game of Life begins with four anecdotes that illustrate the problems faced by the different types of universities (Division I public and private, Division III, and Ivy League) included in the study. The final anecdote, which is intended to show not only how high emotions over sports can run, but also how athletics affect budget and admission decisions, tells the story of Princeton's controversial decision to discontinue its wrestling program. That excerpt, reprinted with permission, follows.

In March 17, 1993, Princeton University announced that it would discontinue its varsity wrestling program, citing "constraints on the department's resources, both financial and in terms of admissions."

To many parents paying $25,000 a year in tuition, room, and board, Princeton's decision to act within budgetary constraints probably made good sense. To an admissions department charged with selecting from among the best-prepared high school seniors in the country, the prospect of not having to reserve a place for a 118-pound competitor who could also fit seamlessly into Princeton's academic community may have been a relief. To faculty members who had watched as the university strained to balance its budget, the decision must have seemed an eminently just sharing of the burden. In fact, on campus the university's decision met with little reaction. But, as one alumnus would later write in a letter to President Harold Shapiro, "Wrestlers are different. . . . Wrestlers are fighters." The emotional and exhausting match that ensued illustrates why decisions related to athletics represent such stressful terrain for colleges and universities of all kinds.

"Why wrestling?" those who cared deeply about Princeton wrestling inevitably asked. Unlike the wrestler who enters the arena with a strategy, knowing his own strengths and weaknesses and those of his opponent but relying on instinct and improvisation to adjust to the situation (literally) at hand, institutions rely on a very different decision-making process. Charged with carrying out a mission - or in truth a wide range of missions - and faced with balancing the interests of students, faculty, and alumni/ae, administrations make decisions deliberately, even laboriously.

At the time of the decision, Princeton (like other Ivy League institutions) offered many more sports than virtually any other school in the country - 17 men's sports and 16 for women. Unlike athletic powerhouses that sometimes concentrate their financial resources on the big-time sports of basketball and football and often sponsor only the NCAA minimum number of 14 teams, the Ivy philosophy has been to sponsor a wide array of sports, from crew and fencing to volleyball and ice hockey. Although the schools adhere to an "old-fashioned" stance of not offering athletic scholarships, this emphasis on broad participation nevertheless requires a tremendous commitment. The costs associated with recruiting, coaching, and equipping the teams and transporting them to their contests around the Northeast and around the country are absorbed by the university. Although Princeton remained committed to this philosophy, and to bearing these costs - both the financial costs and the opportunity costs of reserving places in the freshman class for goalies, shortstops, and midfielders - the administration had decided that, in a period of budgetary restraint, it was necessary to establish limits. Moreover, Princeton had an obligation to comply with Title IX, and eliminating one all-male sport would help redress the imbalance in the number of men and women athletes.

To the former wrestlers - who signaled their vehement opposition to the decision by writing letters, waving banners at graduation, and threatening never to support the university again - the decision to drop wrestling seemed cruel. They also argued that certain former Princeton wrestlers (including former trustee Donald Rumsfeld '54, recently named U.S. secretary of defense for the second time) had achieved prominence in government, business, and other fields.

The media seized upon the story as an opportunity to berate the university and academia in general: "Then again," one columnist sardonically asked, "why should the president of one of the nation's leading universities be expected to have any common sense?" President Shapiro announced that he would review the decision to drop wrestling. He did so, and in June he and the board of trustees backed the decision, despite a renewed bombardment of protest from some wrestling alumni. Subsequently, even as the trustees set out to review every aspect of the university's athletics program, the wrestling issue refused to fade away. The Friends of Princeton Wrestling, a booster group that had historically provided extra support for the program, launched a campaign to raise $2 million that they planned to offer to the university as a separate endowment to fund the wrestling program.

This offer confronted Princeton with a difficult dilemma. Even alumni who cared little about wrestling found it difficult to understand why those who did care could not choose to support financially that which the university had decided it could not afford. The reasoning was as follows: Although the university had accepted gifts to endow the costs of other teams, these funds always remained under the direction of the university and were not allowed to steer the course of policy. Bringing back a program that would be financed solely (in terms of coverage of direct costs) with restricted funds represented a fundamentally different approach to the always-difficult issues raised by targeted gifts. To the university, accepting a gift that determined policy outside the framework of the regular decision-making process would set a dangerous precedent. Yet to those who cared about wrestling, the administration's initial rejection of their offer seemed spiteful; it made the original decision to drop the program for budgetary reasons appear to be a ruse - a cover for some deeper hidden agenda.

Frustrations mounted, and what had seemed like a difficult but by no means unprecedented programmatic decision (in fact 20 percent of all NCAA institutions, including Yale and Dartmouth, had dropped wrestling) now demanded a great deal of attention and created no small amount of tension for the president and the trustees. The university faced an attack not from the outside, but from its own alumni. "You can build all the Centers for Human Values you want," one angry alumnus wrote, alluding to the university's prestigious center for ethics, "but if you don't practice what you preach, it will all be for naught." For President Shapiro - who had overseen one of the world's great sports powerhouses as president of the university of Michigan before coming to the non-scholarship environment of Princeton - the intensity of the backlash must have been startling.

Universities are no doubt well served by those who feel passionately, whether as students competing for victory on the playing fields or as alumni/ae thriving in the world. And yet, as Princeton learned, powerful passions can - in a moment - be redirected. One alumnus wrote, "I will not again give to Annual Giving unless and until the sport is restored to full varsity status. I will donate instead to the Brown or Pennsylvania wrestling teams." In that extreme case, loyalty to wrestling clearly outweighed loyalty to the institution. In truth, many of those upset by the decision only wanted Princeton to be the Princeton they knew and loved - a Princeton with a varsity wrestling program. At the same time, other wrestling alumni supported the administration and even sought to have other varsity sports reduced to a simpler state.

In the end, Princeton agreed to offer a "self-funded" varsity wrestling program with no admission slots and no university financial support. That is the status of the program today, and a wary détente prevails.

From The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, by James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen *58 (Princeton University Press, 2001).