The Chronicle of Higher Education: Articles

A Financial and Moral Battle Over the Role of Athletics

Rutgers strives for big-time success, but some campus groups say the effort sullies the university By JIM NAUGHTON NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J

When William C. Dowling, a professor of English at Rutgers University, speaks of big-time intercollegiate athletics, he uses words like "lie" and "fraud" and "prostitution."

For the last two years, he has been organizing a campaign that he hopes will compel the university to drop out of the Big East Conference, stop awarding athletics scholarships, and radically reduce its spending on sports.

He hopes, not incidentally, to transform the nature of college athletics in the process.

"My hope is that the 'Rutgers model' will become national and people will say, 'It is time to stop this madness.'"

That he is not likely to achieve this goal any time soon has not dulled his zest for the cause.

"The longer I do this, the more it feels like doing civil-rights work in the '60s," Mr. Dowling says.

To achieve his ends, Mr. Dowling has organized Rutgers 1000, a group of alumni, faculty members, and students who want the university to rethink its commitment to maintaining a major athletics program.

The group has spread its message primarily through advertisements and op-ed pieces in The Daily Targum, and through a site on the World-Wide Web (http://members.aol.com/rutg1000). In perhaps its greatest publicity coup, Rutgers 1000 received an endorsement in April from Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who was educated at Rutgers.

The university's alumni magazine refused to print an advertisement bearing Mr. Friedman's statement in a recent issue, but The New York Times broke the story to a much wider audience.

Earlier that spring, however, Rutgers President Francis L. Lawrence announced the appointment of a new athletics director, Robert Mulcahy, a man whose credentials and connections suggest how seriously political leaders in New Jersey take big-time athletics at the state's flagship public university.

In 1989, Mr. Mulcahy was one of three finalists to be commissioner of the National Football League. He has served as head of the state's Department of Corrections and chief of staff to Brendan T. Byrne when Mr. Byrne was Governor.

For the past 19 years, Mr. Mulcahy has been the executive director of the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, which operates the Meadowlands, the home of four professional sports franchises, and one of the most successful arena and stadium complexes in the country.

When Rutgers convened a search committee to choose a successor to the retiring athletics director, Frederick E. Gruninger, Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, who was not officially involved in the process, pointedly told Mr. Lawrence that Mr. Mulcahy was the university's best choice.

"One of the advantages I have is that I don't have to worry about my next job," says Mr. Mulcahy, who is in his early 60s. "I've made my mark, and now I want to make this contribution."

He began his tenure by requesting and receiving more than $3-million from the state Legislature to renovate and expand the administrative offices at the Rutgers Athletics Center, where he currently occupies a cubicle in the midst of other cubicles.

"If I need to call on the [the legislators], I can," Mr. Mulcahy says. "But probably more significant is my experience in having dealt in that world."

Mr. Mulcahy will need all the help he can get in reversing the fortunes of Rutgers's most visible sports. The Scarlet Knights football team had an 0-11 record last season, and a 2-9 record a year earlier. Not surprisingly, the team sometimes played to more empty seats than full ones.

Though both the men's and women's basketball teams pulled off upsets in postseason tournaments this year, neither has performed as well in recent seasons as the university had hoped.

As at many institutions, athletics problems have begot financial ones. According to figures released under the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act, Rutgers has lost about $3-million in each of the last two years supporting its athletics program. That figure does not include salaries and other kinds of overhead, which at the average Division I institution cost an additional $3-million per year, according to a survey by the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics.

The university's athletics setbacks have provided Mr. Dowling and Rutgers 1000 with the opportunity to ask questions about the relationship between academics and athletics that are relevant at any Division I institution in the National Collegiate Athletic Association, but that are more easily ignored by those that are winning championships and earning money.

Rutgers 1000 criticizes big-time athletics on moral as well as practical grounds. The group charges that to compete in Division I-A football and Division I men's basketball, an institution must give scholarships to students it would not otherwise accept. The average SAT score of freshman athletes lags 200 to 300 points behind the average score of other freshmen here, according to the annual studies by the N.C.A.A., the group points out.

The university spends money tutoring those athletes, and maintaining the facilities in which they practice and play -- resources that Rutgers 1000 thinks would be better spent on academics.

"It isn't just a money argument, it is a moral argument," says Greg Tuculescu, a senior who helped found the group. "The lying and the deception that go on at this level are just not right."

