The Worst of Two Worlds

By Ezra Bowen.

Like a lot of college educators, Harry Edwards is disgusted and alarmed. Schools across the country have been shaken by yet another series of athletic scandals involving gambling on rigged games, alleged cocaine traffic among players, and recruiting payoffs. Underlying these recurrent problems, says Edwards, a sports sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, is a deeper issue: the colleges' neglect of the education of their athletes. "I've known athletes . . . who are functional illiterates and have been here for four years," says Edwards, a former college basketball player and track star. "If this is going on at Berkeley, which is supposed to have such integrity, imagine what's going on at the jock-factory schools."

It doesn't take much imagination. A Tennessee grand jury, currently looking into gambling on basketball games, called in the head coach at Memphis State University, where only four out of 38 players have managed to graduate since 1973. In the nine-member Southwest Athletic Conference, more than half the colleges have been tainted by athletic scandals. Jock factories such as these have been the feeder schools for professional teams, acting in many cases more like farm teams than educational institutions. In the National Football League barely one-third of the players hold college degrees, and some estimates for the National Basketball Association are even lower.

Much of the miseducation mess springs from the stretching of entrance standards. Tulane President Eamon Kelly, who shut down the basketball program last spring after five players were implicated in a point-shaving scheme for money, conceded last week that his school still has "multiple criteria for admissions," although he is working hard to change them. Nonathletes aspiring to enter Tulane for a B.A. or an engineering degree need Scholastic Aptitude Test scores of 1,135 and 1,215 respectively (out of a possible range from 400 to a perfect 1,600). A talented athlete, however, may slide in with 700. Kelly will not reveal the SAT score of John ("Hot Rod") Williams, the star among the five players, who are, of course, no longer competing. Williams (who is not registered at Tulane this fall) admitted to an assistant coach that he could not even read the verbal part of the test.

Once in college, such athletes, many with token diplomas from substandard high schools, tend to be cosseted along in such courses as Food 1, Driver Education and Beginning Golf (which Williams reportedly flunked at Tulane). With that kind of schedule, an athlete may graduate, but he is prepared to do little more than play ball. Even at that, the odds against his cracking into professional sports are very poor (77 to 1 for basketball, 100 to 1 for football), and the few who do make it can count on an average playing career of no more than four years.

Still, there are a few signs of fresh concern that reach beyond the Ivy League, with its high entry standards and prohibition against athletic scholarships. On Oct. 2 a panel of university presidents from the National Collegiate Athletic Association unanimously recommended a modified version of a measure called Proposal 48. The rule, scheduled to take effect in August 1986, would require freshman athletes at the major sports schools to enter with SATs of 700 and a grade-point average of 2.0 in real courses. The presidents' commission is seeking to amend the standard to allow a player with grades over 2.0 to score under 700 on the SATs, and vice versa, to accommodate students who test poorly. Eight days later the board of governors of the University of North Carolina system called for a reform of special athletic admissions standards throughout the state. Last week the president of Rice University, George E. Rupp, served notice that the policy at his Southwest ( Conference school, where academic levels for regular students are as high as Tulane's, "is to recruit athletes who are able to meet our academic standards."

A number of other colleges already have reforms in place. At the University of Michigan's flagship Ann Arbor campus, the grades and personal records of top high school recruits are carefully checked. No blatant jock courses are offered, and close to 80% of football lettermen have received their diplomas. At the University of North Carolina's Chapel Hill campus, basketball players must sit out one game for every class cut. Duke University for many years has allowed no appeals by coaches on its strictly academic admissions standards, and Notre Dame combines tough entrance requirements with close monitoring of academic performance. Both of the latter two schools have recorded superb graduation rates for athletes: about 86% of football players for Duke, 97% for Notre Dame. And in the past 35 years Notre Dame has graduated every single one of its basketball players.

Perhaps the most innovative remedy for undereducated athletes is Northeastern's University Degree Completion Program, started last year by Political Scientist Richard Lapchick (son of the redoubtable St. John's University basketball coach Joe Lapchick). Under U.D.C.P., 27 Boston-area professional players finished credit courses given by Northeastern professors. This year the program has expanded to a consortium that includes ten other schools and extends to ex-collegians who never made it to the pros.

Though such steps are heartening, concerned academics like Harry Edwards remain impatient at the slow pace of fundamental change. Berkeley, which has joined the Lapchick consortium, has not yet enrolled any local pros. Neighboring University of San Francisco has enlisted just one. Meanwhile, the majority of major sports colleges go on shuffling their players through, mainly to the limbo of underqualified, often marginally employed ex-jocks. "It's a plantation system," growls Edwards. "They use up (the athletes), and when they're finished, there's no place to go."

With reporting by Timothy Loughran/Boston and Robert C. Wurmstedt/Denver, with other bureaus