Overhaul at Oberlin

Though J.W. Heisman of Heisman Trophy fame once served as the school's football coach (1892-94), Ohio's Oberlin College has always been better known for its string quartets than its quarterbacks. While the Oberlin Conservatory of Music was winning international acclaim, the athletic teams were losing so regularly that an independent study two years ago concluded that the sports program at the small (enrollment: 2,700) liberal arts college should either be scrapped or drastically overhauled. Oberlin's 36-year-old President Robert Fuller opted for the drastic -he appointed Jack Scott (TIME, May 24, 1971), 30, as athletic director and chairman of the physical education department.

Like most athletic directors, Scott is a former jock; he was a sprinter at Syracuse. But that is where the similarity ends. While covering the 1968 Olympics for Ramparts, he "tried to explain why blacks were angry and exploited as athletes." He briefly taught a course at the University of California called "Intercollegiate Athletics and Higher Education: A Socio-Psychologcal Evaluation" and founded the Institute for the Study of Sport and Society to "help interpret what's going on in sport and make it what it can and should be." Scott's two books, A thletics for Athletes and The Athletic Revolution, are so critical of racist, brutalizing, win-at-any-cost practices in college athletics that Spiro Agnew once rebuked him in a speech as an enemy of sport. Despite Scott's growing reputation as a radical, the University of Washington three years ago offered him a job as an assistant professor of physical education. A month later the offer was withdrawn. Scott sued and settled out of court for one year's salary: $10,500.

When Scott arrived at Oberlin last year, the reaction was surprisingly skittish for a liberal institution that prides itself on being the first white college to admit blacks (1835) and the first college to graduate women (1837): four of the 14 staffers in the athletic department, including the football and basketball coaches, resigned. "Sports will be destroyed at Oberlin," one coach warned darkly. Scott, noting that the

Oberlin football team had gone winless in eight games the season before he arrived, had an obvious rejoinder: "How can we destroy sports with a record like that? We have nowhere to go but up." Describing himself as a "radical populist," Scott insists that his aim is not to de-emphasize but to "democratize" sports. In an odd non sequitur, he adds: "What no one realizes is that I voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964, and read Ayn Rand."

Nonetheless, Scott rattled the traditionalists when he hired Tommie Smith (the sprinter who is best remembered for his clenched-fist salute on the victory stand after he won the 200-meter dash at the 1968 Olympics) as track and basketball coach. Last week, in keeping with his crusade to help blacks "become involved in the brains of sport, not just the brawn,", he appointed Cass Jackson as football coach. Of Smith, Scott says: "He's a pretty quiet, dignified guy. He is not a black-power person who's going to blow up the gymnasium with a hand grenade. He wants to build winning teams."

Winning teams? But what about the claim that Scott wants to do away with such antiquated sport rituals as keeping score? Nonsense, he says. "To tell a competitive athlete who is training three and four hours a day, day in, day out, year after year, to not be concerned with victory is liberal snobbery. Or at best it is the remark of someone who simply does not understand the agonistic struggle that is an integral part of the competitive sports experience. It is just as wrong to say winning isn't anything as it is to say winning is the only thing."

Machismo. Scott has also replaced traditional classes in horseback riding with such courses as "Sports and the Mass Media" and "BodyMind Harmony Through Gymnastics." Upon discovering that last year's budget had been spent almost exclusively on men's sports, Scott added two females to his staff to promote women's athletics and "break down the machismo atmosphere." To help eliminate the distinction between so-called major and minor sports, he did away with admission charges to all Oberlin sporting events. And to give athletes more of a say, he granted them veto power over the selection of coaches and the right to help decide their own training rules. "There's more of a team feeling now," says Marty Dugan, co-captain of the basketball team. "It's not just the coach telling you to do something. There's room for questioning." Dugan will soon be on the receiving end when, at Scott's request, he will coach the golf team, the first student to hold such a position.

Though Scott's critics scoff at such plans as having team members vote on starting lineups, there is anything but anarchy on the playing fields of Oberlin. In fact, Scott's quest for "excellence without dehumanizing the athlete" seems to be succeeding. Attendance at exercise classes has more than doubled, and over 30 students are now majoring in phys. ed., a department that was all but ignored in recent years. This season the football team won two of nine games with a lame-duck coach, but Scott claims little credit for the improvement. He agrees with President Fuller that it is too early in his four-year contract to pass judgment on Oberlin's athletic experiment. "The real verdict won't be in for a few years," Fuller says, "but if it does work, I'm sure many other schools will adopt the approach."

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