Institutions that sponsor major sports programs become subservient to the interests of boosters whose primary allegiance is to the teams, he argues. Perhaps more insidious, he says, is the tendency of major sports programs to foster cynicism among students.

"These people I see on the field -- I am not going to see them anywhere else. They don't represent me. If it was John and Joe from my physics class, then 'Go John! Go Joe! Go Rutgers!' But it's not."

Withering sarcasm has been among the group's principal weapons in its campaign against big-time sports.

Visitors to the Rutgers 1000 Web site can enter a "slum classroom" contest by submitting photographs of the most dilapidated classrooms on the campus. They can nominate candidates for the Herbie the Husker Award, which will be given to the person who "during the previous month has contributed most to helping Rutgers University resemble the University of Nebraska." (Nebraska, known as the Cornhuskers, and other football powers, such as Florida State University, are the group's betes noire.)

Also on the Web site, visitors can read a satiric essay urging students at Rutgers to volunteer to "tutor a Tiger," because nearby Princeton University does not provide special tutors for its athletes. And they can sign a petition embracing the aims of the group.

Mr. Dowling says he isn't sure how many people have signed the petition, and no one else in the organization seems to know either.

Critics of the group suggest that Rutgers 1000 has fallen far short of its goal of getting 1,000 signatures on a petition demanding that the university withdraw from the Big East Conference and leave Division I-A.

Because they do not want to give the group additional publicity, President Lawrence and his staff have been circumspect in their comments about Rutgers 1000, seldom mentioning the group by name. However, they are outspoken about the merits of a big-time athletics program.

"Rutgers is a major public research institution with multiple responsibilities to multiple populations, and one I believe is allowing student athletes to participate in competitive athletics," says Carl Kirschner, dean of Rutgers College, the university's main undergraduate division.

"We want to be felt as indispensable to the state," says Mr. Lawrence. Good sports teams, he adds, are a way to win friends and influence people.

This year, for example, the Rutgers women's basketball team made an unexpected run to the second round of the N.C.A.A. tournament. Mr. Lawrence was in Trenton meeting with state legislators the next day, and the team's success was Topic A.

"I can't tell you how many times people patted me on the shoulder and said, 'Gee, our women did a great job.' I must have heard it 25 times."

Jeffrey I. Rubin, Rutgers's faculty athletics representative to the N.C.A.A., puts the matter more directly. "What you want to do is have people who control resources call you up and ask you for tickets," he says.

But whether Rutgers can become successful enough to achieve that goal remains an open question. Pennsylvania State University is the only public institution in the Northeast with a successful Division I-A football program, and some college-sports analysts have questioned whether the Scarlet Knights can ever attract enough good players to become respectable.

Further, while the state produces many outstanding high-school basketball players, Rutgers must compete for those prospects with the top teams in the Big East, such as Georgetown and Syracuse Universities, as well as Seton Hall University, a nearby rival.

"I don't expect a national championship, but Yes, I'd expect the football team to be able to go 8-3 now and then, and for the men's and women's basketball teams to appear pretty regularly in the N.C.A.A.'s," Mr. Mulcahy says.

Mr. Dowling finds that sort of talk distressing. "We are tired of seeing this university prostituted to this ambition to go to a bowl game, to be like the Miamis and the Virginia Techs."

He and John Gillis, a history professor who belongs to Rutgers 1000, say the university should instead be building on its strong academic reputation. Rutgers has more highly regarded academic departments than any institution in the Big East, Mr. Gillis says, and is especially strong in core subjects such as English, history, mathematics, and physics.

The strengths of those departments are important, Mr. Mulcahy says. But he adds: "The things that turn kids on when they are choosing a school are not necessarily the things that you and I might want to see."

The debate between Rutgers 1000 and supporters of big-time athletics has also focused attention on the ways in which athletes can become isolated on the campus.

"You'd be amazed what some people think about student athletes -- faculty members, too -- like that you don't want to study,"says Reggie Funderbunk, a football player who graduated in May and is now in business school at Rutgers.

Matt Briggs, a member of the lightweight crew who graduated in May, says the academic reputation of athletes is being hurt by Mr. Dowling's campaign.

He is grateful, he says, that Mr. Mulcahy has already helped lift the department's morale. "People really look at him as a savior," Mr. Briggs says.

However, he knows that Mr. Dowling has a following, too. Three of Mr. Briggs's teammates were in Mr. Dowling's classes last year. "From everything I have heard, he is a phenomenal professor," Mr. Briggs says. "I wish we had more like him."

